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Laurence 'Green Card' Canter Has No Regrets
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Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them. -- Booth Tarkington
They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox (Score:1, Informative)
I think they even crossposted - meaning that a good newsreader would mark the message as already read in cross-posted groups.
But you could not crosspost to all groups - so one did read the same message too many times - hence all the vitriol .. They were the folks people loved to hate ..
Cheers, Andy!
Re:Normally... (Score:5, Informative)
as I use a Unix based mail client, I cannot block addresses.
On Unix, filtering mail is normally done by Procmail, not by your mail client. See this excellent tutorial [ii.com].
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox (Score:4, Informative)
No, they didn't crosspost, they sent one individual message to each newsgroup. This is what annoyed people.
It was a weird day. Each newsgroup I went to (and I was a student, so I read a lot of them) had this message. I'd never seen anything like it before, and I certainly didn't pick it as the thin end of the wedge.
Re:Normally... (Score:3, Informative)
Once you've learned how to use procmail, you may want to use the Spam Stopper perl script you can download from one of my friend's website [ivarch.com].
Very nifty spam stopper indeed.
NB: Sorry Andy! If you get slashdotted, I'll buy you some beer!
-- Pete.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox (Score:2, Informative)
Before the full-scale war started, people tried to explain to them why 1) spamming was bad, and 2) why spamming in this fashion was _really_ bad. C&S never seemed to understand that real bandwidth (= money) was being wasted.
Not only did C&S not relent, they mocked the Usenet users in the press and published a book on how to reproduce their efforts. They started a company (Cybersell) and used aliases to post ads for others.
When they started spamming, C&S included their physical address, phone, and fax numbers. Once the ground war started, they quickly learned better. It was discovered that S had been disbarred in Florida, IIRC, but could still practice in Arizona. Other publicly available information about C&S was collected and disseminated.
Sure, somebody else would have done it, but until C&S, nobody had on the same scale.
Antisocial (Score:3, Informative)
IANAP (I Am Not a Psychologist!), but check Sociopathy [mq.edu.au].
-
'[psychopaths have a personality that]
emasculates the constraining force of social rules: people for whom...
the idea of a common good is merely a puzzling and inconvenient abstraction.'
Canter says
'Seems that back then the Internet was more or less the private playpen of academics and geeks,
and any commercial solicitations were considered off limits.'
That sounds like a bunch of inconvenient soial rules.
Check 1
-
'Groups high on psychopathy include...
high-pressure salesmen and stock promoters...
unethical lawyers...'
Check 2
-
'... psychopaths are characterised by an absence of remorse or any conception that their behaviours
ought to be changed.'
In reply to the question
'Do you have any regrets about sending the spam?'
Canter says
'I don't think so. Given the same set of circumstance--the same time, the stage of the
Internet--I'd probably do the same thing.' Check 3
Also check out Antisocial Personality Disorder [byu.edu].Former Internet Direct owner's comment.. (Score:5, Informative)
>
> What always made us mad was that they always knew what we were
> doing before we did it. Then they denied the whole thing. We
> set up our accounts with them initially for the purpose of
> doing this.
As former owner of Internet Direct, please allow me to set the
record straight.
At the time most of our accounts (like the C&S account) were
dial up shell and SLIP accounts. We were setting up at least
30 - 50 accounts a day so to say that we knew each customers
intentions for their account's use is totally not right.
About four weeks before the incident, C&S did visit our offices and
they met with my business partner Bill Fisher. They started to
ask vague questions about our capacity and if we offered
programming consulting services. Bill started to figure out
where they were starting to go with their line of questioning
and he told them that we would not help them with any
spamming activities. Bill then referred C&S to the AUP document
they signed when they joined they service and they left our
offices.
From that time to the day of the incident, they found an
independent programmer to create the scripts to do the
mass spamming.
> They terminated our account in a very short period
> of time, a matter of days. And there was a lot of mail that we
> were really never able to get. We guessed there were 25,000 to
> 50,000 e-mails that never got to us. We eventually got a hard
> disk from them some months later that had it all on there, but
> we were never completely successful at pulling the data off of
> it.
We delivered to their lawyer a 4mm DAT tape two days after the
incident. I believe all the info was encoded in ROT 13.
Re:This just in!!! (Score:5, Informative)
In addition to the infamous greencard spam, he later coauthored the book "How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway" which encouraged others to do what he did (and rationalized such actions as being acceptable). So while he may not be exclusively responsible, he carries significantly more culpability than you're giving him credit for.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... (Score:3, Informative)
They weren't unwritten rules intially. When the NSF was still funding part costs of the backbone (through '94 or so IIRC), the feds required you to sign an "Acceptible Use Policy" to get a feed from an ISP. This AUP applied to all users, even on
As I recall, the ISPs were in charge of enforcing the AUP. In those days there were fewer of them around, so the threat of losing one's feed from any one ISP might mean having no other option to reconnect, so the threat was taken seriously.