"Celebrating" 30 Years Of Spam
Pearls are the traditional gift for a 30-year anniversary so... we've found a beautiful pair of earrings for spam!
Yes, it's the 30th anniversary of spam – the e-mail kind, not the spiced canned meat.
Spam is the bane of e-mail inboxes everywhere – not quite so invasive as 419 scams but still a hassle, a nuisance, and the focal point of a never-ending battle between those who would advertise all kinds of ridiculous products (to enlarge or decrease as needed) and those who would block the annoying messages.
And although spam itself is not a computer virus or a Trojan Horse, the messages nowadays can carry nefarious code that often takes over a computer and uses it to send out (you guessed it) more spam.
The first spam message was sent out in 1978 to only 400 people using Arpanet, the precursor to the modern Internet. The sender was soundly and roundly criticized by the recipients and reported to his boss for sending his intrusive and uninvited message.
Today, spam or junk e-mail comprises 85 percent of all e-mail, which means more than 100 billion spam e-mail messages are sent every day. And despite the nuisance factor, it's nearly impossible to identify the actual sender to lodge a complaint or stop the messages. In fact, responding to spam often invites even more spam to an email account.
Spam wasn't actually called spam until 1993, when a Usenet chat administrator named Joel Furr came up with the name after watching a Monty Python skit featuring the meat treat. The big moment for spam came in 1994, when immigration lawyers Canter and Siegel sent a message to more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups advertising their services. This is often regarded as the moment when people who used the Internet stopped behaving according to a code referred to as "netiquette" and started to see the net as a commercial playground. [Source: BBC News]
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