Thanks Andy, The article series had been brought to my attention, but it's hard to summon up the enthusiasm to launch an fresh round of engagement. Every aspect of Ayyadurai's argument up to this point is summarized and evaluated at http://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai. So if you come across anyone interested, please point them in that direction. It does seem that actual journalists are less frequently being fooled by his claims since the 2012 debunking, with a couple of exceptions: substantial coverage in India where his accusations of American racisms appear to be playing well, and a recent public radio segment on Marketplace where he was introduced as "one of the creators of email." However there is a vast world of content farms and bottom feeding syndication sites where any press release will be picked up and recycled. The Huffington Post is an interesting hybrid, as its forays into actual journalism give a spurious legitimacy to the rest of the site which is mostly unclothed celebrities and public relations hackwork. The epic series of Huffington Post articles just reuses material from Ayyadurai's book and website, circling again and again around handful of dubious talking points. The Techdirt piece Andy linked to hits the key points in response, particularly the concerted attempt Ayyadurai is making present copyright on a program code listing as if it was a patent on a technology. Techdirt misses a few things, for example accepting the new claims 1978 date for the system whereas Ayyadurai himself had previously dated the first implementation to 1980. The OED has a 1979 usage of the contraction "e-mail" whereas I have not seen a documented use by Ayyadurai prior to 1981. So even the claim that he was the first to contract "electronic mail" to "email" is so far unsupported. But overall the Techdirt response seems to do the job. The latest Huffington Post piece, which is credited to an MIT "Professor of Practice" although it is clearly adapted from material Ayyadurai previously published on a website and in his book, does mention "an Internet cabal of SIGCIS 'historians' with ties to Raytheon/BBN." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deborah-j-nightingale/the-history-of-email-fiv e-myths-about-email_b_5756340.html Best wishes, Tom -----Original Message----- From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Russell Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2014 9:58 AM To: sigcis Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Why is HuffPost publishing another "invention of email" series? At the risk of (or in hopes of) provoking Tom Haigh and others, I thought I would share the following: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140901/07280928386/huffpo-publishes-biza rre-misleading-factually-incorrect-multi-part-series-pretending-guy-invented -email-even-though-he-didnt.shtml I'm sure many of you noticed the recent round of HuffPo stories, promoting the claims of the guy who claimed to invent email in 1978. Similar to the "Al Gore invented the Internet" story from several years ago, this particular "invention of email" story seems to be more compelling through a media studies lens (i.e., why do media outlets keep publishing nonsense?), and not at all a case of uncertainty or debate amongst serious historians or networking engineers. Andy _______________________________________________ This email is relayed from members@sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://sigcis.org/pipermail/members/ and you can change your subscription options at http://sigcis.org/mailman/listinfo/members