I’ve noticed a strange trend brewing online recently, and I’ve just hit upon a good example of it so I figured now would be a good time to blog about it.
It is a strange new style of reporting that comes from the US and is infecting the culture of bloggers than promote themselves as journalists i.e. produce original or sculptured content.
The story that sparked this off in my mind came from BetaNews, which has over the course of a year gone from a blogging news site to something that looks very similar to the news websites that no doubt all its members were trying to overthrow when they first started BetaNews.
The story concerns Microsoft’s decision to make its SenderID specification open. What this means in English is that technology developed partly by Microsoft to combat spam can now be freely incorporated in other applications. Whichever way you look at this, it is good news.
But the culture of hating everything Microsoft is still strong (even though Microsoft has done quite a lot of good stuff recently, especially in security). Even though the BetaNews story is very informative and has the professionalism to include different viewpoints to achieve a sense of balance, there are two things that make it stand out as this new type of news:
- It is openly contemptuous and biased against Microsoft, and doesn’t so much mix fact and comment as lead with comment and then append facts
- It began with a tortuous, rambling first sentence that is anti-news and drives me nuts as a news editor because it goes against everything that news should be: fast, immediate, clear.
The headline of the story is: “Microsoft ‘Opens Up’ Sender ID Spec” – note the immediate scepticism. And the first paragraph neatly outlines both points made above:
“In its continuing efforts to re-ingratiate itself in the hearts and minds of Internet developers, Microsoft today announced that the specification it had advanced two years ago to the IETF as a standard for e-mail sender authentication, will now be released for license-free use under the ‘Open Specification Promise’ terms it devised last month.”
When I first saw these strange, rambling, biased US news stories, I figured that it would soon die out as people inevitably discover the attraction of a clear, precise first sentence, but if anything, this odd trend is growing. I don’t like it.
The story that Techworld (which I news edit) ran with was “Microsoft opens up Sender ID anti-spam spec“. The start:
“Microsoft has added its anti-spam SenderID technology to a list of open specs.
“The email specification detects when an email address is being spoofed to send spam, and can now be used as a basis for new technology by anyone under Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP), said Jason Matusow, senior director of inter-operability.”
I know which story I’d rather read.
Jay Daley
October 25, 2006 at 9:19 amThe anti-Microsoft feeling is better understood when you understand exactly what the technology is that Microsoft has patented and so generously made available. You might be under the impression that this is a hugely complex piece of work that is truly innovative and worthy of a patent. However it actually turns out that what they have patented is an algorithm that goes
– Check this address like this first
– if that doesn’t work then check this one
– and so on for four steps
This is so astonishingly trivial that you have to question ‘did Microsoft patent this because they were protecting innovation, or were they trying to grab control of an emerging technology?’. The impact of this patent was one of the main causes for the last IETF attempt at an anti-spam system (MARID) from failing. It is the answer to that which is determing the views of many commentators.
Anyway, hopefully this is all irrelevant in the anti-spam world as the latest IETF attempt, DKIM, is not encumbered by patents and far better than previous attempts.
Kieren
October 25, 2006 at 9:27 amCheers Jay,
As ever, a dose of knowledge is better than 1,000 assertions 🙂
This US patent culture though is an illness to which companies are having to heal themselves. I have been consistently meaning to do a long article or short book on how the patent regime was idioitically expanded (against many people’s screaming wishes) in the past decade by a man with a blinkered ideological bent, and how this threatens to cause enormous damage in innovation.
US companies fortunately are starting to realise this. But even so, they still patent everything under the sun as a backup.
Kieren
John Ozimek
October 25, 2006 at 9:45 amI think impartiality is the test of a true blogger – polemic hate-rants can only last for so long before people have said what they wanted to say.
I wonder if this ‘trend’ has spread from mainstream news journalism in the US, which seems to have lost its way when compared to the concise and immediate nature of the blogsphere.
On patents, I agree it is an appalling mess. Change will only come when it becomes commercially essential – don’t forget that behemoths like IBM and Intel make significant revenues through maintaining an enormous patent portfolio.
It reminds me of a quote from the president of Time Warner in the 90’s – “I consider litigation as a revenue stream.”
Skippy
October 25, 2006 at 1:51 pmIn strange ways, the patent situation seems to resemble the nuclear arsenals of the cold war. Only now it’s company versus company, each gathering as many patents as they can. I can’t help but feel that should they ever use them on a massive scale as opposed to precise single strikes, all Hell would break loose.
Roger Weeks
October 25, 2006 at 6:52 pmI wonder how long it will take for some county like China to take all of the western intellectual property and release it into the public domain there. Various novelists have written about this, mostly cyperbunk folks like Gibson and Sterling, but it has already happened in the real world.
See for example the instance of Chinese company Huawei copying large parts of the Cisco IOS router software for use in their own routers. Particularly in the software world, theft like this on a large scale would be very easy for China or India or even Russia.