| Revision as of 15:23, 22 July 2008 editAutarch (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users, Pending changes reviewers16,490 edits 'Refute' and 'deny' are not synonyms.← Previous edit | Revision as of 16:28, 22 July 2008 edit undoAdoniscik (talk | contribs)Extended confirmed users, Rollbackers11,106 edits correct. he was not attempting to deny it. this has no bearing on the subject's veracity Undid revision 227219130 by Autarch (talk)Next edit → | ||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
| {{Refimprove|date=September 2007}} | {{Refimprove|date=September 2007}} | ||
| '''Serdar Argic''' was the alias used in one of the first automated ] incidents on ], with the objective of ]. | '''Serdar Argic''' was the alias used in one of the first automated ] incidents on ], with the objective of ]. | ||
| ==The Serdar Argic posts== | ==The Serdar Argic posts== | ||
Revision as of 16:28, 22 July 2008
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Serdar Argic" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Serdar Argic was the alias used in one of the first automated newsgroup spam incidents on Usenet, with the objective of refuting the Armenian Genocide.
The Serdar Argic posts
For a period of several months in the first half of 1994, the Internet user under the pseudonym of "Serdar Argic" (with the address sera@zuma.uucp) posted messages in any Usenet newsgroup thread involving the country of Turkey, arguing that the Armenian Genocide had not occurred or that Armenians had committed genocide against Turks.
Serdar Argic, who apparently managed to run a daily search on all of Usenet for mentions of Turkey, and followed up all such messages with lengthy and historically inaccurate diatribes about genocide against the Turks.
Argic's postings soon numbered in the tens of thousands, and averaged over 100 posts per day, the highest post count of any single Usenet entity at the time. He posted to several newsgroups, especially soc.history, soc.culture.turkish, and misc.headlines. Because of the posting volume, repetitiveness and minimal responsiveness to follow-up posts, most observers concluded that it was the output of a program, or "bot", which scanned for any new appearances of the keywords "Turkey" or "Armenia" in certain newsgroups and replied with saved pages of political text. The bot would automatically post a reply even if the original message had simply mentioned a Thanksgiving turkey but was cross-posted to a soc.* group. The posts sometimes contained direct responses to specific statements indicating some human intervention.
Response
Internet users sent a barrage of complaints to UUNET, the Internet service provider hosting the account of Serdar Argic. UUNET never took any action based on the complaints, a first sign that spam would become an increasingly common problem on the Internet in the years to follow. UUNET's justification was that Serdar Argic was posting from a host downstream from the host they fed (anatolia!zuma) over which they had no control. Serdar Argic became known as the Zumabot due to the name of his host.
At the time, there was a fear of the free use of third party cancellations, as it was felt they could set a precedent for the cancellation of posts by anyone simply disagreeing with the messages. Cancellations were rarely performed at the time, because spam had not become the problem it became in subsequent years.
The Serdar Argic posts suddenly disappeared in April 1994, after Stefan Chakerian created a specific newsgroup (alt.cancel.bots) to carry only cancel messages specifically for any post from any machine downstream from the "anatolia" UUNET feed which carried Serdar Argic's messages. This dealt with the censorship complaints of direct cancellations, because carrying a newsgroup was always the option of the news feed, and no cancellations would propagate unless the news administrator intentionally carried the alt.cancel.bots group. If sites chose to carry the group, which most did, all of Serdar Argic's messages were removed from all newsgroups.
Popular culture
Ken MacLeod referred to Argic in his novel The Star Fraction as a slang term for "the lowest layer of paranoid drivel that infested the Cable, spun out by degenerate, bug-ridden, knee-jerk auto-post programs. Kill-file clutter." In his novel Accelerando, Charles Stross describes one character as "a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property."
See also
References
- Net.Wars, by Wendy Grossman, NYU Press, 1997, http://www.nyupress.org/netwars/pages/chapter11/ch11_03.html , http://www.nyupress.org/netwars/pages/chapter11/ch11_04.html
External links
- Posts by Serdar Argic archived in Google Groups
- FAQ of newsgroup alt.fan.serdar-argic containing a documentation of the events, articles, and persons involved
- Discussion of Zumabot and quote of the Slashdot post with links to other articles about Serdar Argic