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.'"
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.
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*
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'm afraid you've got the wrong endianness. Next time try programming for the 6800 instead ;)
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.