Slashdot Mirror
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."
From this number, would I be wrong in assuming that there are many people besides spammers themselves who have no problem at all with spam remaining legislation-free? I had no idea anti-spam was such a lucrative business, and I suspect many others hadn't either.
If I could make this sig kill you, I would.
I know that challenge response has been around longer than thatPRIOR ART.
And challenging Earthlink is a bit foolish. All Earthlink needs to do is come up with the hundreds of thousands of examples of Challenge-Response systems in use as early as 1995 in order to verify an actual person was on the other side.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
challenge-reply is a VERY half-baked idea.
How so?
It seems like a great solution to me (coupled with a whitelist).
I'd put all my friends on the whitelist. When anyone not on that list emails me for the first time, they get an automated message back telling them how to respond. If they do this, the message gets through and they go on my whitelist. If not, they have already been informed that their message will not reach me.
How is this half-baked!?
Life is too short to proofread.
Spam filtering companies are proliferating at a rate almost akin to the growth of spam itself, and not all of them are going to survive.
Remember when there was a similar growth in companies delivering anti-virus solutions? Remember when several of them were caught propogating viruses?
Given how little it costs to Spam - especially if you're willing to accept a response rate of ZERO - I wonder how long it will be before some of these companies start hiring people to send out spam; spam tailored so that the anti-spam company has patented the most feasible defense!
Help make virtual black mail legal.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
This exactly what's wrong with corporate America (a.k.a. the "legal system") Rather than willingly share technology and ideas, people hoarde whatever they can in the hopes of becoming the next overnight Joe Millionaire. The problem is, the success of the one in no way benefits the many. In fact, the contrary is true- this sort of crap hurts the industry more than anything. Meanwhile consumers are complaining to their providors, threatening to take their business elsewhere, crippling an already painful market. If people weren't so damn selfish, and freely shared concepts and ideas (e.g. Open Source), without the need to excessively profit, imagine where technology would be.
The first thing I thought of when I read this was "How are mail list posts handled?" The first message from your underwater basket weaving list comes in, Mailblocks sends out it's challenge, it's sent to the entire mail list but the actual user never sees the challenge because Mailblocks won't let posts from the mail list through.
And I thought the people who have vacation responders on their email accounts were bad. Talk about a vicious circle.
d a v e
"Hmmm...upgrades."
How so?
Well, try reading the top rated comments in the last Earthlink-does-challenge-reply business slashdot story. A few of the ideas that occured to me(with varying degrees of seriousness/risk/whatever):
Please help metamoderate.
So now somebody can patent a spam-blocking technique, then bombard you with spam which you can't legally stop because they have patented spam blocking. Then a virus creator will patent virus detection and removal, so you can't legally eliminate their viruses. And they can do the same thing with ad blocking, firewalls, and the list goes on.
The evils brought on society by software patents far outweigh the good brought by the 1% of useful software patents.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
DDOS against whoever's name happens to be in the From line of a spam
You and a couple of other people.
I found very generic patents 6,546,416 and 6,199,102 from 1997 and 1998.. I cant belive that such simple concepts are valid for patent. There is not enough information to deterimine if Mailblocks actualy owns the rights to either of these.
- increased load on mail servers
The load increase is manageable. Challenge response would only need to happen a small percentage of the time for valid email. For spam, yes up to 1 email would be sent per spam recieved. I think the internet can handle that. It's not like there are going to be large attachments or anything.- everyone's challenge-response system will be different and incompatible
That's the whole point of the challenge response system. The idea is that the message can only get though if an actual person is willing to sit there and read how to make it get through. If if isn't worth this unknown sender's time to figure out how to make the email get through, they're probably just wasting my time anyways.The other idea would be to make the response be the results of a computationally expensive task. With a new RFC, the format for this could be standardized, and it could all be made totally invisible to the user. Since CPU power costs money, it would still be effective at reducing spam.
- businesses won't be able to send legitimate automated email(shipping notifications, confirmations, etc.) because everyone will be using different challenge-response systems. You think the average earthlink user is going to be smart enough to even REALIZE they need to whitelist a business, much less what address?
First off, they can just whitelist the whole domain of the business. Hey, the could even tell it to auto-whitelist any email addresses in that domain from which they recieve email in the next 2 hours. Second, yes I do think people will be able to maintain a whitelist. Using a whitelist would be voluntary, so if you can't use it, you don't have to. Once they get fed up with the amount of spam they're getting, it will provide them with enough incetive to learn. Most people can learn how to do simple things with their computer, they typically just don't see it as worth their time to do so. Beside you could make the whole "it's hard to use" argument about the WWW itself. People just eventually decided if was worth learning to use.- Loops when dealing with any of the dozens upon dozens of mailing list software, autoresponders, and legitimate automated email systems.
Other that implementing some basic sanity checking, these would be flaws on their end of the system. The should be no message I can send an automated mail system to make it go apeshit. All the challenge response software would need to do is ignore replies the weren't even attempting to respond correctly. This could be done for N hours after recieving the first message from a source.The only really big problem I can see is what happens if someone sends out spam with your email address. It seems like a potential DOS-style attack. It seems that there's an obvious solution to this: Add a standard string to be include in all response requests.
This way your mail software can check to see if you've sent mail to that address, and ignore it if you haven't.
I looked at the comments in that story, but it still don't see why this idea is half baked. One of us must be missing something.
Life is too short to proofread.
I dont think people here are against software patents in general, rather they are against obvious software patents.
So, a patent can tell a company to stop doing something even if they develop it themselves?
:)
I'm curious.
If you patent A, then I come up with A on my own time, for use in my own company, you can still tell me to stop using it?
I mean, I guess Earthlink is advertising that they're going to be using a challenge/response system, but they're not selling it, are they? I don't understand how the patent system even applies here.
Someone help, my head hurts.
# increased load on mail servers
.001%. Most challenges will bounce.
No, decreased load on mail servers. Spam comes in. A challenge is sent and it bounces (due to the spammer having forged an address). The spam is discarded, saving space on the server. If the server is smart, it will automatically discard all bulk e-mail purporting to be from that address. The user retrieves their e-mail and that traffic does not included the discarded spam. Spammers, recognizing the futility of sending spam to challenge-response mail servers, will stop spamming that domain.
# everyone's challenge-response system will be different and incompatible
Since a human being has to follow the simple instructions in the message, that is not a problem. You don't want something that is easily scripted anyway.
# spammers will figure out how to reply to them
Only if the spammers give a legit return address. And how many of them do? Probably less than
# businesses won't be able to send legitimate automated email(shipping notifications, confirmations, etc.) because everyone will be using different challenge-response systems. You think the average earthlink user is going to be smart enough to even REALIZE they need to whitelist a business, much less what address?
That's a legitimate concern, but one which can be addressed by ISPs creating whitelists of trusted businesses. The businesses, in order to be able to continue getting legitimate e-mail through, will not spam and risk being removed from the list.
# Loops when dealing with any of the dozens upon dozens of mailing list software, autoresponders, and legitimate automated email systems.
That's a very legitimate concern. One way to deal with it is to send one challenge per sender/recipient. In other words, mailing list A sends e-mail to you. A challenge is sent. No response is received. Mailing list A continues to send e-mail to you. Because they are not whitelisted and because they did not reply to the original challenge, the e-mail is discarded/refused.
Challenge-response is a very good way to deal with spam, though I am sure that there will be some setbacks here and there. Overall, I think that it's a very reasonable idea.
I think people like to paint all software patents with a broad brush. It's actually a bigger and broader scope. Work with me here:
"All patents related to software are evil"
The fear is that (and rightly so), the patent office doesn't have the tech knowhow to decide a valid patent or not. Mailblock wants to patent "challenge and response" email. To me that is plain silly. The concept of a challenge and response has existed long before email in regards to communications. Applying such a broad concept to email is nothing new and is only a matter of who got there first.
What SHOULD happen is that a company is granted a valid patent on METHOD. At least in regards to software. Let's take Adobe. What if they were tto be granted a patent on ALL graphics designs programs? It would kill competition in it's tracks. Gimp? nope. PSP? nope. MSPAINT? probably but only because MS would pay the license fee.
You see, in terms of software, the traditional patent model does not work. There aren't enough new ideas out there. The concept of a drawing is as old as caves and berry juice. You can patent YOUR style of pen but not the concept of a pen. What happens is that companies patent more than just THIER way of doing something. Software patents in the current form are diametrically opposed to competition and freemarket operation.
The rules need to be rewritten to take into account this new model. Things like lifetime of a patent on software needs to be rethought as well as the whole process of granting the patent. In the software world, things move too fast. Patent lifetimes are NECCESARY to ensure non-stagnation.
Take the drug market. The patent on the drug (chemical makeup not concept) is the motivation for R&D. Patents encourage companies to develop something to make a profit by guaranteeing those companies the ability to have exclusive profit from that R&D. But this only goes so far. You've got only a few years before the patent expires and anyone else can make a generic version. They can't call it the same thing you do, but the can sure as hell color the pill the same as you.
What now for a company? They must reinvest the money earned from the short term exclusive right of patent and develop a better version. Or something new all together. The company that trys to live on one product dies a quick death. Ever wonder why there are so many versions of sudaphedrine? Patents FORCE innovation. The rules are simple. You come up with something new (such as a drug to inhibit HIV) and you get exclusive right to it. But only for a while. After so many years, anyone can produce it. It's now up to you (the company) to make a bigger and better HIV blocker. You know the rules. Everyone has to play by the same ones. Because a patent is public (has to be or else how would anyone know if they might infringe), you get that exclusivity= bonus for making it public. Don't like that rule? Keep it as a trade secret. The rules are different there. Much more difficult to enforce.
Almost done.
People also link patents to copyrights which have become a bastardized version of what they were. The current Micky Mouse is much better (to some) than the Steamboat Willy '46 version. Copyright terms forced Disney to make a better Mickey Mouse. The problem now (as we all know) is that Disney and the other large lobbies have decided that they don't want to play by the same rules that put them where they are. They are most undoubtedly an enemy of the freemarket and capitalism.
Sorry for such a long rant. Copyrights and patents aren't a bad thing unless misused. This is the case with the Sonny Bono Act and most software patents.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Just pay thousands of third world children .002 cents for every email they "authenticate."
Or, with computer vision growing in leaps and bounds this too would eventually be replaced by a computer with a $20 web cam and some nifty software.
Anyone remember the guy who wrote a program to let his computer play Tetris by taking screen grabs?
Apple free since 1990!
In this country, and probably many others, software cannot legally be patented. I am not an expert, but I would guess that this means software patents granted in other countries are not enforceable in the UK - and therefore no offence would be committed using "patent-violating" software here.
Governments should, if they don't already, have the power to annul any patent, and that power should be exercised against abusers of the system.
Meanwhile, if your ISP offers virtual hosting, you can always use disposable addresses. (well - at least until the spam merchants twig onto that). This is my attempt at disposable addressing.
So whose patent does this violate?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
since software was written before there were software patents, and it wasn't a multi billion dollar business, I would say the software industry would work fine without them.
As a whole, we might be able to progress faster.\
I have written a lot of different typs of tracking software for use in logistics to hospitals. they all basically do the same thing, and the core of most of them could be used for another tracking. Instead, I get to re-write the same thing over and over again. I'm just one guy, and I can believe there are a lot of other companies paying people to do the same thing I have done. I've seen legact apps that have the same function and variable name that I have used.
How much money would corporations save, as a whole, if there was a common repository for code? Sure, company A might need something thats not in the repository and have to pay for it to be written from scratch, but overall they would need to do that a lot less.
This is the reason I feel companis should chose open source, long term cost reduction.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
C/R technology is inconvenient and obsolete. I'm not even sure why Earthlink decided to implement such an obsolete approach that has the side effect of doubling the amount of emails related to spam.
US patent system is going to screw whole US economy more and more. Soon, any software development will be outsourced offshore not b/c of the price of american human resource (americans are the most expensive and that already really unreasonable counting their low intellectual quality), but b/c it will involve less IP problems to develop a software in a free world rather than in USA.
Personally, I think that American industry of software development is dead. Partially - thanks to US Patent Office.
Less is more !