From: "Dave Farber via ip" <ip@listbox.com>

Subject: [IP] Re HuffPo article on Ayyadurai

Date: September 8, 2014 at 11:25:26 AM EDT

To: "ip" <ip@listbox.com>

Reply-To: dave@farber.net

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Declan McCullagh" <declan@well.com>
Date: Sep 8, 2014 1:49 AM
Subject: Re: [IP] HuffPo article on Ayyadurai
To: <jpgs@ittc.ku.edu>, <jpgs@comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Cc: <dave@farber.net>, <dnight@mit.edu>, <news@the-tech.mit.edu>

[Dave, for IP if you like]

Prof. James P.G. Sterbenz wrote to MIT prof Deborah Nightingale:

Do you plan to make a statement on your
Web page to protect your reputation, or do we assume that you are
(figuratively) in bed with Ayyadurai?   If you do make such a statement
I would like a pointer and will include in with the other materials I
maintain on this case along with your original blog entry.

I just noticed something unusual about the now-deleted Huffington Post article published under the name of MIT professor Deborah Nightingale.

What's unusual is that paragraphs of that now-deleted article defending "email inventor" Shiva Ayyadurai are word-for-word identical to a web page called InventorOfEmail.com. It looks like Mr. Ayyadurai created that page himself, though I haven't checked.

You can see this unexpected bit of synchronicity for yourself. Prof Nightingale's article is archived here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140905024145/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deborah-j-nightingale/the-history-of-email-five-myths-about-email_b_5756340.html
"Those who promoted MAIL as "email," when the term "email" did not even exist in 1965, were attempting to redefine "email" as a command-driven program that transferred BCD-encoded text files, written in an external editor, among timesharing system users, to be reviewed serially in a flat-file."
"One would be hard-pressed to draw a historical straight line from MAIL to today’s email systems. MAIL was not "email", but a text messaging command line system, at best."

The InventorOfEmail.com page, which Archive.org says predates Prof. Nightingale's HuffPo blog, is here:
http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp
"Those who promoted MAIL was "email" when the term "email" did not even exist in 1965 are attempting to redefine "email" to be a command-driven program that transferred BCD-encoded text files, written in an external editor, among timesharing system users, to be reviewed serially in a flat-file."
"One would be hard-pressed to draw a historical straight line from MAIL to today’s email systems. MAIL was not "email", but a text messaging command line system, at best."

Also it looks like about 10 paragraphs in Prof. Nightingale's now-deleted HuffPo blog, published September 2, appear in a Google+ comment posted under the name "Jason Rebule" a week earlier. That comment appeared in a KQED thread attacking critics of Ayyadurai. You can see the thread here:
https://plus.google.com/+KQEDSCIENCE/posts/emYcPo9ZjVw

Similarly, another now-deleted HuffPo blog post in the series was published under the name of Rutgers technologist Robert Field. It uses this sentence:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140904233350/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-field/history-of-email-first-email-system_b_5722000.html
"Standard histories of the Internet are full of claims that certain individuals (and teams) in the ARPAnet environment in the 1970s and 1980s "invented email." "

That sentence also, according to Archive.org, had previously appeared on the InventorOfEmail.com site:
http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp

I don't see either Prof. Nightingale or Robert Field credited on the InventorOfEmail.com site.

I presume there's a good reason why a Huffington Post guest blog published under the name of a well-known MIT engineering professor would be assembled in such a manner, but I confess I haven't yet been able to think of one.

-Declan

PS: I recall a CNET article written by some enterprising journalist who revealed the provenance of an anti-Net-neutrality op-ed published under the name of an MIT adjunct professor. The op-ed was actually written in part or in whole by a "secretive lobbying organization in Washington, D.C. called the LawMedia Group" that counted Comcast as a client. I would not dare to suggest, of course, that such a thing could be happening here. http://www.cnet.com/news/wanted-writers-for-d-c-tech-lobby-group-secrecy-mandatory/

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