Serdar Argic
|
|
Serdar Argic was the alias used in one of the first automated spamming incidents on Usenet.
| Contents |
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", who claimed to have a doctorate, posted messages in any Usenet newsgroup thread involving the country of Turkey.
Every time the word "turkey" was posted on any newsgroup, an automated program posting as Serdar Argic replied in the same thread, in which Argic argued that the Armenian Genocide had not occurred -- or that Armenians had committed genocide upon 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. He posted to several newsgroups, especially soc.history, soc.culture.turkish, and misc.headlines. Because of the posts' repetitiousness and canned responses, most observers correctly concluded that they were being automatically posted by a software program which scanned for keywords in certain newsgroups and replied with a canned response. This program, or "bot", would scan through newsgroups for any new appearances of the word "turkey" or "armenia" and respond with pages of political text. The bot would automatically post a reply even if the original message had simply referred to Thanksgiving turkey but was crossposted to a soc.* group. The posts sometimes contained direct responses to specific statements indicating that some human intervention was also involved.
Response
Internet users sent a barrage of complaints to UUNET, the Internet service provider hosting the account of Serdar Argic. UUNET never replied to any of the complaints -- a fault that would be greatly magnified when spamming became 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) which they had no control over. Because of the name of his host, Serdar Argic became known as the Zumabot.
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 (most sites did), all of Serdar Argic's messages were removed from all newsgroups.
Identity of Serdar Argic
During the Serdar Argic phenomenon it was widely believed that the person responsible for the posting was Ahmet Cosar, who at the time was a graduate student in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Minnesota. The belief stemmed initially from the fact that Serdar Argic's newsgroup posts went through a news feed administered by Ahmet Cosar. Many believed that Cosar was also responsible for the posts of Hasan Mutlu, another extremely active poster of Turkish nationalist beliefs whose last Usenet post had come one day after Serdar Argic's first (September 1/August 31 1992). In a post of March 22, 1994, Serdar Argic asked a user to mail him a journal, and gave Ahmet Cosar's name and U of M address as the mailing address. In April 1994 Cosar posted angry messages under his own name against the actions of Chakerian and others attempting to contain the Argic bot. A person using Cosar's feed created the group alt.cancel.armenian.garbage in an attempt at canceling pro-Armenian posts, but never posted cancellations to this group.
A post on Slashdot of early April, 2001 (post ID 1617212, comment ID 141, now disappeared) claimed that Cosar had connections to the Turkish secret police and had to cancel his spamming activities after his visa for the USA was revoked. See here (http://www.jaedworks.com/shoebox/zumabot.html) for a discussion of Zumabot and an excerpt of the Slashdot post.
A person named Ahmet Coşar, who received a Masters in computer science from the University of Minnesota in 1993 and a PhD in 1996, is now on the faculty of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara [1] (http://www.cs.umn.edu/external/alumni/1996.html)[2] (http://ia.metu.edu.tr/en/as/00020946ahmetcosar.htm).