Into Tech

There’s a somewhat bizarre and ethically questionable post up on the usually excellent Patently-O blog, hyping up the fact that Google may lose its patent on PageRank (which Google only holds a license to, since Stanford actually owns it). First off, this isn’t new or particularly surprising. It’s talking about the upcoming decision on the Bilski case, which we’ve discussed at length. The decision could impact all software patents, and the author is merely using the Google name to get extra attention.

Even worse, it’s misguided attention. Google is hardly a massive patent shop. It does get patents, but has rarely (if ever?) enforced them. And the idea that Google’s success is somehow predicated on its patents is pretty ludicrous. Independent studies have shown, repeatedly, that Yahoo and Microsoft’s search technology is just as good, if not better than Google’s. But people use Google because they trust Google and are comfortable using it. Google has built up a reputation — and that has nothing to do with its patents. If Google lost all of its patents today, it would have little to no impact on Google’s position in the market. If anything, it might help Google, as it would also probably end a bunch of the silly patent lawsuits that have been filed against Google.

Finally, the post is ethically questionable, as its author, John Duffy, was hired by a software company, RDC, to write an amicus brief in the Bilski case pushing for the position that software should remain patentable. This is not disclosed in the post. In other words, he’s clearly biased in favor of making sure that the end result of Bilski is that software patents remain in tact, and a little publicity campaign, stirred up by misleading claims that everyone’s beloved Google will somehow be harmed could help push public sentiment towards allowing software patents.

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It’s been four years since the EFF first announced its bogus patent busting project, where it lined up 10 awful patents that needed to be revoked. While it’s taken some time, slowly but surely it’s been winning each battle. Back in January, we noted another win, and now the EFF has announced that the Patent Office has rejected all 95 claims on a patent held by NeoMedia. The patent in question covers scanning a barcode and connecting it to a website to look up info about the product. The EFF presented a bunch of prior art that (of course) the Patent Office had failed to consider. This is just the preliminary rejection, so NeoMedia can (and probably will) respond — but it’s going to have to explain why not a single claim survived.

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Last year, we explained why full text RSS feeds make sense. You can read the whole thing, but the short version is that it makes it easier to read, and that means more people actually read the full stories and are willing to discuss them, share them and get others interested in reading as well. It just makes the reading experience that much better. We’ve always had full text RSS feeds, and we’re not about to change that. However, it appears that Google may be punishing sites that have full text feeds. A concerned reader pointed us to the news that the magazine Mental Floss has reluctantly ditched its full text feeds because Google banned the site and told them the only way to get back in was to get rid of the full text feeds.

The “problem,” according to Google, was that there were plenty of sites republishing Mental Floss’s feeds, and Google’s anti-spam algorithm supposedly uses that as an indication of spam. Of course, rather than figuring out which is the real site, it simply bans them all. This concerns me for a variety of reasons. The reason we publish a full text RSS feed is to make it easier for anyone to do what they want with our content — even if it’s republishing it. There are a bunch of sites that republish our RSS feed (some in the mistaken belief that such sites would get us upset at the “copyright infringement”). Those sites are harmless for the most part. Either they get no traffic at all, or they end up driving more traffic to us. That’s great. But, it’s a bit troublesome that Google might potentially disappear us from their entire index just because we publish a full text feed and someone else uses that feed exactly as they’re supposed to.

I could understand if the deletion of Mental Floss from the index was simply a mistake, and upon being alerted to it, they restored the site. But the fact that Google’s response was to tell Mental Floss to ditch the full text feeds is worrisome. What makes this even more ridiculous is that Feedburner, which is owned by Google, tells people that full text feeds are better. So, you have part of Google telling people to use full text feeds, and another part of Google punishing them for doing so.

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Despite lawsuit after lawsuit ruling in favor of Google whenever a company sued Google
because one of their own competitors was buying keywords based on their trademarks,
American Airlines decided to get in on the game as well. Since American Airlines was
probably the biggest company to take on Google in this manner, some undoubtedly were
hoping that it might actually be able to succeed. However, the two companies have now settled the
case. And, while the terms of the deal remain secret, Eric Goldman checked the ads on
Google and doesn’t see anything that indicates that Google has changed its usual practice
of allowing non-confusing ads.

In other words, it sounds like American Airlines lawyers finally looked at the details of
earlier rulings and realized the company had close to no chance of winning this. A trademark does
not give the holder complete control over the use of the word, and a competitor using the
word for competitive advertising is completely legal, so long as they’re not using it in a
way that is likely to confuse a consumer. Even more important, if there’s any
liability, it should be on the other advertisers, not Google, which is merely the platform provider.

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Blogging looked like fulfilling Andy Warhol’s prophecy that everyone would get their 15 minutes of fame. Xiaxue, however, has been famous for five years, and has turned into a full-time professional blogger, attracting around 300,000 visitors per month. Singapore’s National Library Board has added her to its electronic archives. She may have passed her peak - marked by her Best Asian Weblog award in the 2005 Bloggies - but there’s no sign of this lippy former student/waitress going away.

Xiaxue (”snowing”) has described herself as “just a normal girl who got rather lucky”. Her real name is Zheng Yan Yan, aka Wendy Cheng, and she’s now 24. She started blogging in April 2003, and could easily have sunk without trace. Instead, she became, briefly, a celebrity blogger for The Straits Times newspaper, a Maxim columnist, and co-starred in a sort of reality TV series, Girls Out Loud. She now does a fortnightly series, Xiaxue’s Guide To Life, which runs on Munkysuperstar’s web-based TV channel, clicknetwork.tv. There are quite a few on YouTube.

If you want to know about blinging your long nails with crystals, getting a tongue piercing, losing weight, cooking live crabs, shopping for slutty clothes or fitting out your totally pink Princess Room on the cheap, Xiaxue is your girl. She’d be an ideal Big Brother contestant.

Part of Xiaxue’s appeal is that she’s offensive, by Singapore standards. “Singaporean (Chinese) guys,” she wrote, “like girls who keep quiet and nods in agreement to everything they say, rather than a girl who speaks up for her own opinions. They like girls who are weak, diminutive and vulnerable, not girls who are strong and can protect themselves.” They must also dress modestly and be virgins.

Xiaxue - perhaps corrupted by reading California-based Sweet Valley High books - is the opposite of this Singaporean ideal. She’s bitchy, swears, wears “chio” (pretty but provocative) clothes, writes in intimate detail about things like panty liners, and flaunts her American boyfriend, Mike. It provokes hundreds of comments.

She also generates controversy by attacking other bloggers. One famous post dealt with the Top Seven Most Disgusting Bloggers in Singapore, including Xiaxue. She attacked herself for being a fake, short, fat and ugly. “She is so hao lian [arrogant] of her stupid angmoh [caucasian monkey] boyfriend,” she wrote. “SPG!” Sarong Party Girl: the ultimate insult.

Some of Xiaxue’s posts are labelled as advertorials: she’s paid to write about products, review restaurants etc, and she also got a free “nose job”. Since she’s always writing about the things she does and the products she buys, these aren’t much different from her usual slang-packed, heavily illustrated (and skilfully photoshopped) posts. You can take it or leave it.

As you’d expect, most of Xiaxue’s readers - around 70% - live in Singapore or Malaysia. For the rest of us, she’s a virtual tourist spot, providing an uncensored, unmediated and somewhat voyeuristic peek into a different society. Every nation should have its own Xiaxue, and perhaps they do. We just don’t know about them.

Copyright was clearly designed for a different age: when not everyone was a “publisher.” And while we’ve spent years pointing out many of the different problems that has caused, here’s another one: how is a library or some other institution charged with “archiving” written works for posterity supposed to deal with copyright laws that can often make such archival activities against the law? Well, the Library of Congress and a bunch of other organizations have a suggestion: let them all ignore copyright law for the sake of archiving. Basically, the report recommends that certain organizations be designated as “preservation institutions,” which are then more or less allowed to ignore copyright law and copy-at-will for the sake of preservation. Of course, this is clearly going to lead to many questions, including just who would get designated as such. Many people can probably agree on public libraries and such — but what about Google? After all, Google is already one of the largest players in “preserving” what’s online and also, with its book scanning project, what’s in books. Yet it’s a private, for-profit company. Should it qualify? I would argue that it makes sense to allow it, given how beneficial the archival activities of Google have already been. Even if it is for profit, the public benefit has been tremendous as well. But then what’s to stop any other company from arguing that it to deserves an exemption for preservation purposes? Wouldn’t a better solution be to start rethinking copyright law altogether, since what has become clear from this is that copyright doesn’t quite fit today’s world any more?

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Remember just over a week ago the good news coming out of Germany concerning an appeals court ruling that noted (properly) that the owner of an open WiFi access point was not liable for actions done by others on that WiFi? Well, apparently there’s a bit of a “split” in the German courts. An anonymous reader sends us notice of a news report out of Germany with a lower level court apparently ruling in the exact opposite way (link in German, translations welcome; here’s Google’s translation). From what the submitter and the translation suggest, the court claims that it’s the responsibility of the access point owner to secure the WiFi, and if they do not, they have to take on some liability for what happens on that system. There’s no question, apparently, that the owners of the WiFi system did not actually share the file in question. They showed they were not at home at the time of the alleged infringement, and they had no file sharing software on their computer. While the case isn’t yet over, the owners of the WiFi access point have to pay court costs, lawyers fees and the amount they were sued for… and they may face criminal prosecution as well.

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Thanks to the whole slew of folks who sent this in: TechCrunch has the details on Channel Intelligence, a company that owns a ridiculously broad and obvious patent on creating a list from a database and is now suing a whole bunch of small websites that offer things like wishlists. Read through the claims of the patent and see if you can explain how a single one is possibly new or non-obvious to those in the space. As TechCrunch notes, the lawsuits are all targeted against smaller websites, rather than the big players like eBay or Amazon. There are a variety of reasons why this might be. Channel Intelligence may have approached those companies and actually received a token payout (cheaper than a lawsuit for those companies). Or, perhaps more likely, it’s using these smaller lawsuits to bring in some additional cash and to establish the myth that this patent is valid. That was common a few years back, before people started suing everyone at once for patent infringement. Patent holders would mostly target a few small companies, who wouldn’t be able to launch a strong legal defense — use those “victories” to build up a warchest while also claiming that it showed how the patents are “valid.”

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There’s a growing pile of subnotebooks by the side of my desk, and so far, Hewlett-Packard’s HP2133 Mini-Note is the biggest and the best.

It’s a full-spec ultramobile with a lovely brushed aluminium casing, excellent screen and a keyboard that you can actually touch-type on. As a Wired blog headline put it, it’s “what we really wanted the MacBook Air to be”.

But it’s quite a lot wider and chunkier than an Asus Eee PC900, it’s heavier (from 1.3kg), and it tends to be slow - at least with the Windows Vista running on the version loaned for review. (SuSE Linux is a cheaper option.)

The Mini-Note’s Achilles heel is the 1.2GHz Via C7-M processor, which rates a 1.7 on the Vista Experience Index. In other respects, the machine fares well, with graphics rated 2.9 and the 120GB hard disk scoring 5.2. With the new Via Nano processor, it would be a great machine. An Intel Atom would at least be competitive for its class.

HP knows this, of course. But it’s pitching the machine for educational use (RM is selling it, downgraded to XP), and it had to make deadlines for evaluation purposes.

Waiting for Atom might have meant missing a school year. However, HP may offer an upgraded version when new chips arrive in volume. The Mini-Note is very slow to boot and slow to load programs, but once up and running, the performance is good for its intended uses: word processing, email and web browsing. Vista’s Aero graphics system worked well in 2GB of memory.

The scratch-resistant 8.9 inch screen (same size as the Asus Eee PC900) shows 1280 x 769 pixels, which is in effect the same as the 1280 x 800 you get on the 13.3 inch Dell M1330 or MacBook Air. Everything’s smaller, but that’s fine for younger eyes. The keyboard is a big improvement on rival machines, but should be even better. The Mini-Note keyboard measures 10 x 4 inches, which is only slightly smaller than my IBM ThinkPad X31 (10.2 x 4.2 inches), which has a 12-inch screen. It is far better than the Asus’s 8.3 x 3.1 inch keyboard, but it should be as good as the ThinkPad.

The selection of ports includes ExpressCard (useful for 3G) and SD slots, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and an external monitor port. The Mini-Note also sports Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi .

HP’s website lists the starting prices as £299 plus VAT for the Linux version, and £349 plus VAT for the Vista Business version tested. Judging by appearances, you’d expect it to cost a lot more.

Pros: High-res screen; good keyboard; big hard drive; well made

Cons: Slow processor; big power brick

View the HP2133 Mini-Note here

Over and over and over again, we hear stories of companies that simply dislike what others are saying about them online, and send over threatening legal letters with no legal basis. These cease-and-desist letters are mostly designed to scare users into giving in, because there’s no law against someone criticizing you or saying something bad about you (assuming it’s not untrue). The latest, sent in by Davis Freeberg involves the Everyday Finance blog. The blogger there was approached by a company called “Shop to Earn,” which offers a multi-level marketing (MLM) system. The blogger wrote a post about it, which Davis Freeberg describes as “well balanced,” though the blogger explained the weaknesses of the system and why he chose not to participate.

So what happens? Yes, of course, Shop to Earn got upset and sent Everyday Finance a legal nasty-gram demanding the posts get taken down. As Everyday Finance notes, it’s likely this had something to do with the fact that the posts had made it up the Google search results list. The blogger at Everyday Finance tried to adjust the post, taking out things like the phrase “fatal flaw,” but Shop to Earn said that wasn’t good enough and Everyday Finance needed to take down the entire site. This is, quite clearly, bullying through cease-and-desist. It’s about trying to shut up a negative review of their business model because they didn’t like what it said.

And, it appears that Shop to Earn isn’t just focused on the blogger at Everyday Finance. The company has also sent cease-and-desist letters to other blogs, which were also extremely critical of Shop to Earn’s program (though, that link is also quite well-balanced, pointing out the key flaws to Shop to Earn’s program). Apparently, Shop to Earn seems to think that any review of its program that is negative is somehow libelous, and will threaten bloggers with legal action. What it may quickly learn is that (a) someone giving you a negative review and pointing out the obvious flaws of your program is not defamation and (b) trying to threaten bloggers into taking down their site will simply call much more attention to all of those negative reviews.

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