The Zeitgeist

Société Général (SG) announced yesterday that a ”rogue trader” had racked up US$7.2 Billion in losses.  The NYTimes reporting of this story reported that this “trader” identified as Jerome Kerviel had “managed to evade multiple layers of computer controls and audits for as long as a year.”  Kerviel is described as a “mid-level” employee who was, apparently according to SocGen, a technical and criminal mastermind who single handedly managed to pull off the largest bit of trading fraud in history.

Let me get this straight, a trader was able to get around the entire firm’s auditing and compliance infrastructure and not be noticed while racking up a 7 BILLION dollar tab?   Years ago, like back when Barings Bank was taken down by a ~$1Billion blunder by Nick Leeson  in 1995, the degree of automation was a mere fraction of what it is today — mostly because of Leeson we have the depth and breadth of regulatory and audit controls we have.     

To say it strains credibility is a gross understatement.  If SG didn’t have a full set of automatic auditing systems in place they were mostly likely in violation of securities laws, not just here in the US, but most certainly in the EU as well. Having worked on Wall St. for many years, I’ll bet they had quite a complete auditing system in place. It is impossible to believe that $7.2 billion just “went missing” without the complicity of many, many people at SG. It should be obvious that what we have here is a fall guy… it will be rather entertaining to watch as the investigation unfolds as we see which heads get lopped off over this obvious and not-very-creative lie…  

Here we go again… yet another Patent Troll is going after someone — in this case Apple — for something that so obvious and in fact generic, you’d have to have to be from some other planet not to see that it’s not patentable.

At issue is something known as the “783″ patent, US Patent #7,321,783, which is for something called a “Mobile Entertainment and Communications.”

This patent looks impressive when you open it up from the link above, lots of claims, lots of nice functional block diagrams showing cameras, microprocessors, etc. The thing is, it describes devices that have been around for years. Camera phones, laptops, and more. The text of the patent offers absolutely nothing in terms of uniqueness, innovation or invention. Nothing. It’s all just a scam to squeeze money out of companies who have actually innovated. Here they’re going after Apple and the iPhone, Motorola and RIM (makers of the Blackberry). Why are they not going after Nokia and Ericsson? What about all the world’s laptop makers? They’ve been selling devices that do all these things much, much longer than Apple has…

It’s long past the time that we stamp out litigious patent trolls. There needs to be a in effect a Patent Death Penalty for this kind of crap. It wastes the time of the courts, it makes a mockery of the real hard work done by inventors who really do spend years working to create truly new and novel things — and it really and truly does stifle innovation by making people with ideas look over their shoulders and worry if their years of hard work will be brought down by a clever scam artist and their unethical patent attorneys who know how to game the system on their behalf.

The Penalties when people game(*) the patent system should be draconian:

1. The “inventors” should personally pay the litigation costs for all litigants affected by their bogus “patent.”
2. The “inventors” should be banned for life from filing any further patents or trademarks.
3. The Patent Attorneys assisting in the writing of the “patent(s)” and who filed the “patent(s)” should be fined $1,000,000 per false claim in the bogus “patent” and they should be disbarred in every state in which they have a law license.

This may seem like an outlandishly harsh punishment, but given the poisonous effects that these patent trolls and their (usually) bogus patents take on the ability to innovate, it barely scratches the surface in terms of undoing the damage that is done by each and every bogus patent.

It will just take 1 or 2 instances of this “Patent Death Penalty” before inventors will do their homework, and Patent Attorneys will give their clients solid advise about what is and isn’t patentable… especially if their law licenses are on the line.

*
…and by “game” I mean knowingly abusing the patent system by filing patents that are not valid and they have reason to know based on the existence of prior art or obviousness should not be granted, let alone even filed (as in the case of this patent — since every electronic mobile device such as a cell phone and laptop or PDA fits the basic description embodied in this patent).

I know how to program in a bunch of languages… some really, really old, like Algol-68, PL/1, Pascal, Modula-2 and MC680×0 Assembly Language. Some as mainstream as you can get, like C, Objective-C, Java, Perl and PHP. I’m a Unix guy so I also know several “shell” languages found in things like the C-Shell (and “tcsh”) and the Bourne/BASH shells. I even mess with these new fangled languages that all the kool kidz are using like Python and the darling of Web2.0 startups: Ruby on Rails.

For several years a groundswell has been building around Ruby (a language that feels like a semi-hybrid of Perl and Smalltalk + a smattering of various shells) and a series of libraries collectively known as Rails which as a toolset allows for some pretty rapid development of database-backed Web applications. The whole she’bang is often commonly referred to as Ruby-on-Rails — “RoR” or often just “Rails.”

Rails has been hailed as sort of a messiah of languages, if you believe its supplicants (and their VCs ), it’s all singing, all dancing and the greatest language EVAR. Lots of very popular Web2.0 apps have been written in it including: Campfire, BaseCamp and the incredibly popular Twitter.

Of course if you’ve been writing software long enough, you’ll have experienced a lot of “greatest language EVARs” … and a lot of “greatest” methodologies and “greatest” OSes and on and on. Well, there have been a whole lots of blow ups in the Rails community of late… The blog Juixe gives a good rundown on a set of explosions rocking the core of the Rails community. An even more dramatic rant has been developing from Zed Shaw who is the developer of Mongrel which is a web server and HTTP library optimized for and written in Ruby itself, and a core element of many apps developed and deployed with Rails. Zed’s rant is quite hyperbolic (and more profanity laced/infused/laden that I can describe — you have been warned) but it’s indicative of the depth of the turmoil in the ranks of the Rails elite.

What makes this so interesting is how it shows that no area of human activity, even something as traditionally insular as programming is immune from manias and bubbles. Probably the best analysis ever done on this phenomenon was written in 1841 by Charles MacKay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (here as an ebook from the Gutenberg Project). MacKay was the first to attempt to dissect popular manias that cause people to create speculative bubbles. (Just to be clear, I’m differentiating Rails as a mania affecting programmers in a particular community apart from the general Dot Com bubble that burst in 2000, or what some think is a “Web2.0″ bubble that may [or may not] be in progress now).

From a technical perspective what I find interesting isn’t that Rails is blowing up, but rather that it took so long for common sense to start filtering back into the Rails debate. For about 2 years rails has been seen as almost a Holy Grail: Make no mistake, Ruby+Rails is quite a nice language and framework for fast prototyping and proof of concept development; it’s got a lot of things going for it, and given enough time and experience it may yet take its place as a tried and true language …however the fact that it’s being pressed into service in so many high profile situations, many of which demand ever increasing levels of scalability and performance would be a serious stressor for any relatively young and dynamic programming environment (and, if you read some of these rants and critiques, its exactly that lack of scalability that threatens to kill Rails’ viability).

Sadly, the Internet doesn’t wait for things to mature, and bubbles are very unforgiving things.

[Update: I totally missed Ms. Stacie Somers of San Diego County, another gold-digger wanna be… Macalope covers it nicely…]

It’s interesting how Apple has become everyone’s favorite whipping boy lately. The latest salvo in the “If I sue Apple maybe I’ll get rich” war has been fired by a Florida resident named “Frederick Black” who claims that Floridians have been “victimized” by Apple because their iPods can’t play WMA-protected songs.

First off, there are plenty of MP3 players on the market. Apple’s happens to play unprotected MP3 and AAC files. Microsoft’s play their own format (oddly, the Zune players themselves are incompatible with WMA and use some other DRM scheme I believe, but Mr. Black isn’t suing Microsoft I notice).

There are plenty of online music stores out there besides iTunes… Let’s see… there’s Microsoft’s, there’s Amazon’s, there’s WalMart’s, and that’s not even counting the online stores run by several of the music labels themselves. All of them sell either unprotected MP3’s which will work on anyone’s MP3 player, or WMA-protected tracks which will only work on Microsoft players (except as noted before on the Zune). Mr Black can purchase tunes from any non-protected site, or get a physical CD and copy the tracks onto his iPod that way.

Given the large number of payers and music services as well as the buy-a-CD option, I am not sure how Mr. Black and his fellow Floridians are being mistreated by Apple…

Apple actually has the most liberal policy of any of the device manufacturers and/or online stores. You can free an iTunes track from it’s AAC copy-protection by burning it to a CD and then re-importing it, you can also pay a little more for completely un-protected tracks. Just try that on the Microsoft store. Let me know how that works out for you, ok? Oh, and Apple let’s you sync your music to an unlimited number of iPods, too. And with a WMA protected device/music? Uh… not so much.

Apple also doesn’t mess around with your music collection applying DRM to your existing music. If you have any Microsoft player, including the new Zune, Microsoft applies its DRM system to your music that was NOT purchased from them or an affiliated online store. Once they do that your music collection is effectively frozen and can never be moved onto a new device. Unless, of course, you go re-import all your CDs, etc.

“Mr. Black” and all the get-rich-quick crowd need to step back and see that they’ve got it pretty good with their iPods. I’ll go out on a limb and bet that most of what Apple is doing with regard to DRM is more than likely a side-effect of their agreements with the labels and the RIAA — the folks who are suing grandmothers and teenagers and are now trying to tell consumers that they have no right to rip their own music collections and listen to them whenever they want to and/or on devices of their own choosing…

In fact, I’ll go even further… I’ll say that at the moment the only thing standing between the Rest of Us and a world where every single piece of information is DRMed, lock-boxed and pay-for-played is Apple.