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Before the popularization of the Internet in the 1990s, Internet slang defined a luser as a painfully annoying, stupid, or irritating computer user. The word is a blend of "loser" and "user". Among hackers, the word luser takes on a broad meaning, referring to any normal user, with the implication the person is also a loser. The term is partially interchangeable with the hacker term lamer.
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UUCP is a suite of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers.
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A cancelbot is an automated or semi-automated process for sending out third-party cancel messages over Usenet, commonly as a stopgap measure to combat spam.
Chris Lewis is a Canadian security consultant from Ottawa, who fought spam on Usenet and the early Internet. Active in volunteer anti-spam efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lewis was described in Net.wars (1997) as "the best known active canceler of spam and other mass postings" at the time. In April 1998, he organized an unsuccessful moratorium with forty other anti-spam volunteers in an attempt to boycott internet service providers into doing their share against spam. He worked as a systems architect for Nortel and, as of 2017, is Chief Scientist at SpamhausTechnology.
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Usenet, USENET, or "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
The Meow Wars were an early example of a flame war sent over Usenet which began in 1996 and ended circa 1998. Its participants were known as "Meowers". The war was characterized by posters from one newsgroup "crapflooding", or posting a large volume of nonsense messages, to swamp on-topic communication in other groups. Ultimately, the flame war affected many boards, with Roisin Kiberd writing in Motherboard, a division of Vice, that esoteric Internet vocabulary was created as a result of the Meow Wars.
References
- Ohm, Paul K. "ON REGULATING THE INTERNET: USENET, A CASE STUDY" (PDF). UCLA Law Review . 46: 1984. 46 UCLA L. Rev. 1941 (1998-1999). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-21. Retrieved 2010-02-20.
1984 ... technological innovations, with colorful names like Lazarus and Dave the Resurrector ... Dave the Resurrector is one of a class of computer programs called "resurrector bots." See supra note 11. These programs respond to cancel messages by reporting and reposting the canceled message. Dave the Resurrector reposts any message removed from the news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy. See Skirvin, supra note 33, at app. A(1).
- Skirvin, Tim. "Cancel Messages: Frequently Asked Questions, Part 4/4 (v1.75)" . Retrieved 2010-02-20.
Appendix A: Dave the Resurrector ... written and run by Chris Lewis
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