The father of modern spam speaks (2002) | Hacker News Reader

The father of modern spam speaks (2002)

cnet.com

48 pointsmattbee44 comments

Face recognition comes to mind as a counter example of a technology which isn’t (yet) reached the level of ubiquity of email spam even though it has obvious economic benefits.

I’ve been pitched in building face recognition based systems countless times and I always demur on ethical grounds. I’m sure there are others like me. If only the tech guy who implemented the first spam system had refused to go for the easy money.

Canter may have been seeking a quick marketing win, but he ended up shaping the internet's commercial landscape in a way that's still being debated so many years later. It's definitely a cautionary tale of how a single action can ripple through an ecosystem.

Carter himself posted in reply to some of the outrage at the time saying "don't look at me, this is clearly an opportunity to reach customers, and its going to be exploited, stupid non-commercial rules or not".

its not clear how much that one post affected the eventual outcome

game developers who do not recognize this opportunity are f**ing stupid.. I heard recently.. sounds familiar.

It seems like some kind of internal cesspool overflow, where reason and empathy are pushed aside with force of self-serving actions, and social pressures associated with "succeed or FAIL"

It was probably inevitable. It's like regular mail, except sending it is virtually free, so as the internet inched closer to the mainstream over time, this was always going to happen, I think.

what may not be apparent now, with hindsight, is that we had not expected that the internet was inching towards the mainstream; much of the bushy-tailed optimism/youthful folly of the times was that many of us had thought the mainstream would approach the internet as it inched online.

(did anyone celebrate 30 years of Eternal September last month?)

It was certainly not inevitable in the sense that nobody ever had a choice to do anything other than send spam. It was (and is) always a choice, and the choice of "Don't harass countless others for a chance at your own personal gain" was always on the table.

It was only inevitable in the sense that given enough time some percentage of parasitic assholes will exist who will be willing to do anything to benefit themselves no matter what the consequences of their actions are for others.

There's a world of difference between "this was always going to happen" because of the natural laws of the universe and "this was always going to happen" because some people actively choose to be dicks, and I think people like Laurence Canter believe their actions are somewhat excused because of the "inevitability" of what was always just their own selfish choices.

I agree with that, it's inevitable because of people acting selfishly. You could even argue that it might not have happened under other economic systems which do not follow the principle of the profit motive.

Or even one where the profit motive exists, but doesn't supersede our responsibility to care for each other and the environment we share.

psychologically and in fact, biologically.. the lowest-simplest-most virulent forms of life simply eat whatever, take whatever, shit where-ever.. To know this and distinguish that among other life forms, IMO is basic to self-reflective intelligence. Those individuals without critical thinking skills, on the co-dependent super-highway, that take kindness to mean "anything goes" .. are the support group for this obviously ill behavior. Incredibly fast computers and networks are the enabler.

I'd agree that there's a strong link between the selfish and the lowest, simplest, forms of life. After billions of years of evolution we really should be better.

All societies have an attention economy and spam is a "great" way of getting it. It's incorrect to assume other economic systems would not have this problem.

It's easy to say that, but it makes me wonder to what extent that's just projecting our culture onto all other possible realities due to a failure of imagination/taking aspects of our culture as immutable laws of nature.

I think it's way too easy to allude to 'other economic systems' without at all describing how your fiction would be reality.

> but it makes me wonder to what extent that's just projecting our culture onto all other possible realities due to a failure of imagination/taking aspects of our culture as immutable laws of nature.

Right, so lets see, you're hiding something that only you know, for God knows what reason. Then pretending that its other people failing to reach your level of knowledge in the world. You're the all seeing, who knows better than the rest of humanity. We might as well anoint you.

Go on, prove it. I'll ask every single time, and I bet all I will get is cryptic and imprecise responses.

I'm not trying to advocate for communism, if that's what you mean. But yes, in a planned economy, there is no incentive for companies to try to spam you. It doesn't mean that it's a better system or that there aren't other problems with it.

I meant what I said. I think we do have a tendency to project our norms onto other cultures and systems.

Why did you write the exact same comment again?

All economic systems follow the principle of the profit motive. Some of them try to hide that reality from the masses behind various lies and obfuscations.

You could argue that, but I wouldn't believe you. Someone could simply decide to be annoying, like kids throwing eggs at houses. There is nothing "in it for them" but they do it anyway. Hell, it was inevitable that someone's program that posts to a list of groups would screw up and hit massive numbers of targets. No profit, no motive even, just pure accident.

It was inevitable because the design was naive, like the r commands.

sure, but kids throwing eggs at houses isn't as systemic a problem as abusive marketing

I doubt I'd be charmed with getting the latest state propaganda that I'm required to listen to or my social credit score gets debited.

but you'd be able to find it quickly in your inbox!

It was inevitable in the singular meaning of the word. Spam would have happened even if this couple had never existed. There is no outcome (*) where the Internet stays free of spam (or other intrusive commercialization) forever.

(*) I should qualify, I'm speaking only of our /present/ universe. It's possible that in another multiverse, no human decides to put their personal gain above others.

the concept "if a little works, a lot will work even better!" is pretty much a given in everything. nobody ever does the "small moves, Ellie". it's "but it goes to 11" on everything. with the painlessness of mass sending of email, there was no pain to cause someone to slowdown. it was an immediate "take of and nuke it from orbit" from the word go on everything.

> natural laws of the universe

> some people actively choose to be dicks

These two are a lot closer than you would like, I suspect.

I am of course assuming that we have choice and aren't living in a deterministic universe where our actions are entirely dictated by natural laws.

The same thing has happened to phones. Spam on my iphone got so bad I set it to block all calls on on my contact list.

My land line has become useless as all I get on it is spam calls. Don't the phone companies realize their users are going to hang up on them unless the spam problem is dealt with?

Wow! When i had a landline - many, many years ago - i got maybe 5 spam calls a year. I have had c20 in 15 years of mobile ownership.

1. EU? Possibly. 2. Do not hang up. A dead line costs them money...you'll soon be taken off the lists.

I think you're being too generous.

People used to talk about rules against commercial use, netiquette about Usenet posting, etc. And we knew why.

When along comes someone who doesn't care. That person isn't "shaping", like some influential philosopher, visionary, or noteworthy historical figure.

That person just happened to be the first total piece of fecal matter to come along, and do the obvious thing that everyone said was obvious, and with obvious outcomes.

Back then there was no regulation. At least we have moved beyond the "Silicon Valley tech bros are good guy hippies" phase. No wonder libertarians hate the government it's the only thing that can stop them.

"Canter was disbarred from practicing law by the Supreme Court of Tennessee in 1997, partly because of his e-mail advertising campaign."

I wonder what else he was up to :)

He still has no remorse. Says he'd do again if he could, and that he'd have no problems sending spam right now. I'm not sure if he's an actual sociopath, or if his ego just demands that he believe that he did nothing wrong and that spam isn't a problem. Either way, people like him make the world we live in worse.

While spam is annoying, I don’t think it’s at the level of sociopathy.

Spam is definitely bad for society. So if 1 piece of spam is bad then a billion spams is 1B times as bad. That's a big factor. Probably getting near axemurderer levels of social damage.

Think about it in terms of years-of-life removed from society.

If the average axemurderer removes 10 middleaged (40 years remaining life) people then that's 400 years.

If spam eats 1 second that's 31 years. (1B secs)

Ok so about 3/40 axemurderer.

Axemurderers have an expiry (the day they die/are put in prison), spam does not.

I think your estimation is grossly underestimated too, Nigerian prince scams trigger (insufferable) workplace discussions which take 5 minutes or longer, for upwards of 5 people, spam that causes people to spend money they otherwise wouldn’t increases the wealth gap, impacting lives for generations.

The financial impact of spam alone is estimated to be tens of billions of dollars annually. There are many non-financial impacts that extend far beyond "annoyance"

Spam is annoying the way polluting the ocean or mosquito bites are "annoying". I don't personally see a lot of ocean trash, and nobody I know has ever died from a mosquito bite, but there are massive harms with worldwide impacts caused by both.

In my view, the refusal to accept responsibility and the willingness to repeat and continue his offenses without any regard for the harm it causes suggests sociopathy, or at the very least narcissism.

Labeling him a sociopath implies that, had he never done it, nobody would have done it. In the article, he mentions that, if he wasn't the first, someone else would've done it in time. I agree with that belief.

Directing attention to your business, even without permission, is older than the Internet itself. We've had generations of TV, radio, and newspaper advertisements, as well as stickers placed on lamp posts, flyers in shop windows, or menus placed on doors of homes or hotel rooms. Some advertisement is welcome and paid for, others are done without being caught. But it's all in the name of profit.

labeling a serial killer a sociopath doesn't imply that if they hadn't killed someone nobody else ever would have.

It's people who refuse to act responsibly in a community because they have zero regard for the negative impact they have on others that matters here, not which particular asshole would be first to act purely out of selfishness.

"Directing attention to your business" isn't a problem either, any more than "setting down your butchers knife" is a problem. It's when, where, and how you do those things that can make it a problem. It's the difference between plunging your butchers knife into your dishwasher, and plunging it into someone else's chest. People can advertise, with or without permission, without polluting the internet and turning their selfish behavior into a multi-billion dollar a year problem for everyone else to clean up.

Ah. The asshole who killed Usenet. I remember that. But if it wasn't him, it would have been someone else a bit later.

I was expecting Sanford Wallace.

Side note, but sentences like these slay me:

    "[It] qualified as an unqualified success."
    "[He] was disbarred from practicing law."

Whoever wrote this article was an unintentional genius.

The first one is kinda interesting. I don’t get the humor in the phrasing of the second though. Can you explain?

"He was disbarred" already means what they want to say.

It's an unintentional pun on the word "bar". You can be disbarred, which means expelled from the (legal) bar. Or you can be barred (prevented) from practicing law. But "disbarred from practicing law" is either redundant or double-negative nonsense, depending on how you read the pun.

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