Comment Sleezy Yahoo Business Practices (Score 2, Interesting) 228
In 1998, we had started a company with the sole purpose of proving who and who is not a robot on line. We developed a range of techniques for detecting bots and stopping spammers -- images, rate limits, statistical techniques, etc.
The two most important techniques were what we called the "Visual Turing Test" and a reapplication of a cypherpunk scheme called HashCash.
The Visual Turing Test is widely used today, it's the image generated with a code that you have to type in. Our technique started with that, but went much further to defeat OCRs by including AI-level questions, such as displaying an image with a dog, a cat, and a horse, with instructions in the image that say "click on the one that is not a house hold pet."
Back then, we ran a free webmail service for people, without adds, using these techniques to stop email spam.
We were a very poor start up, working over a year with no pay. We went to Yahoo and had a meeting with their engineers and biz-dev people, under a *nondisclosure agreement*, we demoed all this anti-spam, anti-fraud technology. We were looking to sell them the scalable image generation server software we wrote, statistical analysis software, and our services, and potentially our patent on these techniques.
Yahoo basically said "not interested" after several meetings, and one yahoo engineer basically said "We could implement this all myself, why do we need you?" We never heard from yahoo again, didn't get any more meetings. But magically, about a year later, we noticed yahoo using our techniques.
Our company was eventually bought by one of those "pay to watch ads" companies, because they had massive fraud of people installing fake clients, and signing up for hundreds of accounts. Unlike Yahoo's fraud problem, these companies were paying out tens of millions of dollars in cash to people who were signing up bogus accounts.
But it still doesn't take away from the fact that Yahoo is a dishonest shark. If it wasn't for the fact that I am morally opposed to using software patents against people (only had one to make our biz plan look good for investors), I would have sued them.
Word to the wise. Don't present your ideas to yahoo as a small startup and expect they will abide by an NDA.
The two most important techniques were what we called the "Visual Turing Test" and a reapplication of a cypherpunk scheme called HashCash.
The Visual Turing Test is widely used today, it's the image generated with a code that you have to type in. Our technique started with that, but went much further to defeat OCRs by including AI-level questions, such as displaying an image with a dog, a cat, and a horse, with instructions in the image that say "click on the one that is not a house hold pet."
Back then, we ran a free webmail service for people, without adds, using these techniques to stop email spam.
We were a very poor start up, working over a year with no pay. We went to Yahoo and had a meeting with their engineers and biz-dev people, under a *nondisclosure agreement*, we demoed all this anti-spam, anti-fraud technology. We were looking to sell them the scalable image generation server software we wrote, statistical analysis software, and our services, and potentially our patent on these techniques.
Yahoo basically said "not interested" after several meetings, and one yahoo engineer basically said "We could implement this all myself, why do we need you?" We never heard from yahoo again, didn't get any more meetings. But magically, about a year later, we noticed yahoo using our techniques.
Our company was eventually bought by one of those "pay to watch ads" companies, because they had massive fraud of people installing fake clients, and signing up for hundreds of accounts. Unlike Yahoo's fraud problem, these companies were paying out tens of millions of dollars in cash to people who were signing up bogus accounts.
But it still doesn't take away from the fact that Yahoo is a dishonest shark. If it wasn't for the fact that I am morally opposed to using software patents against people (only had one to make our biz plan look good for investors), I would have sued them.
Word to the wise. Don't present your ideas to yahoo as a small startup and expect they will abide by an NDA.
