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Spamalot Exposes Mailing List |
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Keith Adams
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Sunday, 13 March 2005 |
In an ironic turn of events the mailing list of the Broadway musical Spamalot was exposed to anyone who viewed their site's source code.
Although it may have been caught before too many email harvesters scooped up the addresses; between montypythonsspamalot.com and movinoutonbroadway.com 33,000 email addresses were exposed.
Both sites were created by were built by Mark Stevenson, a designer in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. Mr. Stevenson said he had hired a programmer, whom he would not identify, to add the list sign-up function to the sites. He said that the amount of resources put into security on the sites had seemed adequate, but "in retrospect, this was not enough, and we need to do more."
He said that a message would be sent to the list with a warning about fraudulent e-mail messages. Stevenson has received criticism for using a custom mailing list script instead of one of the available, secure mailing list programs. To top off the irony of the situation internet historians say that the use of the word spam to refer to junk e-mail messages has its roots in a 1970 Monty Python sketch, in which all conversation in a cafe is drowned out by a group of Vikings chanting the word over and over.
The sketch and its song about Spam, the meat product, were adapted for the new musical. Continued at Anti Spam Blog |
