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!