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Wi-Fi Redirect Gateway Patent for Hotspots
Glenn Fleishman writes "Over at WiFiNetNews.com, we just broke the story that Nomadix was issued a patent covering hotspot gateway page redirection. Nomadix makes hardware and software for the hotspot industry, and this patent would cover redirection used by community networking portals (like NoCat), sponsored free networks (like NewburyOpen.Net), and fee networks (like Wayport, T-Mobile HotSpot, and Cometa). It's unclear what terms Nomadix wants for a license, but this patent seems to take a standard way of doing business and put it under fee -- although Nomadix may have been the first firm to employ this method for proxy URL redirection."
Sure URL redirection is neat, but is this that big a deal?
As a standard prior art question, has anyone seen anything like this for wired networks or similar applications?
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
What happens if someone just manually sets their own settings instead of using DHCP? Can they get on the net then without going through the redirection?
Wouldn't many of the old "free shell" systems be considered prior art, or does the fact that you are using wireless instead of wires make this a new idea?
I do seem to remeber telneting to a shell account, and being presented a list of terms for service and a registration dialog with my invalid login (and an opportunity to return to login in case a typo had brought me there).
Does anyone else remeber this? Did nether.net operate this way at one time? Would this be enough to invalidate the patent?
The obvious workaround is to simply not redirect. Install a transparent proxy and serve up your desired page on the first request. This defeats
"modifying, at the gateway device, the original destination address access request and communicating the modified request to a redirection server if redirection is required;"
Better yet, claim 1 is fatally flawed. It includes the words "storing the original destination address if redirection is required". Claim 6 is likewise flawed: "stores the original destination address request if redirection is required". So the really obvious and easiest solution is to do exactly what you've been doing, except that you don't store where the user was trying to go, and they have to type the URL or back up and hit the link again.
While this was a valiant attempt by Nomadix to patent a process that was in common usage (my university used something with this effect, though not necessarially this process when I first hooked up on its dorm network the second half of my sophomore year, in '98), it ultimately falls short of the goal, and Nomadix should fire whatever patent attourney they had file this one.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
This is news, but only in the sense that Nomadix was the first to patent this idea that will possibly become quite important in the future.
Patents also theoretically require their subject to count as non-obvious (the single criterion the USPTO seems to conveniently overlook most often, IMO)... Nomadix may have done it first, and even filed for a patent first, but that doesn't make this any more "right". If truly an act of creation, then doing it first and filing first matters; In this case, they just beat the rush of literally hundreds of people who "discovered" the exact same solution to a particular problem, all within a very small timeframe. That strongly suggests this as an "obvious" solution, thus invalidating it for a patent.
That doesn't mean the USPTO sees it that way, however. The same USPTO that doesn't consider "store a cookie with customer data in it" as obvious. The same USPTO that, although overturned just today, actually ISSUED a patent that Lemelson deliberately stalled in the pipeline for half-a-freakin'-century to pop up recently and start extorting with.
So will this stand? It wouldn't surprise me. But to actually call it "fair" or in any way "non-obvious"? No way in hell. Using a butterknife to tighten a screw may sound like an admirable way to deal with the lack of a screwdriver, but any moron with a knife, a screw, and no screwdriver, will come up with the same solution, even in isolation.
I am so sick of this crap. Why is it that when an obvious solution to an obvious problem presents itself, some ass munch somewhere thinks they own it? WTF is wrong with the world? If you need to hit something hard and you see a rock, does that mean that from then on you own all hammers, clubs and any other heavy blunt objects that might be used to hit something with?
I am grinding my teeth right now.
Well, just within a few minutes, I found dynacc, which offered similar functionality in July 1999.
But more importantly, the patent should be invalid simply because it's an obvious engineering solution. I'm sure we can find previous commercial or free implementations that go back to the early 1990's.
As for why it took four years to get the patent--who knows. Maybe it was poorly written or maybe it was iffy to begin with. I also don't see what difference it would make even if this were a proper patent.