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Laurence 'Green Card' Canter Has No Regrets
Related Links Top of the: day, week, month.
I THINK THEY SHOULD CONTINUE the policy of not giving a Nobel Prize for paneling. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
It was inevitable (Score:2, Interesting)
.
Re:It was inevitable (Score:2)
Perhaps, but he was the first, and has absolutely no remorse or regret about his actions. Quite the contrary - when asked whether he currently sends SPAM he replies:
I haven't been, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't at some time.
Bastard!
Oh HE started it.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh HE started it.... (Score:2)
Unfortunately, he must have loved all that attention and convinced other budding marketers they could reap the rewards of spam too. Perhaps the usenet death penalty needed to be applied in a more stricter sense so people like him can't father children.
Re:Oh HE started it.... (Score:2)
Alt.sex was not a binary newsgroup and was the most popular forum visited by estimates of 100,000 people a week back in 1994. Quite impressive. Now it gets that many spams a week.
His passion and promotion of spam did indeed destroy the most popular forums into a cesspool of unwanted and useless promotions. You may deny the damage, but it is there.
Re:Oh HE started it.... (Score:2)
Re:Oh HE started it.... (Score:2)
Point and click on the convient links to communicate with Mr. Canter and how you feel about spam. But please make this personal, not the automated bombing he performed.
Spam (Score:4, Funny)
Quote from the interview (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess there's justice in the world after all
Invented? Pah! (Score:2, Funny)
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! :)
Re:Invented? Pah! (Score:2)
/changes subject
Okay, so spamming is a royal pain in the arse. but some people are vilifying this man to a stupid extent, like the poster who said he was like Hitler (and I think he was being serious) Please try not to lose perspective of how relatively trivial this matter was. Yes, I said trivial and meant it; every day atrocities happen that are far worse than this - spam is annoying and very little more. Besides, it's evidently creating business for advertisers, and created an industry of providers, so it's not all bad...
Find them and destroy them (Score:3, Funny)
Hopefully all of this will come with a white hot poker in his ass.
Re:Find them and destroy them (Score:4, Funny)
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)"?
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.
Eh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Quack quack quack.
Re:Playing fast and loose with history ... (Score:2)
Reasonable? I remember at looking at the compuserv price lists and being astounded at the cost. Of course I was just a kid back then, but it was still pretty pricey.
I wonder if he gets angry (Score:2, Funny)
Is it any suprise that he has no regrets? (Score:2)
This just in!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Gimme a break. This guy is *NOT* responsible for all of the spam the we deal with today. A society made up of a bunch of money-hungry-but-too-lazy-to-get-off-their-asses-
If this guy is responsible for the spam plague, then why do we bother complaining to spammers / ISPs / web-hosts about our spam...Why not just send all of our complaints to this guy, since he's responsible, right?
Re:This just in!!! (Score:3)
Imagine a serial killer talking with great passion about the acts he committed and the reaction sure to follow. Now imagine since he is the first serial killer, we must let him go since there surely must be more to follow. Might as well throw punishment away too.
No need for a deterrent here. Let's make a whole industry to thrive off the evils we allowed to enter our world. After all the anti-virus and spam software industry helps our economy and increases our standard of living. NOT!
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: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.
should charge one cent per email (Score:2)
But so would (Score:2)
I get my phone and internet bill through email -- so I can pay online from work instead of trying to weasel time in at home.
I am on several mailing lists that go out to hundreds of people -- if I send an email that goes to hundreds, is that one cent, or hundreds of cents? Who gets billed? Me, my ISP, the host of the list?
There -ARE- legimate email-marketing businesses. Who do opt-in, double-subscribe, instant unsubscribe lists.
---
Why should we penalize EVERYONE for the actions of some assholes who can't remember how to get permission first?
Nothing wrong with paying for something used (Score:2)
I get my phone and internet bill through email -- so I can pay online from work instead of trying to weasel time in at home.
It'd still be less than what they'd pay the US mail.
I am on several mailing lists that go out to hundreds of people -- if I send an email that goes to hundreds, is that one cent, or hundreds of cents?
If you're sending it to a central server, it's one cent.
Who gets billed? Me, my ISP, the host of the list?
You get billed once and when your host sends out the daily digest, he gets billed once. That would be no more than 31 emails a month, so with the first 1,000 free, he wouldn't be paying anyway.
There -ARE- legimate email-marketing businesses. Who do opt-in, double-subscribe, instant unsubscribe lists.
It would be part of the cost of doing business. It's cheaper than snail mail or phone calls.
Why should we penalize EVERYONE for the actions of some assholes who can't remember how to get permission first?
It's not a penalization of everyone - most people don't send 1,000 emails a month. And it's not penalizing those who do - it's asking them to pay for a service they're using heavily. It would have the added benefit of making spam expensive and unprofitable.
Whoops! Half-awake! (Score:2)
Well, actually with a mailing list of 100 people, say, he would be sending 3100 emails a month and would pay. Still, there are other ways things like this could be done.
Re:Nothing wrong with paying for something used (Score:2)
I get my slashdot responses in email. How many responses are posted PER article, per day?
--
The return on bulk mail via the Post Office is -maybe- one in 10,000.
And that makes a profit on the rates the Post Office charge.
A one-cent tax won't stop spam, it won't halt spam, it won't slow spam.
It'll just mean that everyone ELSE will have a harder time sending email.
(and as for 1,000 emails a month, well, just on average, I send 100 a -day-. Tech support. LOTS of emails. And that doens't count the personal ones.)
Additionally - it won't work.
Why? Because like you just said -- you send one email, you get charged one cent. The email goes to multiple people -- do you get changed multiple cents? Then mailing lists get penalized. Because daily digests are a pain to read -- and if you FORCE daily digests on everyone, you punish everyone for the spam of a few -- AND -- its still a -very- large number on a large scale list.
Re:But so would (Score:2)
Restaurants and several other 'hospitality' type businesses (amusement parks, casinos, resorts) use email -successfully- (and yes, with the double subscribe AND the unsubscribe link)
I'm subscribed to a few of the lists. Why? Because I bloody well LIKE getting a free dessert from BD's Mongolian BBQ on my birthday!
Because its kinda -cool- to get email from Disney twice a year saying "Hey, bring this to a Disney store, get 10% off. Happy Birthday" (one for each of my kids.)
Yeah, its marketing. Yeah, its EVIL advertising. God forbid they might WANT me to go shop in their stores.
The horror.
Eh. All in all, my kids like their toys, and I got a free chocolate sundae. Maybe I might've eaten there anyway. Maybe not.
Re:But so would (Score:2)
I'll agree with this - when one WILLINGLY invites a business to communicate with them by email, there's not problem. I'm still allowing (of all people) X-10 to email me (once each day, talk about overkill), since I ordered the $6.00 special introductory "FireCracker interface kit" years ago when they were mentioned on slashdot. I'm waiting for them to have another really good deal on something besides their little spy cameras (a bargain on their two-way computer interface and some indoor motion sensors at a ridiculously low price would be nice. More toys for me.)...
What's really funny to me is that I just yesterday(!) got around to finally hooking up the "FireCracker" kit. I can at least say that it works, and was well worth the $6.00 I paid for it...
To get back to the original topic, though, I think the original poster MEANT that there were no legitimate "unsolicited" email marketing programs (in an age when nearly everyone gets ONLY unsolicited advertisements, it's easy to forget that there are a few rare, legitimate solicited ones out there as well)...
Re:But so would (Score:2)
*shrugs*
No accounting for folks who can't read, I suppose.
Re:should charge one cent per email (Score:2)
Re:should charge one cent per email (Score:3, Insightful)
I really hate it when people propose things without thinking them through.
Okay, lets say they did. What would be involved? We would have to create a structure, both technological (finding a way to bill you your pennies) and sociological (finding a way to get people to tolerate their government charging them for sending email)
Let's say you get your wish. There are certainly people working on both fronts right now to grant it. Now what? "Only a penny" right? But then, in the name of national security, we are going to have to raise it to a nickle. You aren't on the terrorists side, right? But Rush Limbaugh says that businesses are going to be hurt by this "tax" so GE and Disney will be exempted. They NEED their email. And [insert powerful liberal equivalent of Rush here] will point out that the health care industry NEEDS its email, so that will be exempt, too. To make up the shortfall, we'll have to raise it to a dime.
Once you allow the government to tax your email, you are foolish if you think it will remain at a penny. It is hard to create a new tax. It is easy to raise an existing one.
Re:should charge one cent per email (Score:2)
You've obviously never listened to Rush Limbaugh -- you just made exactly the same argument he would against such a tax.
Re:should charge one cent per email (Score:2)
Linux-Kernel has thousands of members, and hundreds of posts per day. Who will pay the millions of dollars per year for it to go out? Will you let it die, just to avoid spam?
Re:should charge one cent per email (Score:2)
Must control fist of death... (Score:3)
I gotta say my first reaction was ahah so that's the (expletive deleted) who started all this.
But then if it wasn't them then it would have been someone else. I get junk mail through my letter box so thid is just the logical extension for the internet.
Sure it's a pain in the bum, a total waste of bandwidth etc but given that the problem lays with ISP's allowing this stuff to go on (ie the spammers are their customers!) I can't see any solution to it (apart from ignoring and deleting it).
Just my 2 pence worth.
Lessening Spam (Score:2)
It's not going to stop us from using (e-mail) because it's such a marvelous form of communication. But something does have to be done to eliminate the unbelievable volume (of spam) that many people get. One would think that it would lessen itself because it's not as effective.
Not as effective?
Not as effective?
Spam costs virtually nothing to send when compared to reaching the same numbers of people with the same message via any other media that even if you get only 1 response per million I'm sure its still an order of magnitude more cost effective than, for example, running an add during the Super Bowl. Anyone have any stats on this? How much does it cost per email to send spam?
Look... (Score:5, Funny)
God bless the spam...it changed my life
Re:Look... (Score:2)
Moral justification (Score:5, Interesting)
Siegel died? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]
Re:Siegel died? (Score:5, Funny)
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:Siegel died? (Score:2)
"In lieu of flowers, contributions were send to ...",
or
"The ashes were ..."
But that would be cruel.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]
Re:Siegel died? (Score:2)
Re:Siegel died? (Score:2)
One down, one to go....
I despise spam, too, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
...it's really irrelevant who cast the first stone. Looking back, the commercialization of the Internet (incl. Usenet, email, the Web) seems more like a historical inevitability. If it wasn't Canter and Siegel, it would have been someone else two weeks later, guaranteed. The network was simply too rich and too full of potential at that point in time to not be mined for profit.
Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon. However, had this fundamentalist purity somehow miraculously stayed intact, most of us would probably be out of a job today. I know I would.
Canter and Siegel's place in history will be less on the magnitude of Jimi Hendrix, and more like the name of the first concertgoer through the gates at Woodstock-- a piece of trivia at a historical event.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... (Score:2)
Don't forget, the "unwritten rules" of the Internet as a non-commercial venue included the Web(!) at first; there were always "dot-com" addresses, but outright advertising was seriously frowned upon. However, had this fundamentalist purity somehow miraculously stayed intact, most of us would probably be out of a job today. I know I would.
It is not right to treat PULL information sources like web sites as analogous to PUSH information sources. The commercialization was never the problem for any but a tiny fraction of people. If you had done a "Canter and Siegel" about the Israeli/Palestinian question you would have been flamed also. The only reason that commercialism made it worse is because it was clear that if there was profit in it there would be no end to it.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... (Score:2)
So is war, but that doesn't mean I want to give a free pass to the people who start one.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... (Score:2)
But for those of us who were there and lived through the firestorm following, the names Canter and Siegel will be forever burned into our memories. When it was happening, I knew the internet was about to take a serious turn, and that we'd never go back to the way things were, for better or worse.
And yeah, who knows if history will recall the names Canter and Siegel 100 years from now. But it was a pretty significant event -- the first large-scale commercial advertisement on the internet! Tell your kids or grandkids in 10 or 20 or 30 years that you were there for that. They'll look at you the same way you'd look at a great-grandparent that says they remember when the first person on their block got a telephone or television.
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.
Re:I despise spam, too, but... (Score:2)
Perhaps this is a nitpick, but spamming isn't "the commercialization of the Internet." Commercialization is a matter of something being used for trade, which is a voluntary exchange between two parties. Spamming isn't voluntary on the part of the recipient (or recipient's mail host) -- it's an expense forced upon the recipient by the sender. That's trespass and involuntary conversion, not commercialization.
Yes, the Internet has become commercialized. The first examples of that were UUNET and the other early ISPs -- selling Internet access was a new thing once upon a time. Another example would be the commercialization of the Web -- the rise of online stores and the like. Another would be banner ads, which differ from spam in that they are not "pushed" at the recipient; the recipient instructs his computer to download them by viewing a Web page.
Spam isn't commerce. It's crime. Let's not malign honest businesspeople by conflating them with those who "advertise" by spray-painting on other people's property.
Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparantly his parents were lacking in teaching him morals. My parents always taught me "Before you do anything, think about what the world would be like if EVERYONE did that thing. Before you toss that gum wrapper out of the car window, think about what the street would look like if everyone did it. Before you say something nasty to someone, think about how you'd feel if the rolls were reversed."
It's pretty basic stuff. I can't tell you how many spammers I've confronted via email (I report every spam I get) only to be told "Lighten up jerk! It's only one email. My response is always "Yea, but what if every business on the planet did what you did?"
I'll never understand spammers. They seem to be almost universally lacking in the ability to tell right from wrong. That Canter's excuse is "if I hadn't done it, someone else would have, so it's OK" only shows that he too is lacking in that ability.
-S
Re:Old lesson... do unto others... applies here. (Score:2)
"Well, I was going to take the 401 into work today, but with 6 billion people on it, maybe I'll stick with the subway..."
Proof that Perl is Evil (Score:4, Funny)
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:Proof that Perl is Evil (Score:2)
But remember (Score:2)
Thinking backwards? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article: The Usenet, to my way of thinking, is very different than e-mail because it's not something that's just coming to you.
Isn't he thinking backwards here? Here's a clue: people have to store and transmit Usenet posts, just like they do with email, and they have to pay for the time and the storage, just like they do with email. The only difference from email for our purposes is in the opposite direction from that which he implies.
So when he says that Usenet spam isn't something that's "just coming to you", he's confusing the issue: the real difference from email spam is that it's not coming just to you. The spammer gets to make thousands of people pay to read their one ad, instead of having to go to the trouble of sending an individual message for each one.
You're going to these message boards for whatever reason,
Sure. And 99 times out of a hundred it isn't to get told about how to find a green card.
and although it may be true that mass posting to every Usenet group in sight wasn't good, I still don't see how it is nearly as intrusive as receiving 300 pornographic e-mail solicitations every day
Which makes it quite all right, of course.
<bad-taste> "News.com has an interview today with the surviving lawyer who spammed Usenet with multiple "Green Card Lottery" posts in '94."
You mean someone got the other one? :) </bad-taste>
Ah, memories ... or Canter & Siegel classics (Score:5, Interesting)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) [sethf.com]
Re:Ah, memories ... or Canter & Siegel classic (Score:2)
What exactly did you do to him?
The anger in the community over spam. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that line begins somewhere in the early 1990's.
Anyone using email in that timeframe (who was new to it) looked forward to each communication received via the wires - they were special and important somehow - they were EMAIL!
Then came spam and an eagerly anticipated epistle of import became just so much crap.
I think that many of us have simply replaced disappointment with anger.
I know I have.
Re:The anger in the community over spam. (Score:2)
But I disagree with your theory about where/how it was drawn.
I've been using e-mail since 1987, AND I'm one of those people who just put up with spam as background noise. When I use my home account, the first thing I do is delete 80% of the messages unread. Sometimes I foward the especially appalling to the appearant-source ISP. Or in the case of what claims to be incest-porn, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's CyberTipLine [cybertipline.com]. It's irritating to have to do that, but I just don't get as angry about it as a lot of people do. And while it is true that getting E-MAIL isn't as exciting as it used to be, it is nice to have more than three real life friends who can send it to me. (Not that I didn't or don't still love getting e-mail from Brian, Todd, and Sarah.)
Incidentally, I blame the whois database for my worst spam, since I had virtually none before registering a couple of domains. (Idle, nothing to see here.) And I still have virtually none on most of my e-mail accounts.
Liza
Re:The anger in the community over spam. (Score:2)
The fisrt scumbag outfit to start molesting my home fax machine was Fax.com, sending ads on behalf of National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, who sold the ads to various companies, thinking that since they were a non-profit, the anti fax-spam laws didn't apply to them.
I raised hell with all offending parties and the two major corporate sponsors of the Center: Sun and Computer Associates. It didn't take very long before a profuse appology arrived from the director, but I got the impression that they were going to continue to fax spam.
Martha's story (Score:4, Interesting)
May I have the envelope please... (Score:2)
A disbarred lawyer and a pioneer of Internet spam with no regrets. Talk about morally devoid. Let me guess... he owns two pitbulls, thinks the 9/11 hijackers were justified, and posts goatse pictures to Slashdot forums.
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.
Clash Course (Score:2)
I stumbled on the C&S book at a Barnes and Noble years ago. Flipped through a few pages. Read their story about how they got started. And read their descriptions of the person they managed to find to create the tools needed for their deeds.
They were not kind. In fact, they were almost hostile in their description of the person (and seemed to note his guilt in performing his task). The final mention of the mystery coder is their apparent relief to have the code and be done with his presense. Some gratitude.
It seems these folks were hell-bent on clashing with the tech culture from the very beginning.
Poor interview end (Score:2)
Next interview: Dave Rhodes (Score:2)
Must be the devil himself. (Score:2)
Must be the devil himself.
Spammers never change ... Remember Joseph Melle? (Score:2)
http://www.compunotes.com/Interviews/jmelle.htm
I wonder what happened to him?
What really makes me angry... (Score:2)
Re:What really makes me angry... (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is wierd because most people who realised back in 1994 that the Internet would be huge commercially and acted on it are millionaires today. Canter could have been Amazon, or at the very least CEO of a startup that went under but only after making the founders ten million or so in the IPO.
Instead Canter was disbarred from practising law in the whole US as a direct result of the SPAM incident. He dosen't mention that of course. Most lawyers would think $200,000 to be a pretty poor return for something that causes you to loose your license to practise law. Admittedly Canter's case was overdetermined, he had been previously disbarred in another state. However the Arizona bar chose to bar him for the SPAM and bringing the profession into disrepute rather than failing to inform them of disciplinary proceedings in another state.
The fact is that on the Internet you don't do so well by using sharp practices. The guy who wrote the Perl script for Canter disputes the claim that they made any money. The ratio of genuine to false responses was way to high for it to be economic. However Canter and Siegel thought that they could make a fortune by conning others into spamming.
Canter and Siegel managed to wreck Usenet, but it probably would have gone down anyway. I had a look at soc.culture.british last night, not a single substantive post. Almost everything there was political spam from various varieties of fascist in support (or opposition to) some war criminal or other.
Fixing USEnet is one of those things that lots of people keep trying to get arround to. It is pretty clear that there is a need to have some form of authentication on the posts and that some form of moderation is necessary. I originally became interested in Slashdot after Jammie told me about the moderation scheme. Thing is that Slashdot is a very narrow resource compared to UseNet.
Oh and I do mean fixing USEnet, not just NNTP, although NNTP's flood fill routing is broken too.
Re:Normally... (Score:2)
He actually suggested tagging comercials and other stuff which speaks in his favour. He also acknowledges the inherent right of the individual to filter out what he does not like. This does not even compare to the current b***. They declare any filtering to be a violation of their right of free speach. If they send you an ad on P*** Enlargement by 27 inch you must read it!!!
creative penalties (Score:2)
He should have publicity. Lots of it. He should be well known as the man who invented spam,complete with photos, etc.
There should be dartboards with his face on it.
People would probably boycott him on this basis. I know I would.
Re:creative penalties (Score:2)
No, not in a long time. Maybe that will change if my whereabouts are known. I've been keeping a rather low profile in recent years.
Canter hasn't practiced law since 1995. Six years ago, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he's been developing software to help traders analyze stock options.
I am sure that some newspaper in the SF/SJ area would be more than happy to feature his face in an article.
Re:Normally... (Score:4, Funny)
A lawyer AND a spammer. He's got two strikes. On more and he's out.
Re:Normally... (Score:2)
From the article:
He replies to spam. If we're lucky, he'll get cancer and respond to an ad for laetrile. Strike three, and chalk one up for natural selection.
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: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:Normally... (Score:2)
Not only that, but that's the best way to filter your mail anywhere. Since so many people access their email from several different places, filtering on the client side is not effective. Also, if you have different quotas in different folders (Cyrus IMAP servers for example), you want to make sure the filtering happens as soon as the mail arrives.
You can do server-side filtering with all the servers I've used:
Re:Normally... (Score:2)
Re:Normally... (Score:2)
Re:Spammer reminisces (Score:2)
Also, how often do you get snail mail for pyramid schemes, porno, and other such rip offs? Most snail mail junk mail is from well known companies or local businesses. (Capitol One sends me a new credit card thing every week, grr). Anyway, I think I'm much more likely to find something of use in my snail mail box junk mail than in my e-mail. Afterall, you sometimes find a good deal/coupon among that mess. I don't know if I can say that for 99% of the spam I've received.
Re:Spammer reminisces (Score:4, Insightful)
Ugh... this guy doesn't get it!
The REAL problem with unsolicited e-mail is that the cost of delivering it is ultimately borne by the carriers and the ultimate recipient, not the sender. The sender just has to pay $20 or so for a throwaway dialup account, and he can blast out thousands of emails before he gets shut down.
The recipient's ISP has to pay for extra storage capacity, bandwidth costs, and larger SMTP servers, so that his infrastructure doesn't collapse under the deluge of spam. The open relays between the spammer and ISP also incur significant bandwidth and processing costs, with no compensation.
At least with junk mail, the sender pays a bulk mailing rate and covers the costs of delivering it. He can send as much as he likes, but now there's an incentive to control his costs and make some attempt to target his mailings.
If there were a way of passing the true costs of spam back to the original sender, we would probably see a sharp reduction in volume.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... (Score:3, Insightful)
No matter how full your snail-mail box is, it only takes a couple seconds to empty it and sort through it. You don't pay anything for that junk (except for maybe the garbage collection fee, but that's a flat rate no matter how full your dumpster out back is).
E-mail, on the other hand, is something people pay dearly for. If you're on a slower than broadband connection, like a modem or cell phone, you're usually paying by the minute, and with many spam messages reaching 50k or larger, it can take more than ten seconds each to download. How many here get more than twenty a day? That's over three minutes of your money going to waste. And no matter what connection speed you're on, it takes time to go through and delete them all (no more than sorting snail mail, I guess). And what about the people that get e-mail at their pagers? Many pay money per e-mail.
Spam isn't just evil, it's expensive!
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... (Score:2)
Spam transfers the cost of reading their shit onto the reader. You pay for the connection, for the hit in network performance on the internet (as it processes it all), on your time as you delete it and set up filters. At least with snail mail, they are paying and you can derive some small satisfaction when you toss it in the bin. There are also mature laws covering postal mail.
Snail mail also tends to be targetted, touting for legitimate business, whereas spam is almost entirely illegitmate being randomly targetted, offensive (adult sites), sleazy (penis enlargers, viagra, pheromones, fake subjects, js popups etc.), illegal (nigerian money scams, mlms, cable descramblers etc.) or purely incomprehensible (taiwanese). Worse yet, forged headers and open relays mean you have no idea where this crap came from. I get 30 or more pieces of crap like this a day and I deeply resent having to deal with it.
Note that I consider spam to be something I never asked for and something I have no way of opting out of. I do find value in mailing lists from reputable companies as long as I can unsubscribe to them.
Anyway, enough of the rationalising. I reckon we should implement sharia law for spammers and cut their hands off for theft of service.
Re:Maybe this is a dumb question... (Score:2)
Re:Spamming is a right (Score:3, Insightful)
SPAM is comparable to if I had to pay the postage on all the junk mail I received from the post office, BEFORE I get to see who it's from, what it is, or even if it is junk mail. When you send SPAM you are infringing on my rights a lot more than I am infringing on yours by trying to stop you. By the way, the state of Indiana just passed an anti-telemarketer law not too long ago, and I don't see it being declared unconstitutional by anyone. Maybe that could be seen as some sort of precedence?
Go back to your bridge you silly troll.
Re:Spamming is a right (Score:2)
Nonsense! It is not a right to waste somebody else's bandwidth, disk space, and CPU cycles. At least with snail SPAM, the SPAMMER has to pay for the postage.
People need to wake up or they will come for YOU next. At its core, this is a basic civil rights issue.
Or not... Hyperbole does not a persuasive argument make.
How the fsck did this obvious troll get moderated up for being interesting?
Re:Spamming is a right (Score:2)
Free speech is a right. There is no right to have your speech heard by everybody you think ought to hear it.
Sorry. It's just not the way it is.
So in essence (Score:2)
Yeah, I think we have a deal...
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: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
Re:They spammed Usenet, not your mailbox (Score:2)
There are 3 internet-related moments I will always remember:
I remember the feeling of epiphany each time -- "this is what the future will look like". The first one I was thrilled. The second one I was enraged. The third one I was mournful.
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.
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.
Spam on Usenet is controllable (Score:2)
We've found that ISPs are quite willing to pull accounts when several hundred people complain about a spam. It can also be fun having an ISP's connection shut down.
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).