From: jim@mentat.com (Jim Gillogly)
Date: Thu, 7 May 1998 08:01:57 -0700 (PDT)
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Spam
Message-ID: <9805071457.AA20574@mentat.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Stan the Sequencer sez:
> Apparently only as far back as 1993, the definition of the word "spam" from
> the on-line jargon file was this (according to the New Hackers Dictionary) -
> 
> spam [from the MUD community] vt. To crash a program by over-running a fixed-
> size buffer with excessively large input data.  See also Buffer Overflow,
> Overrun Screw, Smash the Stack.

This isn't quite accurate.  The term "spamming" in Mudding has always meant
inundating the players with repetitive material, whether intentionally
or accidentally, and has been used in that sense since sometime around
1990 at least.  The "overflow" is of user screens, not stacks or
buffers... although of course any high usage like that can test a
program's limits.

I just wrote and snipped a long disquisition on the history of spam starting
with Clarence Thomas IV in 1993, having realized it's probably not relevant to
your interests and old hat to everybody else.  Suffice it to say that spam
does require extra resources to process, both in hardware and time.  We resent
it because the end user is paying for it rather than the advertiser, so there
is no natural limit to the amount of crap they can pour on us.

	Jim Gillogly