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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.
Has it occured to anyone that by patenting an anti-anti-spam technique, AT&T can legally forbid spammers from using that technique?'
Yay AT&T. I applaud you.
Kevin Fox
Now all I need is an anti-patent patent and we can end all the stupid patent nightmares once and for all!
A patent on bank robbery!
Browse at -1, because trolls are often the most creative part of
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.)
Now, instead of being well-nigh untouchable due to spam's precarious placement as little more than a highly undesireable activity, AT&T can go after spammers IN COURT on grounds of PATENT INFRINGEMENT.
And going to court over something like this takes megabucks. Especially against a company the size of AT&T. Even if the spammers somehow weasel out on technicalities (like they didn't actually infringe on the patent directly), they're still going to be out so much money that their great grandkids aren't even going to be able to go to any educational institution after public high school.
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1) Patents are a way of restricting rights to certain ideas/methods/etc.
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2) AT&T can prevent anyone else from circumventing anti-spam filtering software with this patent
3) Ergo, AT&T are the good guys
wait a minute, I thought they were the bad guys
I'm confused now
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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.
Okay. I can work with that. Now I shall patent a method to circumvent systems that use visual inspections to detect and block illegal quantities of cocaine from entering national and/or state jurisdictions.
Forget trying to wrest money out of some crummy /spammers/.
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With the patent, AT&T can sue the makers of spamming software for patent infringement, unless SpamCo (or whatever company) makes sure that their mass e-mailer doesn't use any of AT&T's patented methods for avoiding filters. Of course, this will result in a crippled program: AntiSpamCo (or whatever company) knows exactly what SpamCo is not allowed to do, so their anti-spam filters will actually work.
So why is AT&T doing this? One, it could be good PR for them once AntiSpamCo et al. realize the implications. Two, (this is for all you conspiracy freaks out there) the government may have asked them do to it. Governmental agencies cannot hold patents. Only individuals and corporations hold patents.
I'm not trying to claim that AT&T is some benevolent corporation, though. It's entirely possible that, in addition to suing SpamCo, AT&T could also try to sue AntiSpamCo. They might not have as strong a case, but AntiSpamCo would still be using pieces of AT&T patent in their filtering software.
Despite that troublesome possibility, it'll be good to see SpamCo get what's coming to it. A lot (perhaps most) of SpamCos are rather or the sleazy, shoddy side; I'm sure there will be patent infringement. It will be interesting too see how soon and how vigorously AT&T will defend their patent in court.
Can Slashdot patent anti-anti-anti-spam?
And recursively more anti- as well?
AT&T recently got in trouble for violating the no-call list, because they were telephone "spamming." Also, I've gotten more telemarketing calls from AT&T than any other company, despite the fact that I've asked to be removed from their lists many times. It seems to me that AT&T will use this to spam with e-mail now, since the telephone is no longer working. I don't imagine they'll be violating their ISP's regulations if they do start spamming, either.
The DMCA only covers protection mechanisms designed to protect access to a copyrighted work, not just any protection mechanism. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is probably more applicable to spam, although you'd still need to get a judge to agree with you on that one.
From the final paragraph, before the appendices:
Keeping information secret about methods that could let spammers avoid filters would not prevent someone else from discovering the same techniques, if they haven't already.
Having information publicly about how to circumvent a technology at worst will let these techniques be used slightly earlier than they would've otherwise.
At best, it allows some people to start thinking about how to make counter-counter-counter-filter detectors, or come up with some other strategy AND sue spamming software makers.
So you know what the "email channels" mentioned in the previous quote are, patent are the 2nd to last paragraph states:
(No, I'm not going to paste the whole thing in backwards.)Some mail providers allow you to have multiple aliases for one email address, and to remove any of them when you feel like it. The same (or at least a similar) idea as using an @hotmail or @yahoo account as your non-primary mail, but much simpler to manage your contacts with.
The patent has nothing to do with this method of spam avoidance, except to mention it as not being susceptable to the patented form of counter-filtering. Read the patent. Just thought I'd mention that in case someone didn't RTFA.
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I wonder if hackers are now able to patent stack-smashing code, too. Maybe they could sue viruses and bugs out of existence!
Since slashdotters seem to hate spam so much all reason gets abandoned when it's involved, I thought I'd point out why this is so awful. Basically, it's a math algorythm. Like Quick Sort. Now stop and think about what computing would be like if Quick Sort was patented. The same sytem that allows this to be patented would also allow Quick Sort to be. We're fortunate that most of the ground work for computing was layed before this mess started. Anyways, I just wanted to make the point that there's no such thing as a good software patent.
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1980...
Remember being charged for an unlisted number?
1990...
AT&T sells us caller-id, and then sells caller-id avoidance devices to marketeers, then sells us next-gen caller id to thwart their devices...etc...etc.
AT&T has been playing the middle for years...I see no reason for them to stop now. Patents just mean more money, faster.
Actually, this whole thing is probably blown out of proportion. The patent summary looks a lot like a paper by Robert J. Hall. I expect that ATT has a policy of patenting everything any of their researchers works on, regardless of what it is. The paper itself is mainly mathematics with the spam theme thrown in to make it interesting.
If they cannot call you to get you to change your long distance service, maybe they are doing to "telemarket" to your inbox. The Federal 'Do Not Call List' is changing the way a lot of traditional telemarketers are doing their business. Since they are now being fined for calling you, they need another way to invade your life and bombard you with offers. Having a technology that can circumvent spam blocking would be a step up on the competition.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
If you read the patent, you'll see it has nothing to do with "random letters or dictionary words" to break hashing detectors.
Yes it does. Note that while they describe many ways to alter a message, the specific method used is not central to their claim, which is merely that m different versions are created somehow, that recipients are assigned to sublists in which the same ISP does not appear twice, and each sublist gets a different version. While it doesn't mention them specifically, any technique using n random letters in a message will infringe, since it effectively divides all users into m=26^n sublists and sends the same message to all users in a sublist. Use of enough random characters effectively generates such a large m that each recipient lands in their own sublist. Therefore there is no need to "determine if the selected address is substantially similar to an address on the selected sublist" since there are no addresses already in the sublist. Nobody gets the same message, so you don't need to worry about two copies of one version going to users at the same ISP. It is algorithmically equivalent to what they're claiming.
The patent goes on to describe many ways that a message might be altered, like reordering paragraphs, etc. In general many of the techniques they describe are subtle and do not allow as many permutations as you can get from a bunch of random characters, and so they stipulate (as a part of the claim) that care must to be taken that no sublist contains two "similar" email addresses. Meaning, don't send two copies of the same version to two recipients at the same ISP, who will notice the identical message hash. Duh. Any spammer could figure that out for himself. And like I said, if you use a large enough m this part of the patent is irrelevant since you don't need to worry about this problem. All the messages are unique.
If you are too lazy to read the entire patent, and insist on only reading a small part, how about also reading what the claims section says instead of just the abstract?
Yeah, what in the claims section do you think I missed?
Sometimes, you know, patents are allowed that don't actually have prior art, or at least aren't as obvious as the abstract makes them sound.
While true, that's irrelevant in this case because this is an obvious patent with plenty of prior art.
Those numbers are very wrong. Spammers count returns in sales per MILLION emails, because the rate is so low. It's profitable because they send huge quantities of spam, so even a very low sale rate is quite profitable.
On the other hand real email marketing (done by a well known legitimate business, targetted to specific peoples who agreed to receive it) can get much better results.
I hope that you noticed that I said 'If you are too lazy..." not "You are too lazy...". There is, in my mind at least, a large difference between adding "random letters or dictionary words" to break hashes, and using semantically similar but syntactally different paragraphs.
It appears that you think differently.
It is relatively easy to make filters that will ignore 'non-words', which make the random character method less effective, and the method of adding random words to messages would likely detract from the convincingness/power of a message being sent.
The trick of using html comments to hide these hash-busting words/characters is also easy enough to detect.
It would be more complicated to work out that a properly formed, completely valid looking message, with no strange words and no strange comments at all was spam. Having recognizable 'hash busting' sequences would tend to be recognizable, whereas this method would tend not to be.
Just because 'any spammer could figure that out for himself' doesn't mean they have.
Based on the contents of my inbox it seems that none of the spammers about have realized that. Most messages I get arrive in pairs.
Could you show me some of the obvious prior art with respect to this?
I don't mean the 'hash-busting' part, I mean the combination of any one of the claims in the patent?
I'm not meaning to say that you are lying, but do seem to be using the 'Everybody knows it is true' proof.
If it was 'obvious' it would seem that the duplicate filtering method of spam detection wouldn't work even now, woudln't it?
I may be wrong, but if I am, I would like evidence.
having actually just read the patent it would appear to be useless as it describes a means of avoiding a rather poor spam detection mechanism which I've never actually seen deployed.
Modern spam detection which uses statistical methods applied to the spam content would be unaffected by the techniques described in the patent.
Up until now, all anti spam tech was aimed at the individual spammer, but this can be aimed at the much smaller pool of people who write the tools to spam. This could cripple spamers.
Plato seems wrong to me today
By patenting this "technology", they are showing the weaknesses of current spam filters. Maybe that's what they intended all along... And now that i think about it, wouldn't this come under the heading of a software patent? I mean, its not code, but its an algorithm, right?
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As mentioned in a few other posts, this could mean AT&T can go after spammers for patent infringment. Now this seems unlikely, but if I got only one spam a day and it was from AT&T and I knew that they had hordes of lawyers tracking down "infringers" I would not only switch to AT&T, I would print out the daily message and admire it during the time I've previously allotted to hitting "D" a few hundred times...
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Now stop and think about what computing would be like if Quick Sort was patented.
Easy. C's qsort() would heapsort instead, as it in fact does on some C library implementations such as Metrowerks CodeWarrior's. If heapsort were patented as well, qsort() would merge-sort on large-memory machines and Shell sort on small-memory machines. If more of the efficient sort algorithms were patented, programs would be designed to manipulate data in search trees instead of arrays. There exist several sorting algorithms; unlike patented file formats such as GIF and MP3, these have minimal to no interoperability disadvantages. You're going to need a broader example than that.
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1) Slashdot links to article
2) Article links to Slashdot discussion
3) Slashdot links back to article
4) Article links back to Slashdot discussion
repeat...
That AT&T came out and did this, frankly, rocks. Good show, guys.
The only concern I have is that there is prior art, which will come up as a double-edge sword again. Prior art will protect the good guys from frivolous patent filings (Amazon, anybody?), but as such I'm concerned that the spammers will pull the prior art card against AT&T. On the other hand, AT&T's interest - protecting their network - and the fact that they probably have infinitely larger amounts of money than your spammers just might put an end to them for now.
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It doesn't really matter. Content-filtering based spam controls will never, ever be effective, because as soon as someone figures out a way to circumvent the spam filter, the spam filters get updated. It's a never-ending cycle, and AT&T can create all the goofball patents they want. Relay blacklisting is still the most effective method of controlling spam. The more blacklisting that occurs, the more spammers are forced to congregate in smaller areas of the net and be more ethical in their practices.