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Spam Patents

MailBlocks sues Earthlink over Anti-Spam Tech 336

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."
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MailBlocks sues Earthlink over Anti-Spam Tech

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  • I did that (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:09AM (#5998245)
    Years ago... 1997 to be exact.

    Mailblocks has no right on that patent.
    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:25AM (#5998359)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I am next! Every time I knock on someones' door I am in violation of their challenge/response patent. Same goes with calling someone on the telephone (assuming they answer).
    • Re:I did that (Score:5, Informative)

      by otmar ( 32000 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @10:03AM (#5998606) Homepage
      Checking my mail archive shows that have such a procmail rule since at least early '96.

      In fact, I posted it to Usenet [google.com] later in '96. I'm pretty sure that you can find lots of similar prior art in the google usenet archive.

      /ol

      • Re:I did that (Score:4, Informative)

        by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @10:13AM (#5998678) Homepage
        Checking my mail archive shows that have such a procmail rule since at least early '96.

        John Mallery at the MIT AI Lab used the mechanism in 1992 for the political participation project.

        There are probably even earlier uses. Lots of mailing lists were using the idea simply to validate addresses.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Challenge-Response authentification routines in place, but not activated, years ago, can you say in 1993? Besides, the CONCEPT of challenge-response is older than dirt! "Halt!!, Who goes there?!" "Able Baker Carley!" "What is the password!?" "Blow Me You Patenting Bastards!" "That was the improper response!" BANG BANG. So some yokel in the patent office let this shit slip through? Naturally, they are public servants.
    • Re:I did that (Score:5, Insightful)

      by letxa2000 ( 215841 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @12:49PM (#5999775)
      If I were Earthlink, I'd let Mailblocks keep their patent. Challenge-response was probably a reasonable solution half a decade ago. Filters have improved since then and with a well-maintained filter list of domains PLUS a working Bayesian filter there is no reason to make innocent senders go through the hassle of verifying themselves while at the same time doubling spam traffic (one spam received = one challenge response issued, so instead of a billion spams per day we have a billion spams plus a billion challenge/response mails).

      C/R technology is inconvenient and obsolete. I'm not even sure why Earthlink decided to implement such an obsolete approach that has the side effect of doubling the amount of emails related to spam.

  • by yorkrj ( 658277 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:10AM (#5998252) Journal
    ...and this ladies and gentlement is why the spammers win.
    • So if no one elese but Mailblocks can implement a decent anti-spam response due to patents. then mailblocks has a perfect protection racket. start spamming everyone to sell....anti-spam software.
    • Well, if it's really cutting edge, then they deserve a patent for it, don't they?
    • What?! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      One patent lawsuit and we get "This is why the spammers win"? I mean, I hate software patents as much as the next guy, but spammers have been winning for a decade now. I don't believe this patent suit is to blame.

      No... It's obvious that the spammers are winning because... they have big penisses. We can't do anything because of our tiny little penisses. Spammers have huge, gargantuan penisses. That's why they're winning (Apologies to South Park...)

  • by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:12AM (#5998261) Journal
    "Mailblocks is suing Earthlink , claiming patents on Challenge-Response"

    If Earthlink responds to this legal challenge, they'd be in violation of this Mailblocks patent? A nice merry-go-round.

    I think I'll patent these as well, just in case:
    1. Pleading guilty.
    2. Pleading innocent.

    and so on...
    • Oh that means that I can still patent; 3. Pleading No Contest 4. Pleading not guilty by reason of insanity
    • Enough already ... I've patented the concept of protecting menial IP through government assigned monopolies. All patent holders must pay me royalties for reading/disclosing/enforcing their patents or risk my legal wrath. I've got $27 bucks in my wallet and I'm NOT afraid to use it. Think about it, do you really want Lionel Hutz knocking at YOUR door? Well then pay up!!!
    • by Azghoul ( 25786 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @10:44AM (#5998897) Homepage
      So, a patent can tell a company to stop doing something even if they develop it themselves?

      I'm curious.

      If you patent A, then I come up with A on my own time, for use in my own company, you can still tell me to stop using it?

      I mean, I guess Earthlink is advertising that they're going to be using a challenge/response system, but they're not selling it, are they? I don't understand how the patent system even applies here.

      Someone help, my head hurts. :)

    • I'll bet the patent office wouldn't allow you to patent just plain pleading innocent or guilty.

      However I'll bet that they would allow "method for pleading innocent to an internet lawsuit"

  • Because of them, I have missed out on thousands of opportunities to rid myself of my tiny wiener.

    I could be a mile long by now! You'll pay Mailblocks, YOU WILL PAY!

  • by LordYUK ( 552359 ) <jeffwright821.gmail@com> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:14AM (#5998272)
    Because all the "good guys" are stabbing each other in the back trying to be the one that fixes this problem.

    I say we need to send the One (a large man with a nail bat) to the Source (the companies that PAY the spammers) and let him Disseminate the Code (splatter their heads against the wall).

    Yeah, I saw Reloaded three times since last Wednesday... so sue me. =P
  • $118 Million (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cubyrop ( 647235 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:16AM (#5998282)
    From this number, would I be wrong in assuming that there are many people besides spammers themselves who have no problem at all with spam remaining legislation-free? I had no idea anti-spam was such a lucrative business, and I suspect many others hadn't either.
    • Hence the fight over this. Can you image if Challenge Response were part of say, outlook or built into Longhorn or WebTV, and no-one lese could use this fundmental approach? very valuable indeed.
  • Software patents. (Score:5, Informative)

    by MartinG ( 52587 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:16AM (#5998283) Homepage Journal
    Don't you just love software patents.

    Europeans, contact your MEP now or else we will have this stupidity as well. The vote is next month and it looks most likely to give the go ahead on allowing software patents in Europe.

    I have contacted my MEP and am trying to set up a personal meeting with him. Please do the same. There aren't many of us doing this kind of thing.
    • EU Software patents. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Martin Spamer ( 244245 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:41AM (#5998475) Homepage Journal
      I second this.

      Brits can find out who your MEP is by entering your postcode here [upmystreet.com]. Set aside any personal feeling you may have on the EU, ranting against it is more like to do harm than good.

      Some ideas point to raise.

      Point out you are a IT professional and you are writing in that capacity as well as a voter.

      US companies have been allowed to accumulate large number of software patents for 30 years by a poorly managed US patent system.

      European Companies will be forced to pay royalties to US corporations, even ideas they invented, but patented in the US.

      European Companies can be prevented from competing in some areas by patents, either by cost or denial of access to certain technology.

      Patents prevents fair competition and promote monopolies.

      An expansion of the patents system in the EU to cover computer software is extremely damaging to the European IT sector.

      Point out that software is about maths and numbers, if you cannot patent algebra B or numbers so why software.

      If possible point out a simple example of a patent in your particular field, even better if you can rightly claim it was invented in Europe but patented in the US.

  • by djh101010 ( 656795 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:16AM (#5998284) Homepage Journal
    Didn't Jeff Bezos {amazon.com} invent that? I'm pretty sure he holds the patent for it...
  • by MoZ-RedShirt ( 192423 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:18AM (#5998298)
    From the article: "Mailblocks developed and owns patents for Challenge/Response"

    They will sue me as soon as they find out that I dial in to my ISP using the CHAP protocol.
    RedShirt
  • by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:18AM (#5998301) Homepage Journal
    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?

  • by stanmann ( 602645 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:18AM (#5998302) Journal
    I know that challenge response has been around longer than thatPRIOR ART.
    And challenging Earthlink is a bit foolish. All Earthlink needs to do is come up with the hundreds of thousands of examples of Challenge-Response systems in use as early as 1995 in order to verify an actual person was on the other side.
  • by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:18AM (#5998313)

    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...

    • by theLOUDroom ( 556455 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:31AM (#5998393)
      challenge-reply is a VERY half-baked idea.

      How so?
      It seems like a great solution to me (coupled with a whitelist).

      I'd put all my friends on the whitelist. When anyone not on that list emails me for the first time, they get an automated message back telling them how to respond. If they do this, the message gets through and they go on my whitelist. If not, they have already been informed that their message will not reach me.

      How is this half-baked!?
      • by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:49AM (#5998518)
        challenge-reply is a VERY half-baked idea.

        How so?

        Well, try reading the top rated comments in the last Earthlink-does-challenge-reply business slashdot story. A few of the ideas that occured to me(with varying degrees of seriousness/risk/whatever):

        • increased load on mail servers
        • everyone's challenge-response system will be different and incompatible
        • spammers will figure out how to reply to them
        • businesses won't be able to send legitimate automated email(shipping notifications, confirmations, etc.) because everyone will be using different challenge-response systems. You think the average earthlink user is going to be smart enough to even REALIZE they need to whitelist a business, much less what address?
        • Loops when dealing with any of the dozens upon dozens of mailing list software, autoresponders, and legitimate automated email systems. Remember when one of the relay testing groups got a big surprise when their relay testing crashed some obscure mail server? You simply never know how your stuff is going to "play" with the rest of the world's email processing/sending software.
        • by sqlrob ( 173498 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @10:05AM (#5998619)
          You forgot:

          DDOS against whoever's name happens to be in the From line of a spam

        • by theLOUDroom ( 556455 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @10:33AM (#5998825)
          • increased load on mail servers
          The load increase is manageable. Challenge response would only need to happen a small percentage of the time for valid email. For spam, yes up to 1 email would be sent per spam recieved. I think the internet can handle that. It's not like there are going to be large attachments or anything.
          • everyone's challenge-response system will be different and incompatible
          That's the whole point of the challenge response system. The idea is that the message can only get though if an actual person is willing to sit there and read how to make it get through. If if isn't worth this unknown sender's time to figure out how to make the email get through, they're probably just wasting my time anyways.

          The other idea would be to make the response be the results of a computationally expensive task. With a new RFC, the format for this could be standardized, and it could all be made totally invisible to the user. Since CPU power costs money, it would still be effective at reducing spam.
          • businesses won't be able to send legitimate automated email(shipping notifications, confirmations, etc.) because everyone will be using different challenge-response systems. You think the average earthlink user is going to be smart enough to even REALIZE they need to whitelist a business, much less what address?
          First off, they can just whitelist the whole domain of the business. Hey, the could even tell it to auto-whitelist any email addresses in that domain from which they recieve email in the next 2 hours. Second, yes I do think people will be able to maintain a whitelist. Using a whitelist would be voluntary, so if you can't use it, you don't have to. Once they get fed up with the amount of spam they're getting, it will provide them with enough incetive to learn. Most people can learn how to do simple things with their computer, they typically just don't see it as worth their time to do so. Beside you could make the whole "it's hard to use" argument about the WWW itself. People just eventually decided if was worth learning to use.
          • Loops when dealing with any of the dozens upon dozens of mailing list software, autoresponders, and legitimate automated email systems.
          Other that implementing some basic sanity checking, these would be flaws on their end of the system. The should be no message I can send an automated mail system to make it go apeshit. All the challenge response software would need to do is ignore replies the weren't even attempting to respond correctly. This could be done for N hours after recieving the first message from a source.


          The only really big problem I can see is what happens if someone sends out spam with your email address. It seems like a potential DOS-style attack. It seems that there's an obvious solution to this: Add a standard string to be include in all response requests.
          This way your mail software can check to see if you've sent mail to that address, and ignore it if you haven't.


          I looked at the comments in that story, but it still don't see why this idea is half baked. One of us must be missing something.
          • "For spam, yes up to 1 email would be sent per spam recieved. I think the internet can handle that."

            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

        • While I agree there are issues, I disagree with one or two of the points above:
          • Load on mail servers should go down, as it is less overhead to look up if sender S is on recipient R's white list already than it is to run 75 content filter algorithms and compute the score, etc. And you can do it before you actually accept the body of the email.
          • Your second point and your third point don't play together well -- if they're all different, it makes it much harder for spammers to reply to them.
          • If spammers fi
        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The first thing I thought of when I read this was "How are mail list posts handled?" The first message from your underwater basket weaving list comes in, Mailblocks sends out it's challenge, it's sent to the entire mail list but the actual user never sees the challenge because Mailblocks won't let posts from the mail list through.

      And I thought the people who have vacation responders on their email accounts were bad. Talk about a vicious circle.

  • by MrJerryNormandinSir ( 197432 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:19AM (#5998316)
    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.
  • Just Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by fobbman ( 131816 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:19AM (#5998319) Homepage
    Why can't it be that the penis enlarger companies are the ones that are suing each other into bankruptcy over patent infringement?

  • by ptbarnett ( 159784 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:20AM (#5998327)
    TMDA [tmda.net] implemented the challenge-response mechanism long before Mailblocks came on the scene. Would that invalidate Mailblock's patent?

    Besides, TMDA works, while Mailblocks doesn't. I grabbed a Mailblocks account while I could get a good username, and found that Mailblocks doesn't send out the challenge: it just discards my test messages as spam after 14 (?) days.

    • Mailblocks' patent dates from 1997. Unfortunately TMDA wasn't around then.

      I'm sure there's other prior art though.
    • If so I hope Earthlink sues Mailblocks and its execs out of existence. I hate childish corps and any members of the board that thinks these type of actions are justified. They should be shot on site, but I'll settle for life in prison, stripped of all their valuable possessions and enslaved to do repetitively mindless physical labor for the rest of their days.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:24AM (#5998356)

    "hello?"
    "Hi is this Joe Smith of 104 spammark rd.?"
    "May i ask who is calling?"
    "No, you may not, we've patented the process where you ask who your talking to then decide wethere you want to continue communication, we can license that technology to you though for the special low price of $1 per use."
  • Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Syberghost ( 10557 ) <syberghost@@@syberghost...com> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:26AM (#5998362)
    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.
    • Re:Excellent (Score:2, Informative)

      by brj ( 665333 )
      I'm using a challenge/response system from Qurb, Inc. [qurb.com] that is smart enough to know that a message is to a mailing list and then it won't send out a challenge to the entire list. It will just sideline the message until you approve it and then it knows that anything to that mailing list is ok.
  • ASK software (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pcjunky ( 517872 )
    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.
    • Re:ASK software (Score:2, Informative)

      by et289807 ( 311853 )
      This is a very good point... Now my thinking could be wrong, but when MailBlocks "patented" their idea didn't they have to *prove* they were the first to come up with it/it didn't already exist? Thats how I thought patents worked anyways.

      Well, according to MailBlocks: "...founded in July 2002 by Phil Goldman, a former Microsoft vice president and a founder of WebTV. "

      And according to ASK (Active Spam Killer): "© 2001-2003 by Marco Paganini"

      In other words, Earthlink is not infringing on any "ideas"
  • Obvious Prior Art (Score:5, Informative)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:31AM (#5998395) Homepage
    Challenge-Response is the fundamental security mechanism for TCP [ietf.org], the reliable communication protocol used for everything from the web to SMTP itself. During the three way handshake between client and server, each sends the other a randomly generated 32 bit number, and each refuses to communicate unless that number is successfully returned intact. If either the client or the server fakes its identity, it will fail to receive the required value -- one of four billion -- and will thus be unable to complete the handshake.

    At least, that's the thinking. Perfect security this ain't, but please -- the spec for TCP came out in 1981. TCP's security technique entirely encapsulates challenge-response systems for SMTP -- the same mitigation of false addresses through an inability to respond, the same caching of credentials once a response is received (you can think of a "trusted address" as a permanently open socket, with all the management headaches that implies!), etc.

    In short, this is nothing new. But of course, we already knew that :-)

    Yours Truly,

    Dan "I Do Way Too Much Stuff With TCP" Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com
    • On a dark and rainy night, a shadowy figure walks slowly down the piers of the harbour city. Stopping at a stack of crates, he pulls out a cigarette.

      "The smelly donkey walks a funny walk," a voice whispers from the shadows.

      "My rat has a scaly tail," replies the shadowy figure.

      "Okay," the first speaker announces, leaving the protective shadows. "I have this package for you.."

      Challenge - response, no? Everything else, encryption etc, is just add on. So, sounds to me like the patent fits the "obvious" crit
  • Spam filtering companies are proliferating at a rate almost akin to the growth of spam itself, and not all of them are going to survive.

    Remember when there was a similar growth in companies delivering anti-virus solutions? Remember when several of them were caught propogating viruses?

    Given how little it costs to Spam - especially if you're willing to accept a response rate of ZERO - I wonder how long it will be before some of these companies start hiring people to send out spam; spam tailored so that the anti-spam company has patented the most feasible defense!

    Help make virtual black mail legal.
  • by DarkBlackFox ( 643814 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:35AM (#5998430)
    This exactly what's wrong with corporate America (a.k.a. the "legal system") Rather than willingly share technology and ideas, people hoarde whatever they can in the hopes of becoming the next overnight Joe Millionaire. The problem is, the success of the one in no way benefits the many. In fact, the contrary is true- this sort of crap hurts the industry more than anything. Meanwhile consumers are complaining to their providors, threatening to take their business elsewhere, crippling an already painful market. If people weren't so damn selfish, and freely shared concepts and ideas (e.g. Open Source), without the need to excessively profit, imagine where technology would be.
    • If the patent/trade secret system didn't exist, you could look forward to "All your inventions are belong to MegaCorp".

      Anything you think up, be it a physical device or piece of code or whatever, can be produced cheaper and marketted more effectively by a large corporation.

      It's a good sign that it's little upstart nobodies running around suing each other. It's flawed, but it's better than one big company owning everything.
      • Then tell me, how would a MegaCorp become a MegaCorp without patents in the first place? Where would MS be if it couldn't "protect" it's valued Windows code? Where would any major corp be if it couldn't patent what it built it's success on?

        Preportionally, where would the legal system be without large corps? Would Napster still exist if there was no RIAA to shoot it down? Would Napster even be created if music wasn't protected and procured by major corporations?
        • Inventor invents widget A.
          Inventor take widget A to factory to be mass produced.
          Factory owner say "Hey, this is a neat invention. screw you, I'll make it at sell it myself"
          Factory owner makes another million, on its way to mega-corpdum.
          Inventor decides never to invent anything, or never tell anyone about an invention. Society suffers.

          Get it?
          • Exactly, now you're starting to understand.

            This is why we have to get rid of money.

            Don't you see the real problem? Its human nature plain and simple to act stupidly. Get rid of the carrot and they won't have any incentive to act stupidly. Plus it will give us scientists and people who really do use our brains the ability to educate the rest of you when you stop worrying about so much about money and jobs and thinks that really don't matter.

            We could use civilization and society to give everyone everyth
  • by will_die ( 586523 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:38AM (#5998450) Homepage
    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.
  • by AwesomeJT ( 525759 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:38AM (#5998454) Homepage
    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.
  • Chilling (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CmdrSanity ( 531251 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:38AM (#5998456) Homepage
    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.
  • If it was complete, there wouldn't be any comments here, now would there?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:41AM (#5998482)
    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.
    • Unless there is a proprietary hardware behind or proprietary technology to make such hardware - ALL SOFTWARE IS ALL ABOUT CONCEPT. In other words, in software there is nothing else but concept. Either it a concept of a single bit, or the concept of their combinations, or it's a concept of language: symbols and their meening.

      US patent system is going to screw whole US economy more and more. Soon, any software development will be outsourced offshore not b/c of the price of american human resource (americans

  • by MickLinux ( 579158 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:50AM (#5998520) Journal
    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.
  • by originalhack ( 142366 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:50AM (#5998529)
    Unfortunately, Mailblocks does not cite their patent number and it is not listed under either of the principles' names.

    Possible prior art:

    Patent Filed December 1998....
    US6546416: Method and system for selectively blocking delivery of bulk electronic mail.
    Owned by Infoseek.

    TMDA on Sourceforge, April 2001
  • Prior Art (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bruha ( 412869 )
    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.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:54AM (#5998546)
    Mailblocks has previous filed suits against Mail Frontier [mailfrontier.com] -- makers of the Matador plugin for outlook and outlook express, Digiportal [digiportal.com] -- makers of ChoiceMail, and Spam Arrest [spamarrest.com] who offers end user and enterprise services that directly compete with Mailblocks.

    Recent articles haven't mentions Digiportal or Mail Frontier, so it is possible that they have come to an agreement with Mailblocks.

    Full article (dated 4/05/03) from the San Jose Mercury News [siliconvalley.com].

  • by jdreed1024 ( 443938 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:58AM (#5998574)
    Here's an example of challenge-response from 1999,before Mailblocks was even incorporated:

    Kyle: Who is it?
    Gregory: I'm here for "La Resistance".
    Kyle: What's the password?
    Gregory: I don't know.
    Kyle: Guess.
    Gregory: Uh.. bacon?
    Kyle: OK.

    See? Challenge-response. Worked perfectly.

  • I have registered the patent for "Any technological solution to anything. Ever." I expect to be really rich, really soon.
  • by dheltzel ( 558802 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @10:01AM (#5998588)
    in the $118 million dollar anti-spam solutions market

    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!!

  • by rollingcalf ( 605357 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @10:04AM (#5998612)
    So now somebody can patent a spam-blocking technique, then bombard you with spam which you can't legally stop because they have patented spam blocking. Then a virus creator will patent virus detection and removal, so you can't legally eliminate their viruses. And they can do the same thing with ad blocking, firewalls, and the list goes on.

    The evils brought on society by software patents far outweigh the good brought by the 1% of useful software patents.
  • The ISP is the only one (besides the user, which we won't dare bring into this picture) that can effectively block spam.

    That being said, it is every ISP's job to do whatever they can to block whatever spam that might hit their users. I certainly don't pay my isp to let spam pass through. To put it another way, I don't pay my DSL provider for crappy service, outages, and ping fluctuations. Same thing here only theres a company that sees a big name like Sprint but only sees $$$.

  • Example of prior art (Score:3, Interesting)

    by inimicus ( 194187 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @11:04AM (#5999032)
    http://www.angel.net/~nic/spam-x/ [angel.net] (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?
  • Easily thwarted (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Remlik ( 654872 )
    Just pay thousands of third world children .002 cents for every email they "authenticate." Or, with computer vision growing in leaps and bounds this too would eventually be replaced by a computer with a $20 web cam and some nifty software.

    Anyone remember the guy who wrote a program to let his computer play Tetris by taking screen grabs?
  • Enforceability (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ajs318 ( 655362 )
    In this country, and probably many others, software cannot legally be patented. I am not an expert, but I would guess that this means software patents granted in other countries are not enforceable in the UK - and therefore no offence would be committed using "patent-violating" software here.

    Governments should, if they don't already, have the power to annul any patent, and that power should be exercised against abusers of the system.

    Meanwhile, if your ISP offers virtual hosting, you can always use disp
  • by pair-a-noyd ( 594371 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @11:39AM (#5999311)
    Public executions, first offence, for spammers.

    Broadcast immediate, ALL channels, satellite, cable, OTA, AM/FM. ALL channels.

    We interrupt this broadcast for another public execution of a spammer and as a bonus execution, three patent lawyers. Please stand by, after the executions you will be returned to your regularly scheduled programming.
    Thank you."

  • by Dr. Zowie ( 109983 ) <slashdot@@@deforest...org> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @11:44AM (#5999344)
    In 1993/1994 I was a graduate student at Stanford University and designed a simple challenge/response spam filtering system that works substantially the same as the one being advertised. Unknown incoming addresses were entered into simple ASCII database, and the associated mails were stashed in individual files in a particular directory. Unique challenge letters were to be sent out, and the mail was to be delivered or canned depending on the response (or lack thereof) from the challenge.

    I never finished implementing the system (I wrote my dissertation instead) but still have a midsized collection of emails about it.

    Challenge/response has got to be "obvious to one versed in the art" -- I can think of at least three other people at Stanford who had the same idea at about the same time.

  • I hacked together a challenge-response system in Perl without too much trouble about a year ago. Hardly rocket science.



    I don't use it any more, though, since I neglected to whitelist a mailing list and got an angry response... it's not worth the hassle. I just use a whitelist, and every so often I manually check if anything has slipped through... works nicely.

  • by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @02:07PM (#6000394)
    I suggest searching for "spam" on the USPTO site under current patents. It is depressing. Every conceivable 10 line Perl or awk hack that people have been using for filtering spam has more or less recently been patented.

    For example, patent no 6,167,435, applied for in 1998, patents E-mail verification for mailing list subscriptions. I couldn't find the Mailblocks, which would at least have to reference 6,167,435 as prior art, which leads me to believe that it hasn't been published yet. Patent attorneys may be stupid or brazen enough to ignore decades of actual practice, but they wouldn't ignore another patent.

    Mailblocks itself is an anachronism--a bubble-era startup with no realistic business proposition, financed, in this case, by the winnings from the founder's previous dotcom. Most likely, Microsoft will buy them out to own the technology for Hotmail. If not, they will keep suing people until somebody does buy them.
  • by AnotherBlackHat ( 265897 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @02:11PM (#6000434) Homepage
    I'm collecting prior-art for this.
    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/ [spamwolf.com]

    The best candidate so far (IMO) is this post [google.ca] 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 .sig
  • by multipartmixed ( 163409 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @02:57PM (#6000988) Homepage
    - MailBlocks is owned by Phil Goldman, the WebTV millionaire
    - Phil Goldman is skilled in the art of computing, and so he _obvious_ly thought of using a Challenge/Response system for stopping Spam.
    - He's a .com millionaire, and former employee of Apple, Generial Magic, and knows what patents are worth, so he did a patent search
    - Found patent 6,199,102 (Granted March 2001), and bought it from Christopher Alan Cobb
    - Found patent 6,112,227 (Granted August 2000), and bought the owner, Jeffrey Nelson Heiner, who signed over all rights
    - Patents are "one of the largest expenses that we (at Mailblocks) have."
    - MailBlocks has also sued Spam Arrest (case pending in WA), DigiPortal, and MailFrontier (resolutions unknown)
    - MailBlocks actually started suing before releasing a product of their own.
    - Goldman regularly responds to penis enlargement spams with his credit card number and a request to have them delivered in a plain brown paper wrapper
    - So far, none of them have worked (somebody should tell him creation != enlargement)

    Here is an interesting article: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/556 5843.htm

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