To spam your phone! ! ! "This Day in History: April 12, 1994
On this day in history, 1994, the world's first large-scale commercial Internet spam campaign was launched by husband-and-wife immigration attorney team Lawrence L. When initiated by Kanter and Marsha Siegel, he had been disciplined (see additional facts below) and expelled from the American Immigration Lawyers Association for using a Perl script to spam 5+ people, in For about 90 minutes, there were 500 message boards on Usenet. The purpose of this mass spam was to promote the duo's services to help people fill out and submit the appropriate forms to enter the "Green Card Lottery," that is, Diversity Immigrant Visa Lottery.
According to Canter, the script works as follows: "...a Perl script that just pulls the names of all the newsgroups off a particular server, one at a time. Just take one and send the message to them via various internet protocols that were widely used at the time.
In addition to the mass spam itself being a bit exploitative, their service also charges $95 (individuals) or $145 (couples) to help people enter the lottery. While it sounds reasonable to have a lawyer fill out a form for you, it's worth noting that at the time, all one really had to do was send a postcard or a letter addressed to you during the time period they were accepting registrations. Name and address the letter to the designated U.S. Department of State address.
Even today, the process of entering the lottery is fairly simple (although once selected, it's an entirely different matter, and legal committees are sometimes wise. You just need to register at the U.S. Department of State when registration opens Even though it's easy to enter the lottery by submitting a spreadsheet (it's free), many spammers still try to trick people into paying money for betting services. Modern green card spammers also tend to promise them. It is possible to increase the chance of someone being selected into the lottery, which is of course impossible.
Despite this simplicity, Canter and Siegel made a fortune from this spam. money, resulting in an estimated $100,000 to $200,000. According to them, this large-scale spam did not go down well with Usenet users, and thousands of emails were sent to Internet Direct the next day, Both companies' Internet providers complained about it, and over the next two days it managed to crash InternetDirect's mail servers several times.
Canter and Siegel had previously consulted InternetDirect about the problem. Make sure the company is comfortable with what they're going to do and that it can handle the fact that they're posting to thousands of boards in quick succession and the inevitable backlash this will lead to (including emails from people who want to hire Canter and Siegel and negative complaint emails). InternetDirect said their system could handle it, so Canter and Siegel opened an account and moved on. However, within days due to the backlash, InternetDirect terminated Canter and Siegel's account, causing them to lose it. Some 25,000-50,000 emails, some of which could make mass spam even more profitable, so Siegel and the two other lawyers she brought with her threatened direct action if they didn't reactivate their accounts immediately. sued Internet, but Internet declined. Kanter and Siegel did not pursue actual lawsuits against them.
After this first attack, they filed another lawsuit against about 1,000 others in June. Another "ad" was posted on a newsgroup, which triggered the first "cancelbot" program, which would crawl Usenet and automatically delete spam within minutes of posting.
As you noted. Kanter and Siegel were subsequently vilified in the court of public opinion, but just as boldly, they began selling their services as Internet marketing "experts" to develop and implement a "plan to deliberately misrepresent the facts."
About a year later, Kanter resigned as the state's attorney to avoid additional charges of "negligence, misrepresentation of facts, misappropriation of client funds and perjury." At this point, the two moved to Arizona, where they started an internship. In the early days of chat rooms, chatters would often use large blocks of meaningless text to annoy other groups. For example, a Star Trek chatter would invade a Star Wars chat room and post tons of random text, making it impossible for Star Wars people to talk. Battle of the Nerds! ! ! On the other hand, while Star Trek is far superior to Star Wars overall, as much as I love the latter, including all the subsequent books, including the Heir to the Empire series, it's a phenomenal piece of work, The Enterprise (only half a mile long) would be no match for the Executor-class Super Star Destroyer (12 miles long and packed with weapons); and that's not even counting its arsenal of fighters. The Enterprise is an Imperial ship. class (1 mile long) or a Victory -class (56 mile long) Star Destroyer is still open to question. / Shortly after Canter and Siegel worked on spam, a North Carolina student named Joel Furr (who was also one of the first to use "spam" to describe Internet spam) began selling labels bearing the words "Green Card Lawyer: Spam" "Global" graphic T-shirt. The T-shirts were so popular that when Canter Siegel heard about it, they threatened to sue him, claiming "...any form of likeness, or use of our names or nicknames in any way without our express written permission, this That's what you don't have, which of course isn't true since Foer never explicitly mentioned them by name in the text or pictures. Nonetheless, since he couldn't afford legal counsel, he announced he was stopping sales of the shirts. But the chief counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told him he didn’t have to worry about the lawsuit regarding Kanter and Siegel because: “1) Kanter and Siegel are not members of the Arizona Bar; 2) they Under investigation by the Tennessee Bar; 3) they can only sue in the state where Furr does business; and (4) they have no trademark on the term "green card attorney." Joel Furr first mentioned "spam" (referring to spam) on Usenet on March 31, 1993, and the first known example of it being called spam on Usenet. This is often mistakenly said to be the first time the word spam was used to refer to junk mail anywhere. The first Usenet "spam" term came up when Richard Depew, who had been playing with some mediocre software, had the unintended consequence of posting about 200 duplicate messages in a row to the news.admin.policy newsgroup. Joel Furr later called this spam. Depew himself also called his messages spam when he apologized. Austin, Minnesota is known as the "Spam Home of America," not because of Internet spam, but because the city produces all the food spam sold in North America, South America, and Australia. Spam sold in the UK is produced in Denmark by Tulip, to which Hormel has issued a production license. Hawaii, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands eat the most garbage per capita in the United States, with each person eating an average of about 16 cans per year. McDonald's restaurants in both Hawaii and Guam offer Spam, and Burger King in Hawaii also began offering Spam in 2007 to better compete with McDonald's. Spam is sometimes called "Hawaiian Steak" because of its popularity there. Cisco Systems released the following spam source data by country in 2009: Brazil 7.7%, United States 6.6%, India 3.6%, South Korea 3.1%, Turkey 2.6%, Vietnam 2.6%, China 2.5%, Poland 2.4%, Russia 2.3%, Argentina 1.5%, surprisingly you have to go all the way to 91st on the list before you get to Nigeria, I guess they only have so many rulers died, leaving us their fortune, so maybe that explains the lack of spam. About 73% of all email spam attempts to steal the user's identity in some way (phishing), including possibly banking information or obtaining enough information to open a new credit account from the user.
Of the 90 trillion emails sent in 2009, 81% were spam, which equates to approximately 200 billion spam emails sent every day. Expand ReferencesStart It's SpamThe Father of All Modern SpamChat Usenet Newsgroup Spam with Martha SegalLawrence Kanter and Martha SegalInternet HistoryJoel FurrImage Source