A History of Spam on the Internet
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 30 окт 2022
- From ARPANET to botnets, what is spam and where did it come from?
Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/wereinhell -enter promo code WEREINHELL fro 83% off and 3 extra months Free!
Support the channel by becoming a patron: www.patreon.com/user?u=15387042
Threads: www.threads.net/@wereinhellyt
Follow me on Twitter: / wereinhellyt or Instagram at / wereinhellyt
Email wereinhellbusiness@gmail.com for inquiries
Punch up by @ChillGoblin / chillgoblin
Animation by @Aranock / aranock
Artwork in the background by Zé Burnay www.zeburnay.com/
Music by Will Jarvis willjarvis.bandcamp.com/
Big thanks to @BigJoel @FoldingIdeas @DemonMama @FinntasticMrFox @MaggieMaeFish @TheSerfsTV Shayne Smith, and @twin_rabbit 
Развлечения
Get Surfshark VPN at surfshark.deals/wereinhell -enter promo code WEREINHELL fro 83% off and 3 extra months Free!
great the spammity spam will not leave my head for ages. catchy .
Cawabanga!
Oh that gets, :O
Cawabanga!
you've write "fro"
Sorry you are wrong about Japan. Japan doesn't eat spam. But a starving post war Japan bar Okinawa never took to spam to feed her hungry, instead they turned to canned whale meat. Having had whale tonkatsu about 15 years ago, I can see why its ok if you are starving. But not much else.
It's not as if Japan doesn't eat greasy food. But Spam never got widespread acceptance as did her neighbors.
So, at 1:04:01 : since the internet trusts facebook, twitter, wordpress, and blogspot... What youre saying is those are the places to linkfarm? And to viciously hunt them like theyre JJ. Gotcha.
Just hit the 30 min mark.
Oh fuck off, spammers and scammers jumped *straight* to the "Freedom of Speech == Freedom from Social Consequences" argument? Fucking hell, nothing ever changes.
@@1CT1 Oh, don't worry. I've already accepted the Lord of All, C'thulu into my mind.
@@TheMan83554 And the accompanying racism?
@@OlExtraRegularBass Nah man! Unlike the author, C'thulu does not discriminate between creed or birth.
(The now deleted reply was an "Accept the Lord Jesus into your heart and be SAVED!" type copy paste. Just in case it was deleted before you saw it)
@@TheMan83554 isn't C'thulu only middlingly powerful compared to the rest of the mythos? That's part of why he's scary, the gap between us and him is smaller than the gap between him and his superiors
@GhostPolitics mmmmmmmk
"Only sheer luck separates us from a world where boner pill emails get sent to our 'dead parrot' folder." Fantastic quote. Gonna spa- dead parrot it in all my group chats.
Actually, now that see it used as a verb, it actually kinda works? It feels like a cross between "parroting" and "beating a dead horse" which is basically what spam is anyway.
I'm tempted to start a dead-bird collection of online phrases lol, since "Dead Dove" is already popular and I bet "Dead Parrot" could probably catch on in a small corner of the internet XD
It has already caught on in my heart.
Oh, parrot!
I thought he said parent and was super concused lmao
@@CelestiaLilyI can get behind that
25:00 this was called the eternal september, since before this happened, September was the time of year when new university students would get access to the net, and not being used to the etiquette of the net, be a general nuisance before learning all the rules. But once ISPs started selling access to the net to anyone, it was like september all the time.
Yeah, I was originally gonna explain that but cut it for length. Funny seeing so many people bring it up in the comments
@@WereInHell omg you're famous and you talked to me
@@pedrogarcia8706 Calm down!
Nowadays it's summertime that is known for this 'idiot newbies creeping into online groups' thing, because kids have internet access now, and since there's no school in the summer to keep them occupied they spend more time online- so places that are used to being mostly adults with good netiquette, suddenly see an influx of people who are new and asking a ton of questions.
And not in the fun, Earth, Wind and Fire kinda way 😕
I remember when AOL was pretty much brand new, and certain chatrooms would have a "spam break", and that was where people could "spam" the room with their macros. No, not their keybinding list lmao, they would post intricate art that involved ascii code, i think, and they would draw giant pictures of batman, a woman holding a rose, a penis. Always a penis in an AOL chat room, I tell ya hwat!
a/g/l
"yeah, somehow I find it very easy to imagine an Internet cluttered with ads"
RUclips: "my time to shine!"
My family's house had bed bugs for nearly 2 years due to issues with getting all of the eggs before they hatched. It's been some ten years, yet I still maintain my bed-bug-avoidance behaviors. Those critters are the WORST!
I had them and got misdiagnosed with scabies. The worst part was I first saw the bites while watching the movie "Bug". kinda broke my mind for a while. Glad I'm not alone
Studies suggest people who have dealt with bed bug infestations exhibit symptoms of PTSD
I had them once like 6 years ago and I'm still shook about it too, man.
@@EmissaryofWind Yup. Bed bugs are literally so fucking awful, that they don't just make you itchy, they also fuck with your head. Fucking hate bed bugs.
@@zenleeparadise my sister had them over a decade ago, 2k miles from me, and *I* still have PTSD reactions to seeing a used sofa on the curb 😬
I hope it's deliberate that you “find it very easy to imagine an internet cluttered up with ads” right before a RUclips ad break plays. That was **chef's kiss**
Imagine still watching ads in 2024
Having bedbugs will definitely get to a person after long enough. Some people can smell them, especially when crushed. I spent way too long keeping everything in air tight bags, constantly spraying poison everywhere, living like I was a biohazard personally. Probably contributed to my current social behavior.
Had bedbugs, caught them very early. Got rid of them in less than a week, I was too scared to open my bags of clothes and kept most of them in bags in a closet for a whole year
@GhostPolitics you are 12 years old
I literally don't understand bed bugs I've never had them in 20 years and I've always lived in bushy Australia
@@zirconium2014 Bedbugs hitchhike on/with people. Absolutely brutal to get rid of if you chance on them. I've seen them emerge from dormancy after a year. I hope you stay lucky.
they leave bites yes ?
I was born in 1969 and my dad worked for IBM. We were on arpanet way back in the day. You did a great job covering the early history of it all. I forgot about Johnny Appleseed!
My grandfather worked for IBM too! My mom had arpanet too back in the day lol
nice
@@MCKevin289 my mother was ibm too too! Arpanet ate just johnny appleseed.
Nice
When I had bedbugs, I experienced a small period of psychosis. I had been at war with the beasts for maybe about a week (still have no idea how they got there), and I came home one night after not sleeping for roughly 36 hours and thought little holes in the floor were bed bugs, and started covering them with poison. I think that’s the only moment I can think of where it felt like my whole brain was disconnected from reality, all I was thinking was that I had to kill the little dots.
I was fine after a good night’s sleep, but worse than your blood, those little fucks consume your psychology
Meth was involved in this scenario and you cant convince me otherwise
@@poindextertunesNo uppers were involved in the making of this story. I was working a job at [redacted] and had made the insane decision to pull stupid hours, probably in part to avoid going home to a bedroom where bloodsuckers lurked menacingly just beyond my peripheral vision. Moral of the story is that sleep is good, and the hellspawn which must not be named is bad.
It doesn't matter what kind of substances you abused or if you were actually sober. Simply opening up about a mind-altering experience can be enough for the war on drugs to fuck you up. Violent raids with armed thugs breaking into your home have been planned and executed for less suspicious activities. @@sammosaurusrex 🌈
Yep. In people who are already unwell, there’s an increased risk of harming or even off-ing oneself, mental breakdowns, etc…
They can *really* bug you.
Personally, it was one in a series of, for lack of a better phrase, unfortunate events. And it stood out. Years before not every single fuzz on my bed or floor literally appeared to be crawling. Dreadful wee beasties.
Now imagine how much I suffered from Scabies one year long.
It's like the bedbugs but tinier and they nest themselves into your skin.
I literally had OCD and suic1de thoughts, the itching made me wild,
I would barely sleep and I would destroy my room once a week when
I just didn't fucking want to be in this skin anymore.
That year I was forced to live in a big filthy house full of dirty teenagers,
had escaped my abusive parents through child protection.
I fucking had to flee from that place in Germany to Romania to
finally live somewhere clean. And it just took 2 weeks to escape these
little monsters, there's a very effective cream, but back in Germany I would
just continue to live around these parasites in the filth, no matter
how often I'd use that cream. And you can only use that cream once every
6 weeks cause it can damage your liver.
I had dangerous levels of liver values in my blood from overusing that cream.
I would desperately wait weeks, then do a cream treatment again when I was
allowed again, I would have peace for one week, then I would get infested again.
The part about Blogspot spam made me weirdly nostalgic. I worked in media analysis in the early 2010s as a student, essentially sorting through search results for brand names, etc., deciding whether or not they were legitimate. Every day, I would find literally *hundreds* of these blogs, at time using predominantly Chinese mythology that was autotranslated to German with brand names such as Canada Goose or Hermès thrown in at random. I collected some of them and still have a 100.000+ word long doc with a selection somewhere. I was a literature student who focused on modernist poetry, i.e. French writers like Rimbaud or Mallarmé or of course Gertrude Stein. In a twisted way, I think those spam bots achieved with language what they had always dreamt of: eradicating the human element from writing, letting words collide with each other in ever new constellations. I know all that stuff seems comical to most people, but I have always considered it oddly beautiful.
Anyhow, fantastic video - thank you.
wouldn't any AI type of random text generator do something similar to what you're describing as writing without any human element in it?
@@nafsikaeuripi7 That's true, though much like those texts based on auto-translated stuff that was written by humans, AI still relies on human input or at least input generated by humans. That's a bittersweet conundrum regarding these modernist theories, that language owes its existence to humans so could never be truly independent. But yes, I had similar feelings about the Chatbot, if you still remember that one.
God big Joel’s pronunciation of a smiley just makes me laugh so much.
Big Joel and we're in hell both have the best "positive gremlin" energy, best way I can describe it but watching their videos always makes me feel good.
Can anyone timestamp this roughly? Think I missed this moment while multitasking
@@maggiescarlet 20:28 ish
@@iparihangya that was perfect, thank you!! :-) **Big Joel smugly giggles**
@@iamjustkiwi I think you mean "chill goblin" energy, in which case Chill Goblin needs into this discussion.
Regarding Nigeria, a couple of decades ago I met some people who had left Nigeria and were working on trying to oppose Shell Oil's abuses of their village's land. And what they were showing Shell was doing was really messed up.
Fucking thank you. My 70 year old mom had her computer, accounts, bank and credit card all compromised last month, and it was like the 49th time she's fallen for some various online scheme. The explanation at the end of the vid talking about botnets and worms and such, and the marketplace of hacked information, etc--she really needed to hear all of that, and now has.
Fun fact: I try to tell her this all, myself,but since I'm not on TV I don't spose she listens
This is going to be one of those videos like Dan Olsen's Line Goes Up that I will be rewatching endlessly just to absorb more of it. I like to think of work like this as pleasingly dense, the type of thing I would love to get the transcript to and settle down in my armchair with a gin and a highlighter. Great fucking work man.
This is what people used to do with books
@@PokeNebula No WAY!
1:03:45 Also, fun fact, the PageRank algorithm isn't (just) named after web pages, it's named after Google cofounder Larry Page. Same as the Good move in tiddlywinks, named after John Good. With these facts, you will surely be the life of any party you go to.
This was a *banger*. I have worked on spam filtering technology and was actually CTO at an email company when A Plan For Spam was published, and this had some information that was new even to me!
Your interpretation of Postel's Law (or the "robustness principle") was... interesting. In its original form it wasn't about email per se, but about the way computers interact with each other using standardized protocols. In the context it was intended to apply, its spirit would be better understood as "when creating a system for sending and receiving messages, one should build a participating component to understand as many messages as possible, even invalid ones which do not completely conform to the protocol specification, as long as they can be sensibly understood without complete ambiguity; but be scrupulously correct and in compliance with the protocol when creating messages that you send to others". Your slightly higher-level reframing of it, however, is interesting when considering the cultural history of the principle. For decades it was seen as a guiding principle of the internet's architecture, and generally a Good Thing among software designers. However, in the last 10 years it has become gradually less and less popular, eventually being inverted completely, and currently the most advanced software developers I know all have developed a consensus that one *must* harshly reject any nonconformant messages to prevent a collective degradation of the commons of protocol implementations, even if it makes the individual connection more robust. This really does parallel the development of spam quite closely.
Since youtube hates hyperlinks in comments because of, haha, spam, you can find this by googling draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-03.
A much more minor nitpick: it sounded like you were saying there were two guys, Johnny Appleseed and Licklider, but Licklider was just one dude whose *nickname* was "computing's Johnny Appleseed"; you can see this on his wikipedia page.
Funny, the section on Postel’s law was what stood out to me as well and I also found the reframing of it extremely interesting. To me the bigger faux pas was to not make a joke about Postel’s name in regards to mail ;)
@@mvnnrtwckother I would say that what you're observing here is actually the same trend: i.e. HTTP request smuggling, header splitting, and even things like XSS or SQL injection are (partially) the consequences of the Postel Principle's universal application at the time of the design of those standards, but are now seen as a big problem to be solved systemically rather than a thing an individual engineer needs to "be careful" about. The principle was hugely influential and has its fingerprints on literally everything on the internet, so the process of drawing back and designing new protocols is going to be one that takes decades.
Just passing through the smart people section of the comments. Catching random words here and there. Bye bye now 😚
19:30 I love when youtubers let their little siblings be in their videos. So wholesome
Chicken and Spider are excellent demon children - please give them some chin scritches for me. I have two black cats myself, and can confirm that you have a long and joyful future of forever removing them from surfaces that they are not allowed to be on.
Excellent work as always.
Not allowed? I live in my cat's house. Not the other way around.
Holy shxt I did not know black cats were inherently mischievous. We have a Chocolate York, his name is Gelato and we have full on conversations in the morning. And yes, he gets into everything he’s not supposed to 🙄
He even corrupted our ginger boy who was very well behaved before his arrival. He’s a straight up t3rrorist 😂
The worm bit is interesting. My company has really strict email rules and training regarding security and spam etc. We are told specifically to not open stuff and they regularly run tests like sending an email. And seeing who clicks then retraining those people as needed. This is a great video.
My former company sent me a test email claiming I had been given a parking ticket, and I fell for it because I had just parked like a jackass lmao
My company also does this. The way that I found out was seeing an obvious spam email and clicking it to possibly see what a convincing phishing site might look like. They then let me know that I failed that test.
I have this not only on my corporate email, but also two my corporate email accounts for two different clients. The one time I fell for it, it was a fake scanned document notification and I thought it was coming from the client's new copier down the hall. My clients' boss got the notification, and even though I immediately emailed his admin to apologize in the hopes that somehow the reports went to her and I would escape admonishment, he did indeed inform my boss. That hurt so bad.
Just gonna throw this out there that hospital receptionists don’t get this training dont ask me how I know you’re welcome scammers and spammers! And it’s usually boomers who are opening the emails.
Reminds me of how a year or so ago, the random "word salad"/ copy-paste story fragments thing was all over RUclips comments; then within a few months, spambots were everywhere. Got so bad it killed comments on many "Topic" channels entirely. Now I know why. Thanks much for that.
Huh, is that why they disabled comments across the board? I've been wondering for ages now.
And now they shadowban even innocuous comments.
The idea of a " dead parrot" folder gives me similar vibes to that throwaway detail in "The Adventures of Luther Arkwright" where "Molotov cocktails" are called "Pankhurst cocktails" in an alternate universe. And now I know what I'm going to reread as soon as I've watched the rest of the video... 🤔
I thought he said dead parent.
At some point, the collective spambots became self aware, and Spamnet was born. Soon after it launched every nuke on the planet. The survivors called it Judgement Day.
Can confirm. Having bed bugs in my early 20s absolutely gave me some PTSD. Almost 15 years later and I still freak tf out and tear the room apart if I see any small, blackish bug crawling around. Bed bugs are seriously the worst. IYKYK!
A correction on clean rooms: the air quality is measured with the number of particles of a standard size by unit volume, not directly by the size of particles.
Your past two videos have absolutely knocked it out of the park. You should be very proud.
Thank you so much for the video! Among other things, it reminded me how much NFT and other Web3 discord servers resemble the early internet (exactly as they claim). Spamming, begging, scamming, doxxing, all the good stuff!
If you change a phone number, you should change it to a 555 number. They are specifically designed to not exist so you can freely use them as jokes. Because, even though you said that isn't the real number, someone will end up calling that random number and causing problems.
That is not true, there are actual 555 numbers in existence and there have been for quite a while.
@@Taschenschieber yeah and they were specifically designed to not work but they were used anywhere, either way they are still used a and it's fun to spot them. But yeah since they are used now as real phone numbers wtf it's good having a way to generate unique phone numbers for educational or personal use
I am the person that calls random numbers
I believe it's 555-01xx numbers. At least that's the pattern that I picked up from movies
+
Damn, the dial up beat that starts at 33:20 goes hard, as does all the music in your videos. Also your connection with internet spam and real meat in a can spam via US military involvement blew my mind. Your content never ceases to impress!!
God... I found that genuinely quite scary into the later stages - and not only because the "just doing my job" section damn near gave me a heart attack. Your bug analogy rang uncomfortably true by the end; specifically, it made me think of swarming parasitic worms, and oh boy was that a mental association I did not need. Fascinating as always, though - keep up the good work!
The Python programming language also got its name from Monty Python. Gotta love it
So, you may find it interesting that Johnny Appleseed is actually the name of an American folk hero. The tale goes that he went around America planting apple trees and... that's really it, he was just a cool dude who wondered and planted trees.
that’s not actually it! there are two other important features of his life:
1) he was a fundamentalist Christian who was convinced the world was about to end and would wander around singing weird hymns he wrote.
2) the apples he planted were from seed, which means they were generally inedible. but that’s okay because he wasn’t growing them to be eaten, he was growing them to be fermented into cider and applejack. Johnny Appleseed didn’t bring fresh fruit to the frontier, he brought booze
@@IsaacMayerCreativeWorks yeah, the Johnny Appleseed I was taught about in school was a figure more similar to Santa Claus than anything real, this is all news to me
@@IsaacMayerCreativeWorks There's more. Johnny Appleseed helped people better their land to lay claim to it without having to grow a proper crop.
he wore a pot on his head as a hat of sorts
“Yeah, somehow I find it very easy to imagine an internet cluttered up with A…” *ad break* “…ds.”
was hoping someone else noticed this!
By the way, you managed the audio mixing well enough that I personally didn't have trouble understanding you, but the music in that last third got maybe too aggressive.
As someone who was there for Cantor&Siegel, was an early subscriber to NANAE, and the guy who wrote one of the first self-updating filter lists (“Oasel”) THANK YOU for this history. It’s a fascinating story and needed to be documented.
Don't know it you mention this in the video, but, spam was a massive part in the centralization of the internet. Take email for example: it's a public communication protocol, but with inconvenience of setting up servers and essential information being privately owned (how to filter spam) it slowly centralized into the services we use today
Yes. I often moan about how it seems like we're going back to the old days of mainframes and dumb terminals because it's easier to fortify the central element against attacks and vulnerabilities, especially when the biggest vulnerability is the users. I understand it, but it seems so weird to me when the person touting the brilliance of the cloud to me is older than me and I'm like, dude, remember Unix / VAX / Wang? You were already there, but back then the cloud was located on site and managed by your own IT team. It seems like we've just added in some layers of what can fail and knock your whole office offline for a day.
I think we are now seeing the return of decentralization with FOSS projects and containerized programs like Mastodon instances.
@@tinabean713 yeah, there is a podcast somewhere with the tech learning collective (anarchists) saying exactly this.
Man I work as a software developer and this video is pure gold, right on the topic and super accurate
Love the animation stuff on this one!
>makes this excellent video detailing an extensive knowledge of computer history, technology and psychology
>uses chrome instead of firefox
as an extra note, the SAGE computers had one of the car cigarette lighter things right next to the ashtray
I'm in my mid-fifties and do NOT miss smoking everywhere from grocery stores to hospital waiting rooms.
As God intended.
@@suzbone im sure you dont, i personally can hardly stand to be around it myself
@@dsnodgrass4843 indeed
I'm pissed still that we were so close to some Finnish students making the first full web browser (with images and functional search!) for their finals project in 1992, got international attention for it but it got dropped since their university wouldn't fund the project 😭
The thought of the possibility of a "dead parrot folder" is incredibly funny to me somehow
Hearing the word "bedbugs" triggers something feral in me after having to deal with them from ages 13-15. People who've had them understand.
Now imagine how much I suffered from Scabies one year long.
It's like the bedbugs but tinier and they nest themselves into your skin.
I literally had OCD and suic1de thoughts, the itching made me wild,
I would barely sleep and I would destroy my room once a week when
I just didn't fucking want to be in this skin anymore.
That year I was forced to live in a big filthy house full of dirty teenagers,
had escaped my abusive parents through child protection.
I fucking had to flee from that place in Germany to Romania to
finally live somewhere clean. And it just took 2 weeks to escape these
little monsters, there's a very effective cream, but back in Germany I would
just continue to live around these parasites in the filth, no matter
how often I'd use that cream. And you can only use that cream once every
6 weeks cause it can damage your liver.
I had dangerous levels of liver values in my blood from overusing that cream.
I would desperately wait weeks, then do a cream treatment again when I was
allowed again, I would have peace for one week, then I would get infested again.
I still have to deal with OCD two years later, first the OCD was scratching that continued
even after the Scabies went, and an uncontrollable obsession with picking at my skin.
Then it transitioned to me counting numbers in my head, I can't think in peace,
my thoughts are spamming themselves!
I don't want to say that your suffering was nothing,
any kind of bug infestation can be fucking traumatizing.
We're fellow survivors.
This goes all the way back for me - I literally grew up with all of this technology, with my infancy (and my mom's working career) corresponding with the birth of this technology, as she was an office worker living in the East Bay. Some of my earliest memories are of being sat at an IBM keypunch machine, going clackety-clack on the keys after mom loaded up a brick of cards for me to waste, to keep me distracted long enough for her to finish her shift. I later got to see the Univacs at NASA/AMES (IIRC) in a glass-separated extra-chilled room with a 24-hour _analog_ clock on the way, which freaked me tf out.
The story of Usenet includes one fact folks might find interesting (or perhaps dispute - looking forward to that): Perhaps the first Internet-connected nationwide (and international) mass movement for social justice was the *anti-apartheid movement* of the mid-1980s - which was also the first mass movement I got seriously involved in. In 1985, there was an occupation of the space in front of the administration building, and every night they'd have a mass meeting at which, among other things, the EECS nerds would read out the reports they'd gotten on Usenet from Columbia and dozens of other campuses across the country. (I was the guy who had the bright idea that someone ought to take minutes of these meetings, and since I wasn't a student but had a day job as a word processor in San Francisco, I got to type them up & deliver them to the next night's meeting on my way back home from work.)
That is fascinating! I think there is a bigger story to tell here about how and why social justice movements have interfaced with technology and what impacts that has had on organizing...
Spam is not really a status symbol here in Korea!
Well it used to be the case, but nowadays it's more like the cheapest form of present you can get for korean thanks giving or new years. Not much of a struggle food, yet not so much a delicacy either. You usually won't buy one yourself--not because it's expensive, but rather because you've got some left over from new years.
For context, it's common courtesy for companies to give away thanks giving/new years presents to employees here. And if your best gifts are some cans of spam or tuna(around 10 cans, packed in a clean box, usually around 30 us dollars a box), it's generally presumed that your career's not the most successful.
Great video by the way! :-) I love spam.
This is a great summary of Finn Brunton's Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet. I'm sure it's just an oversight but I was surprised not to see this book credited in the notes.
I sometimes wonder why there weren't more cynical nihilists there at the beginning of the internet to warn people how naïve and optimistic they were being. Is it because cynical nihilists don't build things, or people that build things don't like to listen to cynical nihilists? Or maybe all of their mistakes back then actually created this big wave of cynical people, so back then there weren't actually all that many around.
I'd call it realistic, but I'm a bit nihilistic lmao
Because the early Internet was made by autistic people, who tend to be naive.
Music included, this has been a very great companion to my Metal Gear Rising kick. Thank you for providing some context to “Who else could wade through the endless sea of garbage you people produce”
I also really appreciate how you described the computer logic that David Graham used to filter spam. My philosophy professor spoke about how it is incredibly understated how closely philosophy and computer science are related. Nice to see how those connect outside of the classroom.
I love when fellow humanities and social science grads get into tech.
33:09
"Yeah. Somehow I find it very easy to imagine an internet cluttered up with ads."
*AD PLAYS*
Brilliant
for anyone interested in more spam history, brain krebs' book spam nation focuses on what was going on in russia in the mid 2000's, my favorite part was he actually goes and interviews people who bought the products being sold in spam messages
The literal Mafia got involved in the Spam game for a bit around the turn of the millennium. I remember seeing an article about a guy who owned a Florida-based company that had been responsible for something like 50% of US Spam for a while. He was this burly Italian-American guy who had a criminal record a mile long for robbery and drug trafficking and stuff. The dude literally looked like an extra from the Sopranos.
A whole lot of it, especially the... adult... spam was run by eastern European organized crime as well, mainly out of Russia, Romania, and Moldova. They'd set up these cheap, fly-by-night adults sites, send out a huge flood of spam for them, and then use the sites for credit-card harvesting.
@@EphemeralTao Yeah, a lot of that still goes on in some of the same countries.
Monty Python has had a big impact on computer science in general. Python, the scripting language, is named after them too.
I loved the ending there. I hope you come back to these concepts of cybernetics and the way machines have become the ideal clients for other machines. Have you ever considered doing a video focused on the works of the CCRU? I feel like the mix of the occult and the technological is pretty on brand for this channel.
Absolutely incredible work, you're one of the best writers around rn. My dad worked in tech for 40 years and i had heard of the monty python connection, as a kid he would play the spam song for me on his vinyl of Another Monty Python Record hahaha
I am probably biased, as I have been on the internet for 25 years, and partook in the Usenet communication myself. But this video in spite of its length is the best I have seen for months, and that includes those of a certain Brit who is living in the Czach republic and produces masses of videos each week. Thanks for the work that you put into it.
This really shines a light on the REAL problem, the motive of profit. The only thing that matters in nefarious activities is benifiting and money is the universal motivator. Destroy the profit motive, destroy capitalism.
That last sentence leaves me confused about your motive. It seems to implicitly equate capitalism with nefarious activities. Is that intentional?
If something currently has value, why would it lose that value if we just changed our economic system?
@@mvmlego1212 well unfortunately while the concept of ownership for profit isn't inherently nefarious, as nothing is in a vacuum, it can't be defended without nefarious intensions behind it, why do owners get to have more say and make more money than the workers who actually generate the profit just because they have a piece of paper saying they "own" it?
@@redcloudblackcloak5677 could you rephrase the question I'm not sure wht you mean?
Sure.
If a good or service is worth something, why would switching from capitalism to another mode of economic structuring remove that worth?
Thank you so much for your videos! They are always such an engaging if not pleasurable time. You are a top tier essayist and presenter, good luck with the kitties
9:50 hey one person could use the entire processing power. My dad actually created one of the first chat programs. It would check constantly to see if there were any new messages... which the computer server couldn't handle back then and he caused the campus server to crash and shut down.
I really enjoyed this one! It was cool to see the mentions of John Postel, my dad worked at UCLA and did some stuff with him, he's shown me copies of RFC's he helped work on and some of the very first emails that were ever sent. Really cool to see it talked about this way because my dad treats it like it was no big deal and think it's not worth talking about, but it is!
Also thought the sandals comment was very funny because my dad is the same... He wear flip flops and shorts year round and his hair is waist length. I remember him complaining once that he had to wear shoes and pants to meet the governor and how dumb he thought that was 😂
3/4 of my family (myself included) have ADHD and that ending song is DEFINITELY going to spread to the whole family from me at some point
The original by Viagra Boys is a way different vibe but is just as great! If at least 1/4 of your family is down with some Swedish rock/post-punk I’d recommend their album Cave World
i also have ADHD, i can vouche.
(also i JUST noticed the lyrics lmao)
@@ZackPatchett one of my favorite bands of all time
@@ZackPatchett did you happen to find out who made the version used in this video?
Ah, I found it a second later....
“I find it easy to imagine an Internet cluttered up with ad-“ *ad plays*
Incredible the timing is just impeccable 😂
when you said "unnerving as this video here" and showed the like, 2 seconds of bugs inside a computer, i legit yelped, as if one was going to crawl out at me.
We're like a minute into this video and you're already getting under my skin
I’m only a few minutes in and i already have a parasocial relationship with chicken and spider. I hope you’re prepared to be asked for Kitten Intermission (kittermission? kittentermission?) after every video :D
It’s fun to be old enough to remember actual spam and AOHell
Been watching your stuff for years and I honestly feel like this is one of your best videos. Tremendous work my dude.
"Hey, why is this a Halloween video?" [one hour later] "Hey, why is this the creepiest shit I've ever heard about?"
(Banger vid once again thank u for the brainworms)
Amazingly researched and put together video, as usual; the transition from spam into commodified malware was truly masterful. That barely scrateches the surface of the modern landscape of cyber warfare (a term about as cringey as the stock hacking footage you used, but not inaccurate) though. I'd love to see another video going even further down the rabbit hole.
Wow, this took me back to my USENET days. I modded a group in the late 90s, and the ratio of spam to legit posts was somewhere around 100-1.
Great work on this one. Really concise for what seems to be an unwieldy topic. Great work by your collaborators too. You keep bringing the quality each month
I read that SAGE was kinda not named after anything and "Semi-Automatic Ground Equipment" was a half-assed backronym.
it also had a way to filter out ground clutter, weather, etc picked up on the radar: this consisted of a CRT, a light sensor, and some tippex (or similar). the CRT would show the raw radar returns. the operator paints over anything irrelevant with the tippex/paint. any enemy bombers will light up the unpainted parts of the screen and trigger the light sensor
You promised us this month would be a more upbeat topic and just looking at the title I'm excited!
The history of Internet Spam is a fun topic!
But anytime I talk about it to people in bars or parties, well this topic or the beauty of process automation, they never let me talk for an hour and twenty, I tell you that.
I'm four minutes in and I'm already excited.
As someone who studies corpus linguistics, the Bayesian reasoning part was really interesting. Great video :)
Really loving the audio production on this video. Really evocative and fun
I’m both shock & not surprised spam is this old. Also, why am I not surprised that canter & seagull were the first to trigger a major event of this & that they were not great people.
The original protocol for email (on UNIX) had no sender verification (like a caller ID). You just added your sender name to the form. It was a gentleman's agreement. It still like this, except your service providers now tend to check the IP to see if it looks legit.
One day, they'll be measuring internet stability using the universal internet background spam (UIBS) detector and how close it is to destabilization by a logarithmic hell factor (hF) as a function of all internet communication traffic.
LOVE THIS ONE!! great writing, awesome animations, cool music and everyone's voices were very fun, kudos to everybody who contributed :D
Very nice! I enjoyed the coverage of the early days of the (not yet) internet and the explanation on how modern spam works. Thanks!
Hey I'm only 5 minutes into this but I'd highly recommend the article by Hito Steyerl called Digital Debris, where she breaks down spam according to the Monty Python skit that gave birth to the term, it's a very interesting text!
That essay was what gave me the idea for this video
@@WereInHell Aah I can imagine! Her Name Was Esperanza (the article) also came to mind while watching further. Great stuff man, always an interesting trip to watch your videos.
in love with chicken and spider ❤️❤️
Beautiful ad placement at 33:13… chef’s kiss
dude this is one of my favorite videos you've done and I'd love to see more stuff along these lines
I think that the best metaphor for spam is that one scene from Harry Potter and Philosopher's Stone where Harry's relatives are constantly bothered by letters for him.
Great video!
was working in another tab and that worm message scared the sh1t outta me. imagine getting that on your computer. also about the infestion thing yes YES anything close mentally makes me itch. i lived in an apartment building with a real bad bug problem for a time as a kid and at the beginning of quarantine my uncle's family stayed with us and used my bedroom their dogs' beds gave us bedbugs it was the worst.
i love watching a video essay and hearing other youtubers come in for voiceovers it’s like a cameo in a movie. like i’m distracted doing something else and suddenly i hear Dan Foldingideas
Your old-school computer animations are top-notch! Keep up the good quality and the kitten cameos!
Recording in the same room as two mischievous kittens is always a good idea. Always.
Aallllwwaaayyys.
It is always so interesting to learn about the history of the internet and its parts as someone who grew up with it and used it regularly in the last 11 years. The internet has already changed so much since then that looking into the actual history just boggles my mind sometimes.
It's also really interesting to finally learn what a Bayesian calculation actually is as someone studying stats atm.
Also the ADHD song at the end was a banger xD
the song at the end is a cover of a song called ADD by the band viagra boys
Just gotta say: this is my favorite channel on RUclips!
Super informative and ridiculously entertaining.
Thank you so much and congratulations on the new kittens 😊
Wow, this is the best video you have done so far. It is a perfect balance between tech history, humor and social critique. Perfect in every demension. Respect!
"One person would post an essay about the Armenian genocide on any post mentioning Turkey."
I think this guy still exists
based
Exactly the same feeling about bugs as you. Most of them I’m cool with but as soon as they’re in large groups and infesting something I’m terrified of. The idea of them living on me is even worse. I’ve had both fleas and lice before and it was straight up psychological torture. Bedbugs are one of my greatest fears I can’t go to a hotel without having an anxious breakdown over them. Anyway I know that’s not even near the point of the video but it’s nice to find someone who can relate. Spam definitely does invoke the same feeling, spam emails freak me out a lot too so there might be some connection there as well lol
I usually don't comment on videos in general, but damn, this was a really excellent video. Kept me interested for the entire run time. Your return to non-reality TV content has been an absolute banger so far, can't wait to see what's next!
This video was incredible, i love your writing style so much, definitely sharing it with all my friends
my head started to tingle which meant either we’re in hell JUST posted or i have a tumor in my brain
the music and sound design on these videos is only improving. very well done!
Super helpful and entertaining as always! I work in web design so it’s good to see the evolution of what ultimately amounts to the bane of my existence. You rock. Keep the quality vids coming!
The irony of the "no-one talks about that feature" bit is that it *used* to be something no-one mentioned in ads, or only very briefly mentioned as a footnote, until Tom Scott actually pointed out that that was actually the main use for one for most people and most of the security features were either inaccurately claimed and described or not useful to most users.