Spam Is 30 Years Old

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist commemorates spam's 30th anniversary, a week from today. The first spam message — archived here — was sent to 393 users of ARPANET on May 2, 1978 by someone from computing pioneers DEC. They had to type in all the addresses by hand first."

One Thing That's Changed

As you see below, the mail program would only accept 320 addresses. The rest overflowed into the body of the message. When they found some recipients had not gotten it, they re-sent the message to the rest of the recipients. According to Thuerk, they were unaware of the "address file" function in the mail program that would have enabled a mailing list.

Unfortunately, one thing that's changed is that spammers have become far more sophisticated and clever. Sometimes I analyze a piece of spam that gets caught and when it's at my office's Exchange Inbox, funny things happen. Like I show up as the sender, receiver and subject of the message! Only when I inspect the e-mail do I find that they are using some sort of Exchange exploit to make it appear this way while the actual subject is--you guessed it--viagra (and no, my name is not Viagra)!

In the spirit of the history of Spam, I think it also bears mentioning something I didn't see in the article: a Usenet phrase "Eternal September [wikipedia.org]" which was September of 1993. An exponential growth of spam and gullible users ensured constant income for spammers and provided the initial hit of income for people like The Spam King (I won't even dignify him with printing his name). They've been chasing the dragon ever since at the expense of the hardware and software of the internet. And to think that if the spammers had missed that initial exposure of thousands of people willing to "increase what she prefers your size XXL no one will know you use works 100%" then we might not be in the situation we are today.

Judges today should force spammers to work with law enforcement and security companies to figure out how to stop others before they even start. If not for an initial hit of funding, I doubt any spammer would continue.

Re:One Thing That's Changed

The "reply-to:" field is used by most email clients as the "Sender". You can fill out the reply-to with anything you want. No exploits needed.

Stallman ---

Heh, nice pro spam message by RMS there.

Re:Stallman ---

Heh, nice pro spam message by RMS there.

Of course the context was a little bit different in 1978 than it was more than a decade later when the Green Card Lawyers really kicked off the phenomenon.

Kind of the like a neighborhood where just about everybody knows everybody and thus everyone is accountable for any antisocial behaviour on their part.

Stallman Wants a Date!

Damn AC, you beat me to it. That comment alone made the whole thing worth reading. I was reading along, not really paying attention to who was who, but I got to that line and thought, 'okay, who is THIS yutz?' So I scrolled back and lo-and-behold! It's Stallman.

Someone should make a Richard Lolman pic, "I'm in yer ARPAnet, begging for dates." Or "Online Dating: yer doin' it wrong." Or even "I can has girlfriend?"

And in 30 years...

This is the first time I've purposely clicked a link to view spam.

Re:And in 30 years...

"on 2 may 78 digital equipment corporation (dec) sent out an arpanet message advertising their new computer systems. this was a flagrant violation of the use of arpanet as the network is to be used for official u.s. government business only. appropriate action is being taken to preclude its occurrence again."

whew, glad they took action, such mis-uses could have gotten out of hand.

Wasted chance

A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW

Apparently the original recipients(tm) had a chance to meet the very first spammer and have physical access to him and his product and wasted the chance.

Re:Wasted chance

Oh come on, the only people on the ARPAnet back in 1978 were the nerdiest of the nerds. What were they going to do, throw their pocket protectors at the guy?

For reference, the people complaining about the spam on that page are her [stanford.edu], him [panda.com], and also this guy [fsfeurope.org]

I'm sure the DEC guy was quaking in his boots.

Fail!

"APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN."

So, uhm, they failed?

ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.
ok i won't write in caps but it's a quote damnit.

That was vaguely disappointing...

I half-expected to see a message more along the lines of, "Xp4nd y0ur R4m, d3creeese ur l4tency".

Happy birthday Spam!

Thanks for making people focus less on sending me physical junk mail. The development of a spam filter which automatically rubs it in feces and sends it back to the originator wasn't going so well. The robots were the hard part. Stupid robots.

It's a shame

that we can't get today's spammers to manually type in every address too. That might cut down on spam a bit.

Re:It's a shame

that we can't get today's spammers to manually type in every address too. That might cut down on spam a bit.

Combine that with cutting off the hands of spammers, and I think you'd be onto something. :-P

Cheers

Look who's 70

For those wondering, the original spam (nee Hormel spiced ham) turned 70 last year.

I love this bit...

ON 2 MAY 78 DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION (DEC) SENT OUT AN ARPANET MESSAGE ADVERTISING THEIR NEW COMPUTER SYSTEMS. THIS WAS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE USE OF ARPANET AS THE NETWORK IS TO BE USED FOR OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ONLY. APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.

IN ENFORCEMENT OF THIS POLICY DCA IS DEPENDENT ON THE ARPANET SPONSORS, AND HOST AND TIP LIAISONS. IT IS IMPERATIVE YOU INFORM YOUR USERS AND CONTRACTORS WHO ARE PROVIDED ARPANET ACCESS THE MEANING OF THIS POLICY.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

MAJOR RAYMOND CZAHOR

CHIEF, ARPANET MANAGEMENT BRANCH, DCA

Did Major Czahor have a 6-bit terminal, or was he just indulging in the traditional military fondness for capital letters? But what's really funny is that he doesn't care about the spamming as such, he just wants to remind everybody that the network was for "U.S. Government Business Only". Which is laughable, since unofficial use of ARPANET was rampant, especially in 1978. That's how Zork [wikipedia.org] got developed, with its authors writing it in pieces and using feedback from the ARPANET community to improve the game. There was also an excellent database of limericks; a friend with ARPANET access was good enough to print it out for me, but I've long since lost it. Anybody seen it online? For that matter, is there a PDP-10 emulator somewhere running the original Zork? Not the Fortran port (which never had the complete game) the original MDL version.

Poor poor lonely RMS...

It looks like RMS was looking for love back then too!

10-MAY-78 23:20:30-PDT,2250;000000000001
Mail-from: MIT-AI rcvd at 7-MAY-78 2316-PDT
Date: 8 MAY 1978 0213-EDT
From: RMS at MIT-AI (Richard M. Stallman)
Subject: MSGGROUP# 697 Some Thoughts about advertising
To: stefferud at USC-ISI
Redistributed-To: [ISI]<MsgGroup>Mailing.List;154:
Redistributed-By: STEFFERUD (connected to MSGGROUP)
Redistributed-Date: 8 MAY 1978

---EDIT--

4) Would a dating service for people on the net be "frowned upon" by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.

SPAM!

Well... I tried to make a joke here, repeating the word SPAM a lot, but I got cought by slashdot's SPAM filter:

Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.

But I didn't dive up! Thus, I have figured out a way to beat the system, here it goes:

while echo "SPAM!"; do echo "SPAM!"; done

So for much for a SPAM filter, slashdot!

Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use

Nov 23, 1987 - 1st documented use of the word "spam" to describe unwanted electronic correspondence.

See http://tinyurl.com/4jg5w4 [tinyurl.com] (the url is a tinyurl that links to a google groups posting)

And yes, I'm the one who said that back then, and no, I didn't think I was doing anything big, it just seemed, well, obvious at the time.

Paul Czarnecki Cezanne

Al Gore?

How come Al Gore isn't on this list? Interesting...

A conversation with my children

Q: Daddy, how old are you?

A: Older than spam, kiddo.

Q: ooooooooh

Re:usenet spam - greencard lawyers

The script was written in perl, of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canter_&_Siegel [wikipedia.org]

The article has notes about their numerous ethical lapses also.

Re:usenet spam - greencard lawyers

Canter and Siegel [wikipedia.org]. I still remember firing up trn that morning, coming across the same off-topic message in group after group, and realizing that someone had used a newsgroups list in conjunction with a perl script or something to post the same advert to every USENET group in existence.

The mechanism was obvious as soon as you saw the results, but it seemed so obviously wrong and inappropriate "why would anyone *do* that!". The beginning of the end of the golden age ...

Re:Mr. Watson, come here, I want to sell you a DEC

Though in the case of Spam, I'm surprised it wasn't "Mr. Watson, come here, did you kn0w that you can get h0m3 r3f!n@nCINg for less then 6% APR, no questions asked?"

Or, "Mr. Watson, come here, do you want a G1@nt C0ck like me, if so, buy this pill."

Or, "Mr. Watson, come here, you great uncle from Nigeria just died and you stand to inherit a fortune!"

Re:RMS: If we outlaw spam the terrorists have won!

3) It has just been suggested that we impose someone's standards on us because otherwise he MIGHT do so. Well, if you feel that those standards are right and necessary, go right ahead and support them. But if you disagree with them, as I do, why hand your opponents the victory on a silver platter? By the suggested reasoning, we should always follow the political views that we don't believe in, and especially those of terrorists, in anticipation of their attempts to impose them on us. If those who think that the job offers are bad are going to try to prevent them, then those of us who think they are unrepugnant should uphold our views. Besides, I doubt that anyone can successfully force a site from outside to impose censorship, if the people there don't fundamentally agree with the desirability of it.

This was written in 1978.

For some reason, I really can't get that to settle in, and as much as I hate to call RMS a "visionary", that comment might as well have been written last week...

The fact that RMS and his supporters "won" this side of the debate may very well have played a significant role in shaping the events of the past 15 years.