Week 5 Midterm: What is the origin of the word “Spam”?

What is the origin of the word “Spam”? Spam can be identified as unwanted and annoying messages. “Some people will try and tell you that spam is an acronym. Shit Posing As Mail and Stupid Boring Annoying Messages being two of the most popular.” (http://ezinearticles.com/?The-REAL-Origins-and-Meaning-of-the-Word-SPAM&id=430328) The term today has come to mean network abuse, particularly junk E-mail and massive junk postings. But how did this term come about? Many are not aware that it came it first came from a Monty Python’s Flying Circus skit. The skit is about a restaurant that serves all its food with lots of spam. To describe how much spam was in the food, a waitress repeats the word several times. “A group of Vikings in the corner start a song: "Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"

Until told to shut up.” (http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html) This is where the meaning of something that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance came about.

The first mass post to be called a spam was posted by two lawyers named Canter and Siegel. They posted a message advertising their useless services in a lottery. They hired an mercenary programmer to write a simple script to post their ad to every single newsgroup on the world’s largest online conferencing system. Several thousand post were made. After this incident people quickly indentified it as “spam”. Soon after, people started using e-mailing software to send junk e-email to large audiences who didn’t ask for it. This is the most common use for the term “spam” today. You cal also get text message spam, and social networking spam. The term spamming got used to apply to a few different behaviors. “Some spam is annoying but harmless. However, some spam is part of an identity theft scam or another kind of fraud. Identity theft spam is often called a phishing scam. To protect yourself against e-mail spam, use e-mail software with built-in spam filtering.” (http://www.microsoft.com/protect/terms/spam.aspx)