Who didn't invent email, part 2

Back in 2014, Steve wrote an article discussing Shiva Ayyadurai,and his claims that he was the inventor of email. In that article he links to a number of articles from Techdirt. Earlier this year, Shiva sued Floor64, the parent company of Techdirt, as well as Michael Massnick the Founder, CEO and editor and Leigh Beadon, a writer for Techdirt. (Original Complaint pdf from ReCAP). Ars Technica has a good article on Shiva and his claims.

The complaint asserts that the defendants defamed Shiva in their articles, caused him economic harm and inflicted emotional distress on him.
Today the judge dismissed the case (Memorandum and Order, pdf from ReCAP) against Michael and Leigh.  The legal standard for punishable defamatory statements is there must be a way to prove them true or false. The judge ruled that since there is not a single definition of email, that there is no way to definitively prove Techdirt’s statements as true or false.
No one disputes the Shiva coded a system that encompasses the features we expect of any desktop or web based mail client. As many people have mentioned, the fact he was 14 and put together a complex program is impressive in and of itself. No one is disputing what he did accomplish.
To my mind the fundamental core of email is interoperability. It’s that I can sit in my lab at the University of Wisconsin, type a message, hit send and have someone in Boston receive the message. I can sit here in my office in California and write to my client in the the UK. The bits of the email client, which define email according to Shiva, are not email. They’re important for usability, but they’re not what makes  email email.
According to Ars Technica, Shiva is going to appeal the dismissal.
EDIT: Techdirt has posted an article on the lawsuit and the dismissal.
 

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Today Litmus announced they had partnered with Microsoft to fix many of the rendering issues with Outlook. Congrats, Litmus! This is awesome. I know a lot of folks have tried to get MS to the table to fix some of the problems with Outlook. Take a bow for getting this off the ground.
According to Litmus, the partnership has two parts.

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End of an era

A few moments ago, I cancelled one of my email addresses. This is an address that has been mine since somewhere around 1993 or 4. It was old enough to vote. And now it’s no more.
I am not even sure why I kept it for so long. It was my dialup account back when I was in grad school in Delaware. When I moved to Madison to work at the university, I kept it as a shell account and email address. I gave it up as my primary email address about the time it was bought by a giant networking company. By then I had my own domain and a mail server living behind the futon in the living room. That was back when we started WttW, somewhere around 2002.
15 years the address has mostly laid dormant. I used it for a couple yahoo groups accounts, but just lists that I lurked on.
I did use it as research for some past clients, typically the ones using affiliate marketers. “Our affiliates only ever send opt in mail!” Yeah, no. See, look, your affiliate is spamming me. My favorite was when said customer put me on the phone with the affiliate.

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The twilight of /8s

A “/8” is a block of 16,777,214 usable IP addresses. That’s a big fraction of the entire IPv4 address space – about 1/224, in fact. Each one is all the addresses that begin with a given number: 10.0.0.0/8 is all the IP addresses that begin with “10.”, “184.0.0.0/8” (or “184/8” for short) is all the IP addresses that begin with “184.” and so on.
How are they used? You can see in this map of the entire IPv4 Internet as of 2006.
For the IPv6 map just imagine the XP default desktop picture.
In the early days of the Internet /8s were given out directly to large organizations. If you look near the middle-top of the map, just left of “MULTICAST” and above “DISA” you can see “MIT”.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology got into the Internet game pretty early. This is the first map I have where they appear, in June 1970:

The Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT were assigned the 18.0.0.0/8 block sometime around 1977, according to RFC 739, though it looks like they may have been using it since at least 1976.
By 1983 (RFC 820) it belonged to the whole of MIT, rather just the CS Lab, though you have to wonder how long term that was supposed to be, given the block was named “MIT-TEMP” by 1983 (RFC 870). According to @fanf (who you should follow) it was still described as temporary until at least the 1990s.
But no longer. MIT is upgrading much of their network to IPv6, and they’ve found that fourteen million of their sixteen million addresses haven’t been used, so they’re consolidating their use and selling off eight million of them, half of their /8. Thanks, MIT.
Who else is still sitting on /8s? The military, mostly US, have 13. US Tech companies have 5. Telcos have 4. Ford and Daimler have one each. The US Post Office, Prudential Securities, and Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques each have one too.
One is set aside for use by amateur radio.
And two belong to you.
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And the whole of 127.0.0.0/8 is set aside for the local address of your computer. You might use 127.0.0.1 most of the time for that, but there are 16,777,213 other addresses you could use instead if you want some variety. Go on, treat yourself, they’re all assigned to you.

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