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39 Years Ago The World's First Spam Was Sent (Praise Him)
Wednesday was the 39th anniversary of the world's first spam, sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketer for Massachusetts' Digital Equipment Corporation in 1978 to over 300 users on Arpanet. It was written in all capital letters, and its body began with 273 more email addresses that wouldn't fit in the header. The DEC marketer "was reportedly trying to flag the attention of the burgeoning California tech community," reports the San Jose Mercury News. The message touted two demonstrations of the DECSYSTEM-20, a PDP-10 mainframe computer.
An official at the Defense Communication Agency immediately called it "a flagrant violation of the use of Arpanet as the network is to be used for official U.S. government business only," adding "Appropriate action is being taken to preclude its occurence again." But at the time a 24-year-old Richard Stallman -- then a graduate student at MIT -- claimed he wouldn't have reminded receiving the message...until someone forwarded him a copy. Stallman then responded "I eat my words... Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about."
The article reports that today the spam industry earns about $200 million each year, while $20 billion is spent trying to block spam. And the New York Times even has a quote from the DEC employee who sent that first spam. "People either say, 'Wow! You sent the first spam!' or they act like I gave them cooties." |
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| John Edwards |
South Carolina, as a matter of compromise, displays the Confederate flag on a flagpole in front of the state capitol. Because I grew up in the South and believe that the Confederate flag is a very divisive symbol, I have stated publicly a number of times that I believe that South Carolina should remove the flag from the state capitol grounds. |
| Jefferson Han |
The funniest thing is that now I know what reverse spam is. You know you get spam from people saying, 'Can you invest in this or that?' People are now e-mailing me saying, 'Oh my God, can I invest in your company?' It's a reverse solicitation of money. |
| Rick Baker |
I enjoy doing digital work. I enjoy sculpting digitally. I've had my digital sculptures on covers of the top digital magazines. |
| Jimmy Fallon |
Arnold Schwarzenegger's publicist told USA Today that the actor has not ruled out running for governor of California, saying that he will make a decision soon. Reportedly Arnold needs that time to learn how to pronounce 'gubernatorial.' |
| Leos Carax |
I've always been interested in invisible worlds, and I like to visit digital worlds, you know, any world that's imposed on us. |
| C. S. Lewis |
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. |
| Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.' |
| Hasan M. Elahi |
If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up. |
| Phil Daniels |
My acting career began when I walked into a drama school class run by Anna Scher in Islington. Anna discovered a lot of people: Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke, Gary and Martin Kemp, and Dexter Fletcher were among my contemporaries. |
| Uta Hagen |
We had a relationship that lasted 44 years. Herbert and I lived together 10 years before we were married. He always gave me a little heart for whatever anniversary. |
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Gmail is Now Blocking 100 Million Extra Spam Messages Every Day With AI
Google has recruited its in-house machine learning framework, TensorFlow, to help train additional spam filters for Gmail users. With the new filters in place as of last month, the company claims Gmail is now blocking an extra 100 million spam messages every day. From a report:
In the context of Gmail's 1 billion-plus users, this isn't necessarily a huge gain -- it works out as one extra blocked spam email per 10 users -- but Google says Gmail already blocks 99.99 percent of spam, so working out what constitutes that last sliver of a percentage is hard.
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Unfortunately, I think the rise of chatbots or conversational agents is actually blurring the definition of spam. If a recruiter emails a bunch of people with generated personalized messages, is it spam or not? I certainly don't want to see it and the generated parts often sound super fake and wrong, so it seems even more like spam.
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I had another dream where I was in a building with some people and we went down this elevator and then there were buttons to go to other worlds. I had to go to this other one. I don't know why but I hit the button and when I came out the things that were walking around this building were like creepy crawling things with lots of legs. They were as small as rats and as tall as 4 or 5 feet but they always had some body parts that had way too many tentacles or antennae or legs. There didn't seem to be an outdoors, just a series of worlds connected by these elevators.
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Malware Developer Who Used Spam Botnet To Pay For College Gets No Prison Time (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
The operator of a 77,000-strong spam botnet was sentenced to two years probation and no prison time after admitting his crime and completely reforming his life. The former botnet operator is now working for a cybersecurity company, and admitted his actions as soon as the FBI knocked on his door back in 2013. The botnet operator, a 29-year-old from Santa Clara, California, says he was tricked by fellow co-schemers who told him they were not doing anything wrong by infecting computers with malware because they were not accessing private information such as banking...
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actually i didnt work with that guy, that was a guy from dg. i was originally confusing him with a very respectable affiliate marketer that doesnt rip off people lol
This post is a comment.
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On Thursday, US authorities announced the seizure of the largest dark web marketplace AlphaBay. Europol and Dutch police also claimed seizure of Hansa, another popular market. In their dark web investigations, law enforcement have increasingly turned to hacking tools, including the deployment of browser exploits on a mass scale. But tracking down the alleged AlphaBay administrator was much more mundane, officials said. Alexandre Cazes, who US authorities say used the handle alpha02 as administrator of the site, allegedly left his personal email in a welcome message to new AlphaBay members, according to the forfeiture complaint published on Thursday. The news echoes the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the convicted creator of the original Silk Road, who made a similar security mistake. "In December 2016, law enforcement learned that CAZES' personal email was included in the header of AlphaBay's 'welcome email' to new users in December 2014," the complaint reads. Users received this message on...
This post is a comment.
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Taser Offers Free Body Cameras To All US Police (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Taser, the company whose electronic stun guns have become a household name, is now offering a groundbreaking deal to all American law enforcement: free body cameras and a year's worth of access to the company's cloud storage service, Evidence.com. In addition, on Wednesday, the company also announced that it would be changing its name to "Axon" to reflect the company's flagship body camera product. Right now, Axon is the single largest vendor of body cameras in America. It vastly outsells smaller competitors, including VieVu and Digital Ally -- the company has profited $90 million from 2012 through 2016. If the move is successful, Axon could quickly crowd out its rivals...
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Taser Offers Free Body Cameras To All US Police (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Taser, the company whose electronic stun guns have become a household name, is now offering a groundbreaking deal to all American law enforcement: free body cameras and a year's worth of access to the company's cloud storage service, Evidence.com. In addition, on Wednesday, the company also announced that it would be changing its name to "Axon" to reflect the company's flagship body camera product. Right now, Axon is the single largest vendor of body cameras in America. It vastly outsells smaller competitors, including VieVu and Digital Ally -- the company has profited $90 million from 2012 through 2016. If the move is successful, Axon could quickly crowd out its rivals...
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What is a word made up of 4 letters, yet is also made up of 3. Sometimes is written with 9 letters, and then with 4. Rarely consists of 6, and never is written with 5.
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How One Merchandiser Lost $1M Trying to Monetize the 'Hamster Dance' Site
The CBC is marking the 20th anniversary of the notorious Hampsterdance web site with a 10,000-word oral history by arts reporter Leah Collins, promising "the twisted true story of one of the world's first memes."
https://www.cbc.ca/arts/the-oral-history-of-the-hampsterdance-the-twisted-true-story-of-one-of-the-world-s-first-memes-1.4958325
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