[ih] Free Speech and ARPAnet?

[craig at aland.bbn.com (Craig Partridge)]

> I don't know of anyone being reprimanded for anything.

I do, though I remember because they were rare and proved the point.

The two I remember are:

* A vendor rep sent a list of products in what we'd now call a spam mailing
  in 1984.  Vendor was on the 'net because they sold stuff to ARPANET
  users.  Vendor rep got reprimanded.  I wish I remember the name of the
  vendor.

* Circa 1985, a student tried to notify everyone on campus of a local 'Net
  outage via the wall command.  I think he wrote "wall all", which in that day
  meant writing to the walld socket on every machine in your /etc/hosts
  file.  Except he was on ARPANET, so the command read /etc/hosts
  and wrote to every logged in user on ARPANET who was on a machine
  that had a walld.  Parts of DoD got a message that appeared to say
  the 'Net was going down.   Before folks realized it was a scoping
  bug in wall, there was initially an attempt to determine if the student
  was an authorized user and if so, why his university had authorized him.
  
Craig