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Electronic mail is a method of transmitting and receiving messages using electronic devices. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the digital version of, or counterpart to, mail. Email is a ubiquitous and very widely used communication medium; in current use, an email address is often treated as a basic and necessary part of many processes in business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, and other spheres of daily life in most countries.
Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose, or simply repeatedly sending the same message to the same user. 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 almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing "Spam" repeatedly.
There are a number of disputes concerning the Church of Scientology's attempts to suppress material critical of Scientology and the organization on the Internet, utilizing various methods – primarily lawsuits and legal threats, as well as front organizations. In late 1994, the organization began using various legal tactics to stop distribution of unpublished documents written by L. Ron Hubbard. The organization has often been accused of barratry through the filing of SLAPP suits. The organization's response is that its litigious nature is solely to protect its copyrighted works and the unpublished status of certain documents.
The Usenet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology started in 1991 to discuss the controversial beliefs of Scientology, as well as the activities of the Church of Scientology, which claims exclusive intellectual property rights thereto and is viewed by many as a dangerous cult. The newsgroup has become the focal point of an aggressive battle known as Scientology versus the Internet, which has taken place both online and in the courts.
Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery, coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr.
An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the 1980s, and updated by RFC 5322 and 6854. The term email address in this article refers to just the addr-spec in Section 3.4 of RFC 5322. The RFC defines address more broadly as either a mailbox or group. A mailbox value can be either a name-addr, which contains a display-name and addr-spec, or the more common addr-spec alone.
Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, is unsolicited messages sent in bulk by email (spamming). The name comes from a Monty Python sketch in which the name of the canned pork product Spam is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and repetitive. Email spam has steadily grown since the early 1990s, and by 2014 was estimated to account for around 90% of total email traffic.
Naive Bayes classifiers are a popular statistical technique of e-mail filtering. They typically use bag-of-words features to identify email spam, an approach commonly used in text classification.
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.
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.
Cicada 3301 is a nickname given to three sets of puzzles posted under the name "3301" online between 2012 and 2014. The first puzzle started on January 2, 2012, on 4chan and ran for nearly a month. A second round of puzzles began one year later on January 4, 2013, and then a third round following the confirmation of a fresh clue posted on Twitter on January 4, 2014. The third puzzle has yet to be solved. The stated intent was to recruit "intelligent individuals" by presenting a series of puzzles to be solved; no new puzzles were published on January 4, 2015. A new clue was posted on Twitter on January 5, 2016. Cicada 3301 posted their last verified OpenPGP-signed message in April 2017, denying the validity of any unsigned puzzle.
Webdriver Torso is a YouTube automated performance testing account that became famous in 2014 for speculations about its nature and jokes featured in some of its videos.
Susan Lindauer is an American journalist and former U.S. Congressional staffer who was charged with "acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government" and violating U.S. financial sanctions during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She was incarcerated in 2005 and released the next year after two judges ruled her mentally unfit to stand trial. The government dropped the prosecution in 2009. In 2010, Lindauer published a book about her experiences. Since 2011 Lindauer has appeared frequently on television and in print as a U.S. government critic.
Pepe the Frog is a webcomic character and Internet meme created by cartoonist Matt Furie. Designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body, Pepe originated in Furie's 2005 comic Boy's Club. The character became an Internet meme when his popularity steadily grew across websites such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan in 2008. By 2015, he had become one of the most popular memes used on 4chan and Tumblr. Different types of Pepe memes include "Sad Frog", "Smug Frog", "Angry Pepe", "Feels Frog", and "You will never..." Frog. Since 2014, "rare Pepes" have been posted on the "meme market" as if they were trading cards.
DreamWorks Animation's Shrek film series, based on William Steig's book of the same name, has a underground Internet fandom that started around 2009.
Unfavorable Semicircle is a defunct 2015 YouTube channel that garnered attention due to the high volume and unusual nature of the published videos, usually featuring distorted audio and graphics. The channel was suspended in February 2016 shortly after the BBC reported on the channel.
In Internet culture, shitposting or trashposting is the act of using an online forum or social media page to post content that is satirical and of "aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality". Shitposts are generally intentionally designed to derail discussions or cause the biggest reaction with the least effort. It may even sometimes be orchestrated as part of a co-ordinated flame war to render a website unusable by its regular visitors.
Trash Doves is an Internet meme which originated from a sticker set designed in 2016, which feature a large-eyed purple pigeon in various situations. The most notable sticker of the set is an animated GIF of the bird vigorously thrashing its head up and down. Shortly after its debut on Facebook in January 2017, the purple dove sticker set quickly became a viral subject of edited parodies and image macros on social media.
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.
Lasagna Cat is a web series created by Fatal Farm as a parody of the Garfield comic strips created by American cartoonist Jim Davis. The series was uploaded to YouTube in 2008 and 2017, and consists mainly of humorous live-action recreations of classic Garfield comics.
References
- ↑ Dewey, Caitlin (2 May 2014). "Five of the Internet's eeriest, unsolved mysteries". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 8 November 2020. Retrieved 6 May 2021.
- 1 2 Förtsch, Michael (November 25, 2016). "Sieben ungelöste Rätsel des Internets" [Seven Unsolved Internet Mysteries]. Wired.de (in German). Archived from the original on 15 September 2018. Retrieved 6 May 2021.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Grundhauser, Eric (10 November 2017). "The Gibberish That Sparked One of the Internet's Oldest Unsolved Mysteries". Atlas Obscura. Archived from the original on 29 October 2020. Retrieved 23 September 2020.
- 1 2 3 Morris, Kevin (November 2, 2012). "The Markovian Parallax Denigrate: Unraveling the Internet's oldest and weirdest mystery". The Daily Dot. Archived from the original on 11 September 2017. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
- ↑ Privalov, Alexander (August 24, 2017). "Краткий курс истории спама". Popmech.ru. Archived from the original on 11 September 2017. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
- 1 2 Paul, Andrew (12 March 2020). "Need a distraction? Help solve the Internet's oldest mystery, Markovian Parallax Denigrate". AV Club. Archived from the original on 25 October 2020. Retrieved 23 September 2020.
- 1 2 Chris Brokerage (5 August 1996). "Markovian parallax denigrate". alt.religion.christian.boston-church. Archived from the original on 8 December 2021. Retrieved 5 May 2021– via Google Groups.