taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Open Source: so I was just looking at OSCON 2005’s website, and I noticed that it listed Kim Polese, of SpikeSource, as a presenter.

I don’t really pay any attention to what’s happening in Java these days, but it appears that SpikeSource launched last year to provide ‘enterprise support services for open-source software’ with a Java/enterprise slant.

Funnily enough, my last encounter with a Kim-Polese-headed company did indeed have a big effect on me, open-source-wise.

That company was Marimba, and they made an excellent Java GUI builder called Bongo. In those days (nearly ten years ago!), I was working on a product for Iona as a developer, in Java and C++, and we needed to provide a GUI on a number of Java tools. I chose to use Bongo, as it had a great feature set and looked reliable.

Wow, was I wrong! The software was reliable — sadly, the same couldn’t be said about the vendor. What I hadn’t considered was the possibility that the company might decide to discontinue the product, and not offer any migration help to its customers — and that’s exactly what happened, Sometime around 1998, Marimba decided that Bongo wasn’t quite as important as their Castanet ‘push’ product, and dropped it. Despite calls from the Bongo-using community to release the code so that the community could maintain it and avoid code-rot, they never did, and as a result apps using Bongo had to be laboriously rewritten to remove the Bongo dependencies.

I learned an important lesson about writing software — if at all possible, build your products on open source, instead of relying on a fickle commercial software vendor. It’s a lot harder to have the rug pulled out from under you, that way.

Update: Well, it seems it was quite far off the mark about Marimba. Someone who worked at Marimba at the time read the blog entry, and got in touch via email:

I was an employee of Marimba in the early days, and was around when we developed Bongo, and still later, when we discontinued it, and still later, when Bongo *was* released to the open-source community (jm: appears to be around the start of 1999 I think). It was hosted on a site called freebongo.org and continued to be enhanced with new features and a lot of new and cool widgets. It was ultimately discontinued a few years later due to lack of interest.

It was hosted and primarily maintained in the open-source community by one of the original Bongo engineers. Here’s a link from the Java Gazette from the days when it was called Free Bongo.

So don’t go blaming Marimba. We did listen to our users and release the code!

Fair enough — and they deserve a lot more credit than I’d initially assumed. I guess I must have missed this later development after leaving Iona. Apologies, ex-Marimbans!

Tags: bongo, company, enterprise, gui, java, marimba, open, product, software, spikesource, vendor

Patents: Newsweek: Factory of the Future?:

The dino’s ferociously bared teeth hint at elements of Intellectual Ventures’ bold business plan. Myhrvold and his partner, former Microsoft chief software architect Edward Jung, have created the quintessential company for the 21st century. It doesn’t actually make anything … Only patent attorneys populate the quiet hallways. …

Sources familiar with Myhrvold’s strategy say that he has raised $350 million from some of the largest companies in high tech: Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia and Apple. Google and eBay also recently invested. With this large bankroll, the company is out buying existing patents in droves. (Myhrvold won’t comment on these activities, but sources say he has already purchased about 1,000 patents.) The strategy is to set up a sort of patent marketplace. Patent owners get money upfront for the dusty ideas sitting on their shelves, the investors get the rights to use the ideas without being sued and Myhrvold gets to rent those same ideas to other companies that need them to continue creating products. …

“We’re concerned that these giant pools of patent rights are going to prevent entrepreneurs from entering markets, as opposed to being used to promote innovation,” says one worried Silicon Valley venture capitalist.

Now that’s scary…

Tags: business, company, factory, future, intellectual, microsoft, myhrvold, newsweek, patent, patents, strategy

Spam: Ask Slashdot: How Powerful is the Turn-Off Power of Spam? The question is, ‘How often do you make the decision to NOT buy something form a company because you know they engage in spamming activities?’

This is an old idea — it goes back to a December 1996 column by Roger Ebert, of all people, who proposes the following pledge that all internet users should take:

Under no circumstances will I ever purchase anything offered to me as the result of an unsolicited e-mail message. Nor will I forward chain letters, petitions, mass mailings, or virus warnings to large numbers of others. This is my contribution to the survival of the online community.

8 years later, it’s more important than ever.

However, it’s complicated by one additional factor — not everyone knows which products and companies use spam to advertise. For example, did you know that Kraft routinely advertise their Gevalia coffee through spam?

My suggestion — a daring individual (that rules me out ;) should set up a website where samples of major-product-advertising spam are collected from (trusted) reporters. A quick scoreboard based on how many reports a particular company accumulates, and we have a Boulder Pledge reputation service.

Some simple rules should be applied:

• Messages arriving at never-used spamtrap addresses, or scraped addresses from USENET or the web, especially if the message hits multiple of those addresses (indicating a high volume), is the basis for a listing;
• Failure to respect opt-outs, of course, would be a biggie;
• Using a known spamhaus, or sending via open proxies in Shandong, would be a massive thumbs-down;
• Failure to clean up it’s act after being made aware of the problem, oh dear.

It’d be essential to take an extremely careful approach to this; any hint of personal axe-grinding, and the site would be useless, written off as just the work of ‘another anti-spam kook’.

Essentially, this’d be a Fortune-500-oriented version of spamvertized.org.

Reportedly, many of the large companies using spam to advertise are fully aware at a management level that they are responsible for spamming. (That line about open proxies in Shandong is no joke — at least one Fortune 500 company has hired a spamhaus that does this.)

Doubtless, some spamvertisers may be victim to an overzealous but clueless marketing department, on the other hand — but either way, a public ‘name and shame’ forum gives a great impetus for them to avoid this problem, at least once they’ve been bitten the first time.

In some cases, it’s dodgy ‘affiliates’ that use spam to advertise their products — but a company that operates affiliates really should post a policy that says that affiliates found to be spamming will be terminated and have their commissions forfeited; reportedly, that has been found in other programs to quickly cut off the problem.

Tags: company, failure, message, pledge, power, powerful, question, slashdot, spam, turn

Web: http://ws/ . Nifty!

Tags: abi, analysis, company, control, display, file, genome, mail, nobel, software

Marketing: It appears that MATRIX (the Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information EXchange) at one stage did – and may still — include a ‘terrorism quotient’ field, representing ‘a statistical likelihood of (people) being terrorists’.

Seisint, the company providing the system, is a Boca Raton, FL company founded by Hank Asher, previously of Database Technologies, the company that ’stripped thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter rolls before the 2000 election, erroneously contending that they were felons’. Lovely.

Boca Raton, eh? Yep, there’s a spam connection — Hank Asher also, apparently, bought eDirect.com from noted Boca-based spammer Steve Hardigree (ROKSO record).

The email in the linked article goes on to note that Asher and Hardigree had ‘disagreements’ regarding ‘how eDirect should position itself in the Direct Marketing Community’, so I doubt Asher might have necessarily approved of spamming — but it does appear he had interests in Direct Marketing.

Given that, I suggest a new spin-off strategy for Seisint’s ‘terrorism quotient’ field, courtesy of my mate Luke: terrorist-targeted direct marketing!

Those turrists are in the market for lots of high-profit-margin goods:

• AK-47s (OK, not a very big margin there)
• chemical weapons instructions (just download from the internet! but don’t tell them that)
• weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program-like-activities

All Seisint have to do is SELECT Name,EmailAddress FROM MATRIX WHERE TQ > 120, do a mail run, then watch those non-consecutively-numbered US dollars roll in. Easy!

Tags: boca, company, direct, edirect, marketing, matrix, quotient, raton, seisint, terrorism

Spam: Kottke passes on news of the second coming — in spam:

It is now that blacklisting and filtering and blocking and Blocking of Port 25 and Blocking SMTP connections and filtering out email and anything related that does not allow any person in the United States of America to send email to anybody and then have opt-out or opt-in and that COMPLY with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 are doing something that is ILLEGAL and you are a CRIMINAL for doing this you have CRIMINAL LIABILITY and CIVIL LIABILITY and your company CANNOT protect you in the slightest. If your company asked you to murder somebody would you do this? Of course not for most. Then do NOT do illegal and criminal things now that are out side of the law and outside of Federal Law now with the passing of the CAN-SPAM Act of

1. The corporate veil can be pierced and board members of the corporation and officers of the corporation and executives of the corporation and managers of the corporation and employees of the corporation that are involved in the slightest in the writing of or approval of or enforcement of Terms of Service or Policies or Procedures or Business Decisions or Business Practices or Zero Tolerance Policies that would or does interrupt or cancel or block or filter or blacklist or harass or defame the character of or slander Ted Jesus Christ GOD in the slightest from sending legal email now and into the future are COMMITTING A CRIME and have CIVIL LIABILITY also and can be pursued by the US Attorney and State Attorneys and District Attorneys and the FTC and also if doing certain things also the ATF and the FBI and more. If calling TJCG a SPAMMER and then BLACKLISTING or BLOCKING or FILTERING or putting into list or putting into any Product or Service anything related to stopping the emails of TJCG you are also committing DEFAMATION OF CHARACTER and LIBEL and SLANDER and damaging the good reputation of TJCG.

What, no divine retribution?

Tags: act, blacklisting, blocking, can-spam, company, corporation, email, law, liability, spam, tjcg

E-Voting: Do not miss this fantastic round-up on the e-voting situation in the US. It contains these amazing quotes from the leaked Diebold memos:

”Over (the past three years) I have become increasingly concerned about the apparent lack of concern over the practice of writing contracts to provide products and services which do not exist and then attempting to build these items on an unreasonable timetable with no written plan, little to no time for testing, and minimal resources. It also seems to be an accepted practice to exaggerate our progress and functionality to our customers and ourselves then make excuses at delivery time when these products and services do not meet expectations.’ (Source: ‘Resignation’, announce.w3archive/200110/msg00001.html, dated 5 October 2001)

‘It does not matter whether we get anything certified or not, if we can’t even get the foundation of Global stable. This company is a mess! We should stop development on all new, and old products and concentrate on making them stable instead of showing vaporware. Selling a new account will only load more crap on an already over burdened entity. … You are taxing the development team beyond what they can handle. … Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss managed (sic).’ (Source: ‘Fw: Battery Status & Charging—and too much bull!!’, announce.w3archive/200110/msg00002.html, dated 20 October 2001)’

I’m speechless. At least the NEDAP system planned for Ireland isn’t this bad — or is it? We can’t tell.

Support the calls for a Voter-Verifiable Paper Audit Trail. There’s no other way to continue to have a trustworthy democratic system with widespread use of e-voting in place.

Tags: archive, company, development, e-voting, html, msg, october, practice, source, system, time

Games: Commodore 64 old-timers may remember Andrew Braybrook’s classic Paradroid, easily one of the best games for that platform, and a classic by any standards. Here’s a copy of the Zzap! 64 review from 1986. Many thumbs up, and the bottom line was that Paradroid ranked as ‘THE classic shoot-em-up’.

Paradroid trivia: in the days before .plan files, Zzap! 64 published a development diary by AB! Here’s the birth of one of the game’s key mechanisms, the ‘transfer game’:

Tuesday May 21: An average morning’s contemplation until …ZAP WHIZ POW ! An idea for a game within the main one, fighting for control of a new robot. Instead of just a graphical sequence showing the takeover of a new robot, why not have to play for it, you against the robot’s brain? Base it on logic circuits and use some existing routines. A whole new game segment in a small space!

Cool.

The authors’ company, Graftgold, has a website, detailing its history. Sadly, it maps the decline of the 80’s-style small games company, and ends on this note: ‘I would recommend the games industry to anyone wanting an exciting career buts its certainly not an easy ride. Most publishers we worked with either went bust, sold out or simply did not publish the game to our expections despite tight contracts. The trouble is the developer does their bit first then the publisher can choose the level to do their bit. Unless you can get real commitment by way of big advances you cannot rely on a publisher.’

Shame. Anyway. I’m not the only Paradroid fan out there — it seems a bunch of fellow enthusiasts have come up with FreeDroid, a homage to Paradroid which seems to be evolving into an RPG! It’s quite impressive – the gameplay is virtually identical to the original. Fedora Linux users can install it using apt-get install freedroid.

BTW, related: here’s two attempts at a canon for computer gamers, at costik.com and the Ludologist (of which I’ve played 121). What I find interesting about them is how clearly one is American and Apple-II-based and the other European and Commodore-64/Amiga-based. Stay tuned for the third, Spectrum-based canon. ;)

Tags: bit, commodore, company, freedroid, game, games, paradroid, platform, publisher, robot, zzap

Nathan Cochrane writes in The Age: ‘Opponents of a Canadian company’s patent to tax online transactions believe they can stop it before it is granted by the Australian patents office.’ This is the DE Technologies patent I blogged about before, which they hope to license under some hefty terms; ‘annual licence fees of $US10,000 ($A15,324) each, plus 1.5 per cent a transaction and $0.11 cents each time a document, such as an invoice, is generated.’

At FightThePatent.co.nz, they note that the NZ government plans to amend its patent law to make it much harder to file such patents in future. They also link to another Age article which says the patent has already been granted in Oz as of ‘February of this year, according to IP Australia’.

An Aussie tech executive called Matthew Tutaki is planning to try and have it quashed. The situation can be followed on FightThePatent.co.nz. Unfortunately, in turn it seems DE Technologies are planning to fight back.

Tags: age, cent, company, fightthepatent, licence, office, online, patent, time, transaction

<

p>The New Zealand Herald reports that ‘internet retailers nationwide are banding together to fight a Canadian company’s demands for them to pay up or be shut down.’ A Montreal-based company called DE Technologies has ‘written to several e-commerce operators demanding licensing fees for use of international e-commerce processes.’

<

p> The affected ISPs and e-commerce companies are banding together to fight the patent. The NZ Ministry of Economic Development is quoted as saying ‘This is a commercial matter. If people wish to dispute the validity of the patent there are mechanisms in the Patents Act (1953) for them to seek to have the patent revoked’. However, one company has received legal advice indicating that an attempt to have the patent overturned could cost up to NZ$150,000, and some background on the FightThePatent site indicates that there may also be only 12 days (or so) from today to do so.

<

p> DE Technologies’ news page gives an interesting angle on their activities in NZ. It seems Ed Pool, the CEO of DET, believed in 2001 that it was ‘an insult to call it a business process. To this day, no one has been able to duplicate this design.’ However, it seems that by 2003, at least 40 NZ-based e-commerce outfits have now figured out the details, because that’s how many legal letters his lawyers have reportedly sent. One such letter demanded a $US10,000 signing fee, a ‘royalty rate’ of 1.5% on every transaction, and 11 US cents for each document generated.

Worth noting that the patent has also been granted in Singapore and the US — where it apparently caused a public outcry and was raised on the Senate floor as an example of a ‘bad patent’, before it was granted anyway.

Tags: company, herald, internet, isps, licensing, ministry, new, patent, use, zealand

my mate Luke passes on this gem:

I was driving along behind a plumber’s van today. The van was emblazoned with signs saying that the plumber was a sewers and drains expert. Along the rear bumper of the van was the company’s slogan:

‘Your shit is our bread and butter’

I am not making this up.

Tags: bumper, company, expert, gem, mate, plumber, shit, slogan, today, van

Tom Coates on search engine optimisation. Summary: they don’t work; smart search engines realise you’re trying to game them, and will ignore or penalise your site as a result. The correct answer is to provide interesting/good/linkworthy textual information, and keep superfluous eye candy at a sensible level. I agree with his essay, FWIW.

Personally, I reckon Google deserve a lot of credit for turning the web around, from a flashy, Flash-laden animated DHTML blinky-blink medium, back into one where text is king. Once it got recognized that Google used titles, h1 tags, and other semantic markup as key metadata, and that the gimmicky stuff is unindexable, the never-ending slide into flashy blinky-blink land was halted. Phew!

Aside: Labour MP Tom Watson has a weblog?! Wow. He’d get my vote straight away, no matter what his policies were — that’s transparency ;)

Interesting — so does Liberal Democrats MP Richard Allen. This is really amazing. He even links to SpamAssassin as part of a discussion on the All-Party Internet Group’s spam summit to be held on July 1st!

It’s worth noting that his comment here notes that the APIG concept seems to be leaning towards prosecution of spamvertised products; advertise via spam (sent by you or by a ’spam outsourcing’ company), and you’re liable. A very sensible approach, as long as they can avoid the danger of malicious spammers spamvertising a product without that company’s permission — a la what happens regularly to SpamCop and SpamHaus.

Tags: company, engine, game, google, optimisation, penalise, realise, search, spam, summary

rOD gets an email:

I found your web site, http://www.groovymother.com/archives/week_2002_10_20.html has a reference to a Clue-By-Four ™. Unfortunately, my company owns the trademark to that term, and I am in the process of bringing that product to market. My lawyers have told me that if you do not remove that reference, it dilutes my trademark.

I would much rather ask you politely to remove references to Clue-by-Four™ than have an ugly lawyerese letter sent via certified mail, etc.

WTF? Applied for in 1999, and it refers to a ‘novelty toy, namely a foam rubber two-by-four shaped board’.

Tags: by, clue, company, email, reference, rod, site, term, trademark, web

So, Poland just joined the EU - welcome! ;)

Meanwhile, time for a trawl through IrelandOffline news.

Boards.IE have had enough of crappy internet from the telcos — they’re hoping to launch an ISP. Given one company’s continuing stranglehold over the Irish internet, they’ll need every bit of luck they can get. Good luck guys.

And, in case anyone’s swallowing that ‘there isn’t the demand’ line, check this story out:

The story goes how Old Man Kennedy was getting his shoes shined back in ‘29 and the shoe-shine boy was telling him what stocks looked good and what didn’t. Old Man Kennedy knew the game was up and it was time to get out of the market.

I got my hair cut this morning and the middle-aged man beside me was telling the barber how he had downgraded his ISDN line to get DSL but the DSL failed the test and now he’s stuck with a normal line. The barber was asking him what company he applied through, told him of the others, asked how far from the exchange he was, told him where the exchange was (as he didn’t know), said ‘mmm, that’d be about 3km, as the crow flies. But it’s not as the crow flies - it’s the turns in the road and that.’

Now if my barber can give me the technical requirements for DSL and people are talking of stimulating demand, you have to realise that something fishy is going on.

Forfas delivers damning broadband report : ‘Irish DSL prices for small businesses are about five to six times higher’ than other European countries. Hmm, I wonder why the telcos are reporting a lack of demand.

IrelandOffline’s Broadband - The Next Steps for Ireland document, which was presented to the Dail’s Joint Committee on Communications last week. Conclusions:

• Prioritise Wireless: ‘it is no longer time for trials’

• Increase Availability of Affordable Backhaul

• Raise Public Awareness of Alternative Technologies

And how’s about this for an Alternative Technology? Tethered balloons trialing in the North. Genius. The company is called Skylinc, and uses blimps flying at 1500m; each provides a coverage area of 80km diameter. The result is ‘fibre rate service at DSL prices’; non-contended for 30,000 customers, with 1-10 MB/s throughput. I really hope they can pull this off….

Tags: barber, company, demand, dsl, internet, irelandoffline, line, luck, man, time

my ex-employers, IONA Technologies Announces Chris Horn as CEO — again:

In a series of further moves, Mr. Barry Morris, CEO since May 2000, Mr. Steven Fisch, COO, who joined the company in August 2002, and Mr. David James, Executive Vice President Corporate Development, who joined in 1997, have resigned.

‘The Board of IONA Technologies is responding firmly to the challenges and opportunities of the changed marketplace, to position the company for profitable growth and to take advantage of market opportunities through business and new product development. I want to thank Barry, Steven and David for their enormous contributions to IONA and I wish them well in their next challenges,’ said Dr. Chris Horn.

Good to hear it!

Tags: announces, august, ceo, company, coo, development, executive, may, series, vice

Declan McCullagh: A modest proposal to end spam. Good article on Larry Lessig’s ’spam bounties’ proposal.

Lofgren’s plan won’t give everyone who gets spammed new rights to sue (although spam victims may already may have some rights under state antispam or other laws). Instead, it states that people sending unsolicited commercial e-mail must label it with ‘ADV:’ in the subject line or run the risk of being sued by the Federal Trade Commission. If you are the first to report an unlabeled spam-o-gram to the government, you will get a bounty of ‘not less than 20 percent’ of the fine the spammer pays, assuming it can ever be collected.

There are problems with this. As far as I know, the FTC is not having a problem collecting spam — the figures I’ve seen (can’t recall them right now) indicate that they get hundreds of megs a day. (Even the SpamAssassin.org spamtraps get over 100Mb a day.)

The difficulty is chasing down the perpetrator, and prosecuting. That takes law-enforcement manpower, and that’s just not there right now — because, let’s face it, spam is not a serious offence like rape or murder.

Anyway, Declan says that the major problem is that the spammers are offshore:

For one thing, an increasing percentage of it comes from overseas, and you can be certain that offshore bulk mailers will gleefully thumb their noses at Congress. Ken Schneider, chief technical officer of antispam company Brightmail, estimates that 30 percent to 50 percent of the spam his company tracks comes from outside the United States. ‘It’s a big number,’ Schneider said. ‘It’s a global economy, and spammers are certainly taking advantage of it.’

This is a frequent misapprehension. This is not the case. It’s true that much spam is relayed through machines in Asia and South America, but the originators — the people who are writing the spam and sending it to compromised relay machines and proxies — are US-based. In fact, a vast quantity of ‘em seem to be based in Florida. (This is the thing about country-code blacklists. In reality, if we could track a message all the way back to the origin, a state-code blacklist for FL would probably work much better ;)

In other news from the same article:

… Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is expected to introduce a bill this week to create an national ‘do not e-mail’ list–an idea that the New Democrats touted earlier this month.

OK, while I’m here, let’s debunk ‘do no mail’ lists too. ;) ‘Do not call’ lists work well for telephones, since you typically have only one phone number. But for email:

• one can have thousands of valid email addresses forwarding to you (I do). There’s a variety of methods to address even one user, for example ‘foo@jmason.org‘, ‘foo@jmason.org.’, ‘foo%jmason.org@localhost‘, ‘foo@212.17.35.15‘, ‘foo@dogma.slashnull.org‘ will all reach me. That’s not even considering ‘role’ addresses, like ’sales@’, ‘info@’, etc., or single-use addresses set up for particular transactions, like ‘onetime-buying-stuff-from-ecommerce-site-example@jmason.org‘.

• mailing lists and ‘exploders’ are widespread, and frequently spammed.

• ‘do not mail’ lists are hard to implement, since they may be vulnerable to scraping (if naively done) or dictionary attacks (less naive).

In summary, I’m not confident a ‘do not mail’ list could actually be operable.

Finally — The SBL’s answer to the EMarketersAmerica.org SLAPP lawsuit.

Tags: antispam, article, company, day, lofgren, percent, plan, problem, proposal, spam

Forbes: A Patent On Porn. It seems Acacia Research, an intellectual-property ’shell’ company, has a bunch of crappy software patents on streaming media (to go with their patent on the ‘V-Chip’, remember that?).

Things haven’t been going too good recently. Apparently, they decided to ‘monetize’ these streaming-media patents — in other words get all Sopranos on a bunch of small players, namely 700 porn site operators, sending some legal threats to ‘pay up — 1-2% of gross — or get sued’ their way.

What happened? Did the pr0nsters roll over and cough up? Not a hope.

Eight firms (of 700) agreed to Acacia’s terms. But 40 didn’t, and Acacia promptly slapped them with lawsuits. Rather than buckling, though, several of the porno sites joined together and stood their ground. Now Acacia is in the fight of its life and may even face a shareholder revolt as a result.

Read on for the rest…

Tags: bunch, company, crappy, forbes, patent, porn, research, shell, software, the

Yahoo: al-Jazeera website redirected:

The hacker was able to gain control of the domain name by asking domain
seller Network Solutions for the account password on official al-Jazeera
stationery, said an industry source speaking on condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for Network Solutions’ parent company declined to comment on
how the hacker was able to hijack the domain name, but said the company
had fixed the problem and was trying to track the impostor down.
‘We followed our procedures, in this particular instance someone was able
to get around those procedures,’ said Brian O’Shaughnessy, a spokesman
for Internet security firm VeriSign.

They fixed the problem? Surely this is exactly what happened with the sex.com domain several years ago?

Tags: al, company, domain, hacker, name, network, problem, spokesman, website, yahoo

thanks to blogs, wifi and the web, bullshitting a keynote at a conference isn’t quite as easy to pull off as it used to be! From Dan Gillmor’s keynote at Supernova, via BoingBoing:

At PCForum, Joe Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest was on-stage, doing a Q and A. Joe was whining about how hard it is to run a phone company these days. Dan (Gillmor) blogged, “Joe’s whining.” A few moments later, he got an email from someone who wasn’t at the conference, someone in Florida, with a link to a page that showed that Joe took $300MM out of the company and has another $4MM to go — gutting the company as he goes.

Esther Dyson described this as the turning point. The mood turned ugly. The room was full of people reading the blog and everyone stopped being willing to cut Joe any slack.

Tags: boingboing, ceo, company, conference, keynote, pcforum, someone, supernova, web, wifi

New Scientist: Real-time 2D to 3D video conversion unveiled. “The company behind the new technology claims it is the first system to allow live television events to be watched through a PC in 3D”.

Tags: company, conversion, new, real-time, scientist, system, technology, television, video

some startup called ActiveBuddy has patented instant-messaging bots — in an application filed August 2000. Hilarity ensues…

ActiveBuddy founder Tim Kay: “We invented interactive agents. (jm: bwahaha) Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That’s basically why we secured this patent” (in 2000).

Chris McClelland of WiredBots: “The Net::AIM module (which allows bot developers to connect to the AOL Instant Messenger TOC protocol through Perl) was around since 1998″.

Aryeh Goldsmith (author of Net::AIM): “the Net::AIM module is distributed with a bot”.

Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg: (the patent is) a “big win for the ActiveBuddy folks,” especially if it holds up to scrutiny.

My emphasis. ;) Sounds like ActiveBuddy have just spent a lot of money patenting something with a whole CPANload of prior art, and are on their way down the dot.plughole.

Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2002 23:25:52 -0700
From: “Mr. FoRK” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: ActiveBuddy

Oh… and they patented it too, because “We invented interactive agents.”

=== http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/1446781

August 15, 2002 ActiveBuddy’s Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers By Ryan Naraine

New York-based ActiveBuddy has won a crucial patent covering instant messaging bot-making technology, but hobbyists and amateur developers aren’t buying the company’s claim that it invented the technology.

ActiveBuddy was granted Patent No. 6,430,602 which covers the method and system for interactively responding to instant messaging requests and the company said it would move swiftly to enforce the patent, a move that is sure to create a brouhaha in the bot developer space.

ActiveBuddy founder Tim Kay, who is listed as an inventor in the patent claim, told internetnews.com the clinching of the patent validates the company’s business model of creating interactive agents (bots) that respond to IM queries.

“We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect out future. That’s basically why we secured this patent,” Kay said.

“Any company such as ours that is venture-funded has to protect itself. It’s standard procedure to file for patents when you invent something. This simply allows us to build a business,” Kay added.

He did not say whether ActiveBuddy had specific plans to issue cease and desist orders to Web sites that share code and bot-making techniques but, already, there are rumblings among developers that ActiveBuddy’s patent win is ludicrous.

David deVitry, who founded the RunABot site laughed off the patent win and believes it is unenforceable because of the availability of prior art. “They (ActiveBuddy) don’t have anything that’s really unique. They’re just the first to commercialize it and make money from IM bots,” he said.

deVitry’s RunABot site sells tools for bots that run on instant messaging, e-mails and the Web, but he is unfazed by ActiveBuddy’s patent win. “I’m confident that ActiveBuddy’s patent is unenforceable. “I can name a handful of IM bots that were running long before ActiveBuddy was even a company,” he argued.

WiredBots CEO Chris McClelland was also among the developer crowd wary of ActiveBuddy’s patent win. “Patents block innovation and hurt consumers. When big companies use their financial might to patent software, they undermine the very nature of software, its openness,” McClelland argued.

At WiredBots, McClelland distributes free code and tips on making and running IM bots and, like deVitry, he argued that bots have been running on instant messaging networks long before ActiveBuddy put in a patent claim in August 2000.

“I know for a fact that protocols that allow unofficial clients to connect to the AIM service have been around long before 2000. In fact, the Net::AIM module [which allows potential bot developers to connect to the TOC protocol through Perl] was around since 1998,” McClelland said, disputing ActiveBuddy’s claims that it invented the technology.

ActiveBuddy disputed McClelland’s claims. “I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I’m certainly not aware of any,” said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy’s chief technology officer.

However, back in August 1999, programmer Aryeh Goldsmith wrote the Net::AIM module, which is timestamped at CPAN.

“I’ve had bots running a little before that date (1999) and since that time. I’m sure there are plenty of others who have built bots and have been running them as well,” Goldsmith said in an e-mail exchange.

“It’s important to note that the Net::AIM module was also distributed with a bot. It may have been a very simplistic one — having only the function of waiting for messages and replying with a random quote — but it was a bot none-the-less. Intelligent bots simply do a little more “processing” between the receiving and replying phase,” Goldsmith added.

“I’m not familiar with that,” Kay said in response to claims that interactive bots were in existence even before ActiveBuddy launched, with venture funding from Reuters and Wit Soundview.

“Clearly, we use our patented technology in our products. If you want to do things that our products allow you to do, your best choice is to use our products,” Kay said, referring to the recent launch of the Lite BuddyScript Server, which can be used by hobbyists to develop and run IM bots.

“The buddyscript suite of tools is the best that’s available. We’re confident they are the best choice (for users) who are building interactive agents. The subject of enforcing the patent shouldn’t even come up. Anyone wanting to build a very good interactive agent will find that our tools are the very best,” Kay added.

Kay said ActiveBuddy was not worried about competing firms offering bot-making tools. “Our primary level of comfort comes from the fact that we have the best choice for developers and others. When given the choice, we’re confident people will choose ours,” he said.

Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg isn’t surprised by the brouhaha surrounding the patent win. “This is just the latest example of a company that has picked up a key patent on critical technology and is going to use it to exploit the market. It’s not surprising that the smaller developers are crying foul,” he said.

Gartenberg, who covers emerging platforms from the research firm, described the news as a “big win for the ActiveBuddy folks,” especially if it holds up to scrutiny.

“This underscores the notion of how powerful the ownership of key patents are in the technology landscape. We saw it in the Amazon.com “one-click” case and the recent controversy over the JPEG patent. This is just the latest example of it,” Gartenberg added.

—– Original Message —– From: “Mr. FoRK” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Cc: “Rohit Khare” (spam-protected)
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2002 11:07 PM
Subject: ActiveBuddy

> Kind of interesting application of ‘agent’ technology.
> A mix of telnet and Eliza?
> (wonder if KnowNow needs this as a partner…)
>
> ==
> http://www.activebuddy.com/products/index.shtml
> ActiveBuddy, Inc. has developed patented technology for building and
> deploying interactive agents. ActiveBuddy’s BuddyScript technology powers
> business solutions that leverage the functionality, convenience and appeal
> of instant messaging to provide an efficient and immediate means of
> communication with customers and constituents.
>
> ActiveBuddy technology is proven in the marketplace by the smash success of
> SmarterChild, ActiveBuddy’s showcase interactive agent launched in June 2001
> and visited by over 8 million consumers in its first year of life.
>
> Interactive agents allow your customers and constituents to receive
> information and services in a natural, conversational interface.
>
>
> Software Products
> BuddyScriptT Server - an end-to-end software solution for deploying
> interactive agents. BuddyScript Server provides every component required to
> operate an interactive agent, including connectivity with the messaging
> network, message routing, data access, message formatting, user and session
> management, and detailed tracking. BuddyScript Server is offered in four
> configurations to meet your capacity needs. Its scaleable architecture
> supports virtually unlimited usage. More…
>
> ===
> Here is a sample conversation on (MSN Messenger with ‘SmarterChild’):
>
> Mike says:
> how are you?
>
> SmarterChild says:
> Great thx! You?
>
> Mike says:
> Fine. What is the weather like in seattle?
>
> SmarterChild says:
> Current weather conditions for Seattle, WA:
>
> Currently: 57 F
> Condition: Few Clouds
> Real Feel: 57 F
> Dewpoint: 44
> Humidity: 62 %
> Visibility: 10 mi
> Wind: N/0 mph
>
> Next time, just type “weather seattle, wa.”
>
> To get the forecast for Seattle, WA, just type “forecast.”
>

Tags: activebuddy, aim, august, bot, company, module, patent, startup, technology, win

Microsoft’s Spanish thesaurus, included in Word for Windows 6.0 in Mexico, contains some unfortunate synonyms:

• Indian: man-eater or savage
• Western: Aryan, white, civilized
• Lesbian: pervert, depraved person

That would be the risk when you use a mid-1930s source document, it sounds like!

Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 13:42:02 +0100
From: Barbara Barrett (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Micro$oft’s Spanish language problems

——– Original Message ——–

Microsoft Apology for Errors in Spanish

MEXICO CITY (Reuter) - Microsoft Corp, the world’s biggest software company, apologized Friday to Mexicans for “grave errors” in its computer thesaurus that equated Indians with cannibals. Several Mexicans telephoned the company to protest after a newspaper reported Wednesday that the Spanish thesaurus included in Microsoft’s popular word processor program Word for Windows 6.0 contained some unfortunate synonyms. Used by up to 200,000 people in Mexico, a country whose population is mainly descended from Aztec and Maya Indians, the Microsoft program sugggested as alternatives for the word “Indian:” “man-eater” or “savage.” Consulted for synonyms for “Western,” the Spanish language program gave “Aryan,” “white” and “civilized.” Lesbians were equated with “pervert” and “depraved person.”

“Microsoft Mexico offers an apology to its users and to the public in general for some grave errors in the synonyms of the Microsoft Word dictionary in Spanish, whose mistaken connotations are offensive,” the company said in a full-page newspaper advertisement published Friday. Microsoft Mexico marketing manager Alejandra Calatayud said the company was dispatching a language expert next week from its software development center in Ireland to discuss changes to the thesaurus with El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico’s most august cultural body.

“We accept our responsibility and hope to have a new version of the dictionary available in about five weeks,” she told Reuters. The revised version will be made available free of charge via the Internet. Ignacio Blum, Microsoft Mexico’s product manager for office products, told Reuters that the computer thesaurus was based on existing dictionaries. “If you check these words in most dictionaries, you will find the same definitions,” he said.

Mexican politicians and intellectuals condemned the pejorative computer thesaurus anyway. “I see this as profoundly dangerous because it is a lack of respect for our dignity as Mexicans and for our indigenous roots,” said Adriana Luna, an opposition party congresswoman on the lower house’s culture committee. “We must give battle to combat this specter of conservatism and fascism which is appearing all around us” Florentino Castro, a legislator from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was quoted as saying in the newspaper La Jornada. The English version of the Microsoft Word program does not give the same synonyms. Homosexual was equated with “gay” or “lesbian” and Indian was “cave dweller,” “ancient tribe” or “aborigine.”

Tags: company, language, microsoft, person, pervert, program, thesaurus, western, windows, word

Incredible — Colombia Pictures fabricated a fake film critic, to provide ad-copy-on-demand.

Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2001 14:24:40 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Fake film critic

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Exclusive/0,4029,501215,00.html

Columbia critic exposed as a fake

Sara Gaines Monday June 4, 2001

A critic who has given ringing endorsements to a string of Colombia Pictures films has been exposed as a fake. Newsweek magazine discovered the gushing “critic” David Manning was created by the studio’s advertising department to boost campaigns for a host of new releases. The fake critic’s relentlessly positive quotes were included in advertising spiel for at least four films and the studio has apparently been happily churning out rave reviews in his name since last July. The glowing quotes attributed to Manning included tributes for A Knight’s Tale in which Australian actor Heath Ledger was praised as “this year’s hottest new star!” and for the Rob Schneider comedy The Animal which was hailed as “another winner!” Other endorsements were used in advertising copy for Hollow Man and Vertical Limit. Susan Tick, a spokeswoman for Columbia’s parent company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, admitted to Newsweek the reviews were “an incredibly foolish decision.” The company has now withdrawn adverts which contain the fabricated quotes although some newspapers had already carried them over the weekend. In the adverts Manning is named as film critic for The Ridgefield Press, a family-owned weekly in a small Connecticut town.

To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: (spam-protected)

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Tags: advertising, colombia, company, critic, fake, film, incredible, newsweek, pictures, studio