4 ms·

What's In Facebook's Pile of Evidence Against Paul Ceglia

50 points by grellas 15y ago

mdonahoe 15y ago
I'm impressed Harvard still has the emails, though I went to a tiny school with a laughable 50mb inbox limit. I imagine verifiable Harvard emails will be the end of this case.
- jacobolus 15y ago
  Harvard’s inbox limit was 100 MB when Zuck was a student. I believe they do regular backups of everything, but it’s also possible that since Zuck didn’t graduate they just never got around to deleting his account.
  - thinkcomp 15y ago
    It was easy to raise your limit and everyone with any CS knowledge did. Mark's Harvard account does appear to be active still. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mzuckerb/ http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mzuckerb/ Quite the professional.
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  I strongly doubt that Harvard still has the e-mails of graduated students from five years ago. If they did, they would not let go of them easily. It's possible Facebook subpoenaed Harvard for the messages that Mark should have had anyway, but that just sounds absurd to me, unless there was some strategic reason to use Harvard's copy of the e-mail account.
  - jedberg 15y ago
    The strategic advantage is that it lends a lot more credence to the case if the messages came straight from Harvard's copies, because Harvard is a lot easier to trust in this case than Mark. ie. They would probably be unaltered coming from Harvard.
    - thinkcomp 15y ago
      As long as by "probably" you mean "just as likely to be [unaltered] as from any other active POP3/IMAP e-mail account." :)
      - jedberg 15y ago
        Yes, that is what I meant. :) But in theory Harvard would have records of such modifications, or backups, or something that is more trustworthy than Mark's copies of the emails.
    - nahlyee 15y ago
      If Harvard doesn't have a record of the damaging emails, couldn't it just be because they've been deleted? Barring the mushroom conviction, Zuckerberg has an even greater (albiet shorter) history of alleged shady dealings as Ceglia. I figure the two parties about equal in terms of credibility.
  - dgabriel 15y ago
    I'm at HBS, not the university proper, but I'm not surprised. I'm not precisely sure when we destroy the backups, or if there is a policy in place for doing so, but I do know that if one of our faculty members needs to recover a five year old email, we sure as hell better be able to do that. Tape is cheap enough.
brianbreslin 15y ago
The firm representing ceglia is very well known, it seems strange they would launch this assault without due diligence. Unless they were expecting a settlement quickly.
thinkcomp 15y ago
Unless I'm looking in the wrong place, the e-mails that Facebook's attorneys and Paul Ceglia's attorneys have disclosed all seem to lack SMTP headers. Here's what an e-mail from Mark Zuckerberg looks like when you want to make a point: http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/housesystem/20040106140008.zuckerberg.pdf http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/housesystem/20040106140... There are many more here, though they've been largely ignored by the media since I chose not to be part of the movie: http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/resources.html http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/resources.html SMTP headers are crucial. I wouldn't trust anything that lacks them. While the header itself isn't a guarantee that the message body hasn't been tampered with, it's definitely more reassuring that the message hasn't just been invented out of thin air. As it so happens, the e-mails Mark sent me (and that I sent him) are from the exact same time period that Paul Ceglia is concerned with, so if the full messages ever do come out from either side, a comparison would be fairly straightforward.
- edanm 15y ago
  Have any of the lawyers been in contact with you about those emails? Seems like it would make sense, especially since they're doing linguistic analysis of Mark Zuckerberg's style, etc.
  - thinkcomp 15y ago
    No one has seemed particularly interested. I will say this, because despite my settlement agreement, I can: the whole Facebook controversy--what has indirectly become of my initial work on a fully integrated portal for Harvard students--is an enormous tragedy for everyone, not just for me. Mark's Facebook has distorted so many aspects of our society. The media circus of one claimant after another; the filing, counter-filing, hearsay, "non-fiction" books, "fictional" movies, etc. has detracted from the actual story based on factual evidence to the point where it's hard not to feel sympathy for Mark. Yet no one who values creativity and strives to be an entrepreneur should feel sympathy for Mark. I don't know anything about Paul Ceglia other than the fact that he appears incredibly untrustworthy. And yet, despite not being convicted criminals, I wouldn't trust the Winklevosses and Divya Narendra, either. Nor would I trust Eduardo Saverin or any of the other co-founders. I trust Mark least of all. All of this is to say that you can do linguistic analysis on Mark's writing style all day. It doesn't matter; Mark will be fine and Paul Ceglia was apparently already in a lot of trouble. The vast majority of people I hear talking about this have completely failed to learn anything from it. In fact, we've put Mark and others like him up on a pedestal, and it's really quite sad.

50 points by grellas 15y ago

I'm impressed Harvard still has the emails, though I went to a tiny school with a laughable 50mb inbox limit. I imagine verifiable Harvard emails will be the end of this case.

jacobolus 15y ago
Harvard’s inbox limit was 100 MB when Zuck was a student. I believe they do regular backups of everything, but it’s also possible that since Zuck didn’t graduate they just never got around to deleting his account.
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  It was easy to raise your limit and everyone with any CS knowledge did. Mark's Harvard account does appear to be active still. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mzuckerb/ http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mzuckerb/ Quite the professional.
thinkcomp 15y ago
I strongly doubt that Harvard still has the e-mails of graduated students from five years ago. If they did, they would not let go of them easily. It's possible Facebook subpoenaed Harvard for the messages that Mark should have had anyway, but that just sounds absurd to me, unless there was some strategic reason to use Harvard's copy of the e-mail account.
- jedberg 15y ago
  The strategic advantage is that it lends a lot more credence to the case if the messages came straight from Harvard's copies, because Harvard is a lot easier to trust in this case than Mark. ie. They would probably be unaltered coming from Harvard.
  - thinkcomp 15y ago
    As long as by "probably" you mean "just as likely to be [unaltered] as from any other active POP3/IMAP e-mail account." :)
    - jedberg 15y ago
      Yes, that is what I meant. :) But in theory Harvard would have records of such modifications, or backups, or something that is more trustworthy than Mark's copies of the emails.
  - nahlyee 15y ago
    If Harvard doesn't have a record of the damaging emails, couldn't it just be because they've been deleted? Barring the mushroom conviction, Zuckerberg has an even greater (albiet shorter) history of alleged shady dealings as Ceglia. I figure the two parties about equal in terms of credibility.
- dgabriel 15y ago
  I'm at HBS, not the university proper, but I'm not surprised. I'm not precisely sure when we destroy the backups, or if there is a policy in place for doing so, but I do know that if one of our faculty members needs to recover a five year old email, we sure as hell better be able to do that. Tape is cheap enough.

brianbreslin 15y ago

The firm representing ceglia is very well known, it seems strange they would launch this assault without due diligence. Unless they were expecting a settlement quickly.

thinkcomp 15y ago

Unless I'm looking in the wrong place, the e-mails that Facebook's attorneys and Paul Ceglia's attorneys have disclosed all seem to lack SMTP headers. Here's what an e-mail from Mark Zuckerberg looks like when you want to make a point: http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/housesystem/20040106140008.zuckerberg.pdf http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/housesystem/20040106140... There are many more here, though they've been largely ignored by the media since I chose not to be part of the movie: http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/resources.html http://www.thinkpress.com/authoritas/resources.html SMTP headers are crucial. I wouldn't trust anything that lacks them. While the header itself isn't a guarantee that the message body hasn't been tampered with, it's definitely more reassuring that the message hasn't just been invented out of thin air. As it so happens, the e-mails Mark sent me (and that I sent him) are from the exact same time period that Paul Ceglia is concerned with, so if the full messages ever do come out from either side, a comparison would be fairly straightforward.

edanm 15y ago
Have any of the lawyers been in contact with you about those emails? Seems like it would make sense, especially since they're doing linguistic analysis of Mark Zuckerberg's style, etc.
- thinkcomp 15y ago
  No one has seemed particularly interested. I will say this, because despite my settlement agreement, I can: the whole Facebook controversy--what has indirectly become of my initial work on a fully integrated portal for Harvard students--is an enormous tragedy for everyone, not just for me. Mark's Facebook has distorted so many aspects of our society. The media circus of one claimant after another; the filing, counter-filing, hearsay, "non-fiction" books, "fictional" movies, etc. has detracted from the actual story based on factual evidence to the point where it's hard not to feel sympathy for Mark. Yet no one who values creativity and strives to be an entrepreneur should feel sympathy for Mark. I don't know anything about Paul Ceglia other than the fact that he appears incredibly untrustworthy. And yet, despite not being convicted criminals, I wouldn't trust the Winklevosses and Divya Narendra, either. Nor would I trust Eduardo Saverin or any of the other co-founders. I trust Mark least of all. All of this is to say that you can do linguistic analysis on Mark's writing style all day. It doesn't matter; Mark will be fine and Paul Ceglia was apparently already in a lot of trouble. The vast majority of people I hear talking about this have completely failed to learn anything from it. In fact, we've put Mark and others like him up on a pedestal, and it's really quite sad.