E-Mail Patent Roundup From The NYT

griffjon writes: "This NYT article details a new patent on getting spam to offline e-mail readers with popup ads and banners more annoying than your average spam. Fantastic. Also contains a funny patent about e-mailing stolen computers to retrieve them." I love the system that would let a predetermined e-mail subject line "initiate a predetermined security response, either locking the display screen so nothing would appear, showing only the name and contact information of the owner or erasing the laptop's hard drive." That one sounds foolproof, eh? (freeregistrationrequiredofcourse.)

Comments

Re:No end to spam

[Frymaster]

people(Americans anyway) have the right to free speech as protected by the First Amendment

I can see how that relates to Spam... wasn't it Jackson who said "Give me Liberty or Give Me All Teen XXX Babes Live!!!!!"?

I hope the patent stands!

[stevens]

I hope many, many means of spamming are discovered and patented! Then there will be:

• a disincentive for others to use that way of spamming, and
• organizations (spammers themselves) suing other spammers to stop spamming in certain, infringing ways!

I say, let the spammers make it as hard as they can for each other. No skin off our nose, and it may actually reduce the amount of spam out there.

Steve

Wow! What a useful feature

[anticypher]

The ability to send an email to a computer, have it erase its hard drive, send out additional emails so you know it was successful, and then stop the machine from working.

Oh, wait! We already have that :-)

Its called M$ Outlook.

I understand Pitr is working on a linux port this week :-)

the AC