Bonum Certa Men Certa

Yahoo VP Explains Patent Trolling (Video)

Watch the following 3-minute video.



Ogg Theora





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:



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.

Recent Techrights' Posts

The Free Software Foundation is Looking to Raise Nearly Half a Million Dollars by Year's End
And it really needs the money, unlike the EFF which sits on a humongous pile of oligarchs' and GAFAM cash
Gemini Links 19/11/2024: Rain Music, ClockworkPi DevTerm, and More
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 18, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, November 18, 2024
Links 18/11/2024: Science News and War Escalations in Ukraine
Links for the day
Gemini Links 18/11/2024: Degrowth and OpenBSD Fatigue
Links for the day
Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part VII
By Dr. Andy Farnell
BetaNews is Still 'Shitposting' About Trump and Porn (Two Analysers Say This 'Shitposting' Comes From LLMs)
Probably some SEO garbage, prompted with words like "porn" and "trump" to stitch together other people's words
Market Share of Vista 11 Said to be Going Down in Europe
one plausible explanation is that gs.statcounter.com is actually misreporting the share of Vista 11, claiming that it's higher than it really is
Fourth Estate or Missing Fourth Pillar
"The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media in explicit capacity of reporting the News" -Wikipedia on Fourth Estate
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 17, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, November 17, 2024
LLMs Are Not a Form of Intelligence (They Never Will Be)
Butterflies are smarter than "chatGPT"
Business Software Alliance (BSA), Microsoft, and AstroTurfing Online (Also in the Trump Administration Groomed by BSA and Microsoft)
Has Washington become openWashington? Where the emphasis is openwashing rather than Open(Source)Washington?
Windows at 1%
Quit throwing taxpayers' money at Microsoft, especially when it fails to fulfil basic needs and instead facilitates espionage by foreign and very hostile nations
Links 17/11/2024: Pakistan Broke, Tyson 'Crashes' or Knocks Over Netflix
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/11/2024: Nachtigall Planned, Exodus at Twitter
Links for the day
Links 17/11/2024: China's Diplomacy and Gazprom Setback
Links for the day
Sudan Has Reached a State of Android Domination (93% Market Share, All-Time High According to statCounter)
countries at war buy fewer laptops?
[Meme] Just Do It?
'FSF' Europe (Microsoft) and FSF
Microsoft Front Groups Against the FSF, Home of GPL, GNU, and Free Software
Much of the money (not all of it) comes from the criminals at Redmond
Centralisation is Dooming the Web, RSS is One Workaround (But Not "Planets")
At least Gemini Protocol rejects centralisation
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 16, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, November 16, 2024
Links 17/11/2024: Wars, Bailouts, and Censorship
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/11/2024: Changing Interests and HamsterCMS
Links for the day