11.17.07
Yahoo VP Explains Patent Trolling (Video)
Watch the following 3-minute video.
By the way, Yahoo is no innocent party when it comes to Free software and Linux. Just to balance things a little, here are a few things which you may or may not already know about Yahoo:
- Yahoo! Answers is rejecting Open-Source options in answers
- Yahoo Censoring Open Source
- Yahoo helped China falsely imprison dissident
- Yahoo!, Microsoft ink web pact with Chinese government
- Yahoo in China human rights case
- Report: Yahoo exec apologizes [for lying] to U.S. lawmakers on China
A month or two ago, Richard Stallman called for a boycott that includes Yahoo, due to political censorship. And here are two recent messages from two separate incognitos from USENET:
USENET Message-ID: 1187970640.783887.100410@i38g2000prf.googlegroups.com
I’ve got a Yahoo email address. I don’t actually use it for anything except putting it on forms that demand an email address be supplied (probably so they can sell lists of email addresses to a spammer).
Anyway: I logged into Yahoo, as I periodically do, to see if anything interesting had been sent to me, and I noticed that Yahoo lets its members have a free website on Geocities. I thought I’d give it a go, I didn’t have anything to do at that moment. I know very little about HTML and site building to I decided to use their Page Builder editor, a WYSIWYG HTML editor for clueless newbies like myself. I clicked on the button to use Page Builder, and that’s when it started.
Firefox told me it had prevented a pop-up from appearing. I told Firefox to allow pop-ups from this site, and continued. Then Firefox told me it had stopped another pop-up from popping up. I had been taken to another page, you see. Basically, to get anywhere with this site-building, I would have to allow pop-ups from anywhere.
And now Yahoo said there was a problem: I was using a “non-Microsoft Windows operating system”! Yahoo told me that Page Builder might work for me, but they couldn’t guarantee anything if I continued using “Apple or Unix”.
Unix?! How many people do you suppose use Unix as a general desktop operating system, and who would be using something like Yahoo Page Builder to make a website? I think there are very few such people. Yahoo obviously meant “Apple and Linux”. They’re the most common non-Windows OSes I believe. So why don’t Yahoo just come out and /say/ Linux?
I can remember reading somewhere – maybe it was here – that people who had been suggesting Linux-based solutions to people on Yahoo Answers had had their accounts terminated. Yahoo obviously have an issue with Linux. But why are they being so vehement and troublesome about it? Heaven’s sake, I just wanted to build a little site.
USENET Message-ID: 466e0575$0$7982$4c368faf@roadrunner.com
The system troubleshooting technique taught to me since 1965, in the Air Force schools, is to find the solid parts, and eliminate the possibly faulty ones, one at a time!
So, my ‘toolbox’ of techniques includes a Linux or FreeBSD LiveCDrom, and a REBOOT, to run the OS from the CDrom, instead of from the Hard Drive.
I like “Frenzy” (FreeBSD), Mepis, Damn Small Linux, and PCLinuxOS, as first choices.
Yahoo must hire summer-break students, or idiots who have no village, because they have killed my accounts three times, for helping out poor windoze idiots, and mentioning that a Linux or BSD live CDrom can demonstrate that their equipment is good, or bad!
It’s a real pisser, because, in my case, each account that was suspended/deleted had attained Level 6 stature. There is nothing sacred in Cyberspace.
Yahoo Corporate management is in a quandry with the idiocy! Nobody seems to be in charge, and there is no supervision over the script monkeys!
Yahoo really sucks, because I have usually got 15,800 points, which is some 6,500 questions answered, with over 15% being rated “BEST”.
I do take pride in having advocated Linux and BSD as tools to solve problems, and in having saved many folks from their own ignorance! But, there are always more idiot lemmings!
Back to the salt mine, with a new disposable Yahoo identity!
All in all, Yahoo’s talk about patent trolls was interesting. By no means, however, think of Yahoo as a pleasant company.
