Life: Alec Muffett quotes an Economist opening line:

We tend to meet any new situation in life by reorganising, Petronius Arbiter, a 1st-century Roman satirist, is supposed to have remarked. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.

As apt today as it was then.

(I was recently talking to a mate who’s a post-grad in the classics. She noted that classicists aren’t the fastest-moving academicians around, speculating that maybe it was because, in studying the classics, you realise the same problems and the same solutions have been around for over two thousand years regardless of change in other aspects of life.)

Tags: confusion, economist, illusion, inefficiency, life, line, method, progress, satirist, situation

Patents: Sun files for patents on per-employee software pricing plans (/.). ‘Method for licensing software to an entity, including determining a per-employee cost for the software, determining a number of employees of the entity, and determining a total licensing cost using the number of employees and the per-employee cost, wherein the total licensing cost comprises a software license for all employees of the entity and all customers of the entity.’

But, in my opinion, here’s the good news — this is a patent on a license agreement. In other words, this is a new front for patents — the field of law.

Once the lawyers start running into situations where trivial concepts in their license agreements are patented, you can be sure the situation will start to turn around. ;)

Tags: cost, entity, license, licensing, method, number, opinion, patents, pricing, software, sun

Patents: Oh, come on. USPTO: task list window for use in an integrated development environment. Here’s claim 1:

1. A computer-implemented method for managing development-related tasks, the method comprising:

   during an interactive code development session, evaluating source code to determine whether a comment token is present;

   in response to determining that the source code contains a comment token, inserting a task into a task list; and

   in response to completion of a task, modifying the task list during the interactive code development session to indicate that the task has been completed.

There’s 74 more claims that are about up to that standard, including the usual ‘an input module connected to the knee-bone’ mumbo-jumbo that means it ‘isn’t a software patent’.

This is just quite simply absurd. Are we really supposed to believe that nobody had thought of what is essentially a list of tickboxes, displaying the output of ‘grep TODO *.c’, before March 6, 2000? You have got to be kidding. This /. comment suggests that Delphi 5 (released 1999) did it.

(update: looks like there was a provisional patent application, so that may have to be Mar 5 1999.)

William Chiles, Anders Hejlsberg, Randy Kimmerly and Peter Loforte should be ashamed of themselves for filing this joke. And the USPTO examiner who granted it should be fired.

(PS: a factoid from the slashdot comments: IBM receives (note: not even ‘files for’) nearly 10 patents every day.)

Tags: code, comment, development, list, method, patents, response, session, source, task, uspto

Spam: /.: New Method of Spam Filtering: ‘A simple and easily implemented scheme for combating e-mail spam has been devised by two researchers in the United States. P. Oscar Boykin and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California, Los Angeles use their method to exploit the structure of social networks to quickly determine whether a given message comes from a friend or a spammer. The method works for only about half of all e-mails received - but in all of those cases, it sorts the mail into the right category.’

Abstract here. It appears it classifies 53% of the emails and leaves the other 47% as undiagnosed.

The problem with this scheme is that it relies on the data in the To, From, and CC fields being accurate. Currently, there’s no means to stop spammers faking those addresses.

A trivial way to get around this filter, similarly to the other filters that trust the From address, is for a spammer to send a message using your address in both the From and To fields. Most people would include themselves in their web of trust, hence the spam would get through.

A more resilient method uses IP addresses from the Received headers in conjunction with the From address. Once you do this, you can no longer use To and CC data — and the scheme becomes pretty much similar to SpamAssassin’s auto-whitelist.

Tags: address, filtering, message, method, new, scheme, spam, spammer, trust, use

find-hidden-word-text - a command-line UNIX tool to ease the task of discovering hidden text in MS Word documents.

More specifically, it is an implementation of Method 2 from Simon Byers’ paper, Scalable Exploitation of, and Responses to Information Leakage Through Hidden Data in Published Documents.

In other words, it’ll display just the hidden text (if any exists) in Word docs. Go forth and discover accidental leaks!

Tags: exploitation, implementation, method, paper, scalable, task, text, tool, unix, word

The concept of a ‘pay-to-mail’ scheme — charge people to send you mail — is patented, it seems. Good, I never liked it anyway ;)

A method and apparatus for determining whether a party sending an email communication is on a list of parties authorized by the intended receiving party. If the sending party is not on the list of authorized parties, an electronic billing agreement is emailed to the sending party indicating a fee that will be charged to the sending party in return for the message being provided to the intended receiving party. Preferably, the present invention is implemented with Internet communications and utilizes a security protocol to enable the electronic transaction to be transacted in a secure manner.

Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003 15:00:09 -0400
From: “Bob Wyman” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
cc: “‘Yakov Shafranovich”‘ (spam-protected)
Subject: RE: US Spam patents: Partial list

A new, spam-related, US Patent was issued today. It is a continuation in part of US Patent 6,192,114 which is on the first list of patents I posted to this group.

See: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=6587550

US Patent 6,587,550 METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ENABLING A FEE TO BE CHARGED TO A PARTY INITIATING AN ELECTRONIC MAIL COMMUNICATION WHEN THE PARTY IS NOT ON AN AUTHORIZATION LIST ASSOCIATED WITH THE PARTY TO WHOM THE COMMUNICATION IS DIRECTED

Abstract A method and apparatus for determining whether a party sending an email communication is on a list of parties authorized by the intended receiving party. If the sending party is not on the list of authorized parties, an electronic billing agreement is emailed to the sending party indicating a fee that will be charged to the sending party in return for the message being provided to the intended receiving party. Preferably, the present invention is implemented with Internet communications and utilizes a security protocol to enable the electronic transaction to be transacted in a secure manner.

————————————————————————

Inventors: Council; Michael O. (186 Hurt Dr., Cordele, GA 31015);
Santos; Daniel J. (3525 Roswell Rd., #721, Atlanta, GA 30305) Appl. No.: 783340 Filed: February 14, 2001

Asrg mailing list (spam-protected) https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg

Tags: agreement, apparatus, billing, communication, email, fee, list, method, party, patent

So NetFlix have patented their business method; that is, subscribing to video/DVD rentals — where instead of being charged per disc, you are charged a monthly fee and can keep the rentals indefinitely without late fees. Patent here. Now, NetFlix is a very cool service, I’ve really been enjoying it. But this patent is a bit nasty.

Think about it: what’s difficult about the NetFlix setup? Is it thinking up the concept for how the business works, as described in the patent?

Or is it executing the details, setting up efficient shipping infrastructure, tracking, billing, stock management etc., efficiently enough to make a profit?

Bad news for these companies, who are now infringing:

• GameFly, which is the NetFlix model applied to games.
• GreenCine, a more indie- and anime-oriented DVD site.

As one commenter on the /. story noted, ‘imagine if McDonalds had patented the drive-thru’.

Tags: business, cool, disc, dvd, fee, method, netflix, patent, service, video

A timely reminder for the European Commission, while it considers permitting software patents.

In the US, software patents have been permitted for years, with hilarious results. Here’s a good example.

Back in 1997-98, spam was a minor irritant, but the practice of ‘listbombing’ (forge-subscribing one’s enemies to lots of mailing lists) was more troublesome. As a result, several mailing-list manager programs like Majordomo added challenge-response to their subscription process; this is why, when you sign up for a list, you have to click on a link in the mail you get, to ‘confirm’ you really asked to be signed up. (Here’s a mail detailing how LISTSERV had this feature in March 1996.)

All very clever, and it solved the problem nicely.

Some bright sparks then noticed this, and decided it was non-obvious somehow to apply this to spam filtering. They overlooked the prior art (more listed here) and registered some patents.

Fast-forward to 2003, and we see that there are now no less than three pretty-much-identical anti-spam C-R patents which have been granted:

• United States Patent 6,199,102: Cobb March 6, 2001 (applied: Aug 26, 1997): Method and system for filtering electronic messages
• United States Patent 6,112,227: Heiner August 29, 2000 (applied Aug 6, 1998): Filter-in method for reducing junk e-mail
• United States Patent 6,546,416: Kirsch April 8, 2003 (applied Dec 9, 1998): Method and system for selectively blocking delivery of bulk electronic mail

Oops! Where’s the popcorn?

(Thanks to this posting from RFG for spotting this.)

Tags: aug, mail, march, method, patent, reminder, software, spam, system, united

Nancy Banks-Smith on an ill-conceived method of reviewing, during her career as the Guardian’s TV critic:

Later, we all went to the BBC’s TV centre or various ITV offices, running after each other across town like a row of ducks. Then, programmes were shown in central viewing theatres such as at Bafta. This had the disadvantage that the actors were apt to show up, too, applauding their own performance. It was not a relaxed mix. It was at Bafta that Barbara Woodhouse snapped “Put that out at once!” with such dominance that the critic beside me swallowed her cigarette and had to be extinguished with water.

Tags: bafta, banks, bbc, career, centre, critic, guardian, method, nancy, smith