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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Blackboxes and unknown effects

In my previous career I studied the effect of alcohol on developing embryos. It’s a bit weird I ended up in that field because embryological development always seemed to complex to me. And it was and is complicated. In a lot of ways, though, it was good training for deliverability. We dealt with a lot of processes that seem, on the surface, straightforward.
Fertilization happens, then you get a flat group of cells, those cells fold up into the neural tube, cells migrate around, things happen, limbs form, organs form and 21 days later you have a fluffy little chick.
The details in all those steps, though. They’re a bit more complicated, looking something like this:
There are lots of different things going on inside the embryo to take it from a single cell up to a complex multicellular being. Genes turn on, genes turn off at different times in development, often driven by overlapping concentration gradients. Genes turn each other and themselves on and off. It’s complex, though, and there are things that happen that we don’t quite understand and have to black box. “If I add this protein, or take this gene and that gene away… what happens?”
A lot of that is like what email reputation is these days. There isn’t one factor in reputation, there are hundreds or thousands. They interact with each other, sometimes turning up reputation, sometimes turning down reputation. We figure this out by poking at the black box and seeing what happens. Unlike development, though, delivery rules are not fixed. They are changing along the way.
It’s not simple to explain delivery and how all the moving parts interact with each other. We don’t always know that doing A will lead to X. Because A -> X is not a straight line and there are other things that impact that line. Those other things also impact A, X and each other.
Delivery is a tangled web. On the surface it seems simple, but when you start peeling back the layers you discover the jumble of factors that all interact with each other. It’s what makes this a challenging field for all of us.

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The history of email

My first access to “the internet” was through a dialup modem on a VAX at the FDA. I was a summer intern there through my college career and then worked full time after graduation and before grad school. My email address ended in .bitnet. I could mail some places but not others. One of the places I couldn’t send mail was to my friends back on campus.
A few of those friends were computer science majors, so one weekend they tried to help me troubleshoot things. . There were text files that they ended up searching through looking up how to send mail from .bitnet to .edu. But it was all a baffling experience. Why couldn’t it just work? I had email, they had email, why could we not talk?
I never did figure out how to send email to campus from .bitnet.
Eventually, the FDA moved from BITNET to the internet and I had a .gov address. I could send mail around just by getting the recipients’s address. But the mystery of why I could mail some .edus and not others still lingers. I wonder what our setup was that we couldn’t send mail. I’ll probably never know. I don’t even have enough details to explain the problem to someone who would know. I suspect the answer will be “bang paths” or “host.txt” files, but I really don’t know.

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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.
10.0.0.0/8 is set aside by RFC 1918 for private use, so you can use it – along with 192.168.0.0/16 and 172.160.0.0/12 – on your home network or behind your corporate NAT.
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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