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Checksumming Webpages Patented

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-that-one-takes-the-cake dept.

Just when you thought nothing else stupid could be patented, Wahfuz noted a story running about a company called Pumatech who has apparently patented storing a checksum of a webpage to determine if it has updated or not. I guess from now on everyone who wants to detect changes in web pages will need to store full copies of the pages in question, because I'm sure nobody thought of anything so complex as piping it through md5 and saving the output.

3 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. You think that's bad.... by Francis · · Score: 5

    I used to work at Pumatech. (Actually, I worked in the wireless web-browsing end of things, as an engineeer)

    Anyways, we were checking our emails one day (this was about 6 months ago) and there's some big "congratulations" email - we got another pattent!

    A large portion of the company is based out of synchronization software. (Synchronize your PIM, Laptop, whatever) We'd just received a patent on a revolutionary new technique - time based syncing! Sync data, based on their TIME STAMPS!

    We had a good laugh.


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    #include <malloc.h>
    free(your.mind);
  2. Re:Uhh... ok.. by kijiki · · Score: 5

    You couldn't be more wrong.

    January 1997 -- rfc2068 HTTP/1.1

    See section 14.20, 14.25, 14.26, and 14.43.

    It describes the "ETag: " header, which is usually a md5 hash of the resource.

    The client can then validate the resources in its cache by sending a request with a "If-None-Match: " header with the ETag associated with the copy in its cache.

    The server will either respond "Not modified" in which case the client simply uses the version in its cache, or the server will resend the resource if the ETags don't match.

    Since this patent was filed for in 1999, this is pretty clear prior art, in the most commonly used protocol on the largest network in the world. If the patent office can't locate prior art in incredibly obvious (obvious to anyone skilled in the art, that is) cases like this one, what hope do we have for them intelligently handling more subtle cases?

  3. New business model in the New Economy by Xibby · · Score: 4

    If you patenet it, they will come.

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    I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.