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E-Mail Patent Roundup From The NYT 145

Posted by timothy from the now-why-would-that-be-a-good-idea-again? dept.
griffjon writes: "This NYT article details a new patent on getting spam to offline e-mail readers with popup ads and banners more annoying than your average spam. Fantastic. Also contains a funny patent about e-mailing stolen computers to retrieve them." I love the system that would let a predetermined e-mail subject line "initiate a predetermined security response, either locking the display screen so nothing would appear, showing only the name and contact information of the owner or erasing the laptop's hard drive." That one sounds foolproof, eh? (freeregistrationrequiredofcourse.)
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E-Mail Patent Roundup From The NYT More

E-Mail Patent Roundup From The NYT

Comments Filter:
  • Yet more ways to invade people's lives. It's bad enough that OutlookExpress runs VBS attachments by default, basically letting anyone get at your contact manager, but now we have to play wack-a-porn in our inbox?

    ----
  • SPAM Luncheon Meat [spam.com] is a Hormel product. Here's Hormel's official position [spam.com] of use of the term "spam" to refer to unsolicited bulk mail.
    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • I agree. Anti-spam folks (mail-abuse.org for example) always argue that spam is more damaging than paper junk mail. But I delete spam very quickly, without reading it. Paper mail is disguised as credit card bills, etc. It takes much longer than email to open if you're not sure if it's junk, and it takes longer to delete (walk to the trash vs. hit 'd' in Pine). Plus, email can be forwarded to /dev/null. I'd love a dead-tree null device!

    ibot is right - follow simple practices for keeping spam out of your mailbox: don't post it in newsgroups, use a throwaway account for Barnes and Noble, etc. Get familiar with the D key. And don't spend too much time worrying about it.

  • Your IP changes, the network that it connects to changes, but unless they rip out the Ethernet Card and replace it with another one - or unless they reinitialize the MAC addess (something VERY old III-com cards let you do), you have one hardware address which defines what your card is no matter what.

    A few years ago, when I worked in IT, we had a strange portscan coming from one of our internal machines, becasue everything was DHCPed we used the MAC Addr to identify the offender... half a days worth of work, but it got our manager off our backs... only because we had a listing of our MAC Addresses (some old inventory thing) was this usefull... I could tie it to a name (so I could find the machine)... I'd assume that with a couple of extra days, we could have checked the routers out and gone and listened for the same network activity if we didn't know where the machine was located... on a rediculous side...

    I don't necessarily view any of these as practical or useful solutions (even the MAC stuff) its just a thought as to how they might be doing it... finding a MAC address without knowing an IP though would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack...

    We went IP->MAC->TABLE->LOCATION, what you'd have to go with is MAC->IP->ISP->LOG->UID->LOCATION. I don't know the feasability of that...

    An alternate approach (and semi-jokingly)
    X=V*T right?

    So, if you can tell how long it takes to ping a site, and you have some way of measuring the datarate, you can determine the distance between the two computers... Of course, you would need to then perform this on an adjacent node, run the test again, figure out if you are closer or further, and continue until you got as close as possible (backtrack as necessary)... It winds up being a pain in the ass neural network problem where everyone that owns some hardware between here and there would have to agree to be used as some sort of internet sonar...

  • Far worse than it sounds. First a little background. This patent was filed in October 1997 for work done in late 1995 and 96. Juno was at the time offering a free, dialup e-mail service before Internet/Web use was widespread. That explains the via a modem phrase.

    As for it being obvious, yeah, probably. As Architect for FreeMark Communications (a Juno competitor at the time), I "invented" the same thing in early 1995 and we applied for patents prior to Juno's application. Unfortunately, FreeMark folded before our patents were approved, so Juno got it by default.

    Note that Juno's patent covers on-line delivery of ads for off-line viewing. This means it applies to anything that "dials-up", downloads e-mail and ads, then "hangs-up". Services like WebTV fall into this category as possibly do TV devices like the ReplayTV or Tivo PDRs.

    This is just another in a long line of bad patents. And its only getting worse. Check out Mercata's patent [ibm.com] on Dynamic market equilibrium management system, process and article of manufacture (ie, co-op buying), issued just yesterday.

  • Thank you :).

    Althogh technicaly it's 1/2 serius.
    It stops being funy if we say which half.
  • OK so it's a crime to intentionally create a booby trap. However my Dell PII-300 laptop runs so hot normally I can't even hold it in my lap. It's not a stretch of the imagination to "accidentally" have a short to burn up the box and maybe start a toxic battery spill.

  • The idea has to be so obvious that some random guy (optionally with a university education) working from his garage can think it up. At that point, it has to be so obvious its not worth a patent. Whereas, if a highly-paid team of opportun^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H corporate researchers can come up with it, then it must be worth a patent!

    Yeesh... You Americans! ;-)

    (Note: The only serious thing in this post is this paragraph.)


    -RickHunter
  • now there's an opportunity for people to deny email service... just plug the.guy@i.dont.like.com into the spamnet and the guy isnt able to send email to anyone. bad idea.
  • There's a site in Australia called Emailcash [emailcash.com.au] that is doing that, has been for about a year now. I haven't seen many emails from them as yet (maybe one a month at the most) but a few people I know have received $5, $10 or $20 cheques from them.
  • Ahh, but the patent is not on you or I chaining *nix commands together, but on doing this in a business context, hence the term business method patent.
  • There was a /. article a while back about someone whose laptop had distributed.net running on it.. the laptop got stolen... the theif logged on the net with that laptop... the blocks were uploaded... and with a bit of help from the d.net guys they found the IP address, ISP and identity of the bad dude! :)
  • We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term.

    Then /. might want to remove the little spam logo [slashdot.org] before they get sued...

  • Please! Stop publicizing the non-reg links. Every time there's a NYtimes article, someone has to put in the obligatory karma hungry post of "here's the non-reg link". Inevitably, the non-reg hosts that are published get closed down.

    If people have a philosophical problem with NYtimes requiring registration, DON'T READ THE ARTICLE. It's not your God-given right to be able to access their site.
  • I can already do this... I have written procmail recipes that will shutdown my system given the proper set of characters in the subject. So what's so nifty about his patent? I could have it run any arbitrary command that I wanted. Isn't it wonderful how simple things can already be given a bit if *NIX ingenuity. :-)
  • Lojack works great on cars, politicians like to speed, they use them every day, and it has become engrained into society.

    Computers are not so, we have tech illiterate, we have tech clueless and, tech phobic people (I am a tech phobic but... as you can see I still make my living on a computer - Lojack technology is what I fear).

    Lets start with this simple scenario, the record company sees that you are distributing MP3s from your webiste or posting DeCSS or whatever. Under the DCMA they claim to a judge that your site is infringing ontheir rights. You are contacted and asked to cease and desist. Hypothetically, you refuse, calling some sort of 1st amendment (and also recognizing that if you willfuly stop, you are in some way acknowledging that you believe that what you are doing is wrong). Hypothetically, because you have a Lojack system, and this is now a case of some sort of computer crime, the police - the executive branch - have the responsibility of making you comply to the court order. Your computer is Lojacked off.

    Next scenario, some "31337 h4x0r" (did i m1s3p3ll that?), instead of stealing your credit card this week, hacks the Lojack system, knocking off users indiscriminantly so they can get more bandwidth. Your off, the neighbors are off, everybody's off... the computer infrastructure is at a standstill. (Ironically, I'd go for this - LUDDITES REBEL!)

    If this sells, you provide a pinpointable location to the police, you allow them complete control of your access and you give up your personal rights. While your at it, club a baby seal, shoot a bald eagle, and encourage your company to move overseas.

    If you are concerned about your computer being stolen:
    1. put a padlock on it - thats what colleges do, it may not completely prevent it, but it does make it take longer.
    2. put a BIOS password on it - now they have to be tech savy enough to either reset or replace your BIOS.
    3. remove all your external screws and replace them with those uni-directional bathroom stall screws.
    4. use external hard drives only, and cary yours around with you at all times - sleep with it.
    5. install your own GPS and a transmitter on the inside of the case, you find it, you tell the police where it is... leave a true Lojack system out of this.

    Don't encourage the government to track and/or control you.
  • What about your network provider, whose bandwidth is stolen well before the user ever retrieves that email? They incur the costs, and pass it down to their customers ... Meaning that you already paid for your bandwidth, at least partially.

    While each letter is short, it's a matter of scale. Spam contributes a non-trivial amount of load on the 'net, and technological solutions have only helped to a certain degree.

    - Jeff A. Campbell
    - VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])

  • You need to FIND the stolen computer first. (Score:4)

    by itarget ( 168249 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:19PM (#869050)
    I'd love to know how they'd expect us to find a stolen machine in order to issue the "kill" email to it.

    It's going to be on the net with a completely different ISP (if at all), and the new owner is not likely to access your email account even if the password is available; most ISPs I know of block POP3/IMAP connections that aren't coming from their own subnets.

    Unknown IP address, no email connection, no points of contact... so how's this kill email supposed to be anything but a timebomb waiting to go off on the legitimate owner?

    I'm just glad I don't have such an embarassing patent under my name. =)
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
  • seems to me that that secuerty feture would un relible and hackable, And spam with popups? (/me sceams in horrer). I get enough of those blasted things on the internet. getting popup's in e-mail would be bad because it could be used to spread virii and whatnot this link will crash win9x [concon]
  • What's even dumber is that there's a company out there called mypoints that's been doing this for quite some time (though, granted, you have to actually signup to get the server/mailings, sounds like this guy would use it for spamming).
  • The security system would be useful if, for example, your hard drive contained private information or company trade secrets of some sort. Then, yes, you could prevent access to that information. But, if someone stole a computer, wouldn't the first thing they did be to wipe the hard drive so it couldn't be traced? And the computer wouldn't even get the email unless they downloaded your mail and your mailer was set up to save your password.

    I would think some sort of GPS transmitter or other device such that you could track the thing would be more helpful.

  • Sort of. :-)

    A friend of mine had her laptop stolen. She used ICQ on it, so we all added her ICQ UIN to our lists.

    The first time the stolen laptop came online, it automatically booted ICQ (the thief, I would suppose, wasn't too bright or computer literate). Bang! We had the IP address.

    SeanMike
  • Can't we at least find prior art for this bit? usr/bin/fortune ring a bell? :-)

    I don't think that fortune quite fits the bill, since it doesn't download a new version customized to your usage. OTOH, it does sound very, very similar to something that Mattel did, discussed in this Slashdot article [slashdot.org] a couple of months ago.

  • Check out Mercata's patent on "Dynamic market equilibrium management system, process and article of manufacture" (ie, co-op buying), issued just yesterday.

    I feel that this patent is not only as bad as Amazon's one-click patent, but these people have specifically stated that they will be investigating infringements. You can check out the Reuters press release [yahoo.com] for more high level info if you're interested.

    I'd hate to be in mobshop [mobshop.com]'s shoes right about now.

  • If you want freedom of speech online, and advertising is speech, then what the hell are you thinking?

    The actual legal distinction here is that while the First Amendment guarantees you the right to say anything you want, it doesn't guarantee you the right to force anyone to listen to it.

    Thus, you are allowed to publish a newspaper saying whatever you want (with some restrictions: libel, etc.), but you don't have the right to force the New York Times to print your screed against evil mind-hijacking black helicopters on the front page. Or, you can say whatever you want to whoever'll listen, but you don't have the right to take your own PA system to the Super Bowl and broadcast your views to millions of people who just want to watch a football game.

    So, DeCSS is protected by the First Amendment because it is speech that is simply published on the web for anyone who wants to hear it to get it. The right to publish the phrase "Streaming Teen Sex Slumber Fest" with a hyperlink attached is similarly protected by the First Amendment. The "right" to place it in everybody's email inbox is not.
  • Here's the link:
    Distributed.net Captures Laptop Thieves. [slashdot.org]

    There's lots of discussion on there about ways to make this actually work and be useful for this kind of thing. I think it's much better than this email idea. If only they read through there for some ideas first...

    Jason
  • It's seems to me that one day, Amazon said to it's collective self, "Why Not? It couldn't hurt to try." And filed patent applications for everything internet related.

    The patent office followed the established rules and granted them patents. They have a system established that works the way it works. None of that surprises me. What surprises me is that it was all pretty much uncontested. Any arguments to the patents were never brought out in the media, so it at least has the APPEARANCE of being uncontested.

    What also surprises me is that Slashdot continually posts these lame Jon Katz articles, when personally I would try to get an interview with the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, a Deputy Commissioner, or even one of the two Assistant Commissioners. Boy, wouldn't that be informative and useful....
  • Did anyone else notice that the arcicle starts off with patent #5,987,609 and ends with #6,085,231? It's like in the 5 minutes that the article took me to read, over 98,000 patents have been issued! (All for the public good, of course).

    Does anyone else think that the patent system has gone too far from its intended use?.. On a second thought, don't answer that, I know you all agree.

  • No end to spam (Score:3)

    by ibot ( 219510 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @05:56PM (#869061) Homepage
    Spam's not going anywhere. Get a fast internet connection and set up rules to delete and live with the few seconds a day it takes to delete the spam that gets left out by the filter.

    Founder's Camp [founderscamp.com]

  • Then if someone steals your computer while it's active then it will do something nasty possibly involving thermite.
  • Actually, according to Mr. Science, SPAM stands for:
    Scientifically
    Produced
    Animal
    Matter

    This is, of course, the same guy that told us that ballpoint pens are living organisms, who spew ink in response to having their faces dragged across paper.

  • Spam that can lock your computer...

    Or spit more ads at you...
  • This is funny, but some people will think it's not a joke. If so, just remember that creating booby traps and destructive devices (without a license) is a state and/or federal felony.

  • Not as bad as it sounds (Score:4)

    by po_boy ( 69692 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:25PM (#869066)
    The patent [ibm.com] doesn't describe a way to email people ads, it describes a way providers (like Juno) can make you see ads when you're using their email client, but don't have connectivity. It pretty much grabs a tarball of ads when it can and them shows them to you whenever their client is running.

    I understand that many people consider that spam as well, but that kind of spam is at least controlled more easily.

    Here's the abstract of the patent:

    A system for providing scheduled messages to a remote user in a batch oriented system. In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a user creates and/or reads electronic mail locally. While the user creates the electronic mail, a message is displayed to the user on a portion of the local monitor, the message preferably changing in accordance with a local display schedule and stored on a local storage device. The message is preferably targeted to the particular user. When the user is ready to transmit the e-mail created and/or receive e-mail addressed to him, the user's local client establishes a connection via a modem with a remote e-mail server system. The remote e-mail server system not only receives the e-mail transmitted by the user and/or transmits e-mail addressed to the user, but also updates the user's local messages in accordance with a distribution schedule. After the e-mail and message updates are transmitted, the user's local client computer is disconnected from the remote e-mail server system.

    By the way, I wonder why they included via a modem in there. It seems like an unnecessary limitation.

  • Web cam... (Score:4)

    by chowda ( 161971 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:27PM (#869068) Homepage
    If it had a Built In Webcam (tm) you could tak3 pictures and send 7hem to y0u.

    or what ab0ut a fing3rprin7 [securitywatch.com] l0ck? so identific4ti0n c0uld be sent to the p0lic3 when the attempt to 0pen 1t h4pp3n5.

    What if it had lazerz and 5m0ke b0mbs!! wouldn7 that be c0ol? I c4n get s0me p4r7z 4nd h4x0r 0n3 70g37h3r 0u7 0f 5p4r3 m07h3rb04rdz 4nd 9unp0wd3r!!!!!!! 7H47 WUD B3 1337!!!!

    wow... I should go...
  • What about a background process that contains an encrypted file and checks a web server for that file, if it doesn't find it, or that exact encrypted file, then nothing happens. If it finds the file (which you put there when your laptop was stolen) then it prompts you for the pass phrase to stop whatever will happen when it finds that file.

    I think this has been done, if not, it would be trivial to do.

    Oh well, patents suck

  • The patent office can't invalidate a patent, once issued. Only a US Federal Court can do that. Which means that, usually, somebody has to get sued on the patent first.

    It gets worse. In order to intervene with the Patent Office before the patent is issued, you normally have to show standing. You can send the Patent Office prior art to consider, but they aren't bound by it. And normally patent applications _are_not_ made public, so the general public can't find out about it until the patent has been issued.

  • Hey, that's not the only one. The "E-mail devotees like to know whether they have new messages even when they are not online" baffled me. He got a patent for a system that lets you know when you get email? Great, he reinvented 'biff'. It flashes a light on the keyboard? OK, so he invented 'biff | xset led on'.

    Using the paging infrastructure to do it is mildly cool, I guess, although this bit kind of puzzles me: "When an e-mail is received but the recipient is not online, the server matches the e-mail address to a dial-up paging service. A page is sent to a telephone number that results in an alert like a flashing light on the keyboard..." So if you're using what is effectively a pager, why don't you just send a page that says "You've got mail!" instead of hooking the pager to the computer, and then using the pager to flash a light? Hell, I could do that right now with nohup, biff, my pager company's email-to-pager gateway, and my ISP's shell machine.

  • I'm astonished that they gave out a patent for this technique. Administrators (should) already know and use it.

    Isn't novelty a critical requirement for patents (i.e. no previous disclosure) ?

  • Tell this to people in Cuba, China, various areas of Africa, most of the US where holding a differing opinion or lifestyle will get you in the least, beat up, possibly killed. (I'm sure I've left out many coutnries in precious Europe as well.)

    Just because the UN says you're entitled to something doesn't make it so. This is reality, not the UN's version of the way the world should be. Unfortunately freedom only comes to those with the guns/money/power/all of the above. Mostly because they are able to maintain a position of superiority over those who would oppress them. Only egalitarian use of such power allows those without to flex their "freedom".

    Freedom my friends, is an illusion.

    root@foobar# shutdown -h now
    System will be halted.

  • the email-initiated laptop destruct portion of the article reminds me of the public outcry surrounding the evil dangerous Kevin Mitnick, who was described BY THE US COURTS as being "capable of launching nuclear missles by whistling into a telephone".

    so next time some big tech. corporation pisses me off i'll go on the subway and "accidentally" leave my laptop to be stolen, then after reporting it stolen send an e-command which will send out pre-scripted command to my legion of secretly hacked boxes to initiate a DoS against the hated corp.
    And since I reported it stolen, I have a flawless alibi!

    ---
    the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties.
  • Back at the University of Oregon, I had a friend who purchased an expensive PowerBook. Rather than chain it to whatever desk he happened to be at, my friend came upon another solution.

    He created a background image with a large photo of himself and the text: "If the person using this laptop doesn't look like this, its been stolen!" He also put his phone number and "Reward Offered" in it.

  • Why in the world is it my civic duty to do the patent office's job? You let them off for granting obvious patents, and then shift the responsibility on these bad patents to me.

    I'm sorry, but I have better things to do than monitor the patent office's patent applications. And you know what? I shouldn't have to. I pay to have someone do it for me.

    The patent office probably received the applications, couldn't find anything in the library to contest Amazon's (and you ever so cleverly worded "Some obscure company's") claims?

    Sorry, they're not getting off that easy. If they had so much as asked ONE PROFESSIONAL in the industry whether they'd ever heard of HYPERLINKING, they would have been told that not only is there prior art, but that the idea is already in widespread use! Again, why are you letting them off on a plea of innocent ignorance, when their job is not to be ignorant?

    And don't tell me some tear-jerker story about how many patents these poor few people have to go through. Because if that's the case, it's congress's responsibility to hire more examiners. Likewise, that's what I pay them to do.

    As for objection to the patents, would you consider it conspicuous objection if someone really high-profile like, say, the president of a major computer book publisher wrote an open letter to a company who filed an obvious patent like maybe a major online bookseller? And how about the article I read about the Amazon patent in Newsweek a few months later? And then the article I read in my local newspaper a few weeks after that?

    (And I have a couple of patents, and busted my ass to get them... so I can tell you how difficult it is to obtain one of these puppies.)

    Right, I hope this isn't too presumptuous, but I'm assuming you're not the CEO of a multinational corporation with teams of lawyers?

    --
  • Corporations are seen as individuals in the eyes of the law, I do believe.

    Not really corporations, are treated differently in the "eyes of the law" (especially criminal law) from "natural persons"
  • Since you risk a two year sentence if you dont want to give the authorities the key to the PGP encrypted 733n pr0n on your laptop, you can send a killer e-mail instead after THEY come for you...
  • As the response rate drops, the volume will simply expand in order to achieve the same absolute numbers of marks, until eventually some point of diminished returns is achieved to make it more of a burden than its worth.

    One very simple way to push up the "cost" to spammers would be getting rid of as many relays as possible. This includes ISP provided "smarthosts". Anyway RFC974 (std 14) is over 14 years old. So there really isn't any excuse for its lack of support by certain software.
    Also a reduction in dynamic IP addresses (especially with ADSL/ Cable modems where they make little sense at all) would help in enabling email to be tracked back to it's source
  • Last time I looked [sendmail.net], the "San Francisco inventor, Sunil Paul" was also chairman and co-founder of Brightmail [brightmail.com], which has been executing on patent 6,052,709 for quite some time. Brightmail also hosted Spam Summit 2000 [spamsummit.com] in Washington, DC last May.
  • There is one: MAPS-RBL [mail-abuse.org] uses the existing DNS methods to bounce mail coming into a server that matches a domain on the "Realtime Blackhole List."

    Sendmail supports the RBL as a feature in version 8 I believe. I'm not a sendmail hack at all, and I had the whole thing set up in about 10 minutes.

  • "Large values of 2"?

    Apples and pears are green
    Therefore, for sufficiently large amounts of apples,
    Oranges and lemons are green.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • These can't be legal.... (Score:3)

    by redtoade ( 51167 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:30PM (#869084) Homepage Journal
    and here's why:

    US Code Title 35 (regarding patents)

    "Sec. 103. Conditions for patentability; non-obvious subject matter
    (a) A patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made."

    If you all would stop whining, and put together a letter to the patent office detailing why this is obvious to us (since we ARE in the trade), you might be surprised that they pull the damn thing!
  • Hey, that means it doesn't apply to remote display. I gotta patent that fast! I'll be rich!! :-D
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
  • Ah ha, spammer son, you have discovered the dark arts of ad-fu(AAAHHH, blockstackers plug)? I will merely dispatch my procmail ninjas to deal with your insolence!
  • Interesting comment. Perhaps lawsuits are the first step in natural selection toward the end of a species? That might be a bit hopeful for everything from spammers to the RIAA, but who knows?

    Of course, if the RIAA/MPAA are any indication, the spammers will just unite into a giant "standards" organization, get a good set of lawyers to stop spammers that are spamming using their *innovative* techniques for free, and charge people to spam them.
  • all sound ridiculous to me. sure, he may own the ideas, but who's going to implement them?

    ok, let me rephrase this: who in the open-source world is going to implement them? what will the IETF have to say?

    i'm not worried one little bit.
  • intent isnt sufficient. a newspaper is intended to be read, but newspapers are also used to roll up and swat flies. They may not like it, but they cant stop it. If they want a server for authorized use only, protect it.

    //rdj
  • Just use the cyberphunk/cyberphunk logon. No more demographics.
  • EGN has already been there, done that, some 2 years ago. EGN is an ICQ clone by BrainScan specifically targeted at gamers that never really got off the ground. I've beta tested it, so incidentally my EGN ID# is 108, but that all is beside the point. Thing is, EGN displayed a little ad in the top part of the window, usually advertising some gaming site on the BrainScan network. A whole batch of those would be downloaded off the server when you're offline, and the ads would keep cycling when you were offline or lost connection.

    )O(
    Never underestimate the power of stupidity
  • "I shouldn't have to. I pay to have someone do it for me."

    wow... what a wonderful understanding you have of democracy.

    The patent office has a board. they compare patents against already existing patents. That's it. Yes, these patents shouldn't have been approved... and yes, they're behind the times.

    But if you want it changed, talk to them. Write them letters. Get a non-profit organization together to fix it.

    Stop whining about it.

    And my patents went through the typical domestic AND overseas comparison that all patents go through. And I had to go through over 100 pages of why I shouldn't be entitled to these patents presented to me by the patent office... so they're not my friends.

    But, I jumped through the hoops, played by the rules and won. Apparently, unlike you.

    Oh, and the patents were mechanical in nature, and not computer related in any fashion. And I never wanted them, it was insisted on by the company for which I worked. I would have been happy simply publishing my ideas non-profit.

  • Ofcourse I agree with what you're saying 120%, but you have to realise a few things.

    First of all, there's the law of reverse accountability: the more people are available to do something only one person needs to do, the less likely the chance that anybody does it. Everybody knows the stories of somebody drowning, choking, having a heart attack or dying in other odd manners while dozens of people are watching and not doing anything. If there's one person watching, (s)he'll act. Two persons, they probably will too. Three, probably at leat one will. Once you get to twenty, the chance of anybody acting has already dropped below 10%. Now do the math for a guesstimated 20,000 appalled /. readers.

    Second of all, why would the burdain of checking the validity of patents be on the backs of the public? That's what the whole damn patent office is for! Why don't THEY call in independent professionals to check the validity for them? I mean, that patent on hyperlinking is just rediculous. If anybody of that patent office had ever spent any time on the Internet, they'd have seen how widespread hyperlinking is already used.

    Maybe, on top of my first point, nobody is reacting to them because they're so rediculous that anybody with the slightest bit of common sense will be able to see that it wouldn't hold any ground? Why is it that so many American institutions seem so awefully braindead when it comes to anything that has anything even remotely to do with technology?

    )O(
    Never underestimate the power of stupidity

  • Sometimes you don't want to catch the theif (Score:3)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @12:38AM (#869094) Homepage
    Years ago I set up a unix box (at&t 3b2) to auto dail its own number very few days.

    The box was stolen. When I spoke to the police, I mentioned that it would dial if it was hooked up. The phone company helped out and the police found the person who had the machine.

    It turns out the only ones that knew it was stolen were the police and the insurance company.
  • >It's not your God-given right to be able to access their site.

    and it's not the NY times godgiven right to know the demographics of all their readers.

    //rdj
  • <I>The parent is right. If you want freedom of speech online, and advertising is speech, then what the hell are you thinking? How can you think that Spammers should all be attacked, and made illegal, when you think that DeCSS should be free, because it is speech? I, personally, am for DeCSS. I am also 'pro-spam'. I think that spammers have the right to spam as much as you have the right to post a DeCSS mirror.</I>

    This should be common sense, but since that's such an uncommon thing, here's an explanation of the obvious:

    Spam is unsolicitated commercial email sent to countless people who never asked for it. If you want to post it on your website, as real advertisement, nobody should be able to stop you. But if you keep sending it to others who don't want it, then you should be stopped, you can't abuse freedom of speech to harass others. If DeCSS was sent by mail to lots of people, the spammer who does it should be stopped, but DeCSS itself isn't the problem. Spam isn't a problem, either, only the spammers.
  • have them come round for demonstrations and the likes each time they offer it.. and make sure you're not home.

    //rdj
  • There is a product called the "Thief-cam." It is a software that records any change in picture, so you have a digital picture of anyone approaching your computer.
  • How can you think that Spammers should all be attacked, and made illegal, when you think
    that DeCSS should be free, because it is speech?


    The difference is obvious; the DeCSS authors aren't trying to insert something into someone else's private mailbox against the wishes of the mailbox owner.

    Spammers are trespassers, plain and simple. Fighting spam has nothing to do with free speech, this is about the right to control one's own property.
  • Actually, I think we should tax spam to death. Put the IRS in charge of collecting the tax.

    In addition I think there should be a spammer tax id number included with every spam sent out, so that everyone can bill the spammer as appropriate for loss of bandwidth.

    Only when the cost of spam is higher than the cost of doing business, then will the spam dis-appear

    (gotta find a better way to say that)

  • That is to say: Bury a watchdog that recognizes a phone-from number different than yours, calls a dedicated police line, reports itself stolen and reports the call-from number so the police can come and bring your baby back to you.
  • Not as bad?? To me, it looks like just another mailbox, specially processed by another part of the mailer. Innovative, huh?
    By the way, I wonder why they included via a modem in there. It seems like an unnecessary limitation.
    Bad "inventors". If you do something like this, but "via the net", they can still point to your users with modem, and sue you for infringement...

  • Lojack (Score:2)

    by jjr ( 6873 )
    A lojack type device would be better. Think about it when the computer turns on no matter where it is it send a signal and you can decide on what you can to it. Let the police capture then guy who had it. no e-mail no internet needed.
  • the last patent seems to detail simply sticking a text-to-speach/speach-to-text module into an email client.

    So
    cat /dev/microphone | speach-to-text | email_client someone@somewhere.com

    gets you a patent? surely there would be plenty of prior art of being read your email - isn't that what email clients for the blind do? and dictation isn't a new idea either, don't the ads for it mention dictating email?

    it doesn't sound very novel to me.

    the other patents don't sound to great either...

  • Re:Not as bad as it sounds (Score:4)

    by stevens ( 84346 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:51PM (#869105) Homepage
    A system for providing scheduled messages to a remote user in a batch oriented system.

    Can't we at least find prior art for this bit? usr/bin/fortune ring a bell? :-)

    Actually, this seems too obvious to be properly awarded. Consider if you were given the following requirements:

    • must display ads, and cycle every x seconds
    • must not rely on persistent network connection

    Under such circumstances, would not any reasonably competent programmer be able to suggest downloading several ads while online and cycling them via a timer in the local program? How flipping obvious do these have to get before they're not considered 'inventions'?

    This stuff gets my goat because it makes a mockery out of true inventors.

    Steve

  • Re:No end to spam (Score:3)

    by B1 ( 86803 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @07:33PM (#869110)
    Of course, this couldn't possibly be a troll...no way...

    I too am for DeCSS, but I have trouble seeing how anybody could be pro-spam.

    The big problem with spam is that the cost is borne by the recipient and their ISP, not the originator. This isn't like the bulk-rate mail you get in your mailbox (paid for by the sender). This is like getting telemarketers on your cell phone while roaming.

    Here's how it works...

    The spammer gets their hands on a mass email program which fakes his Email address and message headers, finds an open SMTP relay, and fires away--whether he sends 100 or 100,000 Emails to carefully harvested Email addresses or randomly generated hotmail addresses, his cost is the same--the cost of a throwaway ISP account or stolen passowrd--negligible.

    The recipient pays for their ISP connection (possibly hourly), and outside of North America, he also pays toll charges for his phone line. After paying to download an inbox full of spam, the recipient now has to delete the spam by hand, or install anti-spam software/filters and hope the spammers haven't found yet another way around his filter. Multiply that by 1000 or 100,000 recipients and you're talking about a lot of wasted time, bandwidth, storage, and money.

    The recipient's ISP pays for mail server processing and storage capacity, a good portion of which is wasted on:
    • Storing spam in the customer's mailbox
    • Possibly running a spam filter on every incoming Email message
    • Sending bounce messages for all the spam sent to bogus / random Email addresses

    ...not to mention the staffing resources wasted investigating cases of spam.

    In many ways, spammers are the parasites of the internet. They move from throwaway account to throwaway account, stealing service and wasting resources, to deliver their message to people that do not want to read it, or pay their ISP to store/deliver it.

    These guys need their rights protected? What about *MY* rights? Why is the burden on me to set up filters or admit defeat and change my Email address just to get off a list?

    I concede that anti-spam legislation must be drafted carefully, because poorly written legislation could inadvertently take away rights of legitimate Emailers. We shouldn't *NEED* legislation for this kind of thing, but we can already conclude the honor system isn't working.

    Never mind banning spam...What solution would you propose that would allow spam, but offset the costs of spamming back from the recipients to the original spammer? And how much less spam would we see afterwards?

    P.S.
    Your position is pro-spam, but your Email address doesn't show up in your messages, where it might be harvested by spammers...why is that?

  • Re:Stop publicizing the non-reg links (Score:3)

    by radja ( 58949 ) on Wednesday August 09, 2000 @02:01AM (#869111) Homepage
    I never paid for newspapers I read for free in a coffee-shop, newscafe or bar. I dont see why I should start now. so I'm getting for free what I always got for free. If NYT didn't intend for the non-reg servers to be used they wouldn't have them.

    //rdj
  • How does *that* deserve a patent? My *dog* could write that program!

  • Finally, a legitimate use for Pentium III serial numbers!

  • Re:No end to spam (Score:4)

    by phantomlord ( 38815 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:56PM (#869119) Journal
    If you want freedom of speech online, and advertising is speech, then what the hell are you thinking? How can you think that Spammers should all be attacked, and made illegal, when you think that DeCSS should be free, because it is speech?

    I'm no lawyer but the difference is that people(Americans anyway) have the right to free speech as protected by the First Amendment because it is vital part of individual freedom to allow them to speak their mind about any topic they wish. Businesses are a created entity allowed under law and have no inherent rights - only what the government grants them. The question is then, does government grant the same freedom of speech to businesses that it does to individuals and furthermore, why should/shouldn't it? Someone will probably argue that it is a person working for the business which is actually speaking BUT the key is they are speaking for the business, not for themself.

  • End Spam Fast! (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @06:57PM (#869120) Homepage Journal
    All you have to do is configure procmail to reject any E-Mails not encrypted to your public key. If everyone did this, mass E-Mailing would require enough hardware to make spam unprofitable and the RBL would block the spammer out within the first couple of thousand addresses in his list, if one was so foolish as to try.
  • Basicaly numbers get rounded somewhere.
    2.4 wold get rounded to 2.
    2.4 + 2.4 = 4.8
    of course 4.8 gets rounded _up_ to 5

    so yes. For suficently large values of 2
    2 + 2 dose = 5


  • This is a continuing conversation for me. There was a reply I typed up a couple of days ago in the Sega Shutting Down Hundreds of ROM sites [slashdot.org] article that best sums it up.

    Your perceptions need adjustment, for what you find "obvious" is completely inaccurate. I have been reading for over two years now. I have been responding too, but no one listens.


    I remember the patents to which you refer, and yes the patent office gave them patents. But that was because they weren't contested by anyone. You should read section 135 of Title 35 (Interferences). It speaks of the appeal board. "Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences shall determine questions of priority of the inventions and may determine questions of patentability." Meaning you boneheads could have gotten together and appealed the patent on the grounds previously mentioned.


    But you were too busy patting yourselves on the backs for being so "intellectually superior." Let me ask, of all the people who read Slashdot, have any of you actually written to the Patent Office to complain? (And I have a couple of patents, and busted my ass to get them... so I can tell you how difficult it is to obtain one of these puppies.)


    The problem here is that you all just whine, but don't do anything. The patent office probably received the applications, couldn't find anything in the library to contest Amazon's (and you ever so cleverly worded "Some obscure company's") claims... and accepted the damn things. If you were so APPALLED, you should have immediately collected your evidence on why the patents were non-justified, and sent your findings to the Patent Office.


    It's not the patent office's fault that you all are lazy. But if you want to stop them, you'll have to be MUCH better informed than you are.



  • Re:No end to spam (Score:5)

    by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @07:04PM (#869127) Homepage Journal
    people(Americans anyway) have the right to free speech as protected by the First Amendment

    I can see how that relates to Spam... wasn't it Jackson who said "Give me Liberty or Give Me All Teen XXX Babes Live!!!!!"?

  • It's going to be on the net with a completely different ISP...

    If a laptop has a dialup connection, then in the hands of a non-tech-savvy thief, it's going to dial its owner's ISP's dialup number, which will work anywhere in the same area code, and maybe in a much larger area if the laptop is configured in anticipation of mandatory 11-digit dialing.

  • Wait a minute... does this mean that melissa and iloveyou were... spam?

  • Top Five: (Score:3)

    by SlashGeek ( 192010 ) <petebibbyjr@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @07:36PM (#869130)
    Top five reasons that Spam should be banned:

    5. Vegitarians shouldn't have to deal with meat products getting mailed to them.

    4. Handeling pork products violates many religions.

    3. Nobody really knows what the hell "SPAM" stands for anyway.

    2. Spam is the leading cause of traded lunches in elementry schools in the US.

    And the #1 reason Spam should be banned:
    Spam, like its E-mail counterpart, has very little wholesome content, and is mostly junk fillers.

  • So it's *MY* problem if I'm getting unanted bulk mail that is costing me money to receive?

    At least bulk mail is paid for by the sender--it's still an annoyance, but unlike spam, it's neither trespassing nor theft of service. The postage paid to deliver it helps subsidize the cost of regular first-class postage, and in the thick of winter, it'll keep your house warm.

    As for filtering, Earthlink didn't just pull Spaminator out of a hat...it took them time to design/write/customize it, and continual ongoing maintenance (as spammers find new ways through). It uses CPU capacity to process and filter Email, requiring Earthlink to buy a more powerful mail server than they would otherwise need. Somebody has to bear Earthlink's costs of filtering out this unwanted crap...guess who that usually is? (pssst...not the spammer).

    A technical solution is not the fix--even if it worked perfectly, it would only mask the annoyance facter. The resources are still wasted, and the costs are still borne by the recipient.

  • I hope the patent stands! (Score:5)

    by stevens ( 84346 ) on Tuesday August 08, 2000 @05:58PM (#869134) Homepage

    I hope many, many means of spamming are discovered and patented! Then there will be:

    • a disincentive for others to use that way of spamming, and
    • organizations (spammers themselves) suing other spammers to stop spamming in certain, infringing ways!

    I say, let the spammers make it as hard as they can for each other. No skin off our nose, and it may actually reduce the amount of spam out there.

    Steve

  • Don't Turn Your Computer On, or it May Turn Itself Off
  • The ability to send an email to a computer, have it erase its hard drive, send out additional emails so you know it was successful, and then stop the machine from working.

    Oh, wait! We already have that :-)

    Its called M$ Outlook.

    I understand Pitr is working on a linux port this week :-)

    the AC
  • A theif was caught at my former employer when pictures of him stealing from a coworker's cube were taken by the victim's computer.

    There was a tremendous amount of activity on the images almost every night. People apparently muck around in other peoples' stuff a lot.

  • If you all would stop whining, and put together a letter to the patent office detailing why this is obvious to us (since we ARE in the trade), you might be surprised that they pull the damn thing!

    You obviously haven't been here long. You obviously are still under the false impression that the patent office give one-half of a rat's ass (yes, that would be one rat butt cheek) whether it's patents are actually non-obvious.

    For reference, read up on:
    • Amazon's now-famous one-click patent.
    • Amazon's not as well known affiliate program patent
    • Some obscure company's (I don't remember who) patent on hyperlinking. Post-HTML, of course

    There are several more I can't think of at the moment...

    --
  • Even if they don't it makes no sense to limit the speech of someone simply because they are working for a company.

    I'm not saying limit someone's speech regarding the company they work for, rather that a person sending spam is acting as an agent on behalf of the company thus the spam is speech of the company rather than the person who sent it.

  • The ability to send an email to a computer, have it erase its hard drive, send out additional emails so you know it was successful, and then stop themachine from working.

    Oh, wait! We already have that :-)

    Its called M$ Outlook.

    I understand Pitr is working on a linux port this week :-)

    Actually he finished and released [userfriendly.org] it. Poor trusting movie watchers. :-}

  • Yeah, they got rid of the other two. But you can use this new one(and try to keep this a little more low-key, huh guys?):

    http://channel.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/bi ztech/articles/07pate.html
  • But, if someone stole a computer, wouldn't the first thing they did be to wipe the hard drive so it couldn't be traced?

    You'd be surprised at how often stollen computers don't have their HDs wiped. Sold as is with all files and data intact is the general rule. You have to understand, wiping the HD will likely make the unit unuseable as the fence dosen't have the OS disks needed to reload it.

  • I think the idea for a central spam filter that notifies lots of other machines on the net that intern notify others is pretty neat. Could implement kind of like DNS?

    Perhaps better though would be a co-operative system that did just that. If you have your own personal spam list, what if you had your service tell other services when you received something that you considered spam, and they could then filter. Only you would get like spam conflicts where sometimes you want that particular, but hey we're engineers we can solve anything right?! ;)

  • Sounds like a nifty idea, but it does rely on the thief using your email address, which isn't guaranteed. It also has the potential for someone else to send the triggering email, thus wiping your system...

    -----------------------

  • the difference is not corporations vs. individuals. It's the difference between "Freedom to speak" and "Freedom to forece everyone to listen".

    You're perfectly free to stand on a soapbox in a park and say whatever you want - just as much as I'm free not to listen to you.

    Looking ad advertisments this means: your freedom to publish anything including advertisments on the web should be guaranteed - this does NOT mean that you may force me to view it by sending it as spam however.

  • Hmmm... if the thief left you his email address before he stole your computer you'd be all right.
  • iANAL

    The abstract, background, and preferred embodiment sections of a patent have little if any legal force. Only the claims define the scope of the patent. And my Dr. Mario clone [8m.com] (like all Dr. Mario clones) falls well within the claims of Nintendo's patent 5,265,888 on Dr. Mario.


    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

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