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Microsoft Releases Patent on SenderID
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Oct 23, 2006 10:26 PM
from the sharing-your-toys-in-the-sandbox dept.
from the sharing-your-toys-in-the-sandbox dept.
wayne writes "Microsoft has now put the SenderID patents under the OSP. The Open Specification Promise was discussed on slashdot before in conjunction with web services and it is good to see that they are opening up even more. There are still technical problems with SenderID compared with SPF and, of course, SPF isn't problem free. Still, over the last year, the number of SPF records has more than doubled from around 1.7 million to 4.1 million, with rate of growth increased in the last 6 months."
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Microsoft Won't Assert Web Services Patents 155 comments
Andy Updegrove writes, "Microsoft has just posted the text of a new promise not to assert its patents with respect to 35 listed Web Services standards. The promise is similar to the covenant not to assert patents that it issued last year with respect to its Office 2003 XML Reference Schema, with two important improvements intended to make it more clearly compatible with open source licensing. Those changes are to add an explicit promise not to assert any relevant patents against anyone in the distribution chain of a product, from the original vendor through to the end user; and to clarify that the promise covers a partial as well as a full implementation of a standard. It's all part of a recent wave of such pledges made by companies such as IBM, Nokia, and Oracle, and a significant shift in how Microsoft is dealing with open standards."
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Microsoft Releases Patent on SenderID
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Why the hell did Microsoft have to go and... (Score:5, Funny)
Honestly.
Re:Why the hell did Microsoft have to go and... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.fredshome.org/)
Have they released a SenderID SDK? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Have they released a SenderID SDK? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.imagicity.com/)
I'm not. Not a fan of anything at all, that is. I'm a fan of open systems (preferably officially endorsed standards) that are well understood and secured for use many years into the future. SMTP, for all its baggage, is one standard that has actually aged fairly well over the years.
There are fundamental flaws, of course, and now these flaws are costing us a lot of money, time and effort trying to stop people from preying on the system and on human naïveté.
Microsoft's approach to this can be summarised as, "Hey gang let's all get together and fight spam my way!" This is okay, but in the opinion of this hoary old curmudgeon, I'd rather people said, "Hey gang, let's all get together and figure out how to fight spam!" There's a small but integral difference between those two statements. It lies in the potential for Microsoft to stop in mid-fight, take its ball and go home.
What Microsoft is trying to do with this latest move is to convince the world that it will not do this. I'd like to believe that's true, but their track record gives us every reason to believe the opposite. Even if they're perfectly sincere about this right now, people will still be suspicious that at some time in the future they might try to lock things down again.
It's unfortunate that we have been led to feel this way, and I suppose it's never to late for a leopard to change his spots. I doubt this one will, though.
Re:Have they released a SenderID SDK? (Score:4, Informative)
SenderID can be implemented on both mail servers and clients.
Unfortunately SenderID is not only patented, the Microsoft license prevents other people from modifying it for other uses. This means it should not and cannot be used in Sendmail, Postfix, or other open source MTA's due to license restrictions.
Wrong: http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
SenderID is also cryptographic. This prevents software with it integrated from being exported to "restricted" companies, due to the strange rules about encryption being a material of war.
SenderID has no cryptography. You're thinking DomainKeys.
SenderID is also fundamentally broken: SPF rejects spam messages in a way that is very lightweight and free to implement (publish a TXT record in your domain's DNS), and rejects the message before its contents are even sent, based on the "FROM" line used for email bounces.
Incorrect. Both SenderID and SPF are based off of DNS TXT records. The primary difference between the two is that SenderID validates that the FROM field has not been forged, while SPF validates that the return path has not been forged.
SenderID requires purchased keys from Microsoft, and requires the MTA to accept the email message to process the SenderID key, which seriously burdens the server.
SenderID basically has nothing to do with SPF or anti-spam: it has to do with selling keys for bulk emailers, legitimate or not, to send bulk email while avoiding anti-spam messages. Its presence in a message is actually a very powerful sign that the message is spam, just as those "Haiku" messages in email headers used to be.
SenderID has no cryptography. You purchase nothing from Microsoft. You're thinking DomainKeys.
Unfortunately, the creators of SPF accepted Microsoft sponsorship and involvement with SenderID to get Microsoft support, integrating SPF-like features into Hotmail and other Microsoft tools in order to get a larger user base, but unfortunately accepting a corrupt influence that has actively hindered the acceptance of SPF.
Blah blah blah, insert Microsoft is teh big evil rant here. You should learn what you're talking about before complaining about something it doesn't do.
Brr... (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.fiveeightforums.com/)
Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.lightandmatter.com/)
So now we have Sender ID [wikipedia.org], SPF [wikipedia.org], and DomainKeys [wikipedia.org].
AFAICT, they all aim to accomplish similar things. Unfortunately, there's no consensus on which to use, and that means that they're all basically useless. One of these mechanisms would only become useful if virtually everybody used it, because then people could refuse to accept e-mail that didn't use it. Gmail and yahoo both use DomainKeys, which suggests that it's something that can really be implemented successfully in the real world. Looking at the Wikipedia articles, Sender ID seems to have problems because it breaks preexisting standards (see "Standardization issues"). My impression is that a lot of people looked at DomainKeys and said, "oooh, scary, it uses crypto." But hey, this is 2006, not 1992. Strong crypto is everywhere. Is there any reason not to go ahead and standardize on DomainKeys?
Re:Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.kabewm.com/)
DomainKeys breaks a lot of things. As one of the maintainers of the QmailToaster [qmailtoaster.com] project, I've run across a lot of people where DomainKeys breaks their entire setup.
1) If you forward your mail to an upstream server (sendmail smarthost, Exchange SMTP Connector, etc), DomainKeys will always be void.
2) If you have a backup mail server or a scanning mail server that receives and then transfers to your primary mail server un-modified (IE doesn't remove the DomainKeys) then your main mail server will reject it.
DomainKeys sucks. SPF sucks, SRS is a hack.
Re:Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.kabewm.com/)
The following is from one of my emails:
That's peculiar because Yahoo! doesn't publish SPF records.
Typical SPF Record:
Yahoo!
Re:Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys (Score:5, Informative)
(http://dotfuturemanifesto.blogspot.com/)
There is a big difference between Sender-ID and Domain Keys, Sender-ID uses the IP address of the outgoing email server. DKIM uses public key cryptography. We knew at the start that it would take about four years to agree a cryptographic standard hence the decision to adopt a two track approach.
This is not a VHS vs Betamax competition. There are genuine differences in the specs. If you are going to deploy one you have to do much of the work required for the other.
One of the core problems in MARID was that most of the people involved had little experience of the standards process and no inclination to accept reasonable compromises. Another problem is that the IETF rushed the formation of the group in order to prevent a rival standards body moving in on their turf. This pre-empted the negotiations I was moderating in an attempt to agree on a common proposal before the working group was chartered. As soon as the WG was chartered with an open charter the way was open for third party groups to introduce additional proposals even though they had no support from any constituency.
The original patent license terms were not unusual or unreasonable. It was just that a number of persons decided to make an objection in this case to a practice that nobody had objected to for over a decade. As a result of the SCO case the patent lawyers at several large companies (not just Microsoft) had determined that the reciprocation clause in the traditional open patent license was probably not enforceable if there was an open sublicense clause.
Some people decided to make SPF the place to fight this particular battle and started making unjustified accusations of bad faith on Microsoft's part. Then a splinter group decided to exploit the situation and propose a completely unrelated specification that had no commercial support whatsoever.
The point that was lost on many participants was that the only reason to go to a standards body is to get buy in for a proposal. If you want the best technical proposal you should not involve more than five people in the design.
Sender-ID is not incompatible with SPF as alleged. The only difference is at the recipient side and the recipient cannot be forced to interpret SPF or Sender-ID in any particular way. We had agreement in the WG to proceed on a common spec and nobody found any problems until the patent issue was raised.
Re:Sender ID, SPF, DomainKeys (Score:4, Informative)
But it's a huge difference for the receiver, whether or not you feel it's sane.
1) SPF regulates the envelope sender. Sender-ID regulates the TO: field.
2) SPF can be used to reject incoming messages before any data is sent. Sender-ID has to (at least) wait for the TO: field to be sent along with the rest of the DATA part -- which doesn't limit bandwidth consumption very much.
3) If the MTA isn't going to reject messages and only add to the score, then Sender-ID will be fine for you. If you want to reject messages to avoid tying up your MTA (and lower your bandwidth consumption), SPF is the way to go.
And for the parting shot (not against the parent), DomainKeys is just too much of a load on a busy server, IMHO, because it requires computing a hash for every single message. It just doesn't scale. It has other severe problems too, but I saw them adequately discussed earlier.
Why not just fix Windows? (Score:1, Interesting)
It won't be an easy task for Microsoft, but they'll need to bring the security level of Windows up to at least that of Linux, Solaris, MacOS X and the BSDs. Not only will they have to manage that for any new Windows products, but they'll also have to retrofit those security enhancements all the way back to at least Windows 95. They'll have to make sure that those changes don't break any existing applications, so it'll be a very significant challenge.
You disgust me (Score:5, Funny)
MS could start the adoption wave (Score:2)
(http://www.process64.com/)
Maybe something like how the "nofollow" tag became a standard to stop comment-spam on blogs. It isn't any official standard, but when blogger, and mov-type, wordpress and google followed it became an unofficial standard.
SPF/Sender-ID is great in theory (Score:3, Informative)
nice, but lacking teeth (Score:3, Interesting)
The trouble is that it's a "promise". A "promise" on a web page is not the same thing as a legally binding commitment.
The proper thing to handle this would be for Microsoft to submit the specification to a standards body with a legally binding contract and steep penalties should Microsoft break the contract and take legal action against anybody implementing the specification.
I can't tell why they aren't doing this. It could be
* arrogance ("we're too big to have to make a binding commitment to anybody"),
* it could be ignorance ("if we promise, it ought to be good enough"),
* or it could be nefarious ("the OSP will be good enough for commercial implementors, but it's not FOSS compliant", "they think it's open and binding, but we have hidden this pitfalls in the fine print").
Any guesses?
Note that Microsoft's spec is not needed, since there are already alternatives.
Microsoft Office XML specs (Score:2)
Breaking SMTP not a solution (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.caperet.com/ | Last Journal: Friday August 05 2005, @07:18AM)
All of these solutions have flaws. I'm with deBoynePollard on this:
An interesting take is to make the sender responsible for storing mail [cr.yp.to]: suggested by Dan Bernstein (DJB), the qmail guy.
There's always politics in it. Some people don't like DJB's attitude and they're anti-qmail and go for Postfix or sendmail.
Wietse Venema, the postfix guy, isn't too happy about SPF either [irbs.net]: but he does provide plugins for Postfix.
SPAM needs a solution, but breaking SMTP isn't the way to go IMHO. I think a well configured email server, RBLs, requiring reasonable RFC compliance and such will eliminate much SPAM. Spending energy on evangelising good mail server configuration is still the best way to go.
Re:Breaking SMTP not a solution (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @09:33AM)
As per typical DJB ideas, it's broken and only implements half the functionality of what it intends to replace. I've used this example before, so skip this if it sounds familiar:
A friend of mine hosts a customer that sends weekly newsletters to about 25,000 subscribers. With SMTP, my friend can spool the whole set and then watch as the mail queue flushes over time (measured in a small number of hours). It takes advantage of the fact that if 10,000 of those newsletters are going to @example.com addresses, it can deliver all 10,000 of them at once. In any case, his system delivers mail at the pace it can handle.
Enter DJB's scheme. Now, my friend delivers 25,000 "you've got mail!" notifications. Then, he watches in horror as 9AM EDT rolls around and 5,000 of his customer's customers simultaneously try to fetch unique copies of the newsletter to read with their morning coffee. Repeat at 9AM CDT, MDT, and PDT. His choice is to get out of the newsletter delivery business, or spend $$$$ on vastly increasing his bandwidth.
Basically, it's fundamentally broken. SMTP is more or less optimized for throughput. DJB's plan is more or less pessimized for latency.
Of course (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
And have you heard about the "extra secure" features of exchange 2007? It would restrict you to geting mail only from other exchnage 2007 servers... For your security of course. Its for the kids too.
TLS is another way to go. (Score:1)
Re:Can we get the FUD tag now? (Score:1)
I disagree sir, that sounds like a troll to me. There is nothing FUD about this story.
> Not to be the boy who cried wolf, but why does anything that MS does that even sounds vaguely like Open Source make the news if it isn't Open Sourced?
http://slashdot.org/articles/05/01/30/1433226.sht
Re:Can we get the FUD tag now? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.underachievement.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday January 21 2007, @10:58PM)
What? Do you even know what FUD is? Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. It's usually meant to mean the kind of news Microsoft might release saying "OMG Linux is insecure!!!~" or SCO saying "WTF Linux newbs must pay money or we'll sue!!!". Microsoft trying to show some interest in open standards certainly does not qualify as FUD, especially since this isn't the first open stuff they've done [sourceforge.net].
I think we have a finalist for the category 'Most Useless Cliches in a Slashdot Post'. Congratulations, however I've never heard of actually counting the brass tacks (though it appears I'm not alone [google.com])
Re:Can we get the FUD tag now? (Score:1)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Spammers are already using it (Score:2)
(http://www.votecrow.com/ | Last Journal: Monday July 01 2002, @01:30PM)
I was having this problem, so I added SPF records for my domains. Then spammers started using another one of my domains and the spam started going up, not down.
Re:Spammers are already using it (Score:2)
That's a false hope. I know from very direct experience that it does not work today, and logically it is unlikely to ever work.
The underlying reason that "blowback" from forged spam is a problem is that a lot of people are still running mail systems that are designed (to whatever degree they are designed rather than thrown together) with mid-90's assumptions that are no longer true:
The result is mail systems that accept mail rather promiscuously, storing and queueing it up for steps like filtering or forwarding to other internal systems for delivery. Those later steps can result in failure, and the mid-90's assumptions about mail lead to the decision to follow the traditional ruiles and generate a bounce for any failed message. SPF (or any other sender authentication scheme) can only help if those systems that are living in the past implement its use in deciding whether to accept mail and/or whether to generate a bounce for mail. Many blowback-generating mail systems can eliminate blowback completely (or for less cost: 5-nines complete) simply by rearchitecting for modern realities, without bringing SPF into the picture.
Being in the position of running largish mail systems, I can see quite starkly that SPF alone as a blowback control would do more harm than it is worth. Real mail systems get legitimate mail from domains run by fools who can't get their SPF records right and use "-all" as a trailing default. Real mail systems get mail transparently forwarded to them through sites that do not modify the SMTP sender, no matter how much the SPF cheerleaders would like them to. Real mail systems can't absolutely trust SPF when it is derogatory unless they are willing to accept occasional loss of otherwise perfectly legitimate mail.