Laurence 'Green Card' Canter Has No Regrets

madmagic writes "News.com has an interview today with the surviving lawyer who spammed Usenet with multiple "Green Card Lottery" posts in '94." And today we can get spam in 20 different languages. Hurray.

Oh HE started it....

[secondsun]

Does anyone have his email address; I want to tell him about this new penis surgury...

Spam

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Well, I didn't know who started it, but now I know who to forward it all to.

Invented? Pah!

[Dynamoo]

Back in 1987 we mass-mailed everyone at the university I was studying at to offer them floppy disks for sale. We gathered the names from the mail system usage tables on our Multics system.

Needless to say we got dragged up before the head of school, and severely told off.. but in those days they didn't have any rules against spamming, so that was all they could do.

That was 15 years ago. I guess we weren't the first then either.

We never did sell any floppy disks though! :)

Find them and destroy them

[skroz]

Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"

Hopefully all of this will come with a white hot poker in his ass.

I wonder if he gets angry

[qurob]

When he comes to work at 8:00 am and has 30 pieces of spam in his mailbox....

Look...

[xtermz]

...Stop harping on the guy. If it wasnt for him, I'ld still be bald, my wang wouldnt be 20-30% bigger, my vast real-estate empire would be nothing, and my hot willing wife from asia would still be over there picking rice...

God bless the spam...it changed my life

Re:Find them and destroy them

[Bowfinger]

Oh, there's a special place in hell roped off for this guy. His role in hell? He'll be running satan's mail servers, hunting down open relays that will mysteriously never close. He'll spend hours per day blocking OTHER open relays, only to find twice as many open up. He'll have nightmarish visions of "Free XXX Adult Action," "Over 60 and still HOT TO TROT" and "FREE $$$ HOME MORTGAGES ON THE CHEAP!"

Wouldn't the ads be more like "FREE ice water!!!!!" and "Make your own air conditioner - absolutely legal", with maybe an occasional "Hidden heaven cam, hot teen angels! (34231)"?

Proof that Perl is Evil

[wiredog]

It was with a fairly simple script, a Perl script,

That's right, the first usenet spam was sent with a Perl script. We must stop the spread of tools, such as perl, that allow this sort of evil.

And, since perl makes no attempt to stop spam, or evil hackers copying DVD's, we must souppport the CBDTPAYHBTYHLHAND legislation that will put a stop to the evil that is perl!

Re:Siegel died?

[Tackhead]

> Is this true? I went looking for the obituary, but could not find it. I'd have thought there would be some notice. I wondered if the obituary would have mentioned her as the "co-inventor" of spam (what a thing to be remembered for, in one's life ...)

I guess they were afraid the cemetery wouldn't have enough room for the mile-long line of geeks waiting their turn to, uh, "offer their respects", in the form of what I'll delicately call a libation.

Re:Normally...

[delcielo]

Here here.

A lawyer AND a spammer. He's got two strikes. On more and he's out.

Re:Former Internet Direct owner's comment..

[Anonymous Coward]

We guessed there were 25,000 to 50,000 e-mails that never got to us.

Wow, a lawyer being denied the opportunity to read 50,000 of his own death threats. The tragedy.