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Laurence 'Green Card' Canter Has No Regrets
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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
It was inevitable (Score:2, Interesting)
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Quote from the interview (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess there's justice in the world after all
Playing fast and loose with history ... (Score:5, Interesting)
If this is what passes for factual history in his world, there's no apparent reason that we should listen to anything else he has to say.
What's disappointing is that the reporter apparently saw no need to comment on the accuracy of such "facts".
Re:Playing fast and loose with history ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in 1994 the Internet *was* new, from the general public perspective. Sure, it had been around for years, but but wasn't in the news that much. A better way of phrasing it would be to state that something new was happening *to* the Internet: the average person was climbing on board. For the first time in history a large number of average citizens were accessible via electronic means.
To most people, Compuserve *did* come before the Internet. Back in 1984 I paid a reasonable monthly charge to access Compuserve. I couldn't do the same with the Internet until 1993.
That said, I still find his smug "if we didn't do it somebody else would have" attitude annoying.
Moral justification (Score:5, Interesting)
Siegel died? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]
Re:This just in!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
As a matter of fact, we made a proposal in 1994 with Usenet to (filter spam) by simply starting it with the word 'ad.' Because almost any program can filter things out. So if you don't want it, you can get rid of it. That would be one simple solution.
There should be some kind of regulation. I'm not sure that the regulation of e-mail should be, or needs to be, different than the regulation of any other form of communication.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody really knew - usenet was small enough that people knew a good chunk of the personalities across the entire list of groups. I'm still pissed I never bought a Segar Ardic (sp?) t-shirt. At least I have Fidonet, kibo and Nets on the Net tshirts.
Also, *nobody* had any filters set up to kill crossposts - crossposts were still useful. People were complaining about Delphi users being stupid and ignorant of netiquette (and netiquette was the rule, not the exception). Lots of tradition was lost as the delphoids, then Compuserve, then AOL, and finally Prodigy users came to usenet, each stupider and a larger mass of ignorance than the preveious group.
It was a different era after about 1991. Remember, this was before the web existed, and the internet was much more agressively peer to peer - ISPs tossed you a leased line, not a dialup. You could watch raw, uncompressed streaming video from MIT at Duke simply because there was nobody else using the bandwidth. No DoS attacks, no skriptkiddies, l337speak was still B1FF, and the trolls only hit appropriate threads, and were graduate students or professors tossing in as many inside references and jokes as possible.
It really was a different time - open to abuse simply because there had never really been any, and, like a society with no thieves doesn't make locks, the internet didn't really grow to handle abuse.
Lest you think it was too nice, there was no google or gnutella - Archie was nice, but there wasn't *that* much out there. No CNN, no BBC, no Slashdot, no instant messaging (of course, now there's no finger or write).
In such a different day, this really was a novel, new thing. Nobody except a few farseeing people thought it was anything but a single incident, not to be repeated. I certainly didn't - of course, I thought Mosaic was "neat, but much less useful than gopher". :)
--
Evan
Ah, memories ... or Canter & Siegel classics (Score:5, Interesting)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]
Martha's story (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox (Score:4, Interesting)
The phrase "opt-in" as you suggested is not at all an accurate description. The automated carpet bombing spammers completely destroyed the most popular groups on usenet. Gone are many of the playgrounds where people could freely talk to others in the world. News spools were flooded at the expense of those people who wanted to provide this free exchange of information. The spammer paid almost nothing to start the flood distribution. We paid the price for their abuse.
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox (Score:3, Interesting)
One other thing you missed -- not only did Green Card Lottery post to every group available on their server, they also forged approval headers for moderated groups. The first place I saw their spam was in news.announce.important, since like any good netizen I placed it at the start of my
Back in the days of netiquette, this was something you simply DID NOT DO (except for the occasional AFJ).