Howard Carmack, also known as the Buffalo Spammer, [1] was the first sender of spam in the United States to be imprisoned. He was arrested in New York in May 2003, [2] and sentenced in March 2004 to between 3.5 and 7 years in prison. [3]
Carmack sent out 825 million e-mails, fraudulently using the identities of two people from the city of Buffalo, as well as hundreds of aliases. [4]
Before this conviction, Carmack also lost a lawsuit before a federal court in Atlanta, which required him to pay damages of US$14.5 million to Earthlink, his former internet service provider, for the same actions. [5]
Doom is a 1993 first-person shooter developed and published by id Software for MS-DOS. Players assume the role of a space marine, popularly known as "Doomguy", fighting his way through hordes of invading demons from Hell. The first episode, comprising nine levels, was distributed freely as shareware and played by an estimated 15–20 million people within two years; the full game, with two further episodes, was sold via mail order. An updated version with an additional episode and more difficult levels, Ultimate Doom, was released in 1995 and sold at retail.
id Software LLC is an American video game developer based in Dallas, Texas. The company was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk, programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack. Business manager Jay Wilbur was also involved. id Software made important technological developments in video game technologies for the PC, including work done for the Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake franchises. id's work was particularly important in 3D computer graphics technology and in game engines that are used throughout the video game industry. The company was involved in the creation of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre. Wolfenstein 3D is often considered to be the first true FPS, Doom is a game that popularized the genre and PC gaming in general, and Quake was id's first true 3D FPS.
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send an unsolicited message (spam), especially advertising, as well as sending messages repeatedly on the same website. While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam. It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in every dish and where patrons annoyingly chant "Spam" over and over again.
John D. Carmack II is an American computer programmer, video game developer and engineer. He co-founded id Software and was the lead programmer of its video games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake and their sequels. Carmack made innovations in 3D graphics, such as his Carmack's Reverse algorithm for shadow volumes. In August 2013, he took the position of CTO at Oculus VR.
Eric Robert Rudolph, also known as the Olympic Park Bomber, is an American terrorist convicted for a series of anti-abortion and anti-gay-motivated bombings across the southern United States between 1996 and 1998, which killed three people and injured 150 others. Rudolph spent five years on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list until he was caught in 2003. In 2005, as part of a plea bargain, he pleaded guilty to numerous state and federal homicide charges and accepted four consecutive life sentences in exchange for avoiding a trial and a potential death sentence. He remains incarcerated at the ADX Florence Supermax prison near Florence, Colorado.
Gmail is a free email service developed by Google. Users can access Gmail on the web and using third-party programs that synchronize email content through POP or IMAP protocols. Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1, 2004 and ended its testing phase on July 7, 2009.
Yahoo! Mail is an email service launched in 1997 through the American parent company Yahoo! Yahoo Mail provides four different email plans: three for personal use and another for businesses. By December 2011, Yahoo! Mail had 281 million users, making it the third largest web-based email service in the world. Since 2015, its webmail client also supports managing non-Yahoo e-mail accounts.
Norton Internet Security, developed by Symantec Corporation, is a computer program that provides malware prevention and removal during a subscription period and uses signatures and heuristics to identify viruses. Other features included in the product are a personal firewall, email spam filtering, and phishing protection. With the release of the 2015 line in summer 2014, Symantec officially retired Norton Internet Security after 14 years as the chief Norton product. It is superseded by Norton Security, a rechristened adaptation of the Norton 360 security suite.
Scott Richter is the CEO of Media Breakaway, formerly known as OptInRealBig.com LLC. Other related companies are Dynamic Dolphin and affiliate.com. His companies were major senders of Email spam and he was at one time referred to as the 'Spam King' and at one point his company was sending some 100 million emails a day. He and his companies have been sued several times for mass sending unsolicited advertisements.
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture is a 2003 book by David Kushner about id Software and its influence on popular culture, focusing chiefly on the video-game company's co-founders John Carmack and John Romero.
Antoine Duane Winfield is a former American football cornerback who played 14 years in the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for Ohio State University, earning consensus All-American honors and winning the Jim Thorpe Award. He was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in the first round of the 1999 NFL Draft. He played five seasons for the Bills and nine seasons for the Minnesota Vikings. He was a three-time Pro Bowl selection as a member of the Vikings.
Byron William Brown II is the 62nd and current mayor of Buffalo, New York, elected on November 8, 2005 and is the City's first African-American mayor. He previously served Western New York as a member of the New York State Senate and Buffalo Common Council. He was the first African-American politician elected to the New York State Senate to represent a district outside New York City and the first member of any minority race to represent a majority white New York State Senate district.
Robert Alan Soloway is the founder of the so-called "Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam," or SPAMIS, but is said to be one of the Internet's biggest spammers through his company, Newport Internet Marketing (NIM). He was arrested on May 30, 2007, after a grand jury indicted him on charges of identity theft, money laundering, and mail, wire, and e-mail fraud. He was nicknamed the "Spam King" by prosecutors.
Martin H. Tankleff is an American man who was convicted of murdering his wealthy parents, Seymour and Arlene Tankleff, on September 7, 1988, when he was 17 years old. After serving more than 17 years of imprisonment, his conviction was vacated and he was released from prison in 2007.
Tagged is a social discovery website based in San Francisco, California, founded in 2004. It allows members to browse the profiles of any other members, and share tags and virtual gifts. Tagged claims it has 300 million members. As of September 2011, Quantcast estimates Tagged monthly unique users at 5.9 million in the United States, and 18.6 million globally. Michael Arrington wrote in April 2011 that Tagged is most notable for the ability to grow profitably during the era of Facebook.
Eliot Laurence Spitzer is an American politician, attorney, educator, and real estate developer. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as the 54th Governor of New York.
The history of email spam reaches back to the mid-1990s when commercial use of the internet first became possible - and marketers and publicists began to test what was possible.
Oleg Yegorovich Nikolaenko is a Russian national who has been charged in a U.S. federal court with violating the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Federal investigators believe his activities may have been responsible for as much as one third of the world's electronic spam.