[solardev]

My first job was an internship in a dot com working on anti-spam around when Gmail came out. The job itself was fun. As an intern I would help with everything from bash scripts to web pages to fishing ethernet cables through the suburban house we worked out of to cooking lunch. We'd work all day and then stick around and play video games through the night, falling asleep on the couches to our boss walking in the next morning and chuckling. It felt like a college dorm at times.

Our technology was novel and patented, but relied on the cooperation of ISPs, which we never got. (It was basically mass statistical analysis, but sourced and shared across ISPs. That model lost to huge free webmail providers instead.)

Because anti spam wasn't making money, the founder decided to sell the technology to the Chinese government instead, to use to censor dissidents. I had a long, angry chat with him and resigned that same day.