Thirty
years ago today, the first unsolicited
commercial e-mail went out over the
research network that was the Internet's
predecessor -- and the modern
aggravation of spam was born.
That
e-mail, sent to advertise a new machine
from the now-defunct computer
manufacturer Digital Equipment Corp.,
was swiftly and forcefully condemned by
the tiny community of engineers
developing the Arpanet, or Advanced
Research Projects Agency network, named
after the Defense Department office that
funded the project.
"It was
rather an insult to one's sensibilities
to have an obvious commercial message
sent out over a research network," said
computer scientist Peter Neumann of SRI
in Menlo Park, Calif., who was one of
the 393 recipients of that primordial
spam.
But the
Arpanet was small and tightly controlled
by defense and think-tank scientists
like Neumann, and this early e-mail
insult was not so much the beginning of
the deluge but merely a hint of things
to come, according to Internet pioneer
Brad Templeton, who today is chairman of
the nonprofit advocacy group the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"This
was a spam, though the term would not be
used to refer to it for another 15
years," Templeton wrote in a Web-based
history titled, "Reaction to the DEC
Spam of 1978," which may well be the
definitive work on this dastardly deed.
In a
recent telephone interview, Templeton
offered a short version of the sad
history of spam. He quickly pushed the
clock forward to the 1980s, by which
time the Internet had evolved into a
university-driven network -- that's when
Vice President Al Gore got involved. And
then he moved the story ahead to the
early 1990s when Tim Berners-Lee laid
the groundwork for the user-friendly
World Wide Web.
According to Templeton, in April 1994,
when regular people started logging on
to cyberspace, two immigration
attorneys, Laurence Canter and Martha
Siegel, more or less reinvented spam.
They did so by posting an unsolicited
advertisement for legal services on
thousands of Internet-based electronic
bulletin boards called the Usenet.
That ad
caused an uproar, in part because it
flew in the face of the noncommercial
ethic that still prevailed in
cyberspace, and even more so because
Canter and Siegel, far from being
apologetic, wrote a book titled, "How to
Make a Fortune on the Information
Superhighway."
Interviewed by The New York Times in
October 1994, Siegel painted their ad as
commercial free speech and criticized
their detractors as one of two types of
crybaby: "There are the wild-eyed
zealots who view the Internet as their
home. ... To them it's become a womb,
practically. ... The other group is
people like Wired magazine, who want to
be the people who make money off it,"
she said.
Templeton said it was the Canter-Siegel
message and the ensuing uproar that
catapulted unwanted electronic messages
into everyday life.
His
research also suggests that the term
"spam" originated during the late 1980s
when "multiuser dungeons," or MUDs, came
into being as chat and role-playing
programs. According to Templeton, the
inspiration for the term was a skit by
Monty Python's Flying Circus involving a
restaurant that serves what Hormel Foods
Corp. calls spiced ham, or Spam.
How did
this brand-name canned meat come to be
used as a term of derision on MUDs? It
was apparently something of a
mischievous sport amongst these MUDers
to flood the databases of rivals with
electronic trash.
Templeton said this action was named
after the Spam song from the Monty
Python skit in which the performers
sing, "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam"
until told to shut up.
So by
the time Canter and Siegel declared
their right to send any electronic
message to anyone, the word "spam"
already existed as a label of
disapproval.
"This
spam made newspapers. It made them
famous," Templeton wrote in a second
history, "Origin of the term 'spam' to
mean net abuse."
Fast
forward again to the present and the sad
fact is that, annoying or not, spamming
proved so effective for the senders that
it quickly grew from the occasional
annoyance to the everyday aggravation of
everyone with an e-mail address.
"If I
don't do something, I get 200 to 300
spam messages a day," lamented Sara
Radicati, whose Palo Alto, Calif.,
consulting group tracks e-mail, instant
messaging and other forms of electronic
communications.
The
estimated cost of spam is far too
squishy a number to be worthwhile, she
said. But her firm, the Radicati Group,
recently published a report that
estimates that 78 percent of the 210
billion messages sent worldwide each day
are unsolicited.
Today,
network administrators, Internet service
providers and other users employ a
variety of programs to filter out some
of this unsolicited traffic, which keeps
increasing as spammers find new ways to
flood the Internet with unwanted alerts.
"The
rate of delivery of spam is dropping a
bit," said Radicati, who estimates that
about 93 billion spam messages still get
through the defenses every day.
"There's going to be an arms race
forever," Templeton predicted.
