Huffington Post Doubles Down, Has MIT Professor Spread Blatant Falsehoods About Creation Of Email
from the really-now? dept
We already covered the bizarre situation in which one of the biggest names in PR has "teamed up" with the Huffington Post to write an entirely bogus "series" of stories on the "history of email" that is nothing more than a PR campaign for a liar. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai claims to have invented email. He did not. We went into great detail on this on Tuesday, so you can check out the history there.
Despite my requests to both Huffington Post and Larry Weber (the PR guy who kicked off the "series"), neither has responded and explained if any money is changing hands here. That means either it is, and Huffington Post is violating FTC rules concerning "paid" posts, or Huffington Post just made it clear that it is willing to post pure bullshit without the slightest bit of fact checking. I'm still not sure which is worse.
Instead, it appears that they've gone forward and posted the latest in the series. Incredibly, they've convinced an MIT professor, Deborah Nightingale, to destroy her own credibility by writing a piece that is supposedly "debunking" the "myths" that everyone puts forth in proving that Ayyadurai is simply wrong in claiming to have invented email. Except the "myths" are not myths, and her debunking does not debunk anything. It just repeats the same false claims (using nearly identical language) as Ayyadurai and his friends in their original posts.
Nightingale cherry picks a few things, presents them in a misleading way, repeats the entirely bogus story about Dave Crocker claiming interoffice email was impossible (which is not at all what he actually said), and then just repeats (almost word for word) Ayyadurai's previously disproven claims. It's clear that the only way they think they can win this debate is to redefine what email is in such a narrow way to pretend that Ayyadurai's specific implementation was the "invention" of email. It's not. It's ridiculous. Here's their definition, according to Nightingale, though more or less repeated word for word by the other posts in the series.
"first full-scale electronic replication of the interoffice mail system consisting of the now-familiar components of email: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Attachments, Memo, Address Book, Forwarding, Composing, etc.,"
Again, as noted in our post yesterday, nearly all of that was done previously by others (often many years earlier). But Ayyadurai, Weber and Nightingale are pretending that none of that was truly email because it didn't have every single component that Ayyadurai's app had. That's ridiculous. Email is an ever-evolving set of standards. You could just as easily make an equally ridiculous claim that "email" didn't really exist until it also had color highlighting. After all, the offline interoffice mail system had the ability to highlight with colored pens, and email didn't include color highlighting until years later. But, of course, that's ridiculous, because color highlighting doesn't make email.
Email was very much in place long before Ayyadurai's app. It included all the basic concepts of email, including an inbox, folders, to:, from:, subject, cc:, bcc:, etc. Ayyadurai may have written a wonderful new form of electronic messaging, but he didn't "invent" email.
The thing that's amazing here is that Ayyadurai is using one of the oldest trolling tricks in the book, in pretending that everything that he is actually doing is actually being done nefariously against him. Almost everything that he claims people are doing to him are things that he is actually doing himself:
He claims that the attacks are because Raytheon/BBN's entire "identity" is built off of its fake claim to have invented email.
First off, that's not true. Raytheon is a giant multi-billion defense contractor. It doesn't care about who invented email. BBN has a long and well-documented history of a whole bunch of innovations concerning the internet and networked computing. If it didn't invent email (and no one there really claims to have "invented" email anyway -- they say, rightly, that it was a group evolution by a bunch of folks, some at BBN and some elsewhere), its legacy as the core innovators of the internet would still be in place. Instead, the only one whose entire "identity" is built off a fake claim to have invented email is... Ayyadurai. Here's his Twitter page:
His entire Twitter stream is about him claiming to have invented email. Tweet after tweet after tweet are just about those claims.
He has an entire website called "the inventor of email." He's written a book about email, which claims on the front page that he's "the inventor of email":
Oh, and notice the "blurb" on the cover of the book? It's from Larry Weber. Gee...
He claims that others "fabricated a controversy" to deny him his rightful place in history
The only fabricated controversy is by him. There is no controversy. He didn't invent email. But he sure trades off of the claim that big powerful interests are trying to silence him.
He claims that those of us debunking his bogus claim refused to look at the primary documents
This is untrue. We went through the documents in detail and explained why they actually debunk Ayyadurai's own claims. Their "smoking gun" is a paper by David Crocker at RAND from December 1977, in which they falsely claim he said that an interoffice email system was impossible. Yet they never point you to the paper. go read it here. Go read the primary documentation and you'll see that not only did Ayyadurai and his friends/colleagues totally take Crocker out of context, they pulled two totally unrelated sentences from different parts of the report, excised from context, to pretend he said something he did not. Read the whole report and you'll actually see that not only were email systems quite common, lots of folks were developing all sorts of components of an electronic interoffice mail system. Crocker's paper is about one such version, but notes that many others are doing the same, and it includes screenshots of messages that clearly look like email today.
He claims that everyone is trying to rewrite history
He and his friends are the only ones doing so. The history is clear. There is no controversy other than the one that he's manufacturing.
What's bizarre is that the Huffington Post is a willing accomplice in perpetuating this myth -- and why the company won't comment on this, and the nature of its relationship with Weber and Ayyadurai. Again, either the Huffington Post is running a sponsored series without disclosing it (in violation of FTC rules) or it has been totally duped. I've heard from some folks suggesting that this is just the "blogging" side of Huffington Post, where there are no real editorial controls, but that doesn't explain HuffPost Live's multiple segments on this issue, including its bizarre interview with Ayyadurai. That is a journalistic endeavor (or purports to be) that appears to have been totally duped. The series still promises one more article, by Ayyadurai himself, and we expect more of the same rewriting of history, using the exact same phraseology. The question is whether or not Huffington Post will recognize that it's being used as part of an effort to drum up a faux controversy over something that is blatantly untrue.
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Filed Under: david crocker, deborah nightingale, email, history, huffington post, journalism, larry weber, les michelson, shiva ayyadurai, v.a. shiva ayyadurai
Companies: aol, huffington post, mit
Reader Comments
The First Word
“His book cover is accurate
Don't forget that by titling his computer program "EMAIL", he can rightly claim to have "...invented EMAIL". Meaning that one application.And now, dear friends, I'll return to authoring a grocery-list app called "FOOD". And when I'm done, you may all worship me, saying, "You invented FOOD." And you'll be right!
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No, No, it was me!
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Re: No, No, it was me!
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Re: No, No, it was me!
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Re: No, No, it was me!
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Keep up the good work
BTW, it is surprising to see the "research" published on Huffington Post under the name of Deborah J. Nightingale when it is in large part a variation on a document ("False Claims About Email") previously published without any reference to her on Ayyadurai's website and in his book.
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Re: Keep up the good work
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Re: Keep up the good work
#
She seems well qualified to support the claim about the invention of Email.
/s
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Sounds like huff. what did you expect? They exist for the clean snow and white washing campaigns
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It gets even better.
While he's well known for his work contributing to computer science, he's not actually a CS professor. He's also a raving crackpot. Describing him as lunatic fringe may be putting it mildly. If you actually know about him, he's the LAST person you would trust to say anything outside of his speciality (which is linguistics).
They probably threw him in there as an "MIT professor" to try and diffuse the fact that real computer scientists at that institute did earlier work on email.
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Re: It gets even better.
i have no doubt he has been hoodwinked by a charlatan with semi-plausible -and semi-real- claims, AND he has ZERO clue about any of the attendant technical issues; BUT it is actually kind of instructive in terms of the manner he typically analyzes contemporary media and shows how IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE CONTEXT, you don't know what you don't know...
that is his problem in this situation...
again, i have problems with chomsky's approach on a lot of REAL conspiracies in our his story (he essentially either dismisses then outright as impossible, or dismisses them as having no significant impact on his story), BUT i would -as a matter of general principle- subscribe to his take on most anything he puts some thought to analyzing...
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Re: It gets even better.
Seems you have not supported your argument, at all. Why should I not think that it is you who are the raving crack-pot?
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serioiusly who goes to huffington post?
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I can do it, too!
https://twitter.com/va_shiva/status/507011123678158848
Here's the text:
"VA Shiva Ayyadurai
VA SHIVA
The 5 LIES ABOUT EMAIL'S HISTORY Dr. Debbie Nighingale Exposes Raytheon/BBN huffingtonpost.com/deborah-j-nigh... and who invented email!"
Using Mr. Ayyadyrai and Huffington Post's editing standards, Mr. Ayyadyrai just admitted to lying about inventing email!
Just look at his Tweet posted at 8:44 p.m. on 9/2/2014, which says "VA Shiva Ayyadurai ... LIES ABOUT ... who invented email! huffingtonpost.com/deborah-j-nigh..."
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Establishing a base for a wiki fraud?
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Re: Establishing a base for a wiki fraud?
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Also sounds like it's not the first time such 'fixing' has occurred, both on the email entry and the one for Ayyadurai himself. Someone's certainly been trying to control what's presented, and how it's presented it seems, contrary to how wikipedia articles are supposed to work.
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Re: Re: Re: Establishing a base for a wiki fraud?
But why now?
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I can clear all of this confusion up with a simple history lesson
If that is the case, then I nominate as the "real" inventor of email: Gary Thuerk, because as everyone knows "you can't have email without SPAM"
I did my research, so when do I start my new job at Huffington Post???
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Re: I can clear all of this confusion up with a simple history lesson
Second, at the time of that incident, we hadn't yet coined the slang term "spam"; several synonyms for it were in use, most notably "mass mail abuse". It took us years to figure out that the problem wasn't going to go away quite so easily and so perhaps we might want a handy term to refer to it by.
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I can't decide...
Either way, he deserves full scorn and ridicule for trying to rewrite history. Especially for something as trivial as personal aggrandizement.
One would think that the Huffington Post would be a bit concerned about having their reputation dragged even lower by their misreporting on this.
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I have bad news for you...
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This is why it's important that we don't let this go.
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The alternative would be watcher of the skies unwatcheable, but who likes Genesis over Socrates?
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Nightingale's paper is hilarious
That's funny all by itself, but when you combine it with her legalistic gymnastics in the piece itself (she effectively redefines "email" as purely "what Ayyadurai did") in a misguided attempt to make it true by definition) the result is a pure belly laugh.
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Re: Nightingale's paper is hilarious
"The first use of e-mail was in 1971 on the ARPANET (see also “Internet,” p. 34). It was developed by Ray Tomlinson (b. 1941)." http://bit.ly/valies
For some reason, the hyphen was lost during the 80's; but I still can't help typing it.
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Re: Nightingale's paper is hilarious
And there were no black holes before 1964!
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Nightingale and Ayyadurai
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Takedowns
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MIT has egg on their face
I wasn't sure, but a little Googling turned up this:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man/man1/mail.1
It's the Unix 'man' page for the mail program. Dated October 1972.
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Re: MIT has egg on their face
The really sad thing about this whole debacle is that what Ayyadurai did was actually an accomplishment. His name should be mentioned in the history of the industry. Just not as the "inventor of email" because that's provably, stupidly, wildly incorrect.
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Re:
http://metaphorical.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/how-a-journalist-invented-that-al-gore-invented-th e-internet/
and here:
http://sethf.com/gore/
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HuffPo has been little more than gossip for years.
Great find from 1972 MIT. I dropped out of college in 1973 and worked for a time sharing company that had, running for several years, a full email system, linking customers and employees around the country. To: From: Cc: (probably bcc, I don't remember), forwarding, reply, time stamps, passwords, etc. I don't recall if we had attachments. It's a shame to see an MIT prof put her name on a ghost-written piece of nonsense like this. And, this series would seem to violate FCC rules about comments, except that they are not "reviewing a product."
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His book cover is accurate
And now, dear friends, I'll return to authoring a grocery-list app called "FOOD". And when I'm done, you may all worship me, saying, "You invented FOOD." And you'll be right!
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Re: His book cover is accurate
You FOOD invention gave me cramps and runs for a week, what a crappy invention!
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Re: Re: His book cover is accurate
Did it cause a core dump?
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I'm gonna have a kid and name him EMAIL
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Re: I'm gonna have a kid and name him EMAIL
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Once my PR company repeats my claims on FOX News enough times, the record will be clear that I invented email... and the internet! Al Gore can't take that title away from me!
(They're coming to take me away, Ha-haaa!)
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HUFFINGTON POST
are they another national enquirer
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http://ssrc.mit.edu/people
I don't see Deborah Nightingale listed.
There appear to be a half-dozen "directors" listed. You can apparently be a "director" without being MIT faculty, just MIT affiliated.
Her info page also lists her as being (present tense) a co-director of the Lean Advancement Initiative. The info page lists that consortium as being inactive as of 2012.
She also claims to be affiliated with MIT's Aero-Astro program. Yet her name doesn't appear on the faculty list.
http://aeroastro.mit.edu/faculty-research/faculty-list
Apart from her self-written bio (hmmm, a theme), where is there evidence of what she has actually done?
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DINSDALE?
Anyway, I have a feeling that Mr. Weber has been whispering about MONEY into Ayyadurai's little ears. Money, lots of money.
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More BS stories that fooled your friends
http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/6-bs-stories-that-fooled-you-facebook-real-life-purge/
Perso nally, I think HuffPo runs stories like this just so they can get attention for printing inaccurate information. After all, the average person isn't going to go look for the correct history or even go looking for verifiable sources. And see, it worked- look how much coverage you gave them for their latest BS story. ;)
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http://government-contractors.findthebest.com/l/270482/Deborah-Nightingale-in-Boston-MA
A pparently she is currently an independent contractor, getting a $39K contract from the Dept of Veteran Affairs as a for-profit 'SBA Certified Small Disadvantaged Business' -- definitely not through MIT.
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She co-lectured a course in 2004, probably with the title 'lecturer'. The 'Professor of Practice' title appears to have been added when she taught MIT-branded summer weekend courses 2010 and 2012.
Apart from a book, which seems to have been written primarily to promote her consulting business, the is little in the way of academic activity.
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I became familiar with these definitions back in 2012 when Ayyadurai claimed to be an MIT faculty member but in reality was just a visiting lecturer. If her claim in the article to have "served on the faculty in MIT's Engineering Systems Division for over 17 year" is based on a position as "Professor of the Practice" it is equally bogus. And that position is all she mentions in the online bio linked from the article.
2.3.2 of the MIT Polices and Procedures states "Appointments to the rank of "Adjunct Professor of _____" and "Professor of the Practice of _____" are equivalent." The same section states "An appointment as an adjunct professor or professor of the practice carries no implication of academic tenure or of membership on the Faculty."
Confirming this, 2.1 of the MIT Policies and Procedures states that "Appointments to faculty positions are made at the following ranks: assistant professor, associate professor without tenure, associate professor with tenure, and professor." Only people with those titles are faculty members. Apparently that doesn't include Nightingale.
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And, Al Gohr invented the internet
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email functioning in 1967
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The Queen (Elizabeth II of the UKas opposed to any other)
But maybe monarchs can time travel!
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Huffpost fabricated news
for years huffpo has been a microsoft proxy, for example, reporting as facts any astro-turf anti-google campaigns as if fact, while ignoring ms being caught with hands in the cookie jar. they have always pandered to bill gates as if he were an ethical and wise person.
of course, one of ms lead attorneys was on the huffpost board, so I don't know if this influence was paid for with cash or buddy-buddy.
I emailed huffpo several times on this relationship, never receiving a reply. I posted to corrections to comments, to the best of my recollection several of these comments being deleted.
of course, John Oliver nails it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc
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He also keeps using the comparison of his system to a physical world inter-office mail system, but that doesn't actually mean anything unless you solely define email as an electronic analog of a physical world inter-office mail system.
Saying he "invented" email is equivalent to saying that Columbus "discovered" America or Steve Jobs and Apple "invented" smartphones, touch screens, and tablets. Doing something of historic note in the field is not the same as being the first or most important person to have contributed to it.
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Had never heard of the little fellow till now...
Appears to me as if he is simply a fame-hungry little man. May have done something significant in one small area at one time, but has had no impact since. I think you will find that Mathai Joseph, V.R. Prasad and N. Natarajan have had more impact than this fellow has. Even David Holzgang is more familiar to me.
His attitude could be likened to someone saying Bill Gates was the original creator of multi-user multi-tasking operating systems and leaving out the history of Multics, Unix, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, etc.
David Oliver Graeme Samuel Offenbach
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Has this actually ever worked?
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Telegraphing a myth
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