Happy Spammiversary :-( Spam turns 25 this week. The first spam was a cheesy announcement sent on May 1, 1978 about an open house for the hot new DEC-20 minicomputer sent to everyone on the West Coast Arpanet, although the term "spam" wasn't coined until 1993. Since then, the problem has gotten worse, and even the recently proposed Lawrence Lessig solution has several problems. As Brad Templeton observes:

Spam fascinates me because it sits at the intersection of three important rights -- free speech, private property and privacy. It's also the first major internet governance issue (possibly in tandem with DNS) that the members of the internet community have been so deeply concerned with.

Excellent article. Templeton has more thoughts on the spam issue here. (Via Boing Boing.)