funsec mailing list archives
Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible
From: Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>
Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 09:49:24 +1200
Drsolly wrote:
Damn - now that I've suggested it publicly, no-one can patent it.
Nonsense. To prevent a patent being granted the patent applicant or patent examiner would have to know of it being published. In practice, at least in the US, that means the applicant won't go looking terribly hard and neither will the patent examiner, as both have (different) vested interests in seeing the patent granted. To show you how silly this all is, MS has a patent application in process, or maybe even granted now (this was mentioned sometime last year and got its fifteen minutes of feigning, "gosh, golly, ain't that clever" media coverage), for "rootkit detection" that essentially hinges, when you boil it all down, on "boot clean". MS, as applicant, doesn't want to admit that this is simply ages-old common sense _as applies to doing ANY AND ALL intelligent system investigation_ and dollied it all up in lots of mumbo-jumbo language to make it sound extra-genuis and novel. The patent examiner won't know enough to realize that this application really only applies general, well-established computer security knowledge to a very narrow, specific aspect of the more general, already known and widely discussed, published and implemented practice, and because of the obscure language MS' lawyers wrapped the application in, any obvious searches on apparently key phrases from the application will not return any apparently related hits, so it _will_ appear novel to the examiner's limited abilities to test its claims. In future, if/when MS flexes this patent, all the other developers/ practitioners/etc using this technique will find themselves in the AV/Hilgraeve situation -- it will be far cheaper to swallow their pride and pay up (or even go out of (that line of) business) than to challenge such an utterly bogus patent... Regards, Nick FitzGerald _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
Current thread:
- Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Fergie (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Drsolly (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Drsolly (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Nick FitzGerald (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Drsolly (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Nick FitzGerald (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Drsolly (Apr 05)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Nick FitzGerald (Apr 05)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Drsolly (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Valdis . Kletnieks (Apr 04)
- Re: Point of No Return? Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impo ssible Drsolly (Apr 04)