Day: October 16, 2006

PayPal Founder Pledges $3.5 Million for Life Extension Research

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, announced in September that he would donate $500,000 per year over the next three years to the Methuselah Foundation. The Methuselah Foundation is attempting to encourage research into anti-aging technologies by awarding prizes linked to specific goals, typically extending the lifespan of laboratory animals.

In addition, Thiel has promised matching funds of 50 cents for every dollar donated to the Methuselah Foundation from now through 2009.

The San Francisco Chronicle article on the donations includes a lot of background on the Methuselah Foundation’s Aubrey de Grey, who has become more controversial among researchers doing research on aging as his claims have become a bit more extravagant.

For example, here’s the SF Chronicle on de Grey critic S. Jay Olshansky, who 60 Minutes also used as its obligatory critic in their profile of de Grey,

S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer at the University of Illinois who confronted de Grey on CBS’s “60 Minutes” earlier this year, added: “Where I have vehemently disagreed with Aubrey is where he tries to convince people, especially reporters, that we are on the verge of immortality — that we have people alive today who will live for 1,000 or for 5,000 years.”

At present scientists don’t even know what causes aging, but “Aubrey seems to think that he does — that there are seven (causes for aging), that we have to reengineer the body to eliminate them, and that we’ll live forever.

“In the world of science,” Olshansky said, “you don’t make declarative statements (like that) without evidence to support them.”

Fine, 1,000 years is unrealistic — I’d be willing to settle for 300.

Sources:

Entrepreneur backs research on anti-aging. Keay Davidson, San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 2006.

PayPal Founder Pledges $3.5 Million to Antiaging Research. Press release, Methuselah Foundation, September 18, 2006.

The Blackboard Patent

Probably one of the more absurd recent software patents has to be Blackboard Inc.’s successful application for a patent on “learning management systems,” and its attempts to strongarm competitors by charging them with patent infringement.

Blackboard Inc. owns two “learning management systems” — Blackboard and WebCT. Those are easily the two most popular commercial course management systems, though anyone who has had to use either as a student has to ask why. For the most part, they are stripped down versions of genuine content management systems that force users to jump through hoops right and left to accomplish anything. Their sole advantage seems to be that they scale well on the backend, but open source alternatives are starting to catch up there.

So it makes sense for Blackboard to go the patent route — better to sue your competitors rather than have to compete with them — but its patent again raises the issue of just what the folks at the USPTO are smoking. Just take a quick look at the abstract for the Blackboard patent,

A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are available to the students over a network such as the Internet. Various levels of functionality are provided through a three-tiered licensing program that suits the needs of the institution offering the program. In addition, an open platform system is provided such that anyone with access to the Internet can create, manage, and offer a course to anyone else with access to the Internet without the need for an affiliation with an institution, thus enabling the virtual classroom to extend worldwide.

That’s right folks, Blackboard has essentially been granted a patent on applying a CMS to an educational environment. A close reading of the various patent claims reveals there’s not a goddamn single point of originality or innovation here at all.

Blackboard flaks have publicly said that one of the strongest claims they will pursue is on claim 36 of the patent, which essentially describes a system that provides different levels of access to a website based upon a user’s role — a fundamental feature of most content management systems and of computer systems in general.

As Eben Moglen, attorney for the open source Sakai Foundation, put it in a press release,

The recent announcement by Blackboard that it is attempting to assert patent rights over simple and longstanding online technologies as applied to the area of course management systems and e-learning technologies, and its subsequent litigation against a smaller commercial competitor constitutes a threat to the effective and open development of software for higher education and the values underlying such open activities.

Blackboard is currently pursing legal action against Desire2Learn and presumably will aim its guns at other competitors sooner or later.

How Long Should ISPs Preserve Customer Records?

In September, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told lawmakers that ISPs should be legally required to preserve customer records for perhaps as long as two years. Currently there are no federal laws governing customer record retention for ISPs.

Gonzales says that the customer records must be preserved for that length of time to assist the government in cracking down on child pornography.

The problem with this, of course, is that the result is records are preserved on millions of completely innocent people in order to help prosecute a relatively small number of cases that involve child pornography (in 2000-2001, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a little over 1,700 people were arrested on child pornography-related charges).

And once that data is collected and preserved, it will inevitably be subpoenaed far and wide for everything from terrorism prosecutions to copyright infringement to anything else under the Sun.

As I’ve said before, ISPs should not preserve any sort of customer traffic records for any longer than they need for technical purposes — no more than a few days, at most. More importantly, ISPs and web services need to be more upfront and make more accessible just how long they do preserve such customer data and under what circumstances they will provide said data to law enforcement and other entities.

Sources:

Statement Of Alberto R. Gonzales Attorney General Of The United States Before The Committee On Banking, Housing, And Urban Affairs United States Senate Concerning “Combating Child Pornography By Eliminating Pornographers’ Access To The Financial Payment System”. September 19, 2006.

Child pornography fact sheet. National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Accessed: September 30, 2006.

Gonzales Calls for ISP Customer Data Retention Law. RedmondMag.Com, September 19, 2006.