patent of the day

Leichter, Jerry leichter_jerrold at emc.com
Wed Jan 23 09:13:22 EST 2008


| >http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6993661
| 
| Gee, the inventor is Simson Garfinkel, who's written a bunch of books
| including Database Nation, published in 2000 by O'Reilly, about all
| the way the public and private actors are spying on us.
| 
| I wonder whether this was research to see how hard it was to
| get the PTO to grant an absurd patent.
Alternatively, it could be an attempt to preempt any other patents
in this area.  We'll have to see what Garfinkle does with the
patent.

BTW, I don't see this as an example of an absurd patent.  There might
well be prior art, but the idea of erasing information by deliberately
discarding a key is certainly not completely obvious except in
retrospect.  If you look at any traditional crypto text, you won't
find anything of this sort - it wasn't the kind of thing people had
worried about until fairly recently.
							-- Jerry

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