[OT-Slashdot] McAfee Granted Far-Reaching Spam-Control Patent

[Chris Kloiber <ckloiber ckloiber com>]

Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 02, @08:01AM
from the what-the-system-isn't-meant-for dept.
Titusdot Groan writes "Infoworld is reporting that Network Associates,
makers of McAfee, have been granted a broad anti-spam patent. The patent
covers "compound filters, paragraph hashing, and Bayes rules" and was
filed in December of 2002. The patent appears to affect Spam Assassin,
Spam Bayes and many other anti-spam products and services. As an aside
Paul Graham's "A Plan for Spam" was published August 2002."

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/06/01/2315239.shtml?tid=111&tid=126&tid=155&tid=99

<rant>
I almost (but not quite) wish that all linux distributions would yank
all the spam control projects out aka the multimeda stuff, and we allow
spam to go unchecked for a while. Then when the *net melts down we can
tell the idiotic governments of the world that this is all the fault of
software patents. So ban software patents now.
</rant>

-- 
Chris Kloiber <ckloiber ckloiber com>