21 Jun
2001
21 Jun
'01
5:10 a.m.
At 10:59 AM 6/21/01 -0400, Eric wrote:
Yeah, I remember the good ole days when a person would
send out SPAM
and more that a dozen people would chastise them for it. The guilty party
would then sheepishly apologize and that would be that. Then all the sudden
one day (mid 90s) more than one spammer hit all over and no one could
keep up.
Actually, prior to 1990 when ARPANet, nee NSFNet, was carrying the traffic
and it was still under the auspices of the NSF, it was against policy for
the net to be used for "commercial" purposes. People who tried had their
network connections severed.
Then the backbone was transferred to commercial enterprises (UUNet, MCI,
Sprint, etc) and they had no such policy in place. And as we've seen they
have even _agreed_ to allow spammers to send their mail and advertisements
(do a search on 'pink sheet' and 'spam' on google some time) It was all
over at that point.
--Chuck