Any patent that applies to internet technology should be easy to get around. Just set up a server in a country that doesn't have brain dead patent laws to do the infringing action. Probably you only have to ship a small part of the task out of the country to not infringe.
Avoiding infringement of patents by locating a server in another country is a method, and it seems like it's valuable, so I suppose I should get a patent on it.
Rule #1: Spammers always lie. Are you sure that you want to believe his statements at face value?
"You can trust me because I never lie, and I'm always right" - Baron Munchausen
Rule #1 is "Spammers lie", there's no "always" in it. It's a good rule, but so is "Everybody lies sometimes". Spammer fighters lie too, and so do journalists, especially web based journalists.
I wouldn't accept any of it face value. How should I know this isn't a complete fabrication designed to get free publicity for his web site?
You think AOL has circa 100 million users? Got some stats to back that up? My recollection is it's more like a third of that, meaning an average of 60 per user.And growing exponentially, with no end in sight.
I should have checked my sources more carefully. AOL claims over 140 million users of AIM Their user base is much less - 35.2 million end of 2002 according to Jupiter Research. Like you said, about a 1/3 of what I said. Probably slightly higher now, but yeah, it's 30-90 spams a day per user, not 10-30.
Of course, those are the emails that are blocked, they aren't talking about how many got through.
Sewing is so 18th century. Iron on patches are quicker and easier, and you can attach them with nothing more than a heat gun. But duct tape is still the best IMO.
Patents define things which only the filer of the patent is allowed to do. This power to deny comes from the goverment that grants the patent. Doesn't that mean the government claims ownership of all ideas, even the ones that haven't been thought of yet?
There is no generally accepted definition of spam.
Bullshit.
http://www.elsewhere.org/jargon/html/entry/spam. ht ml
Unsolicited commercial e-mail.
Period.
Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message;
http://spam.abuse.net/overview/whatisspam.shtml
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail;
http://kb.indiana.edu/data/afne.html?cust=7352
Spam is any mass electronic mailing you did not ask for;
http://www.umich.edu/~itua/email/canthespam/what.h tml
Spam is something you receive that you did not ask to receive;
http://www.stop-spam.org/On-Line_Spam/spam.shtml "Spam is about conSent, not conTent", "Spam is about Bulk", "Spam is about selling stuff", "Spam is not about selling stuff", I've heard them all, and many others I'd just as soon not mention.
Anti-spammers who want you to believe that their's is the one true definition is what is Bullshit.
... the only [spam stopping] that has proven to work is intellegent filtering.
There are two schools of thought on this, which I like to call "spam assassin" and "spammer assassin".
People in the spam assassin school are interested in not reading spam. To them, anything that stops them from reading spam "works". They would rate things like Baysian filtering as incredibly successful.
People in the spammer assassin school are interested in stopping spam from being sent. They would rate things like Baysian filtering as a dismal failure that "misses the point".
Intelligent filtering is effective against spam, but not against spammers. It may or may not "work", just depends on your school of thought.
Anti-spammers have published the personal information of more than one of the spammers No law against that.
Privacy is a recognized right, even in the US, (and there most certainly is a "law against that" in the EU)
Note that I'm not claiming the spammers are right, just that it's not cut and dried. I believe in being vigilant, and I hope many people will pay close attention to this suit, the arguments presented on both sides, and adjust their strategies accordingly.
People who underestimate their enemy frenquently end up dead. Don't be in their number.
Allright the blacklisting is allright because the user is requesting those sites to be blacklisted. Don't know about invasion of privacy (probably publishing the names and addresses), publication of false information (isn't that libel?). Finally "intentionally interference with a contract".(well at least it's spammer english:) there was never any contract in the first place and is just the user trying to avoid harassment. I'll be very surprised if this goes anywhere then again we may not have the whole story, remember the register isn't exactly an impartial newssource.
From the suit;
Count I - Injunctive and other equitable relief
Count II - Conversion Count III - Libel per se
Count IV - Invasion of Privacy by Public Discloser of Private Dacts.
Count V - False Light
Count VI - Intentional Interference with a Contract.
Frankly, I believe they have a case for IV, V, VI and possibly even III. Anti-spammers have published the personal information of more than one of the spammers, They have claimed that the spammers break the law, when in most cases, spam isn't illegal (immoral perhaps, but not yet illegal). And they have put pressure on ISPs to cancel spammers contracts. In particular, SPEWS is notorious for listing ever increasing IP ranges of ISPs that don't bind to thier will.
I think they'll lose, but I don't think we can dismiss the suit with a wave, and the vague claim that they're all lying bastards.
Implementing a step function on applications fees might work. For example, for the first 10 patent applications you'd pay the regular price and for every 10 patents afterwards the price would go up.
I think it would be too hard to define the "inventor" with such a system, or rather, too easy to game the system and always be under the limit. "Every employee at our company has 10 patents..."
If they grant thousands of patents a year and we only see 20 stupid patent articles, then maybe they aren't doing the terrible job we're assuming they are.
Imagine if you tested an additive on 10000 cars and found that 9980 cars get better gas milage, but the remaining 20 cars exploded once they reached 55 MPH.
Patents don't cause cars to explode, but they can do plenty of damage to companies, even if they're eventually invalidated.
Then, you forward a joke to someone who gets offended by it, calls it an unsolicited e-mail message, and then uses the law to extract money from your wallet. Meanwhile, since the spammers never send anything using their own return address, they just continue doing what they always have done.
Well, that fact the politicians often pass bad laws doesn't mean that laws are necessarily bad.
If there was a $10.00 penalty per spam, then you might get zapped for 10 bucks. A legitimate mailing list might be hit for a few hundred by mistake, But spammers would be zapped for millions every time they got caught.
Not that I think a reasonable spam law is likely mind you, just possible.
[Some sort of authentication] that a mailserver serves mail for its domain could help prevent a lot of problems. The infamous "fakemail" bug of the SMTP protocol, whereby anyone can send any email from any address, comes to mind.
You mean like a when mailing list sends you an email and "fakes" that it's from the person on the list who submitted it?
No, no one is seriously trying to prevent this, although many people often think it's a good idea until they think it through.
Is anything being done to secure the smtp protocol? I'd like to see encryption between mailservers, domain authentication, and possibly even user authentication in the next generation of the protocol
Why change the protocol for that? If you only want pgp-signed email, then reject email that isn't pgp-signed. If you want encrypted email, then reject any email that isn't encrypted.
If you're not willing to change, why should anyone else be?
30% of the spam that comes in to our mailserver is from residential dsl ip's.
50% of the spam I receives has an odd number of letters in the domain name, but I wouldn't consider filtering based on that. A 70% false negative rate is pretty meaningless without knowing the false positive rate as well. What percentage of your non-spam email comes from dsl ip's?
If you are dial up or home dsl you should not be talking diectly to smtp servers anyway you should be sending mail through your provider.
Sounds like a load of claptrap to me. Care to cite an RFC that suggests such a thing? How about a good network reason why email should be relayed instead of sent directly?
Slashdot Mirror
YASP - Yet another stupid patent.
.sig
Any patent that applies to internet technology should be easy to get around.
Just set up a server in a country that doesn't have brain dead patent laws to do the infringing action.
Probably you only have to ship a small part of the task out of the country to not infringe.
Avoiding infringement of patents by locating a server in another country is a method,
and it seems like it's valuable, so I suppose I should get a patent on it.
-- this is not a
"You can trust me because I never lie, and I'm always right" - Baron Munchausen
Rule #1 is "Spammers lie", there's no "always" in it.
It's a good rule, but so is "Everybody lies sometimes".
Spammer fighters lie too, and so do journalists, especially web based journalists.
I wouldn't accept any of it face value.
How should I know this isn't a complete fabrication designed to get free publicity for his web site?
Because it has an effect on whether the people who are still doing it quit or not.
-- this is not a
I'll roll out IPv6 as soon as there's some pr0n on it that I can't get via IPv4.
.sig
-- this is not a
I should have checked my sources more carefully.
AOL claims over 140 million users of AIM
Their user base is much less - 35.2 million end of 2002 according to Jupiter Research.
Like you said, about a 1/3 of what I said.
Probably slightly higher now, but yeah, it's
30-90 spams a day per user, not 10-30.
Of course, those are the emails that are blocked,
they aren't talking about how many got through.
-- this is not a
Sewing is so 18th century.
.sig
Iron on patches are quicker and easier, and you can attach them with nothing more than a heat gun.
But duct tape is still the best IMO.
-- this is not a
Simple rule of thumb:
1 spam = 1 bps.
11 million spams = 11Mbps or less than a 1/3 of a T3.
Even if they weren't using relays to multiply the bandwidth, it's doable.
-- this is not a
Funny how nobody ever mentions the false positive and false negative rates in these stories.
.sig
If AOL has a false positive rate of 0.01%,
That means over 200,000 incorrectly blocked emails per day.
If they have a false negative rate of 1%,
That means over 20,000,000 spams got through.
2 billion sounds like a big number, but it's still only 10-30 spams for the typical AOL user.
-- this is not a
he was even modded up.
Patents define things which only the filer of the patent is allowed to do.
.sig
This power to deny comes from the goverment that grants the patent.
Doesn't that mean the government claims ownership of all ideas,
even the ones that haven't been thought of yet?
-- this is not a
Of course he does. You can too just:
Create a mail folder called "Spam".
Instead of deleting spam, transfer it to your spam folder.
-- this is not a
There is no generally accepted definition of spam.
There are two schools of thought on this,
which I like to call "spam assassin" and "spammer assassin".
People in the spam assassin school are interested in not reading spam.
To them, anything that stops them from reading spam "works".
They would rate things like Baysian filtering as incredibly successful.
People in the spammer assassin school are interested in stopping spam from being sent.
They would rate things like Baysian filtering as a dismal failure that "misses the point".
Intelligent filtering is effective against spam,
but not against spammers.
It may or may not "work", just depends on your school of thought.
-- this is not a
The suit alledges that spews and spamhause have published false statements on their websites.
Privacy is a recognized right, even in the US,
(and there most certainly is a "law against that" in the EU)
Note that I'm not claiming the spammers are right, just that it's not cut and dried.
I believe in being vigilant, and I hope many people will pay close attention to this suit,
the arguments presented on both sides, and adjust their strategies accordingly.
People who underestimate their enemy frenquently end up dead.
Don't be in their number.
-- this is not a
From the suit;
Count I - Injunctive and other equitable relief
Count II - Conversion
Count III - Libel per se
Count IV - Invasion of Privacy by Public Discloser of Private Dacts.
Count V - False Light
Count VI - Intentional Interference with a Contract.
Frankly, I believe they have a case for IV, V, VI and possibly even III.
Anti-spammers have published the personal information of more than one of the spammers,
They have claimed that the spammers break the law,
when in most cases, spam isn't illegal (immoral perhaps, but not yet illegal).
And they have put pressure on ISPs to cancel spammers contracts.
In particular, SPEWS is notorious for listing ever increasing IP ranges of ISPs that don't bind to thier will.
I think they'll lose, but I don't think we can dismiss the suit with a wave,
and the vague claim that they're all lying bastards.
-- this is not a
It has been pointed out, many times.
Despite claims to the contrary, government is more interested in the money they make from patents then in promoting science and the useful arts.
Prevent politicians profiting from the patent process, and they'd stop passing laws to promote them.
-- this is not a
I think it would be too hard to define the "inventor" with such a system,
or rather, too easy to game the system and always be under the limit.
"Every employee at our company has 10 patents
-- this is not a
Imagine if you tested an additive on 10000 cars and found that 9980 cars get better gas milage,
but the remaining 20 cars exploded once they reached 55 MPH.
Patents don't cause cars to explode, but they can do plenty of damage to companies, even if they're eventually invalidated.
-- this is not a
What makes you think this hasn't already happened?
Well, that fact the politicians often pass bad laws doesn't mean that laws are necessarily bad.
If there was a $10.00 penalty per spam,
then you might get zapped for 10 bucks.
A legitimate mailing list might be hit for a few hundred by mistake,
But spammers would be zapped for millions every time they got caught.
Not that I think a reasonable spam law is likely mind you, just possible.
-- this is not a
You mean like a when mailing list sends you an email and "fakes" that it's from the person on the list who submitted it?
No, no one is seriously trying to prevent this, although many people often think it's a good idea until they think it through.
Why change the protocol for that?
If you only want pgp-signed email, then reject email that isn't pgp-signed.
If you want encrypted email, then reject any email that isn't encrypted.
If you're not willing to change, why should anyone else be?
50% of the spam I receives has an odd number of letters in the domain name,
but I wouldn't consider filtering based on that.
A 70% false negative rate is pretty meaningless without knowing the false positive rate as well.
What percentage of your non-spam email comes from dsl ip's?
Sounds like a load of claptrap to me.
Care to cite an RFC that suggests such a thing?
How about a good network reason why email should be relayed instead of sent directly?
-- this is not a
Mailing lists, forwarding, news to mail gateways, and doubtless many other reasons why this is a bad idea.
-- this is not a