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Information Superhighway that they were among the earliest users of CompuServe and had been online for more than ten years.[2] However infectious Barlow believes net.culture to be, they apparently didn't catch the bug. On April 12, 1994, they posted a message about the so-called "Green Card Lottery" to every newsgroup they could find.[3] This posting coupled a threat--that the 1994 lottery would be the last ever (it wasn't)--with an offer of their services (for a fee, of course).

The green card lottery is a U.S. government effort to bring an element of hope to the miserable, bureaucratic, and lengthy process of applying for U.S. residence visas. Essentially, would-be immigrants from most foreign countries are eligible to fill out a form and enter; lucky winners, chosen according to quotas, by-pass the normal procedures and get green cards. When I lived in Ireland, I knew quite a few people who had entered just on the off-chance of winning, even if they weren't sure they'd ever want to live in the United States. A few had won. The service is free, wherein lay the first objection to Canter and Siegel's message: they were proposing to charge people.

A couple of technical points may help make sense of the fury that followed Canter and Siegel's mass posting. One is that when they posted their "Green Card" message to every newsgroup they did it in such a way as to cause the maximum disruption: they ran a computer program that posted it separately to each newsgroup rather than using a method known as cross-posting. Cross-posting would have treated the message as a single news article while making it available to all the newsgroups in Canter and Siegel's very long list. Instead, their method created 10,000 copies of the message, one per newsgroup.

First, this meant that each news-storing computer (technically, a news server) [4] around the world had to find space for 10,000 copies of the message instead of just one. Second, it disabled the facility within most newsreader software[5] to mark a post as read if it's been seen in one newsgroup, so that you don't have to keep rereading the same post in newsgroup after newsgroup. Most users probably didn't notice the first point until they did some math, but they sure noticed the second one when the message kept popping up.

The "Green Card" posting was not the only mass-posted message of the period, but it was the first advertising an off-Net commercial service so widely. It vied for attention with "MAKE.MONEY.FAST" postings (usually abbreviated MMF), which go back some months before Canter and Siegel and still (unfortunately) circulate widely.[6] These postings, and the thousands of imitations that have followed since, are variations on the chain letters most people remember from high school. They all claim there are huge sums of money to be made legally from following the instructions to repost or email them to 200 more users and send one dollar or five dollars (depending on the version you get) to the five or ten names and addresses listed at the end. In fact, as many on the Net have pointed out, this kind of pyramid, or "Ponzi," scheme is illegal and something the Post Office has been stomping on in court for years. Not much is known about the original MMF poster, Dave Rhodes; according to the "Net.Legends FAQ,"[7] he was a student at Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, Maryland, when he sent out the first ones and has been "voted number one on list of people *every* UseNetter would like to see die an excruciatingly slow and painful death."[8] Just as late-night comedians pick up oft-repeated TV ads (like the Energizer bunny), anything that circulates widely enough on the Internet becomes part of the shared culture and therefore fodder for in-jokes. A number of MMF parodies have circulated, such as one detailing the miserable jail time served by the poster after his arrest for circulating illegal pyramid schemes.

The "Green Card" message was quickly followed by a posting known as "Skinny Dip," which advertised a thigh cream by that name that was supposed to have slimming properties and that interested readers could order from a Miami address.[9]