THE FIRST UNSOLICITED BULK COMMERCIAL EMAIL IS SENT

Today, The Grandma has been checking their email addresses, and she has paid attention to the great quantity of spam that free accounts generate.

On a day like today in 1978, the first unsolicited bulk commercial email, which would later become known as spam, was sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.

Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, for the purpose of non-commercial proselytizing, for any prohibited purpose, especially the fraudulent purpose of phishing, or simply sending the same message over and over to the same user.

While the most widely recognized form of spam is email spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, online classified ads spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam, junk fax transmissions, social spam, spam mobile apps, television advertising and file sharing spam.

It is named after Spam, a luncheon meat, by way of a Monty Python sketch about a restaurant that has Spam in almost every dish in which Vikings annoyingly sing Spam repeatedly.

More information: The History of Spam

Spamming remains economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, servers, infrastructures, IP ranges, and domain names, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have added extra capacity to cope with the volume.

Spamming has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.

A person who creates spam is called a spammer.

The term spam is derived from the 1970 Spam sketch of the BBC television comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. The sketch, set in a café, has a waitress reading out a menu where every item, but one includes Spam canned luncheon meat. As the waitress recites the Spam-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drown out all conversations with a song, repeating Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… Lovely Spam! Wonderful Spam!.

The earliest documented spam, although the term had not yet been coined, was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978.

Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. Reaction from the net community was fiercely negative, but the spam did generate some sales.

Spamming had been practised as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk.

More information: Experian

 SPAM is taking e-mail, which is a wonderful tool,
and exploiting the idea that
it's very inexpensive to send mail.

Bill Gates

DAVID FREDERICK ATTENBOROUGH, THE VOICE OF THE BBC

Sir David Attenborough

Today, The Grandma is in Barcelona again. After spending some amazing weeks in Tuscany, she wants to relax and return to her normal life of readings and leisure.

She wants to celebrate the 93th anniversary of Sir David Attenborough, a legend as a broadcaster at the BBC and one of the most famous natural historians. The Grandma loves Attenborough's works and she wants to homage them talking about their creator and director.

Sir David Frederick Attenborough, born 8 May 1926, is an English broadcaster and natural historian. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, the nine natural history documentary series forming the Life collection that together constitute a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth.

He is a former senior manager at the BBC, having served as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s. He is the only person to have won BAFTAs for programmes in each of black and white, colour, HD, 3D and 4K.

Attenborough is widely considered a national treasure in Britain, although he himself does not like the term. In 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide poll for the BBC. He is the younger brother of the director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough, and older brother of the motor executive John Attenborough.

Sir David Attenborough

Attenborough was born in Isleworth, Middlesex, now part of west London, and grew up in College House on the campus of the University College, Leicester, where his father, Frederick, was principal. 

During the Second World War, through a British volunteer network known as the Refugee Children's Movement, his parents also fostered two Jewish refugee girls from Europe. After leaving the Navy, Attenborough took a position editing children's science textbooks for a publishing company. He soon became disillusioned with the work and in 1950 applied for a job as a radio talk producer with the BBC. Although he was rejected for this job, his CV later attracted the interest of Mary Adams, head of the Talks department of the BBC's fledgling television service.

Attenborough's association with natural history programmes began when he produced and presented the three-part series Animal Patterns. The studio-bound programme featured animals from London Zoo, with the naturalist Julian Huxley discussing their use of camouflage, aposematism and courtship displays.

More information: BBC

Through this programme, Attenborough met Jack Lester, the curator of the zoo's reptile house, and they decided to make a series about an animal-collecting expedition. The result was Zoo Quest, first broadcast in 1954, where Attenborough became the presenter at short notice due to Lester being taken ill.

In 1957, the BBC Natural History Unit was formally established in Bristol. Attenborough was asked to join it, but declined, not wishing to move from London where he and his young family were settled. Instead, he formed his own department, the Travel and Exploration Unit, which allowed him to continue to front Zoo Quest as well as produce other documentaries, notably the Travellers' Tales and Adventure series.

Sir David Attenborough

In the early 1960s, Attenborough resigned from the permanent staff of the BBC to study for a postgraduate degree in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, interweaving his study with further filming.

Attenborough became the controller of BBC Two in March 1965, but had a clause inserted in his contract that would allow him to continue making programmes on an occasional basis. Later the same year he filmed elephants in Tanzania, and in 1969 he made a three-part series on the cultural history of the Indonesian island of Bali.

For the 1971 film A Blank on the Map, he joined the first Western expedition to a remote highland valley in New Guinea to seek out a lost tribe.

More information: Vox

One of his most significant decisions was to order a 13-part series on the history of Western art, to show off the quality of the new UHF colour television service that BBC Two offered. Broadcast to universal acclaim in 1969, Civilisation set the blueprint for landmark authored documentaries, which were informally known as tombstone or sledgehammer projects.

Attenborough thought that the story of evolution would be a natural subject for such a series. He shared his idea with Chris Parsons, a producer at the Natural History Unit, who came up with the title Life on Earth and returned to Bristol to start planning the series.

Attenborough harboured a strong desire to present the series himself, but this would not be possible so long as he remained in a management post.

Sir David Attenborough

After his resignation, Attenborough became a freelance broadcaster and immediately started work on his next project, a pre-arranged trip to Indonesia with a crew from the Natural History Unit.

It resulted in the 1973 series Eastwards with Attenborough, which was similar in tone to the earlier Zoo Quest but without the animal-collecting element. After his return, he began to work on the scripts for Life on Earth. Due to the scale of his ambition, the BBC decided to partner with an American network to secure the necessary funding. While the negotiations were proceeding, he worked on a number of other television projects. He presented a series on tribal art (The Tribal Eye, 1975) and another on the voyages of discovery (The Explorers, 1975).

He also presented a BBC children's series about cryptozoology entitled Fabulous Animals (1975), which featured mythical creatures such as the griffin and kraken. Eventually the BBC signed a co-production deal with Turner Broadcasting and Life on Earth moved into production in 1976.

More information: The Guardian

Beginning with Life on Earth in 1979, Attenborough set about creating a body of work which became a benchmark of quality in wildlife film-making and influenced a generation of documentary film-makers. The series also established many of the hallmarks of the BBC's natural history output.

By treating his subject seriously and researching the latest discoveries, Attenborough and his production team gained the trust of scientists, who responded by allowing him to feature their subjects in his programmes. In Rwanda, for example, Attenborough and his crew were granted privileged access to film Dian Fossey's research group of mountain gorillas.

Sir David Attenborough

The success of Life on Earth prompted the BBC to consider a follow-up, and five years later, The Living Planet was screened.

This time, Attenborough built his series around the theme of ecology, the adaptations of living things to their environment. It was another critical and commercial success, generating huge international sales for the BBC.

In 1990, The Trials of Life completed the original Life trilogy, looking at animal behaviour through the different stages of life. The series drew strong reactions from the viewing public for its sequences of killer whales hunting sea lions on a Patagonian beach and chimpanzees hunting and violently killing a colobus monkey.

In the 1990s, Attenborough continued to use the Life title for a succession of authored documentaries. In 1993, he presented Life in the Freezer, the first television series to survey the natural history of Antarctica. Although past normal retirement age, he then embarked on a number of more specialised surveys of the natural world, beginning with plants. They proved a difficult subject for his producers, who had to deliver five hours of television featuring what are essentially immobile objects. The result, The Private Life of Plants (1995), showed plants as dynamic organisms by using time-lapse photography to speed up their growth.

More information: Time

Prompted by an enthusiastic ornithologist at the BBC Natural History Unit, Attenborough then turned his attention to the animal kingdom and in particular, birds. 

As he was neither an obsessive twitcher nor a bird expert, he decided he was better qualified to make The Life of Birds (1998) on the theme of behaviour. The documentary series won a Peabody Award the following year. The order of the remaining Life series was dictated by developments in camera technology.

Sir David Attenborough

For The Life of Mammals (2002), low-light and infrared cameras were deployed to reveal the behaviour of nocturnal mammals.

The series contains a number of memorable two shots of Attenborough and his subjects, which included chimpanzees, a blue whale and a grizzly bear. Advances in macro photography made it possible to capture natural behaviour of very small creatures for the first time, and in 2005, Life in the Undergrowth introduced audiences to the world of invertebrates.

At this point, Attenborough realised that he had spent 20 years unconsciously assembling a collection of programmes on all the major groups of terrestrial animals and plants – only reptiles and amphibians were missing. When Life in Cold Blood was broadcast in 2008, he had the satisfaction of completing the set, brought together in a DVD encyclopaedia called Life on Land.

More information: Spiegel

Attenborough narrated every episode of Wildlife on One, a BBC One wildlife series that ran for 253 episodes between 1977 and 2005. At its peak, it drew a weekly audience of eight to ten million, and the 1987 episode Meerkats United was voted the best wildlife documentary of all time by BBC viewers.

He has also narrated over 50 episodes of Natural World, BBC Two's flagship wildlife series. Its forerunner, The World About Us, was created by Attenborough in 1969, as a vehicle for colour television. In 1997, he narrated the BBC Wildlife Specials, each focussing on a charismatic species, and screened to mark the Natural History Unit's 40th anniversary.

In October 2014, the corporation announced a trio of new one-off Attenborough documentaries as part of a raft of new natural history programmes.  

Attenborough's Paradise Birds and Attenborough's Big Birds was shown on BBC Two and Waking Giants, which follows the discovery of giant dinosaur bones in South America, aired on BBC One.

Sir David Attenborough

The BBC also commissioned Atlantic Productions to make a three-part, Attenborough-fronted series Great Barrier Reef in 2015. The series marked the 10th project for Attenborough and Atlantic, and saw him returning to a location he first filmed at in 1957. By the turn of the millennium, Attenborough's authored documentaries were adopting a more overtly environmentalist stance. In State of the Planet (2000), he used the latest scientific evidence and interviews with leading scientists and conservationists to assess the impact of man's activities on the natural world.

He later turned to the issues of global warming (The Truth about Climate Change, 2006) and human population growth (How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?, 2009).

He also contributed a programme which highlighted the plight of endangered species to the BBC's Saving Planet Earth project in 2007, the 50th anniversary of the Natural History Unit.

Attenborough also forged a partnership with Sky, working on documentaries for the broadcaster's new 3D network, Sky 3D. Their first collaboration was Flying Monsters 3D, a film about pterosaurs which debuted on Christmas Day of 2010.

A second film, The Bachelor King 3D, followed a year later. His next 3D project, Conquest of the Skies, made by the team behind the BAFTA-winning David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive, aired on Sky 3D at Christmas 2014.

Attenborough has narrated three series of David Attenborough's Natural Curiosities for UKTV channel Watch, with the third series showing in 2015. He has also narrated A majestic celebration: Wild Karnataka, India’s first blue-chip natural history film, directed by Kalyan Varma and Amoghavarsha.

More information: World Economic Forum

It seems to me that the natural world is 

the greatest source of excitement; 

the greatest source of visual beauty; 

the greatest source of intellectual interest. 

It is the greatest source of so much in life

that makes life worth living.

David Attenborough

ENGLISH & THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION

The first British Broadcasting Corporation Logo

The BBC broadcasts its first television news bulletin in July, 5 1954. The BBC is a symbol of good journalism but it's also an excellent tool to learn English.

More information: BBC

The Grandma starts today a new online course to learn English using 2.0 tools. Her last families got A2 and B1 Cambridge Exams. The Grandma has decided to start reviewing B1 level in an attempt to help A2 relatives to improve their English to reach B1 level, and B1 relatives to consolidate their level to continue studying to reach the next B2 level.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees.

BBC Outside Broadcast Equipment, 1951

The BBC is established under a Royal Charter and operates under its Agreement with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Its work is funded principally by an annual television licence fee which is charged to all British households, companies, and organisations using any type of equipment to receive or record live television broadcasts and iPlayer catch-up. 

The fee is set by the British Government, agreed by Parliament, and used to fund the BBC's radio, TV, and online services covering the nations and regions of the UK. Since 1 April 2014, it has also funded the BBC World Service, launched in 1932 as the BBC Empire Service, which broadcasts in 28 languages and provides comprehensive TV, radio, and online services in Arabic and Persian.

More information: BBC

Around a quarter of BBC revenues come from its commercial arm BBC Studios Ltd, formerly BBC Worldwide, which sells BBC programmes and services internationally and also distributes the BBC's international 24-hour English-language news services BBC World News, and from BBC.com, provided by BBC Global News Ltd.

BBC Mobile Unit

From its inception, through the Second World War, where its broadcasts helped to unite the nation, to the 21st century, the BBC has played a prominent role in British culture. It has also been known as The Beeb, and Auntie.

Britain's first live public broadcast from the Marconi factory in Chelmsford took place in June 1920. It was sponsored by the Daily Mail's Lord Northcliffe and featured the famous Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba. The Melba broadcast caught the people's imagination and marked a turning point in the British public's attitude to radio. 

More information: BBC

However, this public enthusiasm was not shared in official circles where such broadcasts were held to interfere with important military and civil communications. By late 1920, pressure from these quarters and uneasiness among the staff of the licensing authority, the General Post Office (GPO), was sufficient to lead to a ban on further Chelmsford broadcasts.

But by 1922, the GPO had received nearly 100 broadcast licence requests and moved to rescind its ban in the wake of a petition by 63 wireless societies with over 3,000 members.

George Orwell

The GPO proposed that it would issue a single broadcasting licence to a company jointly owned by a consortium of leading wireless receiver manufactures, to be known as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd. John Reith, a Scottish Calvinist, was appointed its General Manager in December 1922 a few weeks after the company made its first official broadcast. The company was to be financed by a royalty on the sale of BBC wireless receiving sets from approved manufacturers. To this day, the BBC aims to follow the Reithian directive to inform, educate and entertain.

The British Broadcasting Corporation came into existence on 1 January 1927, and Reith, newly knighted, was appointed its first Director General. To represent its purpose and stated values, the new corporation adopted the coat of arms, including the motto Nation shall speak peace unto Nation.

More information: BBC

Television broadcasting was suspended from 1 September 1939 to 7 June 1946, during the Second World War, and it was left to BBC Radio broadcasters such as Reginald Foort to keep the nation's spirits up. 

Charles de Gaulle in BBC editorial

The BBC moved much of its radio operations out of London, initially to Bristol, and then to Bedford. Concerts were broadcast from the Corn Exchange; the Trinity Chapel in St Paul's Church, Bedford was the studio for the daily service from 1941 to 1945, and, in the darkest days of the war in 1941, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York came to St Paul's to broadcast to the UK and all parts of the world on the National Day of Prayer. BBC employees during the war included George Orwell who spent two years with the broadcaster.

More information: BBC

During his role as Prime Minister during the Second World War, Winston Churchill would deliver 33 major wartime speeches by radio, all of which were carried by the BBC within the UK. 

On 18 June 1940, French general Charles de Gaulle, in exile in London as the leader of the Free French, made a speech, broadcast by the BBC, urging the French people not to capitulate to the Nazis.

More information: The Guardian

There was a widely reported urban myth that, upon resumption of the BBC television service after the war, announcer Leslie Mitchell started by saying, As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted...

In fact, the first person to appear when transmission resumed was Jasmine Bligh and the words said were Good afternoon, everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh...? 

Jasmine Bligh

The European Broadcasting Union was formed on 12 February 1950, in Torquay with the BBC among the 23 founding broadcasting organisations.

Competition to the BBC was introduced in 1955, with the commercial and independently operated television network of ITV. However, the BBC monopoly on radio services would persist until 8 October 1973 when under the control of the newly renamed Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the UK's first Independent local radio station, LBC came on-air in the London area. 

As a result of the Pilkington Committee report of 1962, in which the BBC was praised for the quality and range of its output, and ITV was very heavily criticised for not providing enough quality programming, the decision was taken to award the BBC a second television channel, BBC2.

In 2002, several television and radio channels were reorganised. In 2008, another channel was launched, BBC Alba, a Scottish Gaelic service. Unlike the other departments of the BBC, the BBC World Service was funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the British government department responsible for promoting the interests of the United Kingdom abroad.

More information: History Extra

I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. 

It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. 

George Orwell

COLD CASE: WHO KILLED OETZI THE ICEMAN?

Oetzi, the Iceman

Joseph de Ca'th Lon is in the South Tyrol enjoying beautiful landscapes, nice people and discovering the mystery of Oetzi, the Iceman. Joseph is reading an interesting article which has been written by BBC. He wants to share it with us...

High in a remote area of the Oetztaler Alps in northern Italy, 5,300 years ago, Oetzi the Iceman was shot in the back with an arrow. It hit a main artery and he probably bled to death within minutes. His body was preserved in the ice, making him one of the oldest and best-preserved mummies on Earth.

Oetzi was first discovered in 1991 and scientists discovered the flint arrowhead lodged in his shoulder 10 years later. But only in recent months have investigators, led by a senior police detective, focused more intently on how Oetzi was shot.

Was it murder? And who might have killed him?

Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, where Oetzi's body is on display, called on a professional to investigate. He is Detective Chief Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police Department, who is also head of behavioural analysis with the Bavarian police.

He admits to being slightly taken aback at the request.

More information: BBC

It was a funny situation, because when I was asked by the director if I work on cold cases, I said 'yes, I do', Inspector Horn said.

Oetzi's clothes

But this case was colder than most. 

The usual cold case that we have is 20 or maybe 30 years old, and now I was asked to work on a case 5,300 years old, he said.

Initially, Inspector Horn did not think he could help.

I thought that probably the body would be in a bad condition. But what I learnt very soon was that it was in perfect condition. It's even in a better condition than some of the bodies I am working on nowadays.

As well as visiting the scene of the crime high in the Alps, the inspector was able to draw on the extensive research done on Oetzi over the last 25 years, which includes detailed analysis of his stomach contents and the injuries on his body. Both were to prove key to Inspector Horn's theories.

It looks a lot like a murder, he says.

The killer seems to have caught Oetzi by surprise.

More information: BBC

Oetzi was shot probably from quite a distance, about 30m (100 ft), which is not a close-contact killing; it's a distance killing.

Inspector Horn says Oetzi seems to have been quite relaxed up on the glacier just before he was shot. His own bow wasn't ready for use.

Joseph de Ca'th Lon in the Otzi Memorial

About half an hour before he was killed, he was having a rest up there. He was having quite a heavy lunch or meal at least, so it doesn't seem like he was in a rush or fleeing from something.

Another crucial clue came from the injury on Oetzi's right hand, a wound he received one or two days before his death, probably during a fight.

That injury was something we would define as a classic active defence wound. That would be like if somebody... threatens you with an knife and he stabs you, if you grab into the knife and... try to push it away.

Oetzi did not suffer other defence injuries, so Inspector Horn believes he won the initial fight - which possibly took place down in the valley.

What we think… is that the killing up on the glacier is probably the continuation of this fight that happened about one-and-a-half days before.

More information: BBC

Knowing that he was unlikely to win in hand-to-hand combat, Oetzi's killer probably stealthily followed him up the mountain and shot him.

Joseph de Ca'th Lon in the South Tyrol Museum

The glacier is a very remote area and probably not a place where you would randomly run into each other, Alexander Horn says.

But who was the offender and what were his motives?

Inspector Horn says the offender didn't steal Oetzi's valuable copper blade axe and other gear, so it is unlikely to have been a crime for profit. He speculates that it was probably due to some strong personal emotion.

If there was hate, if it was jealousy, if it was revenge, we will not be able to tell you.

Angelika Fleckinger from the Museum of Archaeology says she is very happy so much progress has been made into the big mystery of Oetzi's death. 

But Inspector Horn says he is still unsatisfied.

I don't think there is a high likelihood we will ever be able to solve that case.

The offender got away with that murder - which I don't like, being in charge of investigations, he said with a wry smile.

I don't like the fact that we have an unsolved homicide there.

One of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's prehistoric peoples is that they all came from somewhere else. 

Norman Davies

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Indiana Jones

The Grandma has been some days in Andorra. She has been skiing, enjoying her country and its culture and she has been controlling her fortune and legacy. Yesterday, she celebrated her 92-birthday. It was a strange day because she was thinking in all her families and hoping the best wishes for all of them. She remembered incredible moments with The Collins, The Addams and The Holmes and plenty of energy she’s returning to London to continue supporting her last family in its objective: PET.

Today, The Grandma, who is a great admirer of public British television, BBC, has decided to share this channel with her family to help them in their studies. In this case, she offers a link to BBC to prepare the Listening Part.

More information: BBC Listening – 6 Minute English

This afternoon, The Grandma has received some incredible news. An old friend, someone who loves Archaeology like her, is going to return very soon. She’s very happy and expectant.

Since today, the final countdown has started. The Holmes have 60 days to arrive to the final and she is going to work as hard as them to reach it.

Come on Holmes, this is the beginning of the end…

Archaeology is the search for fact... not truth.
If it's truth you're looking for,
Doctor Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.

Indiana Jones