Re: nettime Finn Brunton: A short history of spam (LMD)
How could they have missed this? from http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html RMS's reaction is priceless. Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978 Possibly the first spam ever was a message from a DEC marketing rep to every Arpanet address on the west coast, or at least the attempt at that. If you came first to this page you may first want to check out the history of spam or my reflections on the 25th -- now 30th -- anniversary which contains some notes from my interview with Thuerk, the sender. Below is the spam itself. After it you will find a sampling of some of the reaction it generated -- not unlike the reaction to spam today. Look for the celebrity spam-defender! (Of course that was decades ago.) Einar Stefferud, who was one of the recipients of the spam, provides this note of explanation: It was sent from SNDMSG which had limited space for To and CC and Subject fields. The poor soul that typed in the announcement, also (in those days) had to type in all the addresses, and this person was not trained in the use of SNDMSG. So, she/he started typing addresses into the Subject which overflowed into the TO header, which overflowed into the CC header, and then into the Body, and then the actual message was finally typed in;-)... So, lots of intended recipients did not receive it, including me as I was then STEF@SRI-KA. Obviously here was no such thing as quality control in play. Thus it is some kind of classic example of early screw ups... But the reaction was the same as today's reaction to SPAM ...\Stef The sender is identified as Gary Thuerk, an aggressive DEC marketer who thought Arpanet users would find it cool that DEC had integrated Arpanet protocol support directly into the new DEC-20 and TOPS-20 OS. I spoke with him to get his reflections on the event. DEC was mostly an east coast company, and he had lots of contacts on the east coast to push the new Dec-20 to customers there. But with less presence on the west coast, he wanted to hold some open houses and reach all the people there. In those days, there was a printed directory of all people on the Arpanet. Gary spoke to his technical associate, and arranged to have all the addresses in the directory on the west coast typed in, and then added some customer contacts in other locations, including people at ARPA headquarters who did not, according to Thuerk, complain. The engineer, Carl Gartley, was an early employee at DEC who had been called in to help with promoting the new Decsystem-20. They worked on the message for a few days, going through a few rewrites. Finally, on May 3, Gartley logged on to Gary's account to send the mail. 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. Thuerk thought, and maintains to this day that he didn't think he was doing anything wrong -- even though he gets a moderate amount of spam on his current E-mail account. He felt the Dec-20 was really relevant news to the Arpanet community, the first major system with Arpanet software built into it. Indeed, some of those who commented on the message felt it was definitely more of interest than other small mass mailings they had seen, with baby announcements and personal trivia. Nonetheless, he knew there would be some negative reaction. He primed his boss to be ready for complaint, though he didn't anticipate how strong it would be. The Defense Communications Agency (DCA) which ran the Arpanet, called Thuerk's boss, a former Air Force officer to register a strong complaint. Amusingly, SpamAssassin scores this as spam. Partly for being in all upper case, but also because the headers of 1978 are now considered invalid. One user from the University of Utah complained the spam had shut down his computer system. Thuerk says only 3 copies were sent to that system, so it was simply an unlucky coincidence that his mailbox disks were very near full when the message arrived. In those days of 56kb links, the thousands of copies of this message were not an insignificant load, however. Some who didn't get the message felt left out, oddly enough, since it became such a topic of conversation. Thuerk continues his career selling systems today, but his spam career was very short lived. In many ways, the negative reaction to that spam probably made sure the problem did not arise again for many years. Here is the message. Mail-from: DEC-MARLBORO rcvd at 3-May-78 0955-PDT Date: 1 May 1978 1233-EDT From: THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO Subject: ADRIAN@SRI-KL To: DDAY at SRI-KL, DAY at SRI-KL, DEBOER at UCLA-CCN, To: WASHDC at SRI-KL, LOGICON at USC-ISI, SDAC at USC-ISI, To: DELDO at
nettime Finn Brunton: A short history of spam (LMD)
From Le Monde diplomatique English edition original to: http://mondediplo.com/2014/03/16spam Coming to an inbox near you A short history of spam Spam was an in-joke, a wordy waste of time, a hustlers pitch, and now its an inhuman and superhuman slave of crime. by Finn Brunton Objects can talk in cartoons and fairy tales: toys tell their stories. Now our domestic appliances have begun to speak, and they would like to sell us pills and porn, and for us to give them our bank details. Now that there are microchips and network connections in toasters and televisions, many devices have been turned into spam machines the smart refrigerator broadcasting illicit messages or the kettles imported into Russia with small computers that search for Wifi networks to use as spam channels. Despite some exaggerations, the Internet of Things is, like the regular net, being swiftly adapted to spam. What do we mean by spam? Spam is a strange language, a baroque profusion of neologisms, jargon and slang. It mixes the lexicons of computer science, security engineering, law enforcement, criminals (professional and amateur) and the polyglot net: Bayesian poisoning (getting around or corrupting anti-spam filters), bots and botnets (networks of zombie machines), spings (spam+ping) and splogs (spam+blog), victim clouds and rally boxes, worms and phishing, lulz and linkbait (links designed to entice users to click on them) and ransomware. Spamming uses the rich phraseology of scam artists and conmen in a 21st-century setting, online the thieves cant of suckers and marks, the come-on. This problem of language begins with the word spam, which we struggle to define precisely. Most email 85% plus is spam, and is intercepted by filtering systems that we never see. Spam can include tweets, Facebook posts, text messages, blogs, comments, sites, edits on wikis and still newer forms of online expression. People have been fined and jailed for feeding this colossal machine, companies closed down, websites de-indexed from Googles search returns, and entire countries (briefly) harmed. Spam has shaped the net and the services, systems, populations and publics that use it in fundamental ways. In the 1970s before the web or the formalisation of the Internet, before Minitel and Prestel and America Online US graduate students sat in basements, typing on terminals that connected to remote machines somewhere. They did it by night, because by day computers were used for big, expensive projects. They wrote programs, created games, traded messages and played pranks and tricks. Being nerds, they shared a love of science fiction and the absurd. Monty Pythons Flying Circus was a favourite and Python lines were volleyed back and forth the dead parrot sketch and the spam sketch (first broadcast by the BBC in 1970) with Vikings loudly singing Spam, Spammity Spam, wonderful Spam! The sketch caught on. The nerds wrote a simple program that, at the right spot, would post SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! SPAM! without pause, filling the screen, killing the discussion, and often overloading the chat platform, kicking people offline. It was annoying but mischievous rather than malign, like blowing a vuvuzela in the middle of a conversation. This noisy behaviour became known as spamming. The term came in useful through the 1980s to categorise postings that were indiscriminate, time-wasting, verbose, off-topic, tedious or ranting. Then two lawyers from Arizona posted a message across the discussion system Usenet (forerunner of the Internet), offering their services to thousands of users across the world to improve their chances in the US Green Card lottery that gives residency rights in the US. The Usenet community settled on spam as the term for the commercial message. The word had jumped closer to how we understand it now. Those lawyers were offering an actual service, if bordering on fraud: you could call a real telephone number and make an appointment with them. And with much of the spam that followed you really could buy quack weight-loss pills, deadstock toys or counterfeit watches. This kind of spam was despised was but more or less legitimate, if only by accident. Except for advance fee fraud or Nigerian prince letters (Dear Sir, We have one point two million [1,200,000] US DOLLARS on account for you...), spammers presented themselves as brashly inventive promoters, with postal addresses and registered trademarks, seeking recognition as entrepreneurial hustlers. Many people still think of spam as those enthusiastic pitches full of mangled grammar and implausible photography, selling dubious pleasures from timeshares and self-help books to diets and porn. But their time was quite short, before spam was profoundly transformed into what it is today. When you receive spam today in your inbox or Twitter account, or see a spam comment on a blog, you are very likely the first human to have laid eyes on it. It is
