<story><title>Google backslides on federated instant messaging, on purpose?</title><url>http://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/google-backslides-on-federated-instant-messaging-on-purpose</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cs702</author><text>The &quot;unintended side effect of filtering spam&quot; explanation makes no sense.&lt;p&gt;How likely is it that the same company which builds bleeding-edge machine-learning systems to track and predict our behavior online, and which uses these AI predictions constantly to maximize their ad revenue, somehow cannot find a better way to filter out spam invites?&lt;p&gt;How likely is it that the same company that houses the likes of Hinton, Norvig and Kurzweil under the same roof can&apos;t find a better way?&lt;p&gt;Google is &lt;i&gt;packed&lt;/i&gt; with experts at solving the &quot;spam filtering&quot; (i.e., pattern recognition) problem.&lt;p&gt;It appears this was done on purpose[1], driven by a corporate culture that no longer cares as much about openness.  &lt;i&gt;[Please read jholman&apos;s responses below.  He&apos;s right, I went too far with this last sentence.]&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001571.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Edits: added &quot;it appears&quot; at the end, to tone down the language. Also, reworded and added sentences to make my point clearer, and corrected text to refer to invites, not messages (thanks for pointing that out, mdc!) and point out that this was indeed done on purpose.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jholman</author><text>I don&apos;t know what&apos;s going on, and I prefer to trust the FSF, but I notice that they are wilfully misrepresenting the statement by pergu@google on the operators@xmpp list, and so are you, cs702.&lt;p&gt;Per said, a month ago, &quot;is there anything you can do about it in that case, otherwise we will have to institute very tight limits of invites per day being sent from federated domains&quot;, speaking about specific domains, and speculating about a possible future strategy.&lt;p&gt;FSF says (paraphrasing): &quot;we have this symptom, we&apos;re convinced it&apos;s for this technical cause... &quot; (so far so good) &quot; ... &quot;and this email thread says that Google is doing it on purpose&quot;.  Bullshit, that thread says nothing of the kind.  Stick to what you know.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google backslides on federated instant messaging, on purpose?</title><url>http://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/google-backslides-on-federated-instant-messaging-on-purpose</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cs702</author><text>The &quot;unintended side effect of filtering spam&quot; explanation makes no sense.&lt;p&gt;How likely is it that the same company which builds bleeding-edge machine-learning systems to track and predict our behavior online, and which uses these AI predictions constantly to maximize their ad revenue, somehow cannot find a better way to filter out spam invites?&lt;p&gt;How likely is it that the same company that houses the likes of Hinton, Norvig and Kurzweil under the same roof can&apos;t find a better way?&lt;p&gt;Google is &lt;i&gt;packed&lt;/i&gt; with experts at solving the &quot;spam filtering&quot; (i.e., pattern recognition) problem.&lt;p&gt;It appears this was done on purpose[1], driven by a corporate culture that no longer cares as much about openness.  &lt;i&gt;[Please read jholman&apos;s responses below.  He&apos;s right, I went too far with this last sentence.]&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001571.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/operators/2013-February/001...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;Edits: added &quot;it appears&quot; at the end, to tone down the language. Also, reworded and added sentences to make my point clearer, and corrected text to refer to invites, not messages (thanks for pointing that out, mdc!) and point out that this was indeed done on purpose.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cma</author><text>Maybe Hinton didn&apos;t make any progress on it yesterday so they decided to call it quits?&lt;p&gt;It does suck that they did this.  I have been hit with  many spam requests through Google Talk recently though.  You should at least be able to whitelist people in your address book or something.  Yeah, you can still send them an invite, but what if the third party&apos;s service adopted the same policy as Google?&lt;p&gt;They should at least let you opt in to requests.</text></comment>