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McAfee Granted Firewall Patent
BadUspto writes "BetaNews reports that 'The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted software maker McAfee a patent for tracking network events on a computer using a firewall. The patent filing involves tracing the location of an incoming connection and displaying a map showing where the remote system geographically resides.' Doomsday for VisualRoute and others?"
Article text: Although McAfee has not yet said whether it will pursue licensing agreements from other software vendors, the patent is likely to put pressure on rivals such as Symantec and Zone Labs. Most firewall applications provide traceroute capabilities, with some including visual maps to aid users. In 2001, the USPTO granted McAfee an unusually broad patent regarding automatic updating and self-installation of software. At the time, McAfee said anyone "willfully flaunting the technology" would face legal action. ME: Well, even though the text says McAfee hasn't decided on going after other companies with lawsuits..err licensing agreements... they do appear to have a track record of doing so.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
Great. I guess who were using Xtraceroute in the 90s to do this are now all SOL.
------- Code to try when you're bored: qsort( 0, UINT_MAX, sizeof( int* ), IntCompare );
USPTO shows up again! These people either are very uninformed or blind. How can they patent a thing that was used and invented a long time ago by other people. I remember I was using a visual traceroute program on win95 back in the 90's. I'm (still) proud I live in Europe, even if Romania (my country) is not yet a member of EU. I think I saw a visual traceroute program running on linux some years ago too... xtraceroute. Look on their web page here and scroll down to see when it was last modified. This gives you a clue how old the program is yet they didn't request a patent for that.
This is what I am
I can't make it stop
No matter how much I wanna change
I can't make it go away
Maybe I'm in over my head a little bit. Can someone still release an open source GPL product that does the same thing as McAfee's deal and be untouchable?
No, if this patent is upheld noone can release any similar functionality under any license for any reason. More or less.
Having said that, a patent is more or less useless until the patent owner successfully sues someone. Until a court upholds their patent it's just an assertion that's 'checked' by the USPTO. But I sure wouldn't want to be the poor bastard sued first .....
Cheers Koz
It's specific enough that I doubt there is any. Anybody know of software that traces geographically incoming connections, 'cause I don't.
You mean like XTraceRoute?
Not if it's not published its not.
some guy just doing something doesnt count as prior art - it has to be published.
If someone had written a HOWTO on writing a script to use XTraceRoute then that might count.
Except that a patent is not on a concept, it's on a method.
I doubt that the aforementioned script is the method used by McAffee, so not only would it not count as prior art, it also wouldnt infringe.