leichter 's Techdirt Comments
Latest Comments (87)
-
On the post: New Service Lets You Use 'The Computer Ate My Homework' As An Excuse
-
On the post: How Patents Are Harming Small Companies Too
leichter ( profile ), 06 Jun, 2009 @ 03:43amObviousness
One significant cause of problems with patent law is that the courts pretty much gutted the "not obvious" requirement over the last 30 or so years. That may have begun to turn around, but ... perhaps the example here should inspire a legal doctrine. I would propose: A patent shall be deemed invalid due to obviousness if several infringing uses have been independently developed, none of which has been the subject of a patent filing. "Several" might be pinned down to something like "three or more". "Independently" means not based on the patent application or on each other - the best proof being development before the patent is published and introduction to the public by separate parties at about the same time. The level of proof of "independence" required of the defendant should be low; the plaintiff should bear the burden if it claims that there was sharing among the allegedly independent entities (since, in fact, if others seem willing to share the idea, that itself is evidence that "those skilled in the craft" don't think of the idea as patentable).
You'd think that this would go without saying, but it's a sign of how meaningless the "non-obviousness" requirement has become that in fact no such doctrine exists. The recent patent claims concerning ongoing transactions at e-commerce sites - in which an idea "re-invented" without a thought by every major player is being claimed as patentable - is a case in point. -
On the post: Japan, Greece The Latest To Join The Anti-Street View Party
leichter ( profile ), 16 May, 2009 @ 03:48amUnderstand other cultures
Other replies have mentioned this, but it's worth looking at more deeply: What constitutes a "violation of privacy" is highly culture-bound. Applying your standards to a culture you don't share or understand is highly questionable.
I don't claim any deep understanding of Japanese - or, for that matter, Greek - culture. But what I have read about the Japanese is consistent with, say, DaveSmith's remarks. Japan is, and has been for a very long time, a crowded country. Personal space is extremely limited. Rooms are separated from each other by paper screens. Pretty much everything you say can be overheard; much of what you do can be seen by others.
The Japanese, however, feel a need for privacy just as much as any other human beings. They provide it by social convention: Listening in and peeking is just *not done* in many circumstances. We as (predominantly, on this site) Westerners undoubtedly find this approach incomprehensible - just as Japanese no doubt find our fetish for huge homes and thick walls bizarre and hugely, unnecessarily wasteful.
A culture that is built upon a shared understanding that certain things, while physically visible, are simply not to be looked at by proper human beings, will certainly have a legitimate issue with a service that blindly publishes pictures out of their social context.
Frankly, it surprises me that the Japanese consider lowering the camera to human eye level to be enough of an adjustment. But that just shows how little I understand of the nuances of Japanese mores. -
On the post: Why Isn't There A Fan-Use Exception To Copyright Law?
leichter ( profile ), 16 May, 2009 @ 03:12amI should think the reason for the difference is obvious
In a rational world, a rights holder would be happy to see fan sites and similar praise, but might well want to shut down criticism. So it makes sense for the law to protect the latter but ignore the former.
The fact that we even have to raise the question of whether positive sites and such deserve protection shows how irrational the rights holders have become.
One could perhaps use this irrationality to raise a defense: Yes, my site *looks to the naked eye* like a fan site, but the rights holder *saw through that*. Who better to understand the nature of what I've done than the rights holder? Who can question is judgement and understanding of his own material? He's right; I'm ripping his stuff apart. I admit it. I'm a critic. One dose of fair use, please. :-) -
On the post: Visa Tests New Anti-Fraud Card Device, But What About The Data Leaks?
leichter ( profile ), 15 May, 2009 @ 04:49pmRe: Data leaks are a different issue
Oops, typo right at the top. Their security depends entirely on their *secrecy*!
-- Jerry -
On the post: Visa Tests New Anti-Fraud Card Device, But What About The Data Leaks?
leichter ( profile ), 15 May, 2009 @ 04:48pmData leaks are a different issue
The problem right now is that credit card numbers are supposed to be magical: On the one hand, their security depends entirely on their security. On the other, to *use* a credit card, you have to reveal the number. So you have this number you must keep secret, that is only useful if you reveal it to large numbers of people and institutions, whether you can realistically trust them or not.
Sure enough, if you have to share "secret" information with large numbers of parties, there will be many copies - and some will inevitably leak.
The only way to *really* fix the problem is to get rid of the whole nonsense of a secret-but-public number. That's what this kind of approach does: There's nothing to steal, because there's no value in the number given to any particular third party beyond a single transaction.
It's not so much that crime gets harder, as that its nature changes. There are still plenty of attacks - they are just different, and require an attacker to be present in different places and have different skills and tools. (In fact, the attacks now are *so* trivial that any change is for the better!)
A couple of things are worth understanding, however:
- Credit cards are not the only "secret but public" pieces of information. All sorts of banking information is like that. There's enough information on any check you write to enable an attacker to empty your account! There haven't been as many attacks against this infrastructure because it's a bit harder to get away with crimes - you have to move money to an account at another bank, which is usually easy to trace unless you have more sophisticated connections - and it's been so much easier to attack credit cards. Make credit cards more secure, and attacks on banking information may rise rapidly.
- There's plenty of other data that really *is* private (medical records, financial records, etc.) that can still leak, so we need general solutions here.
- This fix is not without its convenience costs. Ever order something on-line in your pajamas? You'll have to go find your credit card now - you won't be able to type in your credit card number from memory. It remains to be seen whether people will accept these costs. -
On the post: Visa Tests New Anti-Fraud Card Device, But What About The Data Leaks?
-
On the post: The Economist Debate On Copyright Needs Your Input
leichter ( profile ), 07 May, 2009 @ 09:00pmRe: Re: Re: Re: Free Market... NST
Property rights serve to efficiently allocate value, not scarcity. There are plenty of scarce things that have no economic value, so we simply never think about whether there should be property rights assigned to them. It makes no difference.
Copyright isn't about copying; regulation of copying is a means to an end. The purpose of copyright is to efficiently allocate *creativity*. It's the creativity that has value - there's little *inherent* value in the copies of some text. The value is in the creative input that went into that text. (In fact, that creative input is also a scarce resource!)
Now, we can certainly question whether, in this day and age with the technologies now available, copyright can actually play the role it's intended to play. Even if it can't, that doesn't make copyright wrong in any fundamental sense. Certainly its goals are correct. It worked for centuries. But it may by now just be so ineffective at achieving those goals that it must be abandoned.
I will agree with the argument that the lack of a plausible alternative is not a valid argument for retaining a no-longer-useful mechanism. But that doesn't mean we should simply ignore the issue. If some mechanism for playing the same role that copyright used to play - providing a way to allocate creativity by ensuring that a market for creativity exists - then there will be costs that society as a whole will pay: Costs in reduced creativity, in creativity that is kept locked away from the public to preserve its value and so on. So it's perhaps worth considering whether anything can be salvaged from the old copyright ideas. -
On the post: The Economist Debate On Copyright Needs Your Input
leichter ( profile ), 07 May, 2009 @ 04:07pmRe: Re: Free Market... NST
This misses the point. The fundamental issue isn't about free markets here; it's about what constitutes property. It may seem obvious, but it's not. Any notion of property starts off with monopoly: I have the right to exclude anyone else from using what is my property. But *how* do I exclude others? I can do it with a gun, but then we're not talking about the rule of law and further debate is meaningless. No, a property right is exactly something that I have a *court enforced monopoly* over.
What constitutes property? That's entirely up to the legal system to decide. Sure, physical objects are easy cases. But consider land. I can keep you from trespassing on my property - but I can't keep you from looking at it. (Again, sure, I can build a wall - but that's not using the court system to enforce a property right.) I can't keep you from listening to sounds produced on my property. I can't keep you from producing sound or light or radio waves that traverse my property. (There are limits on these things, but they have to do with disturbing me or others personally, not with my property.) Even my right to keep you physically off my property has limits - you can fly a plane over my property.
Copyright is a legally-created notion of property - but then *all* notions of property are legally created. Some are more closely tied to our primitive ideas of what can be considered "mine" than others, but that doesn't change the fundamental issue: Property (a) is defined by a monopoly; (b) exists exactly to the extent that the legal system enforces that monopoly. -
On the post: Will Content Company Greed Destroy The Pay TV Business?
leichter ( profile ), 05 May, 2009 @ 08:27pmOn the matter of raising prices...
I recall a comment on this issue - from, I think, a Jaguar dealer! - that appeared in a newspaper article a long time ago. His basic point: In theoretical economics, price and demand are linearly related. In reality, for some kinds of goods - luxury (but not "if you ask the price, you can't afford it") goods in particular, but generally non-necessities - things are more complicated. You can keep raising prices until some critical point. Then the market suddenly dries up.
You don't know where that point is until you've passed it. And the problem with passing that point is that it's hard to get back. Dropping prices doesn't help: What defined the critical point was that it finally caused people to move on to other alternatives. (For true luxury goods, dropping prices is impossible for another reason: It "cheapens the brand", and may cause it to no longer be seen as a luxury item. Cable and other media sources aren't really subject to this hazard - it's hard to see how some of them can cheapen their brands any further!)
The media giants are convinced they are really the only game in town, and if they raise prices - well, people *have* to come back eventually, they have no alternatives. That was true 15 years ago, but they haven't figured out that it really isn't true any more. -
On the post: Hybrid Vehicles Are Quiet — Maybe Too Quiet, According To A Couple Of Lawmakers
leichter ( profile ), 01 May, 2009 @ 03:21pmPray you never need to learn how to navigate as a blind person
The self-centeredness of the comments here astound me.
I'm not blind, but I've spoken to blind people. Imagine you're blind and wish to cross a street. Can you tell if there is any traffic? Can you tell what direction the cars are coming from? A blind person with training and experience can easily do both (based on traffic noises) - and *has* to do both. At intersections with traffic lights and beepers, sure, things are easy. But the vast majority of intersections have no traffic lights, and even those with traffic lights rarely have beepers. (And, by the way, the beepers are a hell of a lot louder and more annoying than any sound generator that would be put in cars.) Even if you decided we should spend the money on putting traffic lights at every intersection in the country, how about driveways crossing sidewalks? What happens when cars make turns, crossing over the lanes where walking is allowed?
Really, look up from your perfect little life and consider those who may be less fortunate than you. Or consider yourself in 10, or 20, or 50 years. Think your eyes (and ears and other body parts) will still work as well?
Cars are inherently hazardous to the people in and around them. We accept that as a tradeoff because they are incredibly useful. We've spend decades making them safer for the people *in* them, but are only now really starting to look at those outside. Thus, there are standards in the works on bumper heights, so that when you hit another car your bumper doesn't ride up over the top doing major damage to its occupants. It may not do *you* any good, and no, your Hummer might not looks so cool - but that's just too bad. There are beginning to be proposals for protecting pedestrians as well. Hell, industrial vehicles have had to have audible alerts when backing up for years.
You want to run your car entirely on private tracks, among people who understand what you're doing? Fine; build it any way you like. But as soon as you bring it out into public, among your fellow citizens, the rules change. They have every right to demand that you take reasonable steps to protect them from your actions - witting or unwitting. -
On the post: Putting Ideas And Inventions Into The Public Domain
leichter ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2009 @ 02:55pmDirty tricks
Sad to say, people have come up with dirty tricks that can make publication of an idea in an attempt to prevent anyone patenting it dangerous. The way it works is this: I find an area where I know active work is on-going and people are coming up with and publishing new ideas. I file an extremely broad patent in the field - one that can't possibly be approved as written because of lack of specificity, a lack that's unavoidable because I don't yet know how to solve interesting problems. But I don't care, because I'll be filing continuations and "clarifications" that gradually fine-tune my patent to match ideas I find others publishing. You'll say, oh, but any changes I make will post-date the publication. Yes, but the legal precedence date for a patent is the date it was originally filed. Later changes don't change that date. A patent application can be kept alive, with the original date, for a very long time these days. (Even patents you *want* to actually issue get delayed!)
Of course, if I'm too obvious about this I can get caught and probably be subject to criminal penalties for fraud on the patent office. But the patent attorney who described this to me - in response to a proposal to publish an idea that the company I was at (a) didn't see any gain in patenting but (b) didn't want to see someone *else* patent either - told me that actual cases of this game were known and you had to watch out for them. The trick to avoid the problem: Publish an article describing the invention in an obscure magazine - there are plenty in every relevant field, and nothing says "prior art" like a dated paper copy of a magazine published by an unrelated third party. Don't have anything in the article tying it to the company involved - this game is only worth playing if you think you can grab a patent out from under a large company. I suppose if the inventor is well-known in the field, it's better to put someone else's name on the article.
Unfortunately, as long as this kind of gaming is possible, any centralized mechanism for "neutering publications" may prove to have exactly the opposite of the desired effect. -
On the post: Putting Ideas And Inventions Into The Public Domain
-
On the post: Lobbyists Get Congress To Investigate P2P Software… Rather Than Bad Security And Employee Carelessness
leichter ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2009 @ 03:36amMore than one over-simplification
This is a much more complicated situation than you make out. While it is probably true that this most recent go-around is being pushed by the record industry and similar players, and anything in the political realm has a publicity aspect to it, that doesn't mean there isn't, or at least wasn't, a real problem here. Go back and read the original reports on this subject. It's quite clear that the software was deliberately designed to lead people to share more than they would have. The best of it was essentially "opt out": The default configurations shared folders that most people would not have wanted shared had they known (e.g., their Documents folders). The documentation describing how to change this was typically atrocious, the UI's hard to understand. If there were disclosures, they were hidden in tons of irrelevant verbiage. Some of the software went way beyond that, outright lying to you. The UI would tell you that you had "disabled sharing", but it would still be enabled. When pushed on these kinds of issues, the vendors would say these were bugs and promise fixes. Fixes would take forever to appear, even as new releases with tons of new features appeared. When the fixes appeared, they would simply move things around and not actually solve the problem. There was a voluntary standard that most vendors said they followed, but somehow the software never quite managed to actually work the way the standard said it was supposed to. If you go back to some of the earliest work on P2P systems, before this stuff became commercialized, you can find papers that discussed dealing with "freeloaders". Very early on, it became clear that given a choice, many people would download but not upload. So you can find quite honest and open papers talking about how to organize the software to make it difficult for people to freeload. Even some of this early material indicated a willingness to fool people. As the software became commercial, and a major selling point was the number of items available for downloading, the same ideas came to be applied in more nefarious ways. We're not talking guns with triggers that require substantial pressure and working safeties here. We're talking guns with safeties that look and feel like every other safety - but which only work if, after setting them, you point the muzzle at the ground, shake the gun three times, then jump at least 6 inches in the air. Otherwise, the safety remains off and the trigger is very sensitive. (Not that this is documented anywhere, mind you.) With a gun like that, laying all the blame on the shooter is missing the point. What the current state of this software is, I don't know. History isn't encouraging, but perhaps things have changed. Is it worth re-investigating? Absolutely - though a Congressional hearing is hardly the right place.
-
On the post: Moore's Law: Dead Again, According To The Press
leichter ( profile ), 14 Apr, 2009 @ 06:35amMoore's Law has *already* come to an end
At least in the sense it was usually taken. Moore spoke about the number of transistors on a chip. At the time he originally wrote, the number of transistors you could fit on a chip limited basic functionality - you needed multiple chips to create a full-function CPU, and indirectly that (among other things) limited the speed of the chips. It also directly limited memory sizes.
Memory sizes are still limited by the number of transistors on a chip, and always will be. We're getting close to fundamental limits here - with all available technologies you need at least one electron per bit! - though perhaps new approaches (spintronics?) will help.
But for CPU's, things have changed repeatedly. We long, long ago passed the point where we could put any CPU functionality we wanted onto a chip. We then spent a couple of decades using additional transistors to make that CPU faster - with pipelining, super-pipelining, caching, and so on. And we used the corresponding decrease in feature sizes to increase clock speed. Both of those approaches have been pretty much played out for a number of years, mainly because we can't cool the damn things. So we've instead used the extra transistors to support multiple threads per CPU, then multiple CPU's per chip. That can keep going for a long time from a hardware point of view, but to make good use of it, we need advances in software - and those have been proceeding at nothing like Moore's Law rates. We know how to use tens of CPU's for graphics - but graphics engines feed human eyes, and those have limits. For some specialized algorithms, we can use hundreds, sometimes thousands, of CPU's for non-graphics computation - but most multi-thread/multi-core uses are for running many instances of HTTP responders and such things. The "Moore's law" advances we've talked about - in which the processor you could buy next year would noticeably improve what you were running today, pretty much whatever it was you were running today - is a thing of the past.
Has improvement halted? Hardly - but it's moved to other places. "Computes per watt" is the new measure we look at. Intel is building new chips with more transistors - but it's also building huge numbers of chips - the Atom - that use many few transistors, but much less power (and provide many fewer "computes"). There's tons of room for advance here - Atom is too slow and *still* uses too much power, relative to demands we can identify even today.
Now, you can batch all semiconductor improvements under the name "Moore's Law" and then safely say "it's not dead yet." But that's not really helpful in understanding what will be produced and how it will be used. The direction of evolution of chips has fundamentally changed, because the previous direction has lead to, not quite a dead end, but certainly an area where advances are much more expensive and slow in coming. New directions have appeared, and they are enabling entirely new classes of products.
Moore's Law is dead - and that's a good thing! Just look at your smartphone to see why..... -
On the post: Yes, Academics Can Add To The News Ecosystem; No, It Doesn't Need To Be In Newspapers.
leichter ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2009 @ 03:42amYou say: "Unfortunately, the way tenure works, 30-40 dispersed faculty would hardly be the assurance a young Ph.D needs." - which is true, but not connected to the previous line: "Zimmerman suggests that ... 30 or 40 prominent research universities issue... a joint statement." -- Jerry
-
On the post: EFF Explains Why You Should Be Allowed To Sell Promo CDs
leichter ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2009 @ 11:53amAbsurdities both ways
This whole dispute has absurdities both ways.
There is no doubt that I can produce a CD and sell it to you, under a contract that we both knowingly sign, that prevents you from reselling the CD. We could agree that you will only play the CD during nights when the moon is full. We could agree that you will only play the CD to people while trying to convince them that they, to, should buy a copy.
None of this implicates copyright; none of it implicates the First Sale Doctrine. I could sell you a car on the same basis. That it would be nuts for you to *buy* a car encumbered by such a contract is neither here no there - if no one buys, the company dies, as it should.
Should you violate our agreement and sell the CD anyway, say to a used CD store, I'm in violation of my contract and you can come after me. Whether the CD store is in any way bound my agreement is more complex. It's easy for them to say "well, we didn't enter into any agreement, we can do what we like". Fine claim, but a fence will say exactly the same thing. Nevertheless, receiving stolen property is a crime. The question comes down to whether the alleged fence should reasonably have known that whoever sold him the stuff wasn't authorized to do so.
In this case, the merchandise is clearly labeled "not for resale", so the store can't deny knowledge of the agreement. On the other hand, there was typically no contract between the record company and whoever receives the sample records - they send these things out en masse. Also, it's been accepted practice in the industry for many years that these things get resold, and absent any kind of contract, one should certainly be entitled to rely on it.
The record companies, at this very, very late date, are trying to establish a convention that never existed. If they seriously want to do this, they can - but they need to do the hard work: Sign actual contracts with whoever they distribute to, with agreements that the CD's remain he property of the record company. Put into place some kind of auditing procedure, where they have the right (which they should exercise) to come in and ask to see their CD's - or even take them back.
Absent that kind of effort, they should be told "sorry, the horse left that barn years ago, as a result of your own actions - don't come to the courts now". And copyright law shouldn't enter into this at all, where the individual CD's are concerned. (They already have the right, under copyright law, to say the CD's can't be duplicated, performed in public, etc. That's true whether they've sold the CD's, rented them, or given them away.) -
On the post: Dear ISPs: When Launching Value Added Services, How About Actually Adding Value?
leichter ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2009 @ 05:48amDifferent values to add
For years, telco's have sold a "value added service" where they charge you a "small fee" for "inside wire insurance" - they'll fix problems with your inside wiring "for free" if you bought the insurance. If you haven't, they'll charge you a very high per-hour rate.
Of course, in many cases you can fix it yourself - or hire some local guy to do the same work for much less.
Still, people buy the service. Why? Because it's simple, convenient, looks trustworthy - and when there's a problem with the phone, it's nice to know that you only need to call the phone company and they'll fix it; you don't have to go search for a local fix-it guy.
Is it "worth it"? That's something that each consumer should decide for himself! For the typical reader of this list, who can probably fix most problems himself, certainly not. For a non-mechanical 75-year-old retiree who depends on his phone service - quite likely.
There are many people who can't "roll their own" backup. I have no problem with ISP's offering such a service. I don't even have a problem with them asking "exorbitant" rates! It's the market that's supposed to determine the *appropriate* costs for things.
That's not to say there can't be problems here. Is Verizon's advertising fraudulent or misleading? Are they abusing their near-monopoly position to gain advantages? (If, for example, the data cap did *not* apply to backups to their servers, I'd say that was an abuse.) Are they charging the advertising and marketing costs for this non-regulated service against their regulated services? All of these things need to be watched for dealt with. Absent that, if you believe in the market - go out there and sell a competing product! (Oh, you think you don't have enough money to get started? How about a service helping people who find "roll your own" too difficult? The world probably doesn't need more backup services - but it certainly has room for easier to use ones!)
-- Jerry -
On the post: A Patent-Holding Software Engineer Explains Why Software Patents Harm Innovation
leichter ( profile ), 25 Jan, 2009 @ 05:55amDifferent purposes
I used to help on technical review of submitted proposals for patents at a large company. Proposals on patents for internal, hidden algorithms were almost never followed up on: They have no real value. It's too hard to know if someone else is actually using the patent. Even if you suspect someone is, it costs a great deal of money to start the legal proceedings that will give you the right to have their code examined - and then you face the difficulty that algorithms usually have variations, and the algorithm you thought they were using is actually not quite close enough - and even if it is, the company you're going after can usually come up with a workaround. Unless you're in the business of being a patent troll, there's not much economic point in such a patent.
When profit margins were high and money flowed freely, I suspect a large part of this was just bragging rights on IBM's part. They could show they were among the leading tech companies by citing the large number of patents. Of course, this also works internally: Their large IP staff could cite their success in bringing IBM to a leadership position in patents to justify ... having a large IP staff. There's less of that sort of thing these days, because money is much tighter.
There *can* be practical uses for such otherwise-useless patents as defensive measures: Having the patent yourself makes it impossible for some troll to get it and come after you. Also, patent lawsuits among the big players are usually settled by cross-licensing, the result of a kind of "mutual assured destruction": If you're actually producing product, as opposed to just trolling, and you go after IBM, they'll go through their vast library and find *something* that you're using. Now - shall we fight over both of these patents, or shall we settle quietly?
By the way, the traditional advice to publish as a way of blocking patents has gotten dangerous as a result of misuse of provisional filings and continuation patents. I file a provisional filing, which is a brief, broad description that's supposed to be a place-holder. It, however, establishes a primacy date. Later, you publish - and I "clarify" my claims by saying they always included what you published. A provisional application is only good for a year, but by various creative games with vaguely drafter, overbroad claims, and continuation patents, one can stretch these kinds of things out. Improper, probably illegal in some cases - but people have gotten away with it. -
On the post: Apple Threatening Patent Lawsuits Over New Palm Pre
leichter ( profile ), 22 Jan, 2009 @ 05:37amJust who are you disagreeing with?
"Building a business by preventing others from improving on what you have". Ahem. The whole *point* of a patent is to grant a monopoly to the patent holder. This is a tradeoff discussed by the founders when the Constitution was written. The intent of the specific grant of authority to create a patent system is to implement a social tradeoff: Publish novel, original, useful techniques for others to study and we'll grant you a monopoly for a limited period of time. (And, unlike copyrights, that time has not grown without bound.)
It's one thing to argue that the way we're granting patents on software makes a mockery of the Constitutional intent. It's quite another to argue that the whole notion of such a tradeoff is invalid. You'll find little support, outside of some (not all) libertarian think tanks, for the latter proposition (and implementing it would arguably require an amendment to the Constitution).
Combinations of old ideas in new ways *can be* the basis of a good patent. In fact, to some degree, it's the basis of *most* patents - very little we do is *completely* new. As Newton said, he stood on the shoulders of giants.
Apple doesn't have a particularly bad history in using its patents to attack competitors. (It certainly has an unfortunate history of various other techniques for attacking those it doesn't like - though it's tended to be more those who it perceives as leaking its secrets than anything else). Attacking them for something they *might* do based on a patent that *might* be bogus ... that's a bit extreme.
Old idea in software
There are many "friend of a friend" stories about software companies buying time by shipping corrupted CD's (or, back in the day, tapes). I've never personally seen this done, but it's certainly been talked about.
I *have* seen hardware companies play such games. To be able to mark some piece of hardware as shipped by the end of a quarter, a company shipped a university CS department a box containing the power supply and backplanes for a hypercube multiprocessor. The cards containing actual CPU's weren't ready, and were shipped months later. Meanwhile, the empty box was good for many a laugh.
I suppose the service at issue represents yet another example of the consumerization of technology....