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Analyzing AT&T's Anti-Anti-Spam Patent
An anonymous reader writes "Dan Gillmor is reporting in his eJournal taken, in turn, from Gregory Aharonian: AT&T has apparently been awarded a patent for circumventing certain spam filters, thereby providing slimeball spammers with yet a bigger hammer!" The patent covers "A system and method for circumventing schemes that use duplication detection to detect and block unsolicited e-mail (spam.)", although it's unclear exactly what AT&T want it for.
If you look back, at the time AT&T would have been filing the patent they were in the consumer ISP business.
Odds are it was filed as an offensive tool to use against spammers.
A patent such as this could be used as a hammer against spammers using filter evasion approaches. The value of that for an ISP of the size of AT&T far exceeds the cost of filing a patent.
(AT&T are pretty clueless on many levels, but this looks like it was a smart move. It'll be interestng to see what, if anything, they do with it.)
What I suspect that they will do is allow it for their Pink contract holders and go after anyone else.
Fight Spammers!
Couldn't you use the DMCA to stop circumvention of mail security software?
That's a question, not a statement.
Maybe this isn't part of a master plan -- maybe it's more random.
I could see a guy inside of AT&T working on something, and having to justify his time to his bosses. The lawyers who filed the patent probably work directly for AT&T, and so they gave it to them, and asked if it could be patented. The patent lawyers filed it, because they're patent lawyers, and that's what they do.
I tend to assume that this situation would fit right into a dilbert storyline. I don't think it's part of a grand strategy.
I can't imagine that AT&T would sell spam technology, because it would be a public relations nightmare. And I can't imagine that they'd try to sue spammers for patent infringment, because that would be expensive, and they wouldn't get anything out of it.
Or, instead of trying to educate the spammers, how about trying to educate the people who respond to spam?
Just do a mass spam once a month, or even once a week, to every email address you can find. Do a few spams: one selling Viagra, a few pushing different types of porn, etc. Cover the basic list of things that get spammed for on a regular basis.
Make the offers believable, and direct the recipient to an appropriately believable web site. Take their credit card details (but don't actually charge the card), do the whole lot. Right at the end, though, put up a page and say "hey, this is a scam site. Lucky we didn't really take your money!"
This will make all of those people that actually buy from these emails actually think twice the next time they go to purchase.
I wouldn't mind getting these "spams" as often as other spam if only for the fact that because the goal of these emails is to educate, there would be no reason to try and break through Bayesian filtering (or any other form). That is to say that they would be very easy for me to filter and never see, and hopefully at the same time we would see a reduction in other types of spam as people are educated about the problems associated with it (as it would drive sales down).
Having said that, I know there is no limit to stupidity, so maybe the market will always be big enough...