Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Patents Pokes-Per-Minute Limits
theodp writes "The USPTO lowered the bar again on Tuesday, granting U.S. Patent No. 8,296,373 to four Facebook inventors for Automatically Managing Objectionable Behavior in a Web-based Social Network, essentially warning users or suspending their accounts when their poking, friend requesting, and wall posting is deemed annoying. From the patent: 'Actions by a user exceeding the threshold may trigger the violation module 240 to take an action. For example, the point 360, which may represent fifty occurrences of an action in a five hour period, does not violate any of the policies as illustrated. However, the point 350, which represents fifty occurrences in a two hour period, violates the poke threshold 330 and the wall post threshold 340. Thus, if point 350 represents a user's actions of either poking or wall posting, then the policy is violated.'"
POKE 53281,0
No wonder the USPTO is overloaded. If this is the garbage that qualifies as patent worthy.
I'm going to patent ass-wiping thresholds now. Once you've wiped your ass 10 times in one sitting and you're still not clean then something has gone wrong...
Facebook inventors don't tend to be short on cash and that's one of the weakest patents I've ever heard of.
Man, that is some hard core stuff right there. Is there anyone frequenting Slashdot with genius-level IQ that could possibly break down this unbelievably complex, non-obvious behavior and explain it to the rest of us? This is what having billions of dollars of capital can do for you - bring the brain power to a company that is required to make these kinds of amazing discoveries. What I'm looking forward to are the physics and mathematical papers that can expand on these newly found principles and constructs. It's really the stepping-off point to marvelous things for humanity. In fact, I do believe this may even bring us a step closer to the Grand Unified Theory.
Better known as 318230.
We might know of some prior art somewhere...
The Right To Be Annoying shall not be abridged by the federal government, it's legislation or it's keepers, the newly created class of citizens who now oversee our political affairs, the corporations.
Hmmmm, my social networking site, which has been around for many many years, has had this since 2008 - I wonder if I should contact the USPTO?
Insert signature here...
At what point does pokes per minute turn into a tickle fight?
EVAR!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Claim 1-If two showers in an apartment building with common hot water supply are turned on, hot water is provided to both. But if four showers are turned on each automatically receives a reduced amount of hot water. Claim 2-If a toilet is flushed while a shower is turned on, the reduced cold water supply changes the mix of hot and cold water, making the shower water temperature hotter.
It is about time someone solved this poking problem! I am sure NASA will be licensing this technology right away!
AOL already implemented this with rate-limiting certain actions on AIM, and beefed it up even further with the warning system.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm going to file a patent to automatically bitch slap the wankers on slashdot who automatically make the stupid fucking "Oh yeah, well I'm going to patent xyz retard joke" whenever one of these stories shows up. And I'll file another patent to send those who automatically respond, "oh yeah well you'll have to get around my patent of your patent" lame jokes to the goatse guy for their punishment.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
We used to configure eggdrop bots on IRC to auto-kick users that performed X behavior X times in a time period of X. *sigh*
Can't they hire some decent software engineers to look at shit like this and automatically label this as obvious and not innovative? Maybe even on contract basis so they rotate people through so they don't eventually go crazy trying to filter the overwhelming onslaught of bullshit Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google patents. Right now even Microsoft is looking good compared to these guys, and that's saying something.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I don't know why I read these anymore, it just makes me so mad. How do you patent "if (x > threshold) then perform_action()" ???? I know this is a simplification of what has probably been implemented, but this seems to be what facebook is claiming is the patent-worthy invention here... What the fuck USPTO? Go away... Please.. Now...
Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke.
Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke.
Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke.
Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke.
Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke. Poke.
Nope, Slashdot is not in violation of the patent. Investigation closed.
Better known as 318230.
Slow down, Cowboy. You seem to have filed too many frivolous patents. Come back in 15 minutes.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
These young'ins have no clue WTF you're talking about.
To them, 6502 assembly is the instruction book for an IKEA furniture product or the access key for some 'i'something or another from Apple.
I got back on Facebook in early September, after spending a while away from it. I'd been on it, on and off, since the .edu-address-required days, and have a lot of friends on there. I started adding them, and before long, Facebook decided I must clearly be a spammer, since no "new" user could possibly know a couple hundred people. It banned me from everything but posting to my own wall, accepting friend requests, and poking people, for a solid month.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Actions by a user exceeding the threshold may trigger the violation module 240 to take an action. For example, the point 360, which may represent fifty occurrences of trivial patents in a five year period, does not violate any of the policies as illustrated. However, the point 350, which represents fifty occurrences in a two year period, violates the stupid-patent threshold 330 and the blindingly-obvious invention threshold 340. Thus, if point 350 represents a user's actions of obtaining ludicrous patents for everyday things, then the policy is violated. Think I'm on to a winner here.
Orc peons in Warcraft II had a poke limit in 1995.
Reminds me of MSN messenger.
The messenger used to limit sending of too many pokes per time unit, but it did nothing to limit receiving pokes.
Catch the correct packet, and sent it 10,000 times a second on repeat; Good times.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
As the subject implies. Thank Facebook for the existence of this concept.
Doh. There went my startup...
Hey, If your poking more than 50 times in 2 hours your doctor needs to cancel your Viagra prescription and say; "GO OUTSIDE AND GET SOME EXERCISE YOU FAT SLOB!!!)
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
If you go to stack exchange , google and the ustpo have gotten together so that 3rd party members and others can invalidate patents in crowdsourcing effort and look at other patents that have not yet been accepted. I have tried to submit this story twice now and was declined. Check out patents.stackexchange. If you think that certain patents should be invalidated then state your prior art and work with those that can help you research. By the way I have tried to start a thread on there about blizzard being sued by worlds inc.
Has anyone bothered to patent limits on how often can a third party break wind?
You can't do insane crap like this, like grant patents on token buckets, and then complain that people don't respect others' intellectual property. You're teaching us to despise your claims to ideas.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have seen this before. Various things that limit messages, signups, email checks, login attempts. I can't count the number of times that I have been told "You have exceeded the number of XXX, please wait X seconds before trying again."
Much as I hate Facebook with a passion, I think this is the "right" strategy for them to survive in a litigious patent regime. In a patent war, you need every weapon you could get. Frivolous patents like this may well be more effective in a patent war than essential patents where you can get sued for abusing FRAND licensing:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/10/24/2033252/doj-investigating-samsung-for-patent-abuse
On hindsight, Google's acquistion of Motorola Mobility doesn't appear to have benefited it much in its court cases with Apple and Microsoft, two companies with a large chest of non-essential, even frivolous patents.
Corporate moral: Patent everything, even if a two-year-old child can build it.
Three strikes.
Where, exactly, is the originality?
If this helps to prevent one more product from implementing the concept of poking, the patent system may just be worth it after all.
Wikipedia's AbuseFilter is prior art.
Same concept.
The ability to monopolize an industry is insignificant, next to the power of the source.
Ask Douglas Adams:
But first: When will people finally get sick of being "poked" in their social fannies by Faceclamp? With just a little consumer discretion, these 'creative geniuses' could easily be patenting their own obsolescence and isolation. For fucks sake, my fellow primates; is this the Personality Banquet At The End Of The Universe?
Face7809904123: ""Good millennium," it lowed and sat back heavily on its Faceclamp poker , "I am the gullible Digit of the Day. May I interest you in the attributes of my psyche?"
It harrumphed and giggled a bit, shuffled its mind quarters in to a more accessible status and gazed submissively at them.
Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Pokerberg and the NSA, a resigned shrug from the CIA and naked hunger from Marketers.
"Something off my children perhaps?" suggested Face7809904123, "compressed into a PDF and spreadsheet ?"
"Er, your whole family?" said Pokerberg in a juicy whisper.
"But naturally my family, Lord," mooed the Face eagerly, "no other is easier to offer."
The Marketers leapt to their hooves and started prodding and exploiting the Face's family salaciously.
"Or my Friends© are very good," murmured the Face. "I've been conversing and receiving lots of "likes", so there's a lot of personal data there."
It emitted a feeble mew, giggled again and started to divulge the data. and so on and so forth
*Theme borrowed from some writer who anticipated the future of social media.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
glad to know smart people like the creator of facebook and its staff are working hard at giving facebook users poke protection, the US economy is saved. folks, investors.. buy some shares in facebook today, your country depends on it.
This, and even more elaborate implementations, have been in use in IRC clients and scripts for years.
To poke more than once, both sides have to willingly engage in the poking. If one side deems the poking annoying, they just have to ignore the poke.
From what I understand, "The female anatomy has ways of shutting that whole thing down."
I hope the USPTO keeps up the good work. Eventually the value of patents will be reduced to zero because there are simply too many ridiculous ones.
In concert band in high school, the girl next to me used to poke me every time the sheet music said "poco ritard." I should patent that before Facebook does. You know, to protect the entertainment rights of band geeks everywhere.
The current patent system makes it imperative that companies patent every line of code they write, so parasites like Intellectual Vultures don't come along and patent that thought and sue.
I have prior art in an Elgg plugin I wrote about a year ago - and that is for a social network - so they can't even claim "* in a social network"
http://community.elgg.org/plugins/821368/1.5/spam-throttle-18x
I doubt I'm the only one, most likely every other social network framework has something similar. The patent is pure BS, lets just add it to the pile.
going to agree that "intellectual property" is neither?
The only instances of intellectual property theft that have occurred has been when human culture has been stolen and privatized by "intellectual property laws."
This space available.
on De Anza in Cupertino already do this.
1. Create something nobody needs, and everybody but the most juvenile will find annoying.
2. Create (obvious) method for limiting the annoyance created by step 1.
3. Patent the method in step 2.
4. ????
5. Profit!
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Thanks for information MLM software | network marketing software
This reminds me of the Breidbart Index, a very longstanding
measure of abuse (cross/multi-posting) to Usenet.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/Breidbart-Index.html
Why would you let your users harass people with these features if you could just as easily disable them once they've reached this imaginary threshold?
Every time I see your sig I picture Jesus riding down the highway on a moped.
Shouldn't he be riding a camel?
Dear Facebook,
Thank you for this. I've often felt a bit lost when people should be told they are annoying. Now that you have cemented this in code aspies everywhere will finally be able to know EXACTLY when a person is annoying and by definition when they are annoying.
I do hope that all future messages, tweets, pokes, posts, nods, winks and obscene gestures will be filtered via Facebook in the future, for posterity.
Perhaps we could go into business together. My registered patent is a bit similar but involves slapping people in the face when they piss me off by. Naturally to demonstrate this we'd have to meet in person, with the creators of this pokes per hour epiphany. You know, genius to genius.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
The Journal of Social Media Interactive Dynamics, staffed by Facebook employees and reviewed by a few professors at the various new Facebook-funded University Chairs of Social Media Interactive Dynamics, would cost less than lawyers.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
However if a user responds in the same speed, the communication is marked as "valid" and no limits apply.
Facebook. If you're going to implement this, let me know. I'm sure we can work something out.
If I find out you implemented this without contacting me, it will be a different story.
Privacy is terrorism.
they implemented a feature FTP sites had implemented twenty years ago. Back then it wasn't called poking or friend requesting, it was called hammering, and you got temporarily (or sometimes permanently) banned for it.
Back then it was a common sense solution to a common problem. Ever since common sense died out in the 90's, people think common sense solutions are novel and deserve patent.
So they are doing this so when Facebook eventually Fails (I mean heck, It takes a ALOT of money to pay people and run Datacenters etc) then along comes the next "big" social network Facebook can sue them for this and hey presto PROFIT!
I recognize that the facebook/email analogy fails on a more than one element, but much of the standard form applies.
Your patent advocates a
(*) technical ( ) legislative (*) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(*) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of facebook will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(*) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(*) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(*) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(*) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
-
I thought IRC channels had bots that did this all the time. Wouldn't that be considered prior art?
Hey I don't know how many of you are attempting to review the patent in question, but it's very difficult for non-MSIE users to load the figures included in the patent. It would be cool if posters would instead link to freepatentsonline.com rather than (or in addition to) the uspto.gov website. Here's a PDF of the patent in question: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8296373.pdf
Crimey