Spam: a shadow history of the Internet

tags

Spam

Notes

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION: THE SHADOW HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

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The history of spam is the negative shape of the history of people gathering on computer networks, as people are the target of spam’s stratagems. It is defined in opposition to the equally shifting and vague value of “community.”

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planes were not just powered, winged craft for flight but objects whose existence was a direct expression of a rational, modern, and global mindset that would simultaneously bring about world peace and subdue colonized populations through bombing.

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This coming class would be necessarily scientific, cosmopolitan, and forward thinking, because they used planes.

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The design constituency cooks up methods and language for using technologies to arrange, dis- tribute, or contain power, status, and wealth, and impact constituencies have countermoves available.

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This complex mesh, sharing practices and debating ideology, is a design constituency, gathering around the technology and trying to marshal support for different and sometimes conflicting visions to push the project into the world.

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founding ambiguities. These let the designers cast a wide net and make it easier to argue that this technological project speaks for you, too.

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root paradigms are dynamic, messy, and enormously powerful concepts built on internal oppo- sitions. They draw their energy and vitality from their unsettled condition of irreconcilable struggle

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arbitraging the speed of new technological developments against the gradual pace of projects to regulate them.

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1 READY FOR NEXT MESSAGE: 1971– 1994

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“The who command,” writes the software engineer Tom Van Vleck, whom we will encounter again at the first appearance of spam, “contains the tacit assumption that the users of the Multics installation are all reasonable col- leagues, with some shared set of values.”

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quality that binds all these diverse applications of “community” lies in how very nearly impossible it is to use the word negatively, with its many connotations of affection, solidarity, interdepen- dence, mutual aid, consensus, and so on.

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“assigning the mantle of ‘com- munity’ to one’s enterprise before the fact as a marketing hook just serves to cheapen the term.”)

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“spam” is very nearly the perfect obverse of “community,” a negative term in both colloquial and specialized technical use that remains expansive and vague,

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Spammers crudely articulate this swaying balance between infrastruc- tural arrangements and the concept of a community by exploiting it relentlessly.

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spammers take the infrastructure of the “good things” and push them to extremes.

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It was easier to issue commands (“d5w”—for “delete five words”) and wait to see the results, keeping some degree of precision in the absence of immediate feedback. “The editor was optimized,” Joy recalled, “so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting [updating the screen to reflect your changes] slower than you could think.”

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spamming demands higher-order debate from the social spaces in which it operates.

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this definition does not necessarily mean automated, much less commercial, speech. “Spam” could be someone pouring out their heart in a public forum as well as automatic text generation. It is simply too much, variably and personally defined.

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her character should be erased and her account closed for being too annoying and antisocial and for writing too badly and too much.

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Spam operates in the indistinct areas between what a system explicitly offers and what it implicitly affords, between what it is understood to be and what it func- tionally permits us to do.

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THE WIZARDS

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“Anyone who can do the work is part of the club. Nothing else matters,” wrote Neal Ste- phenson

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the group operates on “rough consensus and running code,” an alliance based on knowing how.

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The predecessor networks to the Inter- net, and many of the basic elements of the network itself, emerged from contexts profoundly alien to the market and the compromises of demo- cratic governance: these systems were built at the confluence of military contracting—effectively, a radically technocratic command economy—and academic noncommercial collegiality.

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deep but distinct cultures of cooperation that evolved within both aca- demia and the military. These cultures are deeply devoted to techniques of internal interoperation

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You almost certainly knew the person in charge of the malfunctioning host. You had probably met them face to face; you could just call them on a telephone and ask them to take a look at their machine and get it working properly. Problem solved. (As Abbate describes, ARPANET “fixed” a problem with an overload of network traffic early on by all the participants simply agreeing to throttle the amount of data they sent.)

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“mail is easily deleted,” wrote Dave Crocker to the group a few messages later, “and so ‘junk’ mail is not really a serious problem.”

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Everyone involved in the discussion was entirely capable of writing his or her own mail systems from scratch to reflect their personal preferences and beliefs.

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In an environment where attention and bandwidth were scarce, what was the acceptable degree of complexity that people could be allowed to put on the network? Who gets to define what counts as noise, as a waste of resources?

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there are objects, systems, machines, and practices that simultaneously express ontological assertions and show how they could be applied in practice.

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raises the question of “what ought to be included in the ‘self ’ of self-regulation”—solely the body of individual users, who should take charge of deleting messages they don’t want? The protocol developers, who should create a keyword filter in anticipation of the arrival of the marketers and carpetbaggers? Or the ISPs, interested private companies, and national governments, who will build these networks? Who will speak for the polylogue?

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Ted Nelson, when developing the specifications for Xanadu, the original “hypertext” system, presented the “ten-minute rule”: “Any system which cannot be well taught to a layman in ten minutes, by a tutor in the presence of a responding setup, is too complicated,”

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but how long to learn the social rules, the mores and norms, the ways of acting and working appropriate to that environment?

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the role of graduate student poverty and parsimony in shaping the hacker ethos,

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the imbalance Usenet created: it cost nothing for someone to post a message at their local machine, from whence it would be circulated to Usenet, but it cost other users something to receive it, in money, in disk space, in opportunity cost, and in attention.

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Did the Usenet system need to comport itself relative to its semi-official status, supported by the phone budgets and disk space of university CS departments, or did it owe a higher loyalty as a nascent, global, decentral- ized communications system to the unconstrained free speech and liberty of thought that it made possible?

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free speech as permitting any speech except that which actively interferes with Usenet’s ability to function—that is, that which would restrict the speech of others.

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enforcement through social censure—an inbox full of flames and abuse the morning after your infraction.

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Portal.com, the Portal Infor- mation Network, was one of the first private companies to offer Internet and Usenet access to customers as a subscription business rather than something distributed to students or employees, breaking a key element of the tacit social agreement.

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making things so unpleasant for the administrators of Portal. com that they would take the appropriate sovereign action—which, wilting under all the flames, they did, but in an unprecedented manner: “We have received a number of inquiries about JJ. . . . If you view these questions as the burning issues of our time, you might wish to call JJ yourself. You can reach him as: Rob Noha (aka JJ) 402/488-2586.”

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SHAMING AND FLAMING: ANTISPAM, VIGILANTISM, AND THE CHARIVARI

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What I am calling the charivari is a distinct network- mediated social structure, a mode of collective surveillance and punishment for the violation of norms and mores.

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The wave of flames, the inbox full of messages, is a transitional stage of “summary justice (or self-help vigilante revenge)”105 that will become less significant than sysadmin methods under the aegis of a devel- oping due process.

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in 2011, as argued by Matthew Fraser, the enforcement of social order by large groups of distributed network users had made a shift from harassing those who acted badly on the network to harassing those who acted badly in life,

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vigilantism is a rather misleading point of comparison, and the charivari concept offers a more nuanced set of comparisons

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the conjugal and political charivari make a public racket around a private home, drawing attention and pressing upon the private citizen the crushing awareness that everybody knows—while spreading the word to those who don’t know yet.

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There is a crucial dimension of pleasure to the antispam charivari

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It is a party, in the sense of catcalls, costumes, and purposeful vulgarity,

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when the fun runs out so does the charivari, without any formal systems left in place for managing the next problem

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The old meaning of “spam,” a term encompassing the violation of salience—that whatever you were posting, be it duplicated, way too long, saturated with quotes, contextually inappropriate, had broken the implicature of network conversation that held that you should be in some way relevant—simply hopped to the grandest and most ubiquitous and egregious violation of salience yet. Not simply off-topic relative to a newsgroup, it reflected a deeper culture clash—a misunderstanding of the whole point of the network.

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Traffic on the backbone doubled every seven months, and many of the new users weren’t computer scientists or programmers. The demographics of what was now becoming the dominant Internet were changing,

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a system that could use the Internet instead and thus didn’t need to please the sensibilities of a handful of sysadmins

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Gregory Bateson, one of Brand’s mentors,

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It was a group with such powerful social integument that they offer one of the very few instances of positive spamming. Notorious, devoted, flame-warring WELL member Tom Mandel started the discussion topic “An Expedition into Nana’s Cunt,” a loathsome and extended attack on his ex-girlfriend (who was also on The WELL). As the argument about whether to freeze or delete the topic dragged on, other users began bombarding the topic with enor- mous slabs of text, duplicated protests, nonsense phrases—spam—to dilute Mandel’s hateful weirdness in a torrent of lexical noise, rendering it unus- able as a venue for his emotional breakdown.

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In March 1994, AOL enabled what it called the “Usenet feature.” Its massive subscriber base, which had been functioning inside the enclosed space of their proprietary network, were abruptly turned loose onto Usenet.

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abrupt introduction of species from different ecosystems into the same space,

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It was the beginning of a constant state of siege, an “eternal September”

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on New Year’s Day of 1995. The ban on commercial activity on NSFNET was rescinded, with the Internet ceasing to be the property of the U.S. government

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by 1993 the Marc Andreessen–led Mosaic web browser had been built and Berners-Lee had founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Networked computing was about to become far easier to use for many more people, a vast influx entirely free of preexisting intellectual commitments to the ethos of computational resource sharing, research, noncommercial use, and radically free speech.

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For a few hours, there was a pre- cious confusion—a relic of the last moment before spam, and advertising generally, became omnipresent online—as people tried to parse the announcement as a meaningful newsgroup post

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Canter and Siegel’s script had generated a unique copy of their message for each newsgroup, rather than “cross-posting,” which marks the message as a duplicate so that someone who’s seen it in one newsgroup can mark it to be left out of others that are to be polled.

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Kill files [intercepting and deleting the messages you don’t want] are for pacifists.”

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“Let’s bomb ’em with huge, useless GIF files, each of us sending them several, so as to overwhelm their mailbox and hopefully get these assholes’ account canceled by their sysadmins,” wrote a user on alt.cyberpunk, about a day after the green card announcement (a very early instance of the distributed denial of service attack

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Canter and Siegel had the one thing truly difficult for a chari- vari to overcome (as opposed to a vigilante group, with its access to force). They were shameless,

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presenting themselves as icons of free speech on Usenet and the Internet generally, with a total imperviousness to animosity and humiliation.

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The land, the territory, happens to be occupied by “Internet natives”—a very deliberate choice of words, framed in a larger discourse of Wild West “pioneers.” However, it belongs to those who can work it profitably.

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“natives” of the network, with their strange reputational, volunteerist gift economy, driven neither by state nor by market but by forms of Benkler’s “commons-based peer production,” had no grounds to be owners of any- thing.

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the people using the network are simultaneously without authority over its resources and their development, and yet the people and their attention are the resource, that is, the matter to be profit- ably developed.

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The difference here was that Canter and Siegel had broken the rule of salience, the rule all spammers always break. It’s not that they brought commercial grasping into some utopia of loving-kind- ness and cybernetic anarchism. It’s that they violated the principle of staying on topic and ignored the importance of salience

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2 MAKE MONEY FAST: 1995– 2003

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antispam activists of news.admin.net-abuse.email, who were alerted to this early on, expressed deep unease about both the methods and the choices of the MITW—while painstakingly dissecting the data that turned up and mirroring the site to keep it online.

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Everyone’s dream is an understanding (that is, corrupt) service provider who will look the other way and ignore or somehow sidestep complaints. The spammers call this arrangement “bulletproof hosting”; the antispam community calls such a deal a “pink contract.”

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the strange milieu of spam at this moment: people in a complex relationship with legitimacy, accepting the cost of getting ripped off with some regularity in return for being able to operate largely outside the space of courts and contracts, in an informal para-criminal economy.

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notable how little effect the volunteer antispammers had, given the extraordinary volume of their outrage and energy of their efforts. They expose the very real limits of “shaming and flaming” when directed toward the shameless and secretive.

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BUILDING ANTISPAM

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The “Sender”: is a duplicate of the original author’s, but the “From”: heading is set to that of the person canceling, who is therefore available to take complaints and flames if they have canceled someone else’s message inappropriately.

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a listserv administrator who deleted all of her posts retroactively. Tamir Maltz’s study of customary law online describes this event as “an Orwellian erasure of history”

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either accepted only certain forms of cancel messages or refused to accept them at all, whether from a simple anxiety about misuse or as an expression of a priori ethical commitments to free speech.

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it began on the Usenet newsgroup alt. religion.scientology in 1994. Already a scene of confrontation and much vituperation between activists and staff of the church, the battle in the group escalated when messages began to vanish

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is the point of listservs, Usenet groups, email, and the Internet as a whole to “promote the free expression of ideas”? That certainly wasn’t the purpose of its initial construction, and those goals remain a deeply complex and problematic instance of the language of ideology in the debate over what the Internet is to be and which constituency gets to decide—one of the root paradigms at work.

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The great threat, as seen by antispam activists and many on NANAE, was that this legislation would render spam acceptable. CAN-SPAM was simply the legitimation of spamming for those businesses capable of hiring lobbyists and thereby marking their own messages as reasonable and appro- priate.

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it becomes the responsibility of everyone with an email address to opt out, over and over;

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the structure of 419 messages is predi- cated on a general understanding of the operation of a profoundly corrupt society, and actually reenacts this corrupt operation, exploiting a history of exploitation.

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employ the vague and ignorant sense of Africa as a largely continuous and uniform environment of poverty, war, resource exploitation, and corruption. “You know the situation in Africa,”

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gradual and momentous transition of the relevance of text into something robot-readable, particularly how that happened with search on the web, and thus how search engine spamming came into being

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THE COEVOLUTION OF SEARCH AND SPAM

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markup provided a variety of structural elements that could be used to specify the arrangement and appearance of text on the screen, the placement of illustrations, and so on. It meant that each page had two faces, one robot-readable and the other for human eyes: the source, to be interpreted by the browser, and the displayed page, to be read by the person.

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though meta tag elements were popularized by early search engines such as AltaVista and Infoseek, they were so aggressively adopted by spammers that metadata was largely ignored by the turn of the century, with AltaVista abandoning the influ- ence of meta tags on search results in 2002.

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toyota ireland ladyboy microsoft windows hentai pulp fiction slut nirvana. It is a bizarre reading experience, not meant for our eyes, like walking into a field of flowers and seeing them as bright targets of bee violet and bee purple—messages for another order.

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Search engine spamming is one of the great proving grounds for the melding of robot and human readability, with different meanings for algorithms and for eyes.

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‘PageRank,’ an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people’s subjective idea of importance.

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“Linkage on the Web represents an implicit endorsement of the document pointed to. . . . Several systems—e.g., HITS, Google, and Clever—recognize and exploit this fact for Web search . . . because, unlike text-only ranking functions, linkage statistics are relatively harder to ‘spam.’”

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The spam-fighting question is: who is the person, and how much does their endorsement count for?

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The only workaround for spammers would be to build their own artificial societies—which is, in fact, exactly what they did.

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3 THE VICTIM CLOUD: 2003– 2010

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If your ultimate goal is to produce something that can stop spam, you need an accurate simulation of the inbound email for a user or a group of users in which that spam is embedded.

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The SpamAssassin corpus, gathered to test the spam filter of the same name, used posts collected from public mailing lists and emails donated by volunteers. It ran into exactly the opposite problem, with a benchmark set of legitimate text that was far more diverse than that of any given person’s email account, and also used only those messages considered acceptable for public display by their recipients.

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researchers would simply volunteer their own email inboxes for the experiment without releasing them as a corpus. They would hope that the results they got with their experiments could be reproduced with other people’s corpora, as do scientists using their own bodies as the experimental subjects—Pierre Curie generating a lesion on his own arm with radium, or Johann Wilhelm Ritter attaching the poles of a battery to his tongue.

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speaks more to the hacker sensibility than to that of the institutionalized sciences: the code runs, and it’s free, so do the experiments yourself.

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fire up a sequencer and a mass spectrometer and perform the experiments yourself—and on yourself, no less.)

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variation in performance between different users varies much more than the variation between different classification algorithms.

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FERC’s Enron collection includes audio files of trading floor calls, extracts from internal corporate databases, 150,000 scanned documents, and a large portion of Enron’s managerial internal email—all available to the public

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any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor. The key word of this statement is competition.

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These fixed filtering elements, rendered not just useless but misleading after only a few years, highlight perhaps the biggest hurdle for the scientific antispam project: it moved so slowly in relation to its quarry.

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we actually use most words very seldom. The most frequently used word in English, “the,” occurs twice as often as the second most frequent, and three times as often as the third most frequent, and so on, with the great bulk of language falling far down the curve in a very long tail.

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What the spammer needs is natural language, alive and in use up at the front of the curve.

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Litspam cuts to the heart of spam’s strange expertise. It delivers its words at the point where our experience of words, the Gricean implicature that the things said are connected in some way to other things said or to the situation at hand, bruisingly intersects the affordances of digital text.

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the pos- sibility that the people most susceptible to spam—the people that make it profitable—will overlap with those least likely to install filters or feel comfortable using them.

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Abandoning any pretense of legitimacy freed up a great deal of technical ingenuity.

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Strategies such as phishing and identity theft, advance-fee fraud, and virus and malware distribution meant that the profit margin was pushed back up

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could seek any textual shape that got past the filters,

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You no longer needed to be an idiot to be one of the fifteen idiots, and this meant that each new sucker could be worth a lot more

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When does algorithmic quantification part ways with the canny editor who knows that sex, serial killers, and how-to stories sell?

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Per- sonality spamming is the work of arrogating attention for oneself, using social media to build an audience—often a very carefully quantified audience of “followers” and “rebloggers”—rather than a network of friends, as was the initial, notional promise. It is a witty condemnation of the socially acceptable but aggressively eyeball-hungry work of those who would be, or act like, celebrities, “influencers,” or “thought leaders.”

NOTER_PAGE: (185 0.6169611307420494 . 0.6998939554612938)

US$0.35 to US$1.00 for every thousand CAPTCHAs solved— meaning a bit under $3 a day for eight solid hours of typing in CAPTCHA texts six times a minute.)

NOTER_PAGE: (190 0.3102473498233215 . 0.22587486744432664)

“What if spammers come up with an artificial intelligence before Google does?”

NOTER_PAGE: (190 0.5477031802120141 . 0.1325556733828208)

vernacular bot-stopping solutions on personal websites: an email address ending with “oryx,” with a note to remove the “genus of antelope” before sending; a very simple joke for which you must choose the obviously correct punchline; a photograph you must briefly describe (“am I in the house or on the beach?”)

NOTER_PAGE: (190 0.7045936395759717 . 0.39872746553552496)

(Other botmasters trying to take over your network is the biggest ongoing problem you face.)

NOTER_PAGE: (196 0.71660777385159 . 0.15270413573700956)

sell the data you have stolen from the infected computers under your control to a “cashier,” someone who knows how to convert financial authentication information into money.

NOTER_PAGE: (197 0.6395759717314488 . 0.423117709437964)

The market is transnationally hopping—though it looks, like so much of your working life as a global criminal, like a window on your screen with text in it.

NOTER_PAGE: (198 0.5689045936395759 . 0.16648992576882293)

It’s not a bad living, as documented by analyses of Russian forums devoted to doing malware, spamming, and credit card theft deals.

NOTER_PAGE: (199 0.5943462897526501 . 0.16330858960763522)

perhaps half can actually be used buy and ship goods to Russia for resale or fencing before you set off their antifraud detection systems, that can still produce a few hundred dollars’ worth of value per card, for a profit of $13,000.

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response rate of 2 or 3 percent and an average take of $1,922.99 per victim. Even if they spammers don’t net a really big fish, they can ultimately expect to clear about $200,000 in profit,

NOTER_PAGE: (200 0.3780918727915194 . 0.29586426299045604)

At 152 messages a minute from every one of many thousands of computers at no cost to you, the failure of the vast majority of messages at every stage means nothing. This is a post-scarcity manufacturing model of fantastic profligacy,

NOTER_PAGE: (203 0.43886925795053 . 0.33404029692470844)

Storm, or its owners, seemed to periodically identify attempts on the part of serious security firms to investigate it and would retaliate with DDoS attacks,

NOTER_PAGE: (206 0.26501766784452296 . 0.37327677624602335)

The next great botnet resource, many agree, is the African continent, home to about 100 million PCs, of which an estimated 80 percent are compromised or infected with some kind of malware.

NOTER_PAGE: (206 0.7031802120141343 . 0.3637327677624603)

128 distinct DDoS attacks over two weeks against a handful of crucial Estonian sites. “Someone is very, very deliberate in putting the hurt on Estonia.”

NOTER_PAGE: (209 0.11731448763250883 . 0.3626723223753977)

Estonia is a NATO country, and there was consideration of invoking Article 5,

NOTER_PAGE: (210 0.15830388692579506 . 0.3361611876988335)

Col. Williamson, advocating the construction of a U.S. military botnet, asks: “Can the U.S. reasonably believe that other nations have not learned from the DDOS attacks on . . . Estonia in 2007?”

NOTER_PAGE: (210 0.3123674911660777 . 0.19936373276776248)

Antispam is no longer the area of the communal hobbyists, activists, and vigilantes gathered on NANAE, or the collective of programmers building better Bayesian filters. It’s now part of Homeland Security, a front in the “cyberwar,” a place for private contractors to overlap with officers from the Air Force Cyber Command, NATO, and the FBI.

NOTER_PAGE: (212 0.11731448763250883 . 0.4697773064687169)

the group at the core of spam shrinks steadily into one aggressive and bickering extended professional family.

NOTER_PAGE: (212 0.8501766784452296 . 0.26299045599151644)

November 11, 2008, the two “upstream” providers for McColo— the companies whose backbone Internet connectivity McColo relied on to run its hosting service—cut off their bandwidth after receiving reports on their activities. Global spam activity abruptly and precipitately began to drop by the millions and then billions of messages. At the lowest point, global spam levels declined by roughly 65 percent.

NOTER_PAGE: (213 0.5314487632508834 . 0.22799575821845178)

dead zone in the Internet’s address space: the block of addresses allocated to McColo had ended up on enough blacklists for their bad activity to render others leery of taking them over, leaving them as “ghost number blocks,”

NOTER_PAGE: (213 0.7003533568904593 . 0.6394485683987275)

95 percent of “spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica, and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks.” A “handful,” in this case, meaning three: a Norwegian-owned bank in Latvia called DnB Nord, the Azerbaijani bank Azerigazbank, and the St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla National Bank in the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis, in the West Indies.

NOTER_PAGE: (216 0.4614840989399293 . 0.5705196182396607)

finding payment processors willing to do business with spammers is not a trivial matter, and there aren’t that many of them.

NOTER_PAGE: (216 0.6325088339222614 . 0.3510074231177095)

demonetization strategy: a swiftly updated financial blacklist of institutions for which Western banks will refuse to settle a small subset of transactions.

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CONCLUSION

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What is “spam”? Spam is the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit existing aggregations of human attention.

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spam is an information technology phenomenon.

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spam can be presented as the Internet’s infrastructure used maximally and most efficiently, for a certain value of “use.”

NOTER_PAGE: (220 0.20706713780918726 . 0.19406150583244966)

Spammers take advantage of existing infrastructure in ways that make it difficult to extirpate them without making changes for which we would pay a high price, whether in the hobbling of our technologies or in contradicting the values that informed their design.

NOTER_PAGE: (220 0.7851590106007067 . 0.4634146341463415)

If “spamming” at the most general level is a verb for wasting other people’s time online, can we imagine a contrary verb? That is, can we build media platforms that respect our attention and the finite span of our lives expended at the screen?

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NOTES

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

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