Joel Furr

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Joel Furr, circa 2005
Joel Furr, circa 2005

Joel "Jay" K. Furr (born 1967 in Roanoke, Virginia) was a Usenet personality in the early and mid 1990s, immortalized in the newsgroups alt.fan.joel-furr, alt.bonehead.joel-furr, and alt.joel-furr.die.die.die. He was a pretender to the throne of James "Kibo" Parry, and the bitter enemy of Serdar Argic.

One reason for Furr's fame on Usenet was his self-appointed leadership over the alt hierarchy, where any user could create a newsgroup without any official vote or sanction by the user community. Before 1992, internet administrators did not carry alt newsgroups that did not obtain some general community assent; this was a manifestation of Eugene Spafford's "golden rule": "Them that has the gold makes the rules." However, in the time spanning roughly 1993 to 1995, commercial internet service providers were cropping up left and right, and few of them had time or inclination to manage which newsgroups their services carried, so they carried all groups that were created. Furr attempted to bring some order and rationale to this practice, but with minimal success.

According to Brad Templeton, Furr is one of the earliest people to refer to unsolicited electronic messages as "spam". The term "spam" had been widely used by Monty Python fans to describe excessive torrents of verbiage on electronic chat systems and multi-user dungeons, analogous to the Vikings chanting "spam spam spam spam spam, WONDERFUL SPAM" in the legendary Python sketch. Furr used the term in the USENET newsgroup news.admin.policy to describe an out-of-control automated robo-moderation system known as ARMM. While he didn't coin the phrase, he appears to have been the first to use it to describe the phenomenon as it applied to USENET newsgroups.

Furr created an amusing line of Usenet kook T-shirts, which included a "Serdar Argic World Tour " shirt as well as one imprinted with the programming code for RSA encryption, boasting "This shirt is a controlled munition", a reference to US export law.[1][2] He also created and sold t-shirts after the "Green Card" spamming incident carried out by Canter & Siegel.

Furr is now married and living in Vermont, where he works as a software trainer. He holds a BA in English from the University of Georgia and a master of public affairs from Virginia Tech. His website is furrs.org. He enjoys taking Penguin Plunges, geocaching, playing Diplomacy online, and terrorising other Diplomacy individuals such as Doug Massey and Rob Farley.

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Flux", Wired magazine, August 1995. Retrieved on 2007-09-05. 
  2. ^ "Flux", Wired magazine, December 1995. Retrieved on 2007-09-05.