We did that at AOL with regards to fighting spam, when I was the Sr. Internet Mail Adminstrator in the mid-90s.
We would put in weeks and months of work to come up with a new method of fighting spam that would actually work [0], and over the span of a weekend after launch, the spammers would already have worked around it.
[0] As opposed to the random crackpot ideas that every damn stupid AOL VP came up with that started with "Why don't you just ...". If I had a nickel for every damn stupid AOL VP crackpot idea, I'd be a multi-millionaire by now.
We had a similar document that we had developed over time which I believe pre-dated this one. Ours may even have been the inspiration upon which this one was based.
For me, by that time AOL had become a sufficiently toxic place that we came to a mutual agreement that it was time for me to leave.
If it hadn't been for that, I would never have gotten a chance to work at Collective Technologies, where we had more O'Reilly authors on staff than any other company in the world!
We would put in weeks and months of work to come up with a new method of fighting spam that would actually work [0], and over the span of a weekend after launch, the spammers would already have worked around it.
[0] As opposed to the random crackpot ideas that every damn stupid AOL VP came up with that started with "Why don't you just ...". If I had a nickel for every damn stupid AOL VP crackpot idea, I'd be a multi-millionaire by now.