DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This book was intended to provide a snapshot of life in Silicon Valley in the last third of the 1990’s. Po Bronson, a contributing editor for Wired Magazine, is as close to the “inside” as someone can get in Silicon Valley, a place characteristic for not having an “inside,” or as Po points out, even a “there.”

The book tells the stories of a handful of people and companies — from immigrants living on time borrowed from the INS, trying to build an enterprise as quickly as they can, to successful companies on the day of their IPO. Bronson absolutely captures the flavor of the dot-com craze.

Especially intriguing are the stories of Sabeer Bhatia (founder of Hotmail) and Danny Hillis (of the Long Now Foundation and its 10,000-year clock), as well as anecdotes about programmers and salespeople. Bronson captures some outrageous, hilarious dialog, and his retelling of stories makes this book a must-read.

It’s easy to get a preview; the book was excerpted in Wired as well as Salon. Further, some of Bronson’s other articles in Wired seem to have originated with the same notes and interviews that led to this book. For example, see his profiles of Sabeer Bhatia and Danny Hillis.

The saturation-level press received by the book is typical of anything having to do with Silicon Valley in 1998-1999. Since early March of 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, there’s been no way to know where this industry is headed. Whether it recovers or not, though, this book will always remind me of the insanity that was rampant in the industry for so long.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)
• Amazon (hardback)

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I’ve just confirmed that spammers troll ebay to collect email addresses. The message below was sent to an address that I’ve only ever used on ebay.com.

Reply-To: m0056@switchboardmail.com
From: @hotbot.com
Subject: How Would You Like....................................
To: hoover@decaturnet.com

Bill Problems?  What Is Your Next Move?

Debt Consolidation!

... [typical e-crap deleted]

Anyone familiar with the web industry knows of the trend of patenting so-called inventions to prevent competition. What’s unusual is that some of these “inventions” should not be patentable: according to James Gleick (in Patently Absurd), an idea cannot be patented. Actual programming code cannot be patented either, although it is protected by copyright. “Software and algorithms used to be unpatentable,” says Gleick. But that appears to have changed, as evidenced by recent well-known patents on ideas: Amazon’s “1-click” ordering method, Priceline’s “name your own price” shopping methodology, and Intouch Group’s method of sampling music.

This last example strikes close to home. I know people who used to work at Intouch. And I know some people who work at the companies Intouch has sued for patent violations: Amazon, Liquid Audio, Listen.com, etc.

Today the legal landscape shifted dramatically. A website called BountyQuest, established to find “prior art” in contested patent issues, has announced 4 winners. “Prior art” is something that proves that a patent should never have been issued, because the “invention” was not original to the patent holder. In the case of Intouch’s patent on music sampling, Perry Leopold was able to prove he had released his music-sampling concept to the public domain years before Intouch existed. This would tend to call into question the validity of Intouch’s patent — and if the patent is overturned, the Intouch lawsuit should disappear quickly.

The core problem seems to be that USPTO analysts are not equipped to find prior art when they issue patents on software algorithms (see Gleick’s article for more on this). I hope BountyQuest’s recent success leads to a fundamental change in the USPTO approval process.

At long last, the source code that produces this site is available for free download. I’ve christened the system Monaural Jerk. Enjoy.

It’s not unusual for spammers to disguise themselves, but this example demonstrates a clear willingness to deceive. They sign the email “The Internet Special Offers Team” — sounds plausible to newbies, I’m sure — and imply that I’m a subscriber, which is a lie. But the twist is using a Yahoo.com address for replies, implying that they’re associated with Yahoo, which they are not.

I received two copies of this spam at two different addresses. The first used a FROM address at ematic.com, shown above; the second used a Yahoo address in the FROM header. Both Yahoo and Ematic claim they’ve “taken action” against the accounts listed in the spam. Ematic even has a web page about it.

The great thing about fast responses from both Ematic and Yahoo is that, by deleting the freemail accounts, they prevent the spammer from harvesting any addresses that had collected there. This is the only value I can see for this particular spam — to get people to respond, opting in or out, in an effort to build a fresh, clean database of valid email addresses.