After email became a popular means of communication, it didn't take long for marketers to start bombarding people with unwanted and unsolicited messages. Today, this unwanted email, or "spam", is the bane of many users' inboxes, even though numerous programs and techniques are available for combating it.
Now that internet phone calls are becoming popular, brace yourselves for another problem ? internet telephony spam, or "spit". But the German industrial giant Siemens
is ahead of the game and has come up with a way to filter out unwanted spit.
The technique has long been used in the battle against email spam, albeit with mixed results.
The idea is to keep a list of known spitters and, when an incoming call is received, have the receiving computer search for the caller's name or number on the spit list. If the computer finds a match, the call is rejected.
This all sounds sensible enough, but if that's all it took to combat unsolicited email, we would surely have killed it off years ago.Read the full spit filter patent application