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Spam's tenth anniversary is today (Netcraft)
Netcraft looks
at ten years of spam. "Ten years ago today, spam as we know it
was born. On 5 March 1994, a message was posted to some Usenet newsgroups
by a law firm called Canter and Siegel, advertising their services for the
U.S. Green Card lottery. It sounds mild enough today, but at the time that
move and its follow-ups provoked increasing outrage across the Net. Many
were appalled that "netiquette" - the unspoken rules that hitherto had
maintained order in cyberspace - had been breached, sensing perhaps that
things would never be the same again."
(Log in to post comments)
Spam's tenth anniversary is today (Netcraft) Posted Mar 5, 2004 19:30 UTC (Fri) by jdthood (guest, #4157) [Link] The Internet without spam. Those were the days.
Spam's tenth anniversary is today (Netcraft) Posted Mar 5, 2004 19:45 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Yes, they certainly were... it was a wonderfully quiet realm. No ads on web sites, no spam in your mail spool.I also remember fondly the days before the Great Shift (or so I call it...); the time when the great majority of Linux news items appeared on weekends, and Linux happenings were scarce Monday-Friday. Now of course it's the other way round... but there was a time...
Spam's tenth anniversary is today (Netcraft) Posted Mar 6, 2004 0:39 UTC (Sat) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link] I wonder when your Great Shift occurred. The LKML archives are public. You could write a Perl script to scan the archives for message dates. Also interesting would be comparing messages during verus after business hours. :-)
Spam's tenth anniversary is today (Netcraft) Posted Mar 8, 2004 0:13 UTC (Mon) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link] > [Wonderful days...no ads on web sites...]OTOH, remember WAIS? Google is a godsend.
Spam's tenth anniversary is today (Netcraft) Posted Mar 6, 2004 0:59 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] Canter and Siegel were not the first to post off-topic advertising messages to Usenet, but they were the first to do it in bulk. Canter and Siegel posted an individual Usenet message to each of several thousand newsgroups. Because they did this, a user who subscribed to 100 newsgroups would have to delete 100 distinct copies. And C and S were aggressive about it, offering to help others do the same as them.
Nope... first spam in 1985! Posted Mar 6, 2004 8:11 UTC (Sat) by dank (guest, #1865) [Link] I recall the first spam I ever recievedwas in 1985 or so; it came in via UUCP, and it was an ad for (surprise) a bulk mail sending program.
Spam's tenth anniversary is today (Netcraft) Posted Mar 6, 2004 15:53 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] There *is*, though, one positive aspect to all this:all the articles keep talking about how spam has made Usenet effectively useless... which is wonderful, because it nicely balances all that September-forever crap we *used* to have to put up with. Just keep telling them that... :-)
Spam's tenth anniversary is today (Netcraft) Posted Mar 6, 2004 16:08 UTC (Sat) by jdthood (guest, #4157) [Link] One thing that is better about the Intenet now is that we have Google. It allows me easily to look up mysterious terms such as 'September forever'.
67th anniversary of Spam Posted Mar 8, 2004 1:47 UTC (Mon) by bkeepers (guest, #13299) [Link] Ironically enough, March 5 was the 67th anniversary of Spam(R) (the meat-or whatever you'd call it).
Spam in a can Posted Mar 8, 2004 14:21 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] It's a "potted meat product". But the common date is not ironic, it's just almost unbelieveably coincidental. I wonder if it's true. If so, we can start telling journalists that's where spam got its name, and stop confusing them with Monty Python skits. :-)Of course nobody actually eats SPAM, except in Hawaii.
Not really the same spam Posted Mar 12, 2004 17:31 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] That particular transgression wasn't really an example of what we think of as spam today. It was a two-pronged attack on Internet culture: 1) the worst offense was that virtually all of the postings were off-topic. That's not applicable to spam sent to personal email addresses. 2) it was commercial use of the Internet. Remember that in the early days, that was considered evil, though it was never clear exactly what "commercial use" meant. This law firm would have been despised even its ad had been posted only to legal.greencardlottery.But still, the underlying concept of stealing the attention of millions of people even though only a few are interested, is the same. I wonder when then first mass unsolicited commercial email happened.
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