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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."
All hail the "new" dark ages...where instead of guilds and religion repressing knowledge and progress, we have "intellectual property rights"!!!
Good news is, in about 1000 years will have another
"new" industrial age and be able to move on...
Wouldn't it be interesting if the "privately-funded" Mailblocks were to win and then refuse to license their patent to anyone? Or maybe offer to license it, but for exorbitant license fees. Then, 20 years from now, we'd find out that their private funding came from companies with an interest in Direct Marketing? Or that Mailblocks itself exists as a marketing tool, to collect email addresses and sell them?
One of the very real uses of patents is to prevent people from using the technology.
So am I paranoid enough yet?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Majordomo, Mailman, elzlm...almost all mailing list software sends you a confirmation email, requiring your reply(nowadays via a URL with an embedded authentication string, or via email simply by replying.) Kinda seems like prior art, since I'm guessing "Mailblocks" hasn't even been around as long as majordomo, which dates back into the Dark Ages.
However, in all honesty, this is probably one of the few cases where everyone wins- for many of the reasons folks cited in the comments on the last article that mentioned Earthlink's move... challenge-reply is a VERY half-baked idea, and anything that supresses the market for that software(ie, patent) is a darn good thing in my book.
I'm a mailing list manager, and if Earthlink does manage to get out of this one and fire up the challenge-response business, I'm damn tempted to simply block every earthlink user, possibly at the mailer level, because the users simply aren't smart enough to handle whitelisting the mailing list(s). Hell, most of the hotmail/yahoo mail users can't even keep their mailboxes under quota. We're talking rocket science compared to keeping your mail folder clean...
Please help metamoderate.
Gee... I use a a Sendmail AntiSpam list. It works.
I was going to write a filter that would do a
lookup on the incoming emailaddress, If I don't
find them I refuse the email. That's not patentable. And it should not be.
I block all challenge-response systems at the MTA level, because they're fscking annoying because their users always use them on mailing lists.
Thanks to this article, I know about Mailblocks. I will go dig up their MXes now. Thanks, goombah99.
I have been using the excellent utility ASK (Active Spam Killer). This uses the challenge response technique. It's blocked 670 SPAM messages in the last 10 days. It's been around for a while. I thought that an idea had to be "non-obvious" to be patentable. Lots of people comming up with an idea thats not obvious.
Kind of interested if thier is a solution for this already.
What happens if I have one of theses CR set up and a friend has another one we are not on each others lists. I send him mail, which gets me a piece of mail asking for a responce, since my system does not know the address it then replys, and so on......
I presume with the same product they watch thier know thier own responces so they can put a stop to this.
Kill spam with tech patents -- patent on sending email in bulk, patent on the "click here to remove me", patent on email header forgery, and of course patent on screwing with the subject field to get by most spam filters. Obviously, you have to actually *find* the spammers to sue them. Oh well.
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
I understand the need for companies to protect their intellectual property, what I don't understand is how you can classify such a simple, dare I say obvious, spam prevention scheme as "intellectual." It's scary to see such a huge legal throw-down over code that any programmer worth his weight in thumb-tacks could write in 30 minutes using VBScript. And really, if your entire company is based on something so trivial that little Johnny 12 year-old could reproduce it during recess and still have time to play 4-squares and get in a round of hoops, then it's time to close shop and start flipping burgers because you aren't going to last in the business world. Take heart MailBlocks; Micky D's is always hiring, and the little Johnnys of the world will always want fries with that.
CONCEPTS aren't patentable, are they?
The CONCEPT here is that of requiring a human response from a sender of an email before the recipient receives that email.
There are thousands of ways it can be implemented, I would imagine, be it with something written proprietary for a company, or through something open source (procmail recipes like I use?). Am I the next target because I run Procmail with a recipe set that requires a response before I receive an email from someone? Could the person who wrote this recipe set and gives it away free be a target?
The only way I can see Mailblocks even stands a chance to win anything is if it's proven that Earthlink is using something written by Mailblocks without the authority to use it. But that's licensing violation, not patent infringement. I would hope that a patent revocation would arise from this case.
Just my thought here: Many states, maybe all, have made spam a crime.
But they have not been effective in stopping it.
Now, normally, when I am victimized by a crime, I am justified in defending myself. Mailblocks, however, is saying "You can't defend yourself against this crime, because we own the intellectual property for the methods of defense"?!?!
Okay, so whenever a new technology comes out, the mafia just needs to figure out (1) a way to victimize people (2) the best ways to defend against it. Then patent the defenses, and subsequently hit people from both sides.
Our government is coming to a real decision. Either defend IP at let criminals roam free, victimizing all and destroying the economy, or give up IP, and maintain order.
Meanwhile, Ralsky and his friends are going to be down at the patent office in a flash.
Something is rotten in the state of our legal system.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I've seen this system used for the last several years. There are several cgi/pl scripts out there that email processors or mail clients would use to do the same function.
And lastly I'll never let a 3rd party process my email other than my ISP holding it on the servers there.
This looks like it's becoming another "unholy alliance" like the virus / anti-virus market. It's as if the net had no native problems, so people have had to think up some so they could sell solutions for them. I wouldn't care if there wasn't so much collateral damamge to the net's reputation and so much extra effort on my part for "trash removal" in my corner of the net.
I'm a proud capitalist, but this is sickening. It's like embedding nails in the road to increase sales of tires and towing services. Surely if there were ever a "solutions market" that deserved to be trashed by OSS, this is it.
Go SpamAssasin and Mozilla!!
http://www.angel.net/~nic/spam-x/ (with revision history dating back to 2001.
The only thing that it doesn't address is the potential for a spammer to bulk-mail accept-list confirmations prior to or as part of their mass-mailings.
So maybe use a digest of the headers to ID the original message, recover the e-mail address from it, and add it to the whitelist?
Internet Explorer was unable to link to the Web page you requested. The page might use standard HTML or CSS.
the internet might NOT be able to handle that. (but i do think the challenge/response system has potential...)
from http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr030520.asp: The basic facts are staggering. Internet service provider Earthlink estimates that 40% of the e-mail that comes through its system is spam. Brightmail, a spam prevention company, says that 45% of e-mail sent is spam. AOL claims that 70% to 80% of its incoming e-mail is spam. Jupiter Research reports that the average e-mail inbox gets 42 spam messages a day. USA Today quotes an estimate that more than 2 trillion pieces of spam are expected to be sent over the Internet this year. That's trillion with a "t."
I'm collecting prior-art for this.
.sig
If anyone has anything they think is relevant, please email a copy to prior-art@spamwolf.com
The relevant stuff (what I consider relevant) is being posted at http://www.spamwolf.com/patents/
The best candidate so far (IMO) is this post to news.admin.net-abuse.usenet on 1996-11-17.
I'd really like something prior to 1996-08-26 though.
I'm looking for anything prior to 1997-08-26 that;
compares the sender's address to a list of accepted senders; (friends list)
-and-
sends a challenge if the sender's address is not contained in the list
-and-
the challenge is designed to be answered by a person and not a machine.
-- this is not a