EvilAlphonso notes news of a “Texas” IP holding company suing 36 actual companies for violating its claimed patent on spam filtering. Techdirt deconstructs the patent itself, No. 6,018,761, which seems to amount to little more than a database lookup. It was filed in 1996 and issued in 2000 (despite the lawyers’ press release claiming that it “was awarded… nearly 15 years ago”). Among the companies being sued are 3Com, Apple, Google, AOL, Yahoo, (more…)

A team of computer scientists from the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA are claiming to have found an “effectively perfect” method for blocking spam. The new system deciphers the templates a botnet is using to create spam and then teaches filters what to look for. “The system … works by exploiting a trick that spammers use to defeat email filters. As spam is churned out, subtle changes are typically incorporated into the (more…)