taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

I needed to buy a new laptop for work a few months back, and after a little agonizing between the MacBook Pro and a Thinkpad T61p, I plumped for the latter. As I noted at the time, one of the major selling points was the quality of IBM/Lenovo’s after-sales warranty service, compared to the atrocious stories I’d heard about AppleCare in Europe. I was, however, taking a leap of faith — I had used IBM service to great effect in the US, but had never actually tried it out in Ireland.

Sadly, I had to put this to the test today, after the hard disk started producing these warnings:

/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:21:13 wall kernel: 
[2075890.116000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189461
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:21:38 wall kernel: 
[2075914.824000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189460
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:24:18 wall kernel: 
[2076075.072000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189462
/var/log/messages:Feb  7 11:25:05 wall kernel: 
[2076121.932000] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 116189463

It’s a brand new machine, and a Hitachi TravelStar 7K100 drive, with a good reputation for reliability — but these things do happen. :(

Interestingly, I thought this was a case of the Bathtub curve in action — but this comprehensive CMU study of hard drive reliability notes that the ‘infant mortality’ concept doesn’t seem to apply to current hard-drive technology:

Replacement rates [of hard drives in a cluster] are rising significantly over the years, even during early years in the lifecycle. Replacement rates in HPC1 nearly double from year 1 to 2, or from year 2 to 3. This ob- servation suggests that wear-out may start much earlier than expected, leading to steadily increasing replacement rates during most of a system’s useful life. This is an in- teresting observation because it does not agree with the common assumption that after the first year of operation, failure rates reach a steady state for a few years, forming the “bottom of the bathtub”.

Anyway, I digress.

I ran the BIOS hard disk self-test, got the expected failure, then rang up Lenovo’s International Warranty line for Ireland. I got through immediately to a helpful guy in India, and gave him my details and the BIOS error message; he had no tricky questions, no guff about me using Linux rather than Windows, and there were no attempts to sting me for shipping.

There’s now a replacement HD (and a set of spare recovery disks, bonus!) winging their way via 2-day shipping, expected on Tuesday; I’m to hand over the broken HD to the courier once it arrives. Fantastic stuff!

Assuming the courier doesn’t screw up, this is yet another major win for IBM/Lenovo support, and I feel vindicated. ;)

Update: the HD arrived this morning at 10am — a day early. Very impressive!

Tags: hardware, ibm, laptops, lenovo, service, support, tips

Argh. My Thinkpad’s power socket must have received a knock during the move. It no longer works with either of the two power bricks I have here — so it looks like it’s time to either (a) buy a soldering iron and some screwdrivers (incl Torx ones?) or (b) renew my IBM warranty service and send it in for some fixing :(

Bad timing.

Update: oh look, it’s working again! phew. I guess I should probably set aside some time for warranty service here anyway though…

Tags: hardware, hassle, ibm, laptops, thinkpad

Another day, another absurd IBM software patent. Via the IP list, here’s United States Patent 7,003,497:

1. A method for confirming an electronic transaction, comprising the steps of: performing an electronic transaction between a first party and a second party; providing, by the first party to the second party, contact information of a third party service provider associated with the first party; contacting, by the second party, the third party service provider to obtain a location of a predetermined, private mailbox associated with the first party; sending, by the second party, a request for confirmation of the electronic transaction to the predetermined, private mailbox associated with the first party; accessing the private mailbox by the first party; and sending, by the first party, a reply message to the request for confirmation to thereby confirm authorization of the electronic transaction, wherein information regarding the private mailbox is not communicated to the second party during the electronic transaction.

There’s lots of waffle in the background section about this being for electronic e-commerce transactions, but that claim, and claims 2 and 3 at least, are easily sufficiently broad to cover simple “confirmed opt-in” email subscription systems — in other words, the system whereby a potential newsletter subscriber clicks on a link in order to “confirm” that they want to subscribe to a newsletter. That’s the current best practice email subscription method used by pretty much everyone.

Filed December 31, 2001. There was plenty of prior art before this date, but who would want to go up against IBM, no less, to attempt to get this invalidated, especially now that it’s been issued?

Thanks USPTO, you’re doing a heck of a job!

Tags: email, ibm, mailing-lists, patents, subscription, uspto

Web: I link-blogged this, but it’s generated some email already, so it deserves a proper posting.

One thing you quickly learn about IBM where software patents are concerned, is that if IBM Research is making noise about a new software technique, they’ve probably patented it already. A few years ago, IBM was keen on HTTP transcoding — rewriting web content in a proxy, to be more suitable for display and access from less-capable devices, like PDAs and mobile phones.

So I probably should not have been surprised today when I came across USPTO patent 6,886,013, which is an IBM patent on a ‘HTTP caching proxy to filter and control display of data in a web browser’. It was applied for on Sep 11 1997, and finally granted on Apr 26 of this year.

The first claim covers:

1. A method of controlling presentation on a client of a Web document formatted according to a markup language and supported on a server, the client including a browser and connectable to the server via a computer network, the method comprising the steps of:

   as the Web document is received on the client, parsing the Web document to identify formatting information;

   altering the formatting information to modify at least one display characteristic of the Web document; and

   passing the Web document to the browser for display.

Notice that there’s actually no mention of a HTTP proxy there — in other words, an in-browser rewriting element, such as Greasemonkey or Trixie may be covered by that claim. However, the claim does indicate that the document is passed from the ‘client’ to the ‘browser’, so perhaps having the ‘client’ inside the ‘browser’ evades that.

It appears this really wasn’t original research even when the patent was applied for — there’s probable prior art, even if the patent itself doesn’t cite it. For example, WWW4 in 1995 included Application-Specific Proxy Servers as HTTP Stream Transducers, which discusses ‘transduction’ of the HTTP traffic and gives an example of ‘A “rewriting” OreO (transducer element) that encapsulates each anchor inside the Netscape Blink extension, making anchors easier to spot on monochrome displays’. On top of that, Craig Hughes notes that his ’senior project at Stanford in 1992 was an implementation of a content-modifying HTTP proxy. It re-worked HTML in http streams to add some markup to enable full navigability through touch screen or voice control, for screen-only kiosks.’

Add this to the ever-growing list of over-broad software patents.

Tags: browser, claim, client, display, document, http, ibm, patent, proxy, web

Patents: wow, this is amazing news! ‘IBM today pledged open access to key innovations covered by 500 IBM software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software. IBM believes this is the largest pledge ever of patents of any kind and represents a major shift in the way IBM manages and deploys its intellectual property (IP) portfolio.’

Even better, they are hoping to begin a ‘patent commons’ for other companies to join, and the OSI definitions of which licenses are judged ‘open’ apply.

More details:

• IBM’s press release
• PDF list of patents
• the list, as plain text (fixed!)

Of course, it would be better if it were also safe for commercial software development. But this is a valuable bulwark against Microsoft-style patent tactics.

Tags: access, ibm, kind, list, news, patent, patents, pledge, software, source, today

Spam: So, CEAS was great fun, and very educational:

• Got to meet up with various antispammers, including Daniel and Theo from the SpamAssassin dev team, Jeff Chan from SURBL, Dan Kohn from Habeas, Catherine Hampton from The SpamBouncer, Miles Libbey, John Levine, Neil Schwartzman — lots of good chats.
• MS really know how to feed a conference! I hear rumours there was an extra-special tinned-meat-product-based dish at the banquet…
• But their firewalling tendencies put a serious damper on keeping in touch with the outside world, at least until we set up an SSH tunnel on port 443 ;)
• During a lull, Dan Kohn fired off a hands-up census — a good 75% of the attendees (roughly) admitted to using SpamAssassin!

My highlight papers:

• IBM’s Chung-Kwei pattern-discovery system — the one which Mark dug up. Very interesting stuff; it turns out that bioinformatics is full of large corpora of data (genomes) which you then need to find patterns in. Funnily enough, so is SpamAssassin: s/genomes/spam/, s/patterns/regular expressions/. The more advanced pattern-discovery algorithms even allow complex patterns to contain alternative blocks, ‘don’t-cares’ and similar regular-expression-like features.

  The really good bit of Chung-Kwei is the Teiresias algorithm (more pages, online demo). Of course, being IBM research, it’s probably patented to the hilt, and may be tricky to license; but it’s certainly pointed us in a whole new interesting direction — anyone know any bioinformaticians?

  IBM is really gearing up on anti-spam research. 4 of the 6 papers listed on their website were presented this year, at CEAS.

• Another good paper was On Attacking Statistical Spam Filters, by Gregory L. Wittel and S. Felix Wu, which (similarly to Henry Stern’s submission, which I helped a little with) dealt with an attack on Bayesian filters.

  This is interesting stuff; we’re pretty sure it’s not as serious as it could possibly be, in SpamAssassin’s implementation, but it’s still a serious attack.

• The Impact of Feature Selection on Signature-Driven Spam Detection was an interesting paper on AOL’s new signature schemes. (The conference was sponsored by Cloudmark, BTW, but those guys were nowhere to be seen — in which case they missed this presentation ;)
• Reputation Network Analysis for Email Filtering was interesting, in that it mirrors to a degree the thinking behind web-o-trust.org, but in my opinion suffered due to a lack of thought about avoiding spoofing (by including IP address information in the FOAF file, it could do this now). However, once SPF becomes pervasive, this could be combined with that to generate personalised webs of trust usable for email whitelisting.
• Resisting SPAM Delivery by TCP Damping was very nifty; plug a classifier into your MTA, and thereby detect connections from spam relays. Once you’ve found them, you then throttle down their connection as they attempt to deliver spam. Some other TCP-level tricks can do nifty stuff like massively increasing the bandwidth consumption of the spamming machines. Very very nice!

I took copious notes on the SpamAssassin wiki, if anyone’s curious.

Tags: attack, ceas, dev, fun, got, ibm, research, spam, spamassassin, stuff

Hardware: So IBM Thinkpads come with a predesktop area — a hidden 4GB partition of recovery files, Windows XP install disks, windows drivers, etc. taking up space on the hard disk.

I haven’t used Windows much at all on this machine, given that I don’t use Windows when I can avoid it, but I did pay several hundred dollars for it – since it’s now impossible once again to buy an IBM laptop without doing so (or without paying quite a lot extra). So I want to keep it around, and I want to make sure I can reinstall if things go wrong.

Having a hidden partition just isn’t quite safe enough for me — because I’ve had hard disks go belly-up before, or scribble on the partition table, or so on — these things happen. Thankfully it’s easy enough to get CD-ROMs shipped from IBM support if you ask nicely, so I did so yesterday afternoon at about 3pm.

This morning at 9am, there was a knock at the door, and I received a package shipped from Durham, NC containing the reinstall CDs.

It’s great dealing with professional hardware companies again ;)

Tags: area, disk, hardware, ibm, partition, predesktop, recovery, reinstall, space, thinkpads, windows

Open Source: Clemens Vasters: Where do you want to go, Aiden? Sadly, Clemens misses the
point dramatically.

Point one: I’ve worked on open-source and proprietary software. I still do. I work on them both simultaneously (or, at least, proprietary 9-5 and open-source outside work hours ;). I have a good few of the things you’re supposed to have ‘by the time you’re 30′.

It’s not an all-or-nothing thing; working on open source doesn’t mean retreating into a garrett and staying up all night. Nothing is black-and-white like that, and surely Clemens should be able to recognise that aspect of the real world by now. ;)

Point two: Open source work does found a career. It acts as a fantastic testament to your ability — especially if you’ve written good code or organised a team. I’d be much more happy to hire someone who had demonstrated that ability, over people who had no OS dev experience, if I was interviewing candidates in the day job. (In fact, I have in the past. ;)

For one thing, a tar.gz from Sourceforge is a lot easier to verify than some assertion that when you worked for some big company, you were Very Important and did Amazing Things, but sorry, they were all secret and proprietary so you have no proof.

Point three: ‘It doesn’t matter whether you love what you are doing and consider this the hobby you want to spend 110% of your time on: It’s exploitation by companies who are not at all interested in creating stuff. They want to use your stuff for free. That’s why they trick you into doing it.’

This is total FUD — pretty much just shouting ‘it’s an IBM conspiracy!’

For the record, I’ve never even talked to anyone from IBM about open source, as far as I know — aside from when I stood up once at a conference and attempt to ask an IBM manager about their crappy software patent policy and how it conflicted with their avowed support of open-source. (Obviously their payoff cheque was late that month ;)

More good comments on slashdot, believe it or not (with the threshold at 3, that is).

(finally, an aside: I suspect the guy’s name was ‘Aidan’ BTW.)

Tags: ability, aiden, ibm, open, point, software, source, stuff, thing, time, work

Patents: Wonder why MS is just now starting to monetize^W’liberalise’ its patent portfolio, starting with a VFAT royalty fee for digital cameras?

Here’s a possible reason why — they’ve hired Marshall Phelps, from IBM, the executive who began IBM’s aggressive patent-based revenue program in 1985.

Microsoft has reached a point, (Eben Moglen) says, where the company can no longer enjoy the same annual revenue growth that it did in the 1990s. Like IBM in the eighties, it’s now looking for ‘creative’ ways to keep the shareholders happy.

CDWow: Anti-IRMA, pro-CDWow leaflet to print out and post somewhere (link via Donncha).

Tags: cdwow, ibm, liberalise, monetize, patent, patents, portfolio, revenue, royalty, vfat, wonder

Patents: New Scientist reports that IBM have applied for a patent on “an electronic password ‘wallet’ that securely stores all your passwords, with overall access via a single password. The wallet pops up on screen whenever you are asked for a password. You enter the master password and the wallet then answers the online request by pasting in the appropriate password for that site.”

This should be familiar to anyone who’s used Mozilla’s Form Manager feature, which fits the patent claims perfectly. That page notes that the Mozilla feature was created in 1999, just under 3 years before the patent application. Let’s hope the USPTO remember to do a Google search this time!

Tags: access, feature, ibm, mozilla, new, password, patent, patents, scientist, screen, wallet

New Scientist reports that IBM have applied for a patent on “an electronic password ‘wallet’ that securely stores all your passwords, with overall access via a single password. The wallet pops up on screen whenever you are asked for a password. You enter the master password and the wallet then answers the online request by pasting in the appropriate password for that site.”

This should be familiar to anyone who’s used Mozilla’s Form Manager feature, which fits the patent claims perfectly. That page notes that the Mozilla feature was created in 1999, just under 3 years before the patent application. Let’s hope the USPTO remember to do a Google search this time!

Tags: access, feature, ibm, mozilla, new, password, patent, scientist, screen, wallet

Funny: some Linux graffiti from Norway — a bit more accomplished than IBM’s efforts, but still — Linux?! (link via the ArcterJournal)

Tags: arcterjournal, bit, funny, graffiti, ibm, link, linux

Derek has an interesting suggestion for IBM:

Grab a controlling interest, tell the senior management to sod off, tell the employees to clear out their cubicles, and clear up any hint of IP confusion by selling to IBM for $1 all intellectual property, and then dissolve the corporation entirely with their 50.1% voting share.

IBM has to be careful not to actually buy the company, but strictly be a majority shareholder, making decisions that are in the majority of the shareholders’ interests, even if the other 49.9% of the shareholders vehemently oppose them. :-)

Golden parachutes for senior execs? Good luck getting them from that non-existent corporation, and since IBM never actually ‘bought’ the corporation, it’s not liable for any contracts/debts/etc. SCO may have incurred. It gets all the benefit of running SCO and none of the downside.

Gotta say, I like it. ;)

Tags: corporation, grab, hint, ibm, interest, majority, management, sco, sod, suggestion

blah blah SCO v IBM blah. Never mind all that — LWN points out some interesting share trading while all this waffles on. And the Google ads have something to say about it, too… ;)

Tags: blah, google, ibm, lwn, mind, sco, share, something, trading

Ben forwards a link to this Byte article, SCO: All your base are belong to us. His commentary:

One day I’ll have a blogtastic dalymount.com, but for the moment, have you seen this priceless interview, in which SCO goes over the edge into complete barking insanity?

‘We believe that UNIX System V provided the basic building blocks for all subsequent computer operating systems, and that they all tend to be derived from UNIX System V (and therefore are claimed as SCO’s intellectual property).’

His emphasis. But let’s face it, he’s emphasising the right part ;)

So they now think they are owed money by every modern OS: that includes FreeBSD, Windows, Apple, presumably QNX, etc. etc. Linux was just the easiest one to start with, since the source is available and IBM (with their deep pockets) are closely allied with it. MS have already paid up for a SCO license, although many commentators see this as a means to support SCO in their anti-UNIX lawsuits.

In more detail, SCO claim to have full IP rights to several major components of any high-spec OS:

• JFS (Journalling File System).
• NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access).
• RCU (Read-Copy Update).
• SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing).

Let’s pick one there: RCU in Linux seems to have originated (at a glance) from code developed by Sequent for their DYNIX/ptx UNIX, which was an AT&T UNIX System V-based OS. Sequent ran into trouble, and were bought out by IBM. Later, patches to implement RCU were submitted by IBM from Sequent’s code.

SCO now owns the AT&T UNIX System V IP; therefore SCO owns the RCU code in Linux — even though Sequent developed it independently, on top of the System V base, as far as I can see. Hey, that’s even more ‘viral’ than the GPL — at least the GPL tells you in advance what mistakes you’d have to make for this to happen! ;)

In other words, it seems their POV is that, if any code came anywhere near other code that may have been part of the original AT&T codebase, it’s now tainted with SCO’s own ‘viral license’. Absolutely insane.

It’s unclear exactly how ‘all subsequent computer operating systems’ also infringe this viral license, but SCO reckon they do.

In the meantime, they don’t seem to have realized that these kinds of over-broad claims are not looked on favourably under EU law; while they make cartooney threats in the US, they open themselves up to all sorts of anti-trust-type claims elsewhere in the world. But then, at this stage I don’t think they plan to actually offer any products, or operate as a software company, so they probably don’t really care about that.

To really muddy the waters, an ex-SCO employee has recently made allegations that SCO copied code from the GPL’d Linux kernel into their UnixWare product.

Ah, fireworks. Anyway.

For a kinder, gentler form of total insanity, check out the guidelines for forming ‘inexplicable mobs’ in Manhattan — via bb. Totally cool.

Tags: base, code, gpl, ibm, linux, rcu, sco, sequent, system, unix

SCO sues IBM (via Slashdot) . Talk about self-immolation: sue IBM, of all companies, with an intellectual property case. One SCO claim:

‘It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach Unix performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of Unix code.’

Apart from the fact that SMP is just not a state-of-the-art thing any more; things move on! Perhaps if SCO/Novell/USL hadn’t sat on their hands for 10 years, swapping IP and suing BSDI, they’d still be in the game. Anyway, here’s what the analysts think:

‘It’s a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company,’ said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. ‘Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it’s what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can’t get by winning in the marketplace.’

He said it.

Tags: case, claim, ibm, linux, performance, property, sco, slashdot, talk, unix

Good article about SpamAssassin at IBM developerWorks:

After having used JunkFilter for years, and thinking it was pretty good, I was blown away by how effective SpamAssassin is. I think that this is due in large part to several good design decisions on the part of SpamAssassin’s developers.

Why, thank you! ;)

Tags: article, design, ibm, junkfilter, part, spamassassin

C|Net reports:

Two weeks ago, six top financial institutions met privately with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, IBM and other leading corporate instant messaging providers and urged them to build communications networks that interoperate. …. The meeting, which took place at Merrill Lynch’s New York offices, was among the first convened by the Instant Messaging Standards Board (IMSB), a newly created consortium led by financial services firms Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Holy shit, that’s a lot of gorillas! (via Doc).

Tags: aol, ibm, interoperate, lynch, meeting, merrill, microsoft, morgan, time, warner

IBM’s SF graffiti is being imitated country-wide! Spotted in Boston too.

Date: Tue, 01 May 2001 20:27:50 -0700
From: “Gordon Mohr” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: Re: Sun volunteers to clean up IBM graffiti :-)

> [Cheeky, for a $20B (revenue) company. I can only hope we retain such a
> sense of humor! -- Rohit]
>
> SUN OFFERS TO CLEAN UP FOR IBM
> ————————————————————————

I think IBM’s initial campaign was boneheaded — but I now suspect that SF culture-jammers have started to propagate the sidewalk-markings elsewhere, to make IBM look even worse.

I initially saw the black-stenciled “Peace. Love. Linux.” icons on sidewalks around Moscone center, near the time of some technical conference, which at least makes sense.

(An apparent attempt has been made to remove some of the black-stencilled markings along Market street, but they remain visible, only faded.)

Now I’m noticing them in other areas, including the Haight and the Castro, where I doubt IBM would have targetted for initial ‘tagging’.

Tonight, I saw sloppy *green* and *yellow* reproductions that appeared to be fresh in Nob Hill, on California avenue, descending from the Fairmont Hotel.

• Gordon

Tags: cheeky, date, graffiti, ibm, may, revenue, sense, subject, sun, tue