Haiku vs Spam

Mark Cantrell was among several people who sent in a story about a company using "Haiku to Stop Spam. Essentially you use a copyrighted Haiku to tag that a message meets criteria (1 Recipient, Pre-Existing Relationship, etc) which then makes it a simple matter to filter the mail. I'm sure the spammers in China will laugh wildly as they forge the haiku. I challange comment posters to post only Haiku in this discussion ;)

Comments

[Slightly OT] nitpick time...

[billbaggins]

The linked article
Displaying limited brains
May be quoted thus:

Habeas is a Latin term used in legal proceedings that means "evidence" or "to show proof."

Habeas in fact
means "let us have" and no more
and not "evidence"

They are thinking of
"writ of habeas corpus"
"Let's have the body"

Nitpick mode now off
Let those who frequent this board
Now resume to speak.

Re:[Slightly OT] nitpick time...

[Bob Violence]

Conjugate rightly.
Those endings are important.
This is what you said:

Habeas in fact
means "let us have" and no more
and not "evidence"

But that's not correct.
"Habeas" means "you should have."
It's second person,

singular, or so
I learned in Latin classes
many autumns past.

Read the article...

[jaaron]

read the article

mystery revealed to you

poem placed in header

The strategy, in plain English

[mblase]

Five-seven-and-five
Aren't nearly enough words
To explain oneself.

The Habeas mark contains a three-line haiku protected by copyright law. Six other lines contain the copyright and trademark notices and other trademark protected information.... If senders fail to meet the criteria, they could be sued for trademark and copyright infringement, Mitchell said.

Basically, they're using copyright law to replace a non-existant spam law. If your header contains their copyrighted haiku, then you're not sending spam and you're allowed through. If you use the haiku header and you're still spam, you're violating their rules and are sued for copyright infringement.

Cute strategy, especially the part where they piggyback on the geek affection for gratuitous haiku, but it's built upon the (frankly) naive idea that their subscribers can get everyone they want to get email from to play along. It basically turns your entire flow of email into an "opt-in" list. It's nice that you can sue spammers with forged headers for copyright infringement, but that's not what's going to happen; what will happen is you'll get a "unknown sender" folder chock-full of spam and a few useful e-mails from people who don't know or don't care how to use the haiku header, and you'll still have to sort through it by hand every day.

The spammers won't need to forge their headers, unless (somehow) this tactic gets adopted by the entire Internet, including Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL. The inconvenience will be great enough that no one will want to play along anyway.

Learn you some Haiku

[sielwolf]

A common mistake among English speakers is that in English, haiku would still be composed of seventeen syllables. It is not.

Here is a very good article on it (featuring my favorite haiku BTW).

It comes down to the semantics of English versus Japanese. Under English there is a much more constrictive syntax, thus the meaning of a phrase can change just by resorting the words (Japanese, OTOH, is more resilient). Why is this important? 17 syllables in English can carry much more meaning than 17 syllables in Japanese.

Most haiku authors agree that the rough mean in English should be 12 in three phrases. Of course that is just a starting point at best. One of Ezra Pound's better known haiku is 18 syllables in two lines. In the end haiku creation is not a rote process.