Meathook Reality

From Wired…

A small social networking software company filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming that much of the source code behind Orkut.com, the search engine’s popular social service, was stolen by a former engineer.

In its lawsuit, Affinity Engines, based in Palo Alto, California, said engineer Orkut Buyukkokten illegally took the code he had written for the company – which he co-founded – with him when he joined Google. Affinity Engines also claimed that Buyukkokten promised Affinity Engines that he wouldn’t develop a competing social network service for Goog le. Affinity Engines, which filed the claim on May 25 in Santa Clara Superior Court, is seeking unspecified damages and royalties.

This looks pretty simple (The Wired article links to information about the court filings, but not the documents themselves). I think Mr Buyukkokten is going to be looking for a new job soon, and given Google’s mid-IPO status, I betcha there’s going to be some money laid out, or even a simple purchase of Affinity Engines in the future.

Here’s an interesting tale, for anyone out there who understands some of the nitty-gritty of the way the Internet works.

Overview, as I read it, mainly from the affidavits referenced below:

Kid sets up successful hosting business from his parents basement sometime back in ‘98, and has grown it by several hundred percent in the past several years. He’s done this, I assume, by organizing servers, writing some software, advertising, and purchasing bandwidth and colocation space from a provider. Of course, most colo providers have realized that they, too, can sell hosted space, which is all well and good (heck, I ran the Newsnipple Collective right next to Hurricane Electric’s hosting servers). The problem comes when the colo provider decides that they want to buy out one of their customers, and the customer will not cave. In this case, the customer has been trying to move out, despite the fact that the provider has been raising rates. Moving a business is not particularly easy. Doubly so when it depends on being as close to 100% reliable as possible.

Moves on the Internet can be particularly tough. When I moved my servers home from Fremont, the IP addresses changed – this is because I effectively switch Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The ISP provides the connection between your computer(s) and everything else. And every computer on the Internet has at least one address. These addresses are doled out by the American Registry for Internet Numbers. All of the major ISPs lease a block of numbers, and when they connect together, tell each other, through various protocols, how to send data to those blocks. Those blocks are further subdivided into networks, and eventually the networks or individual addresses get assigned to customers. Because of this heirarchy, when a customer moves from one ISP to another, they get a subset of the new ISP’s address. This change causes just about all the normal hassle you would expect: various notification methods must be used to make sure that data gets to the correct place.

Anyway, this post brings to attention a case where a customer has gone so far as to cause a restraining order {pdf} to be taken out to force the ISP to allow them to use their existing addresses, at least until they move.

The most interesting thing I’ve noticed, while following this relatively new case, is that the email, while showing concern for the Internet As We Know It™ because of the possible detrimental effects that forcing ISPs to section off their namespaces could cause, it utterly fails to take into account what appears to be a pretty fascinating back story as to why this customer has gone to such pains.

This morning, while hustling the woman off to work (Mondays are always a little slow), I overheard our friends at KFOG mentioning that the Supreme Court had just handed down a few rulings. It’s been, as one would expect, showing up in the big list of webfeeds I currently monitor. The basic links to the original PDF files are up at Intel Dump, and I’m still reading people’s opinions. There’s plenty of fodder over at Crescat Sententia.

As this op-ed piece mentions, there may currently be a crisis facing America today: doctors who are forced out of business due to high malpractice insurance premiums. Of course, the insurance companies would prefer to blame the lawyers. This has even gotten a little out of hand, in reality and hypothetically.

This week’s progress has been mostly under the hood. While I’m still typing this into the postgresql command-line, since there is still no webform for publishing (or even editing) my content, I have created a fairly slick way to move a chunk of SQL code out of two pages and into a common location. That doesn’t really help ya’ll out much, but it makes me happier. There’s also been some progress in abstracting the links over on the right-hand side of the page.

Web Development has never been my forte, but it helps to pass the time. I have 6 more weeks of freedom before school starts, and while I am doing a fair amount of reading (and it looks like I may want to re-read A Civil Action, since there are rumors that we start getting questions on Day #1), I want to get a little more slacking and distraction in as well.

It took me 3 years to really get into the swing of school the first time around – now I don’t have time to do anything but hit the ground running.

Wow. It’s pretty amazing how many incredible websites there are out there, when you take into account just how hard programmers have made it. There have been several attempts to divorce conrent from layout, yet I still find that I need to hardcode a lot of things I would rather not. Microsoft half-assedly implemented transparent PNG support, which is not just causing me headache, but is changing some of the design of my site. The irony of all of this “not invented here” syndrome that is causing me to write my own content management and syndication, is that I’ve really done this several times before. My first real website was the “Church of Bruce Campbell", which I really put together just to test what was at the time the only really WYSISWYG editor: Microsoft FrontPage 1.0. Since then, I’ve kept it simple. There was much more written here, but I forgot to escape a ‘ and my SQL insert failed. Perhaps I need to write the page to do that, too. :)

Almost all of the content that’s currently here is going away before this system “goes live", so rather then cover law, like some other sites I could mention, for the time being this site will cover it’s own growth. For those who claim that only a dork would weblog about his own weblog, I bite my thumb at thee. Anyway, back when I started making web pages, in early 1994 (Note: 10 years ago!), HTML was pretty young. It had been created by the folks at CERN so that they could create multimedia hypertext documentation of their projects. It really didn’t do much: you could set the title of a page, do some basic formatting (underline, italic), and even set up lists of lineitems. If I recall correctly, this was before tables had been invented.

I’m not really sure if it’s worth getting excited at this point. I can put entries into the database by typing raw INSERT statements, and they come out on the page. It validated to the W3 spec at least once, but now I need just a little more content to work with while I tune the stylesheets and try to make things a little prettier.

If you are reading this, I’ve at least gotten the basic infrastructure for my new weblogging in place. For now, this is really just filler – more should come in the future.