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MailBlocks sues Earthlink over Anti-Spam Tech
goombah99 writes "Mailblocks is suing Earthlink , claiming patents on Challenge-Response as a means of blocking spam. Slashdot recently discussed Earthlink's plans to implement a challenge-response email system. The next day mailblocks filed suit to defend their turf in the $118 million dollar anti-spam solutions market. MSNBC has a complete discussion."
When are we going to take those idiots at the Patent Office out and shoot them all?
.. any collection of rational citizens could do a better job than they at rejecting the obvious.
Gods
Actually, I submit a local Hells Angel chapter could do as well.
Call me crazy but I'll ask anyway. Since everyone is so gung-ho about how evil software patents are,
imagine for a moment that software patents were abolished. Do you think companies and people would continue to innovate software? Or do you think software development would stop? What would be the consequences to industry? Would the economy collapse due to a severe outage of software companies (The entire world has a huge stake in it, anyone know the numbers and percentages? percentage of GDPs?) ? What about the Hardware Manufacturing companies? How would they be impacted? Inquiring minds want to know.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
You: Then you delete all 142,675 copies of the spam, keeping it from being downloaded 142,675 times by your customers.
That's not a challenge/response system. You're talking about a networked solution to spam where spam identified by one user is used to identify other people's spam. That's fine, but the same system can be implemented with Bayesian or pure filters without having to resort to generating C/R traffic for each spam.
Then spam decreases by 99.9% because spammers know that their messages don't get through... If spammers know that their messages will be blocked because of challenge/response mechanisms, then they will stop spamming that ISP.
On what do you base that assumption? History has shown us that every time we make it harder for spammers to get their garbage to us they respond by mangling their spam, getting around the solution, and sending MORE spam, not by reducing it.
ISPs like Earthlink recognize that keeping spam out of customers' mailboxes helps them attract more customers
Yes, but C/R is not the best way to keep spam out of customers' mailboxes for reasons that I and others have already explained here.
I run the domain anti-spam.org.
Oohh, I didn't realize I was dealing with royalty. Let me cower in my lack of knowledge because I am a commoner that doesn't run anti-spam.org. :)
I know that spam would be economically infeasible with either of the methods you describe above.
You underestimate labor costs for the first one when using teen-labor and/or folks in 3rd-world countries, and I don't understand why you think the second one would be too expensive for a spammer. If they can send a million spam they can send 100 million spam to brute-force their way through commonly-unblocked email addresses.
You ignore the fact that the receiving server could easily determine, by IP address, that the mail purporting to come from "support@microsoft.com" or "enlarge_your_penis@yahoo.com" was, instead, coming from an open relay in China. Drop that connection and the problem is gone.
You ignore the fact that that's NOT challenge/response and not what we're talking about and that same solution (which is not a bad one!) could be applied to Bayesian or traditional filters without the hassle of challenge/response and without generating MORE mail traffic (from C/R requests) in the process.
If you sharply increase the number of times that a spammer has to try to get a message through, you make spam unprofitable. While he may be making money with a .01% sales rate, he won't be making it at .001%
You seem to assume that it costs 100 times more to send 100 million emails than it does to send 1 million. I don't believe that is the case. In fact I KNOW it's not the case.
It is, in fact, an elegant solution that does not require legislation or a fundamental change to the e-mail infrastructure of the Internet.
As is Bayesian which doesn't require legislation or a fundamental change to the e-mail structure of the Internet, and which DOESN'T worsen bandwidth problems by sending out C/R requests to each spam received, and to which your other anti-spam techniques (networked deleting of identified spam and checking IP address to see if the mail is from who it supposedly is from) can also be applied.