Slashdot Mirror

Trailer Trash writes "According to this story at bizreport.com, Hallmark has given in and licensed Tumbleweed Communication Corp's patent for delivery of online documents with e-mail notification. Will the idiots at the patent office never stop? Jeff Smith of Tumbleweed claims to have been granted three patents last year."

An anonymous reader writes: "Tumbleweed, 'secure' email via http with SSL, so, not really end-to-end secure, just got the patent on private URLs; "Tumbleweed IME generates a private URL for each secure delivery. The private URL that IME creates is unique, tied to the sender of the package or transaction, to the content being sent, and to the intended recipient." I guess I can't tell my buds to surf to a non-public directory on my website to download stuff anymore." Many web applications generate these private URLs. Like the cheesy insecure bookmarkable login URL that Slash uses for example (which is just your name and password plain text in the URL which you should never use unless you're on acid, lazy, and/or realize that losing your slashdot user account will in no way affect your life because you are not a moron and use a unique password so bring on the packet sniffers ;)

An anonymous reader writes: "Tumbleweed, 'secure' email via http with SSL, so, not really end-to-end secure, just got the patent on private URLs; "Tumbleweed IME generates a private URL for each secure delivery. The private URL that IME creates is unique, tied to the sender of the package or transaction, to the content being sent, and to the intended recipient." I guess I can't tell my buds to surf to a non-public directory on my website to download stuff anymore." Many web applications generate these private URLs. Like the cheesy insecure bookmarkable login URL that Slash uses for example (which is just your name and password plain text in the URL which you should never use unless you're on acid, lazy, and/or realize that losing your slashdot user account will in no way affect your life because you are not a moron and use a unique password so bring on the packet sniffers ;)