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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.
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.
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.
... 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.
Yup. Eternal September was the beginning of the tidal wave that changed the net forever. Usenet is no longer what it once was, and the net is a little bit lesser since the days of Kibo, Ludwig Plutomium, alt.folklore.urban, Seder Argic, Ted Frank, Joel Furr and the Green Card Spamming t shirts, et. al. I sold stuff to folks all over the globe on a simple promise to pay when they got it and never got screwed. Time and change ...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
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