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Happy spamiversary
Last modified: April 12, 2004, 4:00 AM PDT
By Paul Festa and Evan Hansen 
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

               
On April 12, 1994, a pair of attorneys in Arizona launched a homemade marketing 
software program that forever changed the Internet. 
Hoping to drum up some business, Laurence Canter dashed off a Perl script that 
flooded online message boards with an advertisement pitching the legal services 
of Canter & Siegel, the law firm he ran with his then wife, Martha Siegel.
The response was immediate and harsh, offering one of the loudest signals up to 
that point that unchecked marketing would not be tolerated in the new medium. 
Thousands of recipients registered their displeasure, and a new label for the 
burgeoning business of unsolicited mass Internet advertising was coined.
"Send coconuts and cans of Spam to Cantor & Co.," one outraged Usenet reader 
wrote amid the uproar that followed the Canter & Siegel message. "(Be sure to 
drop the can of Spam on its seam first.)"
Ten years after Web surfers began using the spam label to describe intrusive 
online marketing, junk e-mail has ballooned into an epidemic of massive 
proportions. But righteous anger over the problem has increasingly been replaced 
by resignation. With no effective solution in sight, many people now ruefully 
wonder whether the "Internet era" might more accurately be dubbed the "age of 
spam."
Despite unceasing efforts to rein in junk e-mailers--including federal 
legislation aimed at limiting the practice enacted in the United States--spam is 
big business. Some of its most shameless purveyors have raked in fortunes, while 
the rest of the world has paid in frustration, wasted time and stolen network 
resources that one recent study, by analyst firm Basex, valued at $20 billion 
per year.
Even Canter later claimed that his pitch was a success, bringing in between 
$100,000 and $200,000 in business.
Expensive annoyance
Internet giants such as America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft have poured 
technical resources into solving the problem, and legislators have moved to 
limit the worst practices. Last week, prosecutors successfully won a guilty 
verdict in a criminal case that saw the so-called Buffalo Spammer sentenced with 
up to seven years in prison for alleged identity theft and forgery that enabled 
him to send more than 800 million e-mail messages through Internet service 
provider EarthLink.
Yet the spam problem has only seemed to grow worse each year, as spammers adopt 
potent new tactics that make Canter's Perl script seem quaint by comparison. In 
a worst-case scenario, spammers may now work hand-in-hand with overseas 
organized crime groups, employing Trojan-horse attacks that can turn PCs into 
"zombie" machines that spew out spam under the noses of their unwitting owners. 
Infected machines can then be rented or sold to underhanded marketers looking 
for a cheap way to send out millions of messages in hopes of garnering a handful 
of sales leads.
Atonishingly, some people actually respond to spam messages, keeping the whole 
system afloat. Even outrageous (and by now, well-known) frauds such as the 
Nigerian e-mail scam have duped some victims. Since spam is so cheap--even free 
to the sender under some methods--criminals are more than willing to annoy 
hundreds of millions of people for the chance of cashing in on one mark.
The problem is so bad that spam now threatens the very future of e-mail. Once 
billed as the Net's killer app for both business and consumers, e-mail senders 
are now largely aware that their messages may not be seen or read, because they 
may have been accidentally swept aside by antispam measures. For really 
important matters, use the phone, some now advise.
To be sure, spam isn't the only thing that's changed since Canter first launched 
his message board script. The Internet itself is more overtly commercial than it 
once was, having been transferred from government to mostly private control. 
Once policed primarily by social pressure and rules of etiquette, e-mail 
marketing is now ruled by myriad state and federal laws, and overburdened 
companies and consumers now have their pick of dozens of software products 
claiming the ability to manage the deluge.
From anger to resignation
Attitudes about spam, too, appear to have changed under the constant onslaught. 
While nearly everyone would seem to agree the Internet would be better off 
without it, spam has now become so pervasive that some people now seem to take 
it as a matter of course, treating it as an ineradicable, if unwelcome, feature 
of the landscape.
It was not always that way, though. People who have used e-mail long enough 
remember their first spam--and their anger--vividly.
"I was furious and disgusted," recalled California state Sen. Debra Bowen, who 
started using e-mail in 1989 and sponsored her first antispam bill in 1998. "It 
felt like a real violation."
Bowen recalled that, 10 years ago, the Internet was still considered an 
essentially noncommercial zone, populated mostly by academics and with 
relatively few choices in services. "All you can eat," unlimited-access plans 
common today were not widely available, and connection speeds were slow as 
molasses by comparison with current standards, making bandwidth precious.
"Spam was not just annoying; it was expensive," Bowen said.
Now, people with unlimited Internet access and broadband connections complain 
that they could use all their online time in just dispensing spam, most of which 
isn't pretty.
The advertising vehicle that proved so effective for Canter & Siegel's legal 
services is equally effective for hawking pornography, sexual aids, pyramid 
schemes, stock tips, credit repair--with unlikely return addresses pointing to 
the likes of Prince Peter Kabila, Clattering J. Spectroscopy, Sebastian Goins, 
Mrs. Floxy Page, and abcss016@1588.adsldns.org.
And that's just from yesterday's batch.
Canning spam
Spam's pruriency has incited legislators--claiming the mantle of decency--to 
throw the book at spam purveyors. The first national spam law reflects that 
mission in its name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and 
Marketing Act (Can-Spam).
President George W. Bush's signing of that law in December, which capped years 
of legislative maneuvering, satisfied next to nobody. Despite a flurry of 
lawsuits by major e-mail providers, it has yet to curb the flow of spam.
Postini, a Redwood City, Calif.-based e-mail management provider, earlier this 
month said spam made up about 77 percent of the nearly 5 billion e-mails that 
coursed through its system in March. That's up a point from February.
"If this is the test of our ability to deal through legislation with the 
problems of the Internet age, Congress gets an F," said David Kramer, a partner 
with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, who has criticized Can-Spam for 
legitimizing unsolicited commercial e-mail. "It's very disheartening to see that 
10 years after this problem arose, not only have we done nothing on a 
legislative front to deal with it, but we've actually made it worse."
Given the international reach of spam and the creativity of spammers, some 
experts believe that technology will have to play a role in bringing it under 
control. Proposals have been floated that would revamp the Simple Mail Transfer 
Protocol (SMTP) e-mail standard to better track the real identity of e-mail 
senders, among other things. Others have suggested slapping fees on the delivery 
of e-mail to make spam uneconomical for the sender.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently opined that new countermeasures will 
eventually be found to solve the problem once and for all. But little consensus 
has emerged to date over what might work.
'Spam spam spam'
Analysts said the Canter & Siegel anniversary comes with some caveats--there was 
spam before April 12, 1994, even if it wasn't called that yet.
The term spam itself originally came into being in 1937, when Kenneth Daigneau 
won $100 for coming up with the name to replace Hormel Foods' canned meat-based 
product, then known as Hormel Spiced Ham.
Thirty-three years later, the British comedy group Monty Python got its hands on 
Spam. In an episode of the troupe's Flying Circus television show that aired 
Dec. 15, 1970, Monty Python performed a sketch in which a waitress at the Green 
Midget Cafe recites dish after dish featuring copious amounts of the canned 
meat, accompanied by a Wagnerian chorus of Vikings who drown out the restaurant 
patron, who protests that she does not want any.
On May 3, 1978, a Digital Equipment marketer named Gary Thuerk sent over the 
Arpanet--the Internet's academic, military and strictly noncommercial 
predecessor--an unsolicited e-mail that advertised the company's support of the 
Arpanet protocol in its products.
But it wasn't until the 1980s that users of the multiuser dungeon, or MUD, 
network environment made reference to the Monty Python skit by using the term 
spam to describe the posting of overly large text files.
According to Jonathan Spira, chief executive of Basex, it wasn't until 10 years 
ago that the Canter & Siegel e-mail inspired the use of "spam" to describe 
unsolicited commercial messages.
Hormel says that despite early moves in defense of its trademark, it has given 
spam up to the e-mail vernacular.
And while the company claims to have a sense of humor about its much-pilloried 
product, the 2-year-old, 16,000 square foot Spam Museum has no reference to junk 
e-mail.
"We don't really track that history," Hormel representative Julie Craven said. 
"The kind of spam we like to talk about the most is the kind you eat."
That's not funny
Spam critics say the problem is no laughing matter, costing the economy in many 
ways. One is the time it takes people to weed through in-boxes for spam and 
spam-boxes for legitimate e-mail; filters notoriously mix up spam and nonspam. 
Then there is the cost of data that goes missing with the so-called false 
positives.
Second is that managing spam cuts into a company's IT budget, sucking up time 
and money that would have otherwise gone into product development or systems 
upgrades.
Then, there are the tight restrictions marketing departments have to observe in 
order to avoid the dreaded "spammer" label. That inhibition is particularly 
acute for vendors of certain pharmaceuticals that are mainstays of the spam 
diet.
"What if the company that produces Viagra ever wanted to send out an e-mail?" 
Spira mused. "The value of that mark in that context has been utterly 
diminished."
With Viagra losing its trademark potency, corporations bleeding information 
technology time and money, and individuals and businesses alike losing patience 
and in some cases giving up, many are pinning their hopes on technology to solve 
the problem.
So far, spam has behaved like a wily retrovirus, adapting to whatever obstacles 
are thrown its way.
When companies began to employ filters that aim to identify and remove junk 
e-mail by examining the subject line or content of the message for suspicious 
words, spammers started misspelling them. When e-mail providers like Microsoft's 
Hotmail and Yahoo Mail started instituting visual verification tests to prevent 
computer-generated registration of accounts, spammers started using cheap 
African labor to pass those tests and open new accounts. Sophisticated spammers 
even use random word generators to try to increase the number of false positives 
so that e-mail users and providers have to turn off their filters.
Spam evolves on a three-month cycle, according to Burton Group analyst Fred 
Cohen.
Cohen--who says he's personally received as many as 60,000 spams in a 24-hour 
period--stresses that virtually no spam filter or deterrent can prevent the 
practice from being inherently profitable.
"You can send millions of spam e-mails a day for about a dollar," Cohen said. 
"That means if one in a million people buy something from you, you break even. 
Lists of validated bulk postal mail can cost a couple of cents to a dollar per 
person, and you can grab physical addresses of decision makers with buying power 
in Fortune 500 companies. But in spam, you don't have to be that selective. You 
could just say everyone in the United States."
And they do.
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