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Re: josh@lummox.hartley.reshall.columbia.edu
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(response below)

On Mon, 19 Dec 1994, Carl Malamud wrote:
> Your user, Joshua Grossman, has sent approximately 6500 mail
> messages to santa@north.pole.org. A rumor was started on the
> network encouraging people to write to santa@north.pole.org.
> This false rumor said that this was a charity drive and encouraged
> people to write in.
>
> Most people sent in one or two messages. A few people sent several
> hundred or even a thousand. Mr. Joshua Grossman decided that this
> was an opportunity to use his computer as a weapon and bombard us
> with as many messages as possible.
>
> In most cases, we consider this to be a well-meaning denial of
> service attack, but in the case of Mr. Grossman we can think of
> no circumstance in which a mail bomb of that size is justified.
> We're particularly disturbed to learn that Mr. Grossman works for
> NBC. My group is a small non-profit corporation trying to make
> our way on the Internet as real media. Mr. Grossman apparently
> doesn't value our work and seems to feel his actions will make
> a difference. The main difference Mr. Grossman has made so
> far is to prevent thousands of letters from little boys and girls
> from reaching the top of our queue.
>
> I really hope that NBC and Columbia will take appropriate actions
> on this matter.

It is nice that Mr Malamud is quite familiar with my actions. However, since he failed to check with me, he is missing a few details.

No malice was intended. I did not use my computer as a weapon, as Mr. Malamud so politely puts it. When I heard this "rumor", I was interested. Not wanting to shut anyones system down over what is almost always a rumor, I email the postmaster at this site. This is the reply I received:


>From generous@uucom.com Mon Dec 19 11:49:05 1994 Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 15:43:23 -0500 (EST) From: "Curtis C. Generous" <generous@uucom.com> To: Joshua Daniel Grossman <jdg@cs.columbia.edu> Subject: Re: *hungry for the holiday spirit* (fwd)

Yes, it is ligitimate. The project was lanuched by the Internet Multicasting Service out of D.C. The dime donation also applies to all hits to the charitable organizations which are shown on our WWW server ("http://north.pole.org").

--curtis Santa's Helper

According to Joshua Daniel Grossman:
>
>
> Cna you verify if this is real? I would rather not be mail bombing the
> site if it is a hoax.
>
> From: karma-mechanic@lsd.com (Dave Del Torto)
> Subject: *hungry for the holiday spirit*
> To: karma-engine@lsd.com
>
> Want to do a kind thing for some hungry kids this holiday season?
> If not, press delete now. If you have a heart and a minute, read on.
>
> Sun Microsystems is donating $0.10 to a food bank each time an Internet
> user sends an email msg to any (or all) of the three addresses below:
>
> santa@north.pole.org
> elves@north.pole.org
> rudolph@north.pole.org
>
> Doesn't matter what the msg contains; it could be an empty msg, full of
> invisible holiday spirit. Pick your favorite and send email there a few
> times. If *everyone* on the net were to BCC all three addresses with every
> msg they posted to a list for one day, the counter would top out almost
> instantly, so this is like a weird and wonderful test of Mass Human Kindness.
>
> You can do your part to help big fat international corporations make
> good on their Promises of donations to charities. It only takes 250,000
> msgs to reach the $25,000 Sun promised to donate to a Bay Area food bank
> for homeless families. Other corporations are donating to selected causes,
> including a banking firm in Washington DC that will donate up to $5,000 to
> the Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage (only 50,000 msgs...li'l baby
> birdies...furry baby rabbits... c'MON now! :)
>
> Other corporations are participating too: any firms wishing to add matching
> funds should contact Luther Brown at <elfmaster@north.pole.org>. The
> announcement's in the Dec 94 Advanced Systems magazine (pg 22). Who knows,
> someday you might see companies all across the globe donating part of their
> obscene profits to children's charities in Sarajevo, San Francisco, Manila,
> Mogadishu, Bombay, Moscow, Port-au-Prince, Bucharest, Shanghai, Rio de
> Janeiro... everywhere Santa stops in.
>
> Remember: any user can send multiple msgs, so please be counted at least
> _once_, OK? There are not many such opportunities to directly affect
> something with your computer, and it doesn't take the Compassion of
> Siddhartha to see what's good about putting food in the mouths of little
> children with no home, wherever they are.

With confirmation from the *postmaster of this site*, I considered this valid.

It may also be noted that no mention is made in any of these posts that a reply will be sent, implying that it might be a simple counter, which could accept far more mail that an autoreply system without trouble. No mention was made of any other purpose for this address other than to count incoming mesages for donation purposes. My original "test" send received no reply initially, (it arrived 2 days later), appearing to confirm this.

A later post was made from *the same organization*, saying the email gag was a rumor, but there was a web site. I immediately discontinued sending email. Investigating the web site, I found through it's own messages that the web site was valid ($.10 donated per touch to the site), but no mention of any email donations. This seemed to imply that the second poster was correct, and the postmaster incorrect; or, otherwise stated, this company has little idea what each of its hands were doing.

Nevertheless, long after I had ceased emailing, Mr. Malamud chose not to contact me seeking an explanation or apology or a (belated) cessation, but instead emailed yourselves. My apologies to you folk for any inconvenience. My apologies to anyone whose mail was delayed or othewise inconvenienced, and to the net at large for the use of bandwidth for what turned out to be no purpose. I apologize to the company which is running this service with the qualification that they should get their act together and decide what service they are running. I do not apologize to Mr. Malamud, explicitly, as has acted purely on assumptions and was considerably insulting on the phone (I called him) before he abruptly hung up.

--josh grossman

PS: Sorry to have you to read all of that.

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