Newsgroup spam
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Newsgroup spam
Newsgroup spam is a type of
spam where the targets are
Usenet
newsgroups.
Spamming of Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates
e-mail
spam. The first widely recognized Usenet spam (though not the most famous)
was posted on January 18, 1994 by Clarence L. Thomas IV, a sysadmin at Andrews
University. Entitled "Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon", it was a
fundamentalist religious tract claiming that "this world's history is coming to
a climax." The newsgroup posting bot Serdar Argic also appeared in early 1994,
posting tens of thousands of messages to various newsgroups, consisting of
identical copies of a political screed relating to the Armenian Genocide.
The first commercial Usenet spam, and the one which is often
(mistakenly) claimed to be the first Usenet spam of any sort, was an
advertisement for legal services entitled "Green
Card Lottery - Final One?". It was posted in April
1994 by Arizona lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, and hawked legal
representation for United States immigrants seeking papers ("green cards").
Usenet convention defines spamming as excessive multiple posting, that
is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages).
During the early 1990s there was substantial controversy among Usenet system
administrators (news admins) over the use of cancel messages to
control spam. A
cancel message is a directive to news servers to delete a posting,
causing it to be inaccessible to those who might read it. Some regarded this as
a bad precedent, leaning towards
censorship,
while others considered it a proper use of the available tools to control the
growing spam problem.
A culture of neutrality towards content precluded defining spam on the basis
of advertisement or commercial solicitations. The word "spam" was usually taken
to mean excessive multiple posting (EMP), and other
neologisms
were coined for other abuses — such as "velveeta" (from the processed cheese
product) for excessive cross-posting.
[1] A subset of spam was deemed cancellable spam, for which it is
considered justified to issue third-party cancel messages.
[2]
In the late 1990s, spam became used as a means of vandalising newsgroups,
with malicious users committing acts of sporgery to make targeted newsgroups all
but unreadable without heavily filtering. A prominent example occurred in
alt.religion.scientology. Another known example is the Meow Wars.
The prevalence of Usenet spam led to the development of the
Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "spamminess". The use
of the BI and spam-detection software has led to Usenet being policed by
anti-spam volunteers, who purge newsgroups of spam by sending cancels and
filtering it out on the way into servers. This very active form of policing has
meant that Usenet is a far less attractive target to spammers than it used to
be, and most of the industrial-scale spammers have now moved into
e-mail
spam instead.
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