Monthly Archives: March 2004

zed1.net Down!

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My zed1.net sites have been down for more than 30 hours now! I am a very unhappy bunny! I even­tu­ally received an email response from the host­ing company’s sup­port team this morn­ing, stat­ing

We had migrated your site zed1.net to more secure and reli­able server. So site will take 12 hours for propogation.

This was received more than 16 hours after I last saw it work­ing. It is now 30 hours+ and still no sites! :-(

Coin­cid­ent­ally my post­ing from 1 year ago today form­ally announced the new sites at zed1.net and explains:

They are both hos­ted on zed1.net so access is inter­mit­tent at the moment.
How­ever, by the end of Thursday Zed1.net should be on a new server and I’ve been prom­ised no more out­ages like the recent ones.

It seems some things don’t change!

Spam’s Tenth (-ish) Birthday

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Spam turns ten today

Today (5 March) marks the tenth anniversary of what is gen­er­ally con­sidered the first spam mes­sage.
On this day in 1994, US law firm Canter and Siegel pos­ted a mes­sage on sev­eral Usenet news­groups advert­ising their ser­vices to people inter­ested in par­ti­cip­at­ing in the US Green Card lottery.

That date (5 March 1994) is only a couple of months before my very first per­sonal inter­net email. I got my first ISP account (although we didn’t call them that back then) with Demon Inter­net around June 1994. I still have that email some­where!
I had been online for few years before that via FidoNet. I think I must have first gone online in 1986 or ’87.

Inter­est­ingly, Brad Tem­pleton has evid­ence of much earlier spam, though the term wasn’t used then; 26 years ago in fact.

And he has a nice piece on the his­tory of the term spam, again, going back much fur­ther than 10 years.

PS: Let’s not for­get this!