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Microsoft's 'Naughty or Nice' Patent Application
theodp writes "Those of you worried about Microsoft's stance on network neutrality won't find much comfort in the software giant's just-published patent application for systems and methods to facilitate self regulation of social networks through trading and gift exchange, which classify users as good or bad and call for network bandwidth to be reduced for those deemed 'less desirable.'"
"Nothing for you to see here, please move along." How very apt.
Can we have a limit please on the number of patents one company may have.
Why UNIX?
I see someone's finally figured out how to have an entertaining Slashdot thread.
If you post a link to the patent instead of an article, you're virtually guaranteeing that no one will read the fucking article, let alone understand it! And just think of the wacky hijinks and hilarity that are bound to ensue from there!
Goo goo g'joob.
If you go to microsoft websites, then you get more bandwidth; if you go to google... bad user! no bandwidth for you!
stuff |
Having the members of a community reduce a persons presence on an website? Slashdotters would never stand for such a thing, surely.
(PS pls mod me up!)
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
In most other situations, market/social forces will usually make the right result come out.
Probably this would put an end to the Trolls. Who knows? The one who would take the hit would be the AC.
...but I did find the part where bandwidth is mentioned as an asset that can be controlled via this system.
While you can look at it one way and say this is just a logical extension of rewarding 'good' users, the fact that the system can be used to punish 'bad' users and explains nothing about how this definition of 'good' and 'bad' will be determined makes me more concerned for the people using such a service.
I bloody well wouldn't.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
What happens if a lot of Linux/Mac users give Microsoft a bad rating. Doesn't this mean that they should have reduced bandwidth? What about all of those who still use Windows but hate MS because Word just ate their essay, Powerpoint destroyed the presentation that is about to happen in a few hours. I can see this raising very interesting prospects, just need a large enough group of people.
But MS probably have insulated themselves against it anyway...
I always wondered where this setting was...
With network neutrality, I mean resources allocated for you on a larger WAN scale than within a company's (in this case Microsoft's) own network, by the owners of that physical network infrastructure. Are we sure this is talking about affecting actual network neutrality where e.g. network owners are affected by a classification system by Microsoft, or is this patent just describing a method for Microsoft to reduce bandwidth of e.g streaming media (the patent explicitly speaks of audio and video) for abusive accounts on a new or existing online site of theirs?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
What has this to do with net neutrality? They are talking about social networks. I don't see anything about reducing bandwidth in the article. Way to muddy the waters Slashdot editors!
I hate microsoft as much as the next man but if they don't patent it then some other twonk will. Fix your patent system.
Here is the first claim of the patent:
... on whether the user behavior is desireable" is obviously a big part of the moderation system (flamebait, troll, are ways to discoiurage undesirable behavior).
"1. A system that facilitates self-regulation of a social network comprising: a network monitoring component that watches user behavior on the social network; and an asset allocation component that allocates or re-allocates one or more assets among one or more network users based at least in part on whether the user behavior is desirable."
As I read that, the Slashdot moderation system infringes. The "network monitoring component" is the editors and the moderators. They "watch user behavior on the social network". The "asset allocation component" is the karma, which affects how broadly users' messages get seen. Lastly, "based
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Cf. Malinowski, 1915, 1922.
Come on, guys....
Yay! That way we can stamp out anything but the average, the mediocre and the banal.
Deleted
From what I've read from the patent, it sounds like it's some sort of moderation system for a website (social networks. Like myspace and MS's own Live Spaces site). Basically, it rewards productive users of a site while punishing trolls and spammers.
Although the patent is questionable, (it sounds similar to the Slashdot Karma System to me) it doesn't sound like something that will be used for net neutrality.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
So how long unitl Anonymous Cowards lose bandwidth on /.?
For that matter does this mean my karma might buy me more bandwidth?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
This seems like a variation of the old evil bit idea.
Many ISPs and social networks already use similar criteria to guide subscribers on correct behaviour of the network. My ISP imposes restrictions on the bandwidth I can use every month and when I can use it during the day (a maximum of 10Gb@peak time every month). Many bit torrent communities also specify that you have to share at least the amount of data that you have downloaded, to deter leechers.
[sarcasm] Yes please M$ take my bandwidth from me. No no, i wont mind at all. [/sarcasm] With that said, if this gets used on /. i'll have little bandwidth..must plot to raise karma..
mod how you will.
So many choices, so little tolerance.
Didn't get down to the very details, but the summary sounds like any human social interaction in any given environment. If you consider your office a "network" the next time you give a co-worker you happen to like a gift be prepared to pay Microsoft some money on the side! They now would own how you interact!
Has anyone tried patenting oxygen lately?
As if I wasn't a total outcast before, now I get to be e-rejected by VIRTUAL people! Awesome!
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Somebody submit Slashdot's comment moderation system as prior art. Go ahead. I dares ya.
*chuckle*
Anyhoo, just what we need -- more technologically-enforced tyranny by majority.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
"r systems and methods to facilitate self regulation of social networks through trading and gift exchange, which classify users as good or bad and call for network bandwidth to be reduced for those deemed 'less desirable.'"
Sounds a lot like how bittorrent does bandwidth throttling - give away a lot of chunks, you get back a lot of chunks; be miserly in your upload rate, and get bit-slapped (no, that's not a type - its a pun :-)
Here's what we need if we want to preempt as many stupid obvious patents: Pick a friendly noble license everyone's most likely to agree on (Creative Commons, GPL, or whatever). Set up a site that allow two kinds of submissions: (1) Individual algorithms in a number of languages (and perhaps in pseudocode), (2)
Pi Ran Out
I'm sorry Microsoft but, Santa, has had prior art on this one for years.
Is it just me, or does this sound like the stereotypical persona given to us involving the 'cool' kids vs. the bad kids from high school?
Who VOTES good or bad?
I say the users should get to vote. 1 vote per user which can be modified when/if necessary.
Mary user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Ian user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Cathy user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Ralph user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Olivia user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Sean user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Olga user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Frank user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Teresa user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Sam user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Uma user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Charlie user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Kelly user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
Sol user see the Windows Genuine Advantage message come up and votes bad for Windows Update Website.
. . .
Then, Microsoft Updates arrive slower, and the fixes for the fixes they send out can be fixed before you get them! ;)
Dmn... hit "submit" instead of "preview." First time I did that.
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Maybe some stupid obvious patents could be prevented like this: Pick a friendly noble license everyone's likely to be comfortable with (Creative Commons, GPL, or whatever). Set up a site that allow two kinds of community contributions under that license: (1) Descriptions of individual algorithms in any of a number of languages (perhaps pseudocode among them), (2) Descriptions of possible systems that can be derived from combinations and permutations of algorithms in the catalog.
The more robust the catalog becomes, the more likely it is that some system in the catalog will constitute evidence of prior art (or simultaneous / parallel art) in a future patent case. To get a robust system, it needs to be useful to programmers, i.e. searchable, easy to cobble together working code modules on the fly by wiring inputs & outputs together, etc. Just feed (bandwidth allocation algorithm 354) with the output of (peer behavior composite scoring system 12(peer action evaluation loop 18)).
This could actually be a worthwhile contribution to the community aside from its possible effects on private intellectual property accumulation. What "OWL" sought (seeks?) to be for classes, properties and relations, an endeavor like this could be for software systems.
Pi Ran Out
Look, network neutrality doesn't make any sense (to me anyway...)
.com domains instead of just .edu's that used to exist.)
.EDU folks? Maybe, but I sure that they even pay something to their backbone providers... and HOW many .EDU sites host large traffic sources like YouTube? (Bittorent maybe, by a good ADMIN can fix that if they REALLY want to.)
I PAY to have bandwidth on my ISP... THEY PAY to have LOTS of bandwidth to sell to the customers... the People that they get it from PAY some HUGE company (used to be Sprint I think... , Still is?) for that bandwidth to sell and they maintain those lines for ME. Everyone making profit on they way up the ladder.
Now YouTube comes along... And I want to watch a video... Gues what... SAME thing tracks back as above for YouTube. YouTube is paying for their bandwidth, one way or another. So, the REAL internet carriers that maintain the backbone for a FEE get to charge 2x for every site I visit!
First they eventually have revenue trickle back from me as a destination of content, and second they have revenue trickle back from the source of the content. That rule applies no matter WHERE the content comes from... This is NOT the FREE University internet that used to be! It was comercialized in the early 90's. (with advent of
So If I go from my computer to Bittorrent site, they get paid 2x for that traffic... If I go to GOOgLE, they get paid 2x for that traffic... If I call out on IP fone like Vonage, they get paid 2x for that traffic!!!!
Someone pays to send, someone pays to recieve. JUST LIKE THE TELEPHONE! To have they say to me that they are gonna give my crappier service because I want to call a 1-900 # and they are gonna just use the phone lines to sell sex to me instead of me calling my grandma, would be outragous! This is all BS! We ALL eventually PAY for the service.
Who doesn't? Lots of
So it boils down in my book that it's all BS.. and there should be NO Throttleing of ANY content based on who you are... If someone wants dedicated IP Backbone on the empty fiber, thats different, but don't throttle my stuff just because I'm useing the service for what it was intended, passing information from point A to Point B.
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
This looks like an attempt to patent a direct (and seemingly fairly obvious) application of the principle of preferential attachment, as presented by Barabási in Linked: The New Science of Networks and demonstrated everywhere. Prior art? Try, uh, nature...
I can see where this would make sense and be a legitimate thing for Xbox Live aka. Live Anywhere. People on XBL who get reported consistently as bad by other gamers, or are caught cheating / modding would suffer for their actions. It would be kinda like Xbox Jail!. I for one would appreciate that self policing.
How about XBox live's 'rep' system? Lower bandwidth for modded-down players, anyone?
only if you're in econ 101 do market forces "usually" make the "right" result come out.
there's a reason why phrases such as asymmetric information and channel management exist. and why poor people pay more for the same services as rich people. it's called marketing, appropriately enough.
weeeee. market forces!! they created the current patent system, moron, along with pro-business new jersey laws, and self-regulation schemes. not to mention redlining, and zipcode based insurance, and new products paying for space at grocery stores, and mail-in-rebates, and manufactured 'minutes' plans, and all sorts of other interesting little quirks and inefficiencies that occur when you don't have anywhere near perfect competition. Companies know and understand this and that, even in cases where the market will eventually 'deal' with problems, improvements in the market can be delayed again and again by managing the product and policies appropriately.
Apparently P2P apps implement some of this, and RFC3514 has covered some more since early 2003. I would just love it if that RFC torpedoed a patent like this.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Presumably Microsoft's point is that this is bad patent claim feedback, so if you submit it, you'll get less bandwidth for submitting future patent claim feedback.
But seriously, yes, this is the Mother of all Prior Art, or rather, to untangle the metaphor properly, the Ungrateful Stepchild of all Prior Art. After all, creating a predicate for goodness and badness and then throttling bandwidth based on that seems to me to be a description of how, at some level, such organized theories as neural nets and such disorganized theories as Darwinian evolution are alleged to work. Can't you just paraphrase this application to say "survival of the fittest"? If you agree, there is quite literally no older theory of anything.
Even the notion of seeking to lock out competition by acquiring a monopoly on a critical resource from the government is, at the meta level, an example of trying to gain more (political) bandwidth by proposing that a given political theory (this patent) is better and that Microsoft should be rewarded with more control of the world around it. So this entire proposal itself, to be meaningful at all, presupposes that the system it alleges to "invent" is already in place and active.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Gee, one could think of karma and moderator points as things that might match the description here. Slashdot is prior art!
I think this one is yet another example of the USPTO granting patents for things that are obvious.
I was thinking the very same thing. Bittorrent is the ultimate prior art for this patent.
A community-oriented lyrics site
How is this different from the Am I Hot or Not style of websites? Or any self-moderated website like slashdot? Where's the novelty?
Isn't this just basically the same principle behind Metamoderation? Instead of rating the mods though, the community rates everyone else... I also DO like the type of way they punish poorly behaving people - it gives them a chance to shape up without outright banning them. HOWever, I'm somewhat troubled by this being patented. Metamoderation already exists, and to cripple it is rather risky, since the patent almost covers JUST metamoderation without the bandwidth control, too.
Is this intentional mockery of a broken patent system? These guys are patenting a system to reward people who tell some tracker they've emailed links and photos to friends? (And no, I'm not making this up. See pp 54,55.) A system that can forbid transfer *based on content or identity* (p 53)?
A system that can optionally run on your computer? (p 43)?
And these are the details?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Why is everbody complaining. All p23p applications do this. Example. Bittorrent limits your download speed if you dont have a good upload speed
.Why is everbody upset?
Some other p2p systems do this too
If you think that evolution and neural nets are doing anything more grandiose, you're in for a rude awakening one day.
The phrase "survival of the fittest" should always cause you to ask "fittest for what?". You should not assume "fit" in this sentence means the kind of "fit" that your doctor (hopefully) proclaims you when you go in for a physical, meaning "fit in all ways". Fittest in the "survival of the fittest" means "capable of surviving whatever hurdle has been put before you today" with no regard as to whether there's any sense of continuity whatsoever to any other hurdle on any other day. Evolution is not cranking out things that are fit for all purposes, it's cranking out things that are fit for the moment, given history only as "how you got there", not proof that you deserve to survive further. The dinosaurs survived hugely longer than man has, and were by all accounts fitter than we'll likely ever be. But then they went away--poof.
Nature favors what's best at the moment, very much like the stock market favors the stockholders of the moment. Nature has no long-term theory of what it is trying to achieve. In a desert ecology, the best design might be the ability to survive without water, but nature can go millions of years designing that model and then if there's a flood one day, nature will favor for survival only those desert creatures that can swim (or maybe that find a cactus to float on), which is not really that different than a corporation buying another just because it likes what's in its bank account and then disassembling the rest for spare parts, even if the part it's disassembling has no long-term value to the population.
Nature always has a myopic view of what it is trying to achieve. It cares about surviving to the next moment, nothing more. Not a lot different than modern corporations caring about surviving to the next quarter, and failing to plan for the long term.
And even neural nets, which you imagine are struggling to be more general, are really hugely dictated in what the will become by what their experience is "growing up". The implicit allegation of the Microsoft patent claim is that they have invented "good parenting, which is the standing "best practice" for training a neural net. Things don't come to be "best practice" without being "prior art".
You might also allege that the claim is equivalent to a perceptron, since the notion seems to be that by throttling the bandwidth based on isolated goodness/badness without coordinating activity with other goodness/badness that might operate in a sympathetic way that can generate good results even though it's been pretty well proven that this sort of simplistic system doesn't in fact result in such things.
The problem with patents is that they appear to be a credential. So even though this may be a proven-to-be-bad idea doesn't mean it won't get used. I've often thought of thinking up bad ideas myself and patenting those. They're easier to think up than good ideas, and their being bad doesn't seem to be a barrier to use. If you can get paid (through patent revenue) for other people being stupid, why wouldn't you? You'd think this would retard people moving toward the bad ideas (by making them more expensive) and so implicitly move them toward the good ones, but I fear that the number of bad ideas is so densely packed compared to the good ones that you'd not actually notice any beneficial effect of having lined out only a few of them.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
So basically Microsoft is filing for a "One Clique" Patent?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
From my understanding of the Bittorent protocol this is what it does already with the "Choking" and all. How can they get a pattent on something with prior art that they do not own.
Or does this mean that they are going to buy Bittorent?
I believe the "technology" is already in use by any given torrent client, not to mention scores of other p2p apps. Another stupid patent. I'm currently drafting my patent on "Symbols arranged in an order thereby giving them meaning, and facilitate the exchange of information." Should this break through make me a trillionaire in court by sueing everyone who uses any langauge ever? Our patent system sucks. Microsoft has the click and double click patented. How stupid can it get? FREE INFORMATION, FOR EVERYONE
Based on the "gifts" MS has bestowed on us, I'd have have to deem them "less desirable". Maybe this is why MS Update seems so slow... </troll> :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If this were applied to the Internet as a whole, Slashdot would be gone. MySpace and YouTube would have all the bandwidth they could ever need. And nobody would be able to mod me down for this comment because their screen would never refresh.
Not that it's pantentable, but the idea is great.
/.'s response time should be based on your karma. Or how soon you can see a story.
I think
Hel, I think lifes response time should be based on your karma.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It is a patent application. I can apply for a patent for a patent on the lever. Doesn't mean it will be granted.
Also, not all prior art is obvious. Sure it muight be obvious to YOU, but not to everyone.
Also, Obvious mean thinking ahead, not using hindsight.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
May be they are going to use it as prohibititive patent, so noone ever undermine net neutrality?
Just a thought... You know, one of those thoughts...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Is it open source?
IANAA and tax rules vary.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
You would know the need for this technology if you ever spent time on XBox Live playing Halo. About patenting it? Not sure, but the idea is sound. An alternative I once proposed was allowing individuals who received consistently low marks from their peers to just get matched up to play with others of the same ratings so you could have two teams of de-levelers, PK's, early-quitters, cheaters, and general nuisances fighting it out.
microsoft and att are buddy buddy over ip tv - so don't be fooled by what they say publicly.