Erich Schubert: ResearchGate Spam
Update Dec 2012: ResearchGate still keeps on sending me their spam.
Most of the colleagues I had that tried out RG now deleted their
account there, apparently, so the invitation mails become fewer.
Please do not try to push this link on Wikipedia just because
you are also annoyed by their emails. My blog is not a "reliable source" by
Wikipedia standards. It solely reflects my personal view of that web
site, not journalistic or scientific research.
The reason why I call ResearchGate spam is the weasel words they use
to trick authors into sending the invitation spam. Here's the
text coming with the checkbox you need to uncheck (from the
ResearchGate "blog")
Add my co-authors that are already using ResearchGate as contacts and invite those who are not yet members.See how it is worded so it sounds much more like "link my colleagues that are already on researchgate" instead of "send invitation emails to my colleagues"? It deliberately avoids the mentioning of "email", too. And according to the researchgate news post, this is hidden in "Edit Settings", too (I never bothered to try it -- I do not see any benefit to me in their offers, so why should I?). Original post below:
If you are in science, you probably already received a couple of copies of the ResearchGate spam. They are trying to build a "Facebook for scienctists", and so far, their main strategy seems to be aggressive inivitation spam. So far, I've received around 5 of their "inivitations", which essentially sound like "Claim your papers now!" (without actually getting any benefit). When I asked my colleagues about these invitations none actually meant to invite me! This is why I consider this behaviour of ResearchGate to be spam. Plus, at least one of these messages was a reminder, not triggered by user interaction. Right now, they claim to have 1.9 million users. They also claim "20% interact at least once a month". However, they have around 4000 Twitter followers and Facebook fans, and their top topics on their network are at like 10000-50000 users. That is probably a much more real user count estimation: 4k-40k. And these "20%" that interact, might just be those 20% the site grew in this timeframe and that happened to click on the sign up link. For a "social networking" site, these numbers are pointless anyway. That is probably even less than MySpace. Because I do not see any benefit in their offers! Before going on an extremely aggressive marketing campaign like this, they really should consider to actually have something to offer... And the science community is a lot about not wasting their time. It is a dangerous game that ResearchGate is playing here. It may appeal to their techies and investors to artificially inflate their user numbers in the millions. But if you pay for the user numbers with your reputation, that is a bad deal! Once you have the reputation as being a spammer (and mind it, every scientist I've talked to so far complained about the spam and "I clicked on it only to make it stop sending me emails") it's hard to be taken serious again. The scientific community is a lot about reputation, and ResearchGate is screwing up badly on this. In particular, according to researchgate founder on quora, the invitations are opt-out on "claiming" a paper. Sorry, this is wrong. Don't make users annoy other users by sending them unwanted invitations to a worthless service! And after all, there are alternatives such as Academia and Mendeley that do offer much more benefit. (I do not use these either, though. In my opinion, they also do not offer enough benefit to bother going to their website. I've mentioned the inaccuracy of Mendeleys data - and the lack of an option to get them corrected - before in an earlier blog post. Don't rely on Mendeley as citation manager! Their citation data is unreviewed. I'm considering to send ResearchGate (they're Berlin based, but there maybe also is a US office you could direct this to) a cease and desist letter, denying them to store personal information on me, and to use my name on their websites to promote their "services". They may have visions of a more connected and more collaborative science, but they actually don't have new solutions. You can't solve everything by creating yet another web forum and "web2.0izing" everything. Although many of the web 2.0 bubble boys don't want to hear it: you won't solve world hunger and AIDS by doing another website. And there is a life outside the web.
A minor feature release 
The following proposal extends the JSON specification, with the idea
of using JSON as an information interchange format, rather than just a
way of writing certain ECMAscript values. They do not add anything but
only restrict valid JSON content and encoders with some rationale.
First of, I d like to remind everyone, including JSON s author, that
JSON is case-sensitive, except in the four hexdigits
after a backslash-u sequence in a String.
Second, I d like to remind everyone that JSON is not binary-safe. No
way around that, it implements Unicode (actually, 16-bit UCS-2, and it
doesn t guarantee that UTF-16 surrogates are correctly paired) text. I
also consider only UTF- 8, 16,32 B,L E valid encodings for JSON. (No
PDP endian, either. Sorry, guys.)
For my first proposal, I d like to point out CVE-2011-4815 which was
about overflowing hashtables. The obvious fix is to randomise the hash
per hashtable; to ensure this doesn t leak, we sort ASCIIbetically the
keys of an Object in the encoder. (Using Unicode is good here we can
just sort the keys as UTF-8 strings by their uint8_t value or
as Unicode (UCS-2 or even UCS-4 or UTF-16) strings by the codepoints.)
JSON was never preserving the order of elements in an Object anyway so
we make it standardised (we still accept any order, and, when parsing,
in collision cases, the later value wins). This also helps diffs.
For my second proposal, I d like to forbid \u0000, \uFFFE, \uFFFF in
strings. The first because many implementations use C strings, and for
an information interchange format this is better; it also has security
implications to allow NUL in a string. The other two, but not unpaired
UTF-16 surrogates (as ECMAscript uses UCS-2 and got UTF-16 only later)
because they re not valid Unicode; JSON was not binary-safe already so
why bother. Among other benefits, this also helps implementations.
For my third proposal, I d like to agree that implementations should
impose a nesting depth limit that may be user-defined, and in the face
of which, cyclic checking may be ignored by an encoder. I emit nesting
depth overflows as literalnull; might also throw an error. Since I was
asked, the common standard value is to restrict nesting depth is 32,
unless the user specified one. (I also saw 8, but 32 WFM pretty well.)
Most seem to use it even if it may seem low at first. Only specialised
applications probably need more, and they can always pass a value.
For my forth proposal, backslash-escape U+007F U+009F always. It may
upset humans, editors, databases, etc. (This paragraph is newly added,
after some 
Thanks very much to everybody who commented, both publicly and privately, on my previous entry.
To recap: I have three sites that were each generated by slightly different templating software I'd built and tweaked over the years. I was frustrated that the three copies of the generation tool had all drifted and diverged from each other, and was looking to setup a new (static) site.
The obvious conclusion was either:
This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who 
Back from the mini-debconf, I have been trying to 
I'm pleased to say that a usable version of shim is now available for 
For many years, I have aspired being a university teacher. I remember asking at different universities as early as ten years ago But I didn't have the needed papers. And yes, I have been a "Licenciado en Ingenier a en Software" for one year already.
Anyway, I won't go into the details on why I didn't do this earlier on. But this time, I did get my act together in time, and by mid October, I contacted Juan Carre n, an enthusiastic teacher I met a long time ago as he helped a lot for the formation and cohesion of the (now defunct?) LIDSOL group (Laboratorio de Investigaci n en Software Libre, Free Software Research Laboratory), a group of very worthy students, mostly from the Engineering careers.
Juan Carre n had long offered me help in getting to the right people in Facultad de Ingenier a as soon as I had my formal requirements ready. I just didn't expect it to be so swift! Within two days of my initial mail, he contacted me back asking me to look at 
Have you ever wondered one of those?
Next release of 
After seeing some book descriptions recently on planet debian,
let me add some short recommendation, too.
Almost everyone has heard about Gulliver's Travels already,
so usually only very cursory. For example: did you know the book
describes 4 journeys and not only the travel to Lilliput?
Given how influential the book has been, that is even more suprising.
Words like "endian" or "yahoo" originate from it.
My favorite is the third travel, though, especially the acadamy of Lagado,
from which I want to share two gems:
"
His lordship added, 'That he would not, by any further particulars, prevent the pleasure I
should certainly take in viewing the grand academy, whither he was resolved I should go.' He
only desired me to observe a ruined building, upon the side of a mountain about three miles
distant, of which he gave me this account: 'That he had a very convenient mill within half a
mile of his house, turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family, as
well as a great number of his tenants; that about seven years ago, a club of those projectors
came to him with proposals to destroy this mill, and build another on the side of that mountain,
on the long ridge whereof a long canal must be cut, for a repository of water, to be conveyed up
by pipes and engines to supply the mill, because the wind and air upon a height agitated the
water, and thereby made it fitter for motion, and because the water, descending down a
declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river whose course is more upon a
level.' He said, 'that being then not very well with the court, and pressed by many of his
friends, he complied with the proposal; and after employing a hundred men for two years, the
work miscarried, the projectors went off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him
ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as
well as equal disappointment.'
"
"I went into another room, where the walls and ceiling were all hung
round with cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the artist to go in and out.
At my entrance, he called aloud to me, 'not to disturb his webs.' He
lamented 'the fatal mistake the world had been so long in, of using
silkworms, while we had such plenty of domestic insects who infinitely excelled
the former, because they understood how to weave, as well as spin.'
And he proposed further, 'that by employing spiders, the charge of dyeing
silks should be wholly saved;' whereof I was fully convinced, when he
showed me a vast number of flies most beautifully coloured, wherewith he fed
his spiders, assuring us 'that the webs would take a tincture from them; and as
he had them of all hues, he hoped to fit everybody s fancy, as soon as he
could find proper food for the flies, of certain gums, oils, and other
glutinous matter, to give a strength and consistence to the threads.'"
Not that I'm bored or anything, but I spent some more time on this
since last month, and apparently some people are interested enough, so
here's the recent news about 
About a month and a half ago, I got an email from someone studying at
the HELMo institute for higher eduction in Li ge, Belgium, inviting me
to talk at their conference which was held today. In the email, they
asked me to talk about "Debian and Open Source", which is such a wide
subject that I could talk about it all day; and then they gave me 20
minutes to do it. So I picked "Debian", and focused a bit more on that,
only to find out when I saw their schedule that they'd put "Open Source"
there instead. Hrm. Oh well.
The talk itself went pretty good. I believe I managed a good balance
between introducing Debian to those who've not heard of it before, and
explaining to those who have, how this Debian thing works (or is
supposed to work). The fact that the audience consisted of first- and
second-year IT students made this easier (in case you were wondering:
the third-year students, who're supposed to graduate at the end of this
eyar, organized the thing). I got some interesting questions afterwards
(which is always a good sign), and only positive comments as well (which
is even better).
After me, 
I'm still unsure about colors to use for highlighting different state - the failed checks should not be too different from translated strings as they might contain quite some false positives while fuzzy strings need to be really different as they absolutely need attention from translator. If you have better ideas about color scheme, please let me know!
You can see live example at 
Working with open hardware
Some weeks ago at LinuxCon EU in Barcelona I 
