DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I’ve just confirmed that spammers troll ebay to collect email addresses. The message below was sent to an address that I’ve only ever used on ebay.com.

Reply-To: m0056@switchboardmail.com
From: @hotbot.com
Subject: How Would You Like....................................
To: hoover@decaturnet.com

Bill Problems?  What Is Your Next Move?

Debt Consolidation!

... [typical e-crap deleted]

Anyone familiar with the web industry knows of the trend of patenting so-called inventions to prevent competition. What’s unusual is that some of these “inventions” should not be patentable: according to James Gleick (in Patently Absurd), an idea cannot be patented. Actual programming code cannot be patented either, although it is protected by copyright. “Software and algorithms used to be unpatentable,” says Gleick. But that appears to have changed, as evidenced by recent well-known patents on ideas: Amazon’s “1-click” ordering method, Priceline’s “name your own price” shopping methodology, and Intouch Group’s method of sampling music.

This last example strikes close to home. I know people who used to work at Intouch. And I know some people who work at the companies Intouch has sued for patent violations: Amazon, Liquid Audio, Listen.com, etc.

Today the legal landscape shifted dramatically. A website called BountyQuest, established to find “prior art” in contested patent issues, has announced 4 winners. “Prior art” is something that proves that a patent should never have been issued, because the “invention” was not original to the patent holder. In the case of Intouch’s patent on music sampling, Perry Leopold was able to prove he had released his music-sampling concept to the public domain years before Intouch existed. This would tend to call into question the validity of Intouch’s patent — and if the patent is overturned, the Intouch lawsuit should disappear quickly.

The core problem seems to be that USPTO analysts are not equipped to find prior art when they issue patents on software algorithms (see Gleick’s article for more on this). I hope BountyQuest’s recent success leads to a fundamental change in the USPTO approval process.

At long last, the source code that produces this site is available for free download. I’ve christened the system Monaural Jerk. Enjoy.

It’s not unusual for spammers to disguise themselves, but this example demonstrates a clear willingness to deceive. They sign the email “The Internet Special Offers Team” — sounds plausible to newbies, I’m sure — and imply that I’m a subscriber, which is a lie. But the twist is using a Yahoo.com address for replies, implying that they’re associated with Yahoo, which they are not.

I received two copies of this spam at two different addresses. The first used a FROM address at ematic.com, shown above; the second used a Yahoo address in the FROM header. Both Yahoo and Ematic claim they’ve “taken action” against the accounts listed in the spam. Ematic even has a web page about it.

The great thing about fast responses from both Ematic and Yahoo is that, by deleting the freemail accounts, they prevent the spammer from harvesting any addresses that had collected there. This is the only value I can see for this particular spam — to get people to respond, opting in or out, in an effort to build a fresh, clean database of valid email addresses.

Whenever I download MP3s with Napster, my first choice (when I’m not searching for something so obscure that nobody else on the planet, apparently, has encoded it) is to download from the bozo who claims his bandwidth is 14.4k. Invariably, these guys have OC3s — capable of serving up not just a song, or even a CD, but an entire genre of music in about sixty seconds. For unknown reasons every one of those guys thinks that by hiding their monstrous bandwidth behind the “14.4'' label, nobody will figure out that they’re running Napster one hop away from MAE West on a 72-node Beowolf cluster with trunked gig-E connections to a NetApp filer.

But sometimes I’m wrong, and I find a guy who really is trying to squeeze dozens of megabytes of music through a crackly old analog phone line — miles of corroded copper wire strung haphazardly to a shed behind an abandoned gas station in Tucumcari, NM — where he proudly boots into Napster on a hot-rodded 486 (133MHz DX-4!) with 8 megs of RAM, and a genuine 14.4k modem with a street value of about five cents.