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39 Years Ago The World's First Spam Was Sent (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader write:
Wednesday was the 39th anniversary of the world's first spam, sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketer for Massachusetts' Digital Equipment Corporation in 1978 to over 300 users on Arpanet. It was written in all capital letters, and its body began with 273 more email addresses that wouldn't fit in the header. The DEC marketer "was reportedly trying to flag the attention of the burgeoning California tech community," reports the San Jose Mercury News. The message touted two demonstrations of the DECSYSTEM-20, a PDP-10 mainframe computer.
An official at the Defense Communication Agency immediately called it "a flagrant violation of the use of Arpanet as the network is to be used for official U.S. government business only," adding "Appropriate action is being taken to preclude its occurence again." But at the time a 24-year-old Richard Stallman -- then a graduate student at MIT -- claimed he wouldn't have reminded receiving the message...until someone forwarded him a copy. Stallman then responded "I eat my words... Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about." The article reports that today the spam industry earns about $200 million each year, while $20 billion is spent trying to block spam. And the New York Times even has a quote from the DEC employee who sent that first spam. "People either say, 'Wow! You sent the first spam!' or they act like I gave them cooties."
An official at the Defense Communication Agency immediately called it "a flagrant violation of the use of Arpanet as the network is to be used for official U.S. government business only," adding "Appropriate action is being taken to preclude its occurence again." But at the time a 24-year-old Richard Stallman -- then a graduate student at MIT -- claimed he wouldn't have reminded receiving the message...until someone forwarded him a copy. Stallman then responded "I eat my words... Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about." The article reports that today the spam industry earns about $200 million each year, while $20 billion is spent trying to block spam. And the New York Times even has a quote from the DEC employee who sent that first spam. "People either say, 'Wow! You sent the first spam!' or they act like I gave them cooties."
[quote]Thuerk prefers to receive e-mail from people he has cleared first.[/quote]
Funny that.
Maybe I've been watching too many WolfePit videos, but I wasn't thinking email.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Sounds like a business model only anti-virus vendors would love. Or Republicans.
One of the best definitions of "evil" is to accept a large damage to somebody else for a relatively small personal gain. Why are we tolerating these people on this planet again?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Thank you sir. It's technologically inept individuals like yourself that keep me at work and put a roof over my head.
Hey RMS!
How did your point number 4 work out for you?
Thought so.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Die Spammer DIE!!!
Rick B.
20 Million vs 20 Billion of any currency is a major difference. In US dollars it is a HUGE difference (for now at least). The Spam industry is easily criminal as the harm caused so vastly outweighs the gain that if they were simply paid direct protection money it would be cheaper. Yes, that equates Spam with the mafia.
I wasn't on the internet in 78, but I was in 84, and I remember years and years of spam-free usenet before the Canter and Siegel "event". It seems to me that the flood of non-technical people into the net brought a cultural acceptance of spam and online advertising that the earlier technical crowd did not tolerate. I don't even recall getting a single email spam until the mid 1990's, and certainly never on my bang address.
When spam started to become a problem, some of us took steps to combat it, but by then, technical users were diluted and didn't have as much influence as in the past. Then when the web appeared, it was a similar story with web based advertising, and then web based tracking. Those things exist today because they work. They would not work if 99% of internet users had blocked that shit from the moment it appeared. It would not have been financially viable, so it would have died out. But the influx of non-technical users brought a culture shift which accepted advertising and mass commercial surveillance as if the internet was supposed to be TV 2.0.
Captcha = "corpse". Nicely done, captcha bot...
B-b-but how could spam exist in '78 when Shiva Ayyadurai wouldn't even invent email until '79? It's like someone is a pathological liar or something, but who?
If I post a comment about IT or Trump, the asshats act like I gave them the cooties. If I post a comment on any other topic, everything is fine. Go figure.
It's technologically inept individuals like yourself that keep me at work and put a roof over my head.
That's why I give thanks to Microsoft for my daily bread and butter.
The last time one of MY emails ended up flagged as spam was because the spam filter of the receiving mail-server did a sender check with my mail server, but that sender check didn't conform to the SMTP specs, so it was refused as spam attempt by my mail server.
( On the plus side, the receiving mail server didn't just silently drop it or put it in a spam folder, but it refused delivery with a 5xx code, so that I could notify the recipient via other channels. )
... and, some years ago, I was seriously thinking that should fight it, that I could contribute towards its eradication. How could a stupidity-based method succeed?
I was sooo naive and spammers were way ahead of me in the adequate understanding of the sad real nature of most of people: they are intrinsically idiots; idiots who feel safer among idiots and idiocy; idiots who prefer to complain about not understanding, being afraid, being fooled, etc. than making the slightest effort to actually understand.
Now, I do understand stupidity much better than before. That's why I also understand why spam (and many other things) exist, will continue existing and I shouldn’t spend even a second of my life by trying to change that reality. I will always fight for what is right, but stupidity-related stuff isn’t a concern for me anymore. Now, I plainly accept it, its unfixable essence and, eventually, enjoy it.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Not sure what is supposed to be the point of this article. A celebration of human failure? A monument to how a small amount of greed can drive a YUGE scam-and-anti-scam industry? Okay, $200 million sounds like a lot of money to you or me, so maybe the greed seems justified, but that $20 billion on the other side is just plain insane.
Causes:
(1) SMTP ignores accounting
(2) "Live and let spam" is a bad business model
Solution:
Let's work together to break the spammers' business models. That means the email providers AND the victims of the spammers. Not just the obvious victims like the suckers who lose money or the corporations that suffer damage to their reputation or the customers of those corporations who are victimized through their (dying) trust in those corporations, but even the MILLIONS of little suckers who lose some time whenever the spammers can steal a bit of their attention.
Obviously filtering has failed. How about an iterative analytic approach where we, the victims, would help identify the problems and countermeasures of each spam message. Also would allow for prioritization of the proper countermeasures along with better targeting.
Trivial example for a phishing scam spam. Even the google is not smart enough to know all my bank accounts (at least I hope so), but I would be able to say "Whoa. That's a GREAT looking phishing scam. Almost makes me sad that I've never had an account at that bank." Working together to share that kind of information would allow Gmail to stomp on it more quickly.
Yeah, I know no one is listening and Slashdot is pointless, but I'll still close with the joke: "Lots more details available upon polite request." I know that because of prior reactions and replies, but before you waste your keystrokes let me say:
(1) I'm quite willing to answer questions, including for clarifications where I'm too terse.
(2) If you want to defend spammers, then I think you are (a) insane, (b) a spammer, or (c) worse.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
The whole spam digest/folder/quarantine thing is one of my biggest peeves.
People seem to think that obvious spam should be rejected, questionable stuff should be put in a folder or a digest or otherwise hidden, and the obvious good stuff should go through.
That's treating the outright, no-doubt spam much better than the iffy stuff! Totally wrong. If you're not going to deliver to the user, then reject, so that the sender has some chance of even knowing there's a problem.
I wonder how many online orders of yours have been cancelled.
The way our email protocols were created show a total lack of consideration for this type of bad behavior. If it happened on Arpanet, it should have been fixed by the time it became Darpanet. This shows a real lack of foresight in the creation of SMTP (in 1982).
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I sent the message to his network administrator and then even phoned the guy demanding to know what the heck he was doing polluting my in-box.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Turns out theirs was the first big Usenet spam, not the first ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Dear NYTimes,
Clearly you have no interest in people linking to your content.
This is demonstrated by your page source looking like diarrhea under high magnification.
Let me tell you about a href html page jump tags href="#blahblah". I think you will find them very useful, and they have widespread browser support due to their pre-Jurassic era creation date.
Regards,
ihateyouverymuch.
Dear Slashdot readers,
If you too want to experience the pain of finding TFA, please follow the link to James Comey / brexit etc and scroll/search most of the way down the page to the section labelled "Back Story".
Regards,
dontblaimthesubmiter-nytimessux
Typo in the title. I give up.
Maybe that's when the first e-mail spam was sent, but according to this link, the first record of spam being sent was back in 1864, via telegraph.
The biggest traitor in the history of Western Civilization and nobody outside of the tech BUSINESS knows who he is.
If a sender is not on an approved list, they get an email from the receiving system requiring them to fill out a form for whitelist approval. Forged headers are detected and automatically trashed without review
A PDP-10 is a minicomputer.