Unsolicited Email
Before the word” hacker “meant criminal, hackers were considered just Smart guys who figured things out. Hackers were given cool hacker names. My hacker name was Darkl0d”. It sounds pretty cool, right?
It was given to me by a friend who overheard my wife yelling at me while we were on a phone call. My office was next to the laundry room. I had thrown in a load of laundry containing dark and light colors. The dark colors bled into the light colors and ruined a shirt. My (thankfully now X) wife was yelling,”DARK LOAD!, DARK LOAD!” My friend started calling me Dark Lode. I substituted a zero for the letter “O” and Darkl0ad was born.
If one were to look deep into the archives of UseNet, one would find that the origination of the concept of unsolicited email (now called spam) was attributed to Darkl0ad. I am not going to confirm or deny this. But I make the unequivocal statement that I am NOT the father of spam. I was doing someone a solid!
Those of us in Tech had access to email long before most people. Before the web, shortly after the Arpanet became the Internet, I did send out one unsolicited email. But that was a time when we enjoyed getting emails.
The following is what happened. I knew a woman who was involved with a pyramid scheme; I think it was NuSkin. I figured that if I reached out to half a million people, a certain percentage of them would be interested in buying her product. At the time, there were no marketing mailing lists available for purchase. I had a friend who taught at MIT. Together, we wrote some code that basically grabbed email addresses as they floated through the Internet. I don’t remember how it worked, but my friend was on an Internet committee that submitted RFCs (Requests for Comments) and he knew his stuff. It worked at a pretty low level.
I sent out the emails and got a response you would not expect. People were not angry that they received an email from a stranger. They were angry because, at the time, the people who developed and worked on the Internet insisted that it would never become commercial. They were upset that I was selling something on the Internet. Keeping business off of the Internet was practically a religion. And like Salman Rushdie, I was blasphemous. I became the first person in the world to receive a death threat from a stranger on the Internet. Actually, it was a message left on my home phone!
As you can imagine, I didn’t do that again. It was several years before the technology was available to regular people. I did not invent spam. You could find the invention of spam attributed to a few different people, me not being one of them.
But I did learn a lesson from this that became relevant decades later. I learned to ask myself, “Just because you can do something, should you do it?”. More importantly, “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube”. If I invent something as a perfectly harmless solution, someone else could take my solution and use it for sinister purposes.
Addendum 2025:
Have a look at the page for the invention I called “the hood”. I was asked if I could think of a way to help with a bad situation. Based on innovations that are in my current project, Reflex, I built a system of creating organizations that are invisible. I did this for free with my own resources.
It was pointed out to me that system could be also used for groups that are not beneficial to society. I received an implied seven-figure offer from what appeared to me to be a member of one of these groups.
The title of this site is poltergeist memoir. Society has told me that I have already died. And I do believe society deserves an angry poltergeist to not think twice about taking money from something that was harmless. I sought out the advice of people I considered “moral”. Very religious people who espouse the word of God right and left. It was their opinion that I can’t control others from doing something with my invention that was not intended. Take one look at social networks and you can see others feel the same way.
Fortunately for all of society, I don’t fit in. I wiped out the project and the space it occupied in my head has been filled with something else.