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Intuit Beats SSL Patent Troll That Defeated Newegg
Last fall, Newegg lost a case against patent troll TQP for using SSL with RC4, despite arguments from Diffie of Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Intuit was also targeted by a lawsuit for infringing the same patent, and they were found not to be infringing. mpicpp (3454017) sends this excerpt from Ars: U.S. Circuit Judge William Bryson, sitting "by designation" in the Eastern District of Texas, has found in a summary judgment ruling (PDF) that the patent, owned by TQP Development, is not infringed by the two defendants remaining in the case, Intuit Corp. and Hertz Corp. In a separate ruling (PDF), Bryson rejected Intuit's arguments that the patent was invalid.
Not a complete victory (a clearly bogus patent is still not invalidated), but it's a start.
RC4 should be long deprecated. There is no sane reason to use those ciphers anymore.
It's secure. Sue me, mother fuckers
Modern browsers workaround the limitations or have TLS 1.1 or better. If you may be faced with clients that implement neither the workaround or TLS 1.1, rc4 can be better by virtue of being a stream cipher since TLS 1.0 flubbed the IV
Q: "How do you know so much about key exchange?"
A: "I invented it in the 70s."
Q: "Fail, you lose."
-vs-
Q: "How can you prove this is prior art?"
A: "Blah-biddy blah blah legal legal blah."
Q: "Seems legit. Intuit wins."
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
it's the patents that are bogus. Judges need to invalidate more patents, they need to invalidate all software patents.
no, I don't have a sig
"In addition to the disagreement between the parties as to the meaning of the agreed-upon claim construction"
I don't fully speak legalese, but the ruling had me literally LOL'ing. The threw everything from grammar naziism to stare decisis.
...but intuit. Ya...
If those folks were forced out of business tomorrow, I'd be just as happy.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Judges merely pattern-match against statutes and case law, and logic is absolutely not allowed to override either of the latter. In that specific sense, yes, judges indeed cannot act intelligently, because any intelligence they may possess must be suppressed to remain within the M.O. of their profession.
No judge could ever pass the Turing Test under such mental shackles. The normal M.O. of law is a disaster for humanity, an otherwise semi-rational species.
Can someone please explain why the original patent is "clearly bogus"? Just because it's being wrongly applied to situations it was never meant to cover doesn't make the patent itself wrong.
If Swingline uses stapler patents to sue Mozilla over pinning browser tabs, that doesn't invalidate the stapler patents themselves. (Does it?)
Man, are you retarded. In the future, it's probably best if you don't post this shit.
And to answer the question, no, it doesn't invalidate the patents. Trayvon Martin was still dead after George Zimmerman was acquitted.
I honestly wonder if any of these are legitimate claims or just "Trolls" as they are labeled.
I'll have you know, the man in the white coat said "retarded" is not technically the correct word for what I am.
Although the man in the white coat said that, too. So you're half-right. But you're also half-WRONG!! WRONG WRONG WRONG! How do you like being wrong, Mister Wrongy?
All this judge did was say the defendant did not do what this patent covered, as defined by the claim. It does not invalidate software patents. It does not declare the plaintiff to be a "patent troll". It does not declare this patent to be invalid. Whoever submitted this story must be desperate: like throwing a handful of party snaps into the air at a gun show...
Can someone please explain why the original patent is "clearly bogus"? Just because it's being wrongly applied to situations it was never meant to cover doesn't make the patent itself wrong.
The Jones 5412730 patent is about a security enhancement to encryption techniques whereby encryption keys are changed synchronously at the encrypting transmitter and at the decrypting receiver without the changed keys having to be transmitted. This improves security since the amount of data encrypted with a single key is shorter. It should be obvious that this technique could be used for the key for block ciphers or for the key (sometimes called a seed) for stream ciphers. The issue isn't applying the patent to stream ciphers, but the WAY it is being applied. TQP didn't assert the patent saying that RC4 (a stream cipher) as a whole was the encryptor -- that is, they didn't say RC4 had its seed/key initiating the algorithm changing, but rather that the encryptor was the exclusive-or INSIDE the RC4 algorithm. That way, the pseudo-random number generator used in the patent matches up with that in RC4 (and any other stream cipher).
The patent is not invalid in spite of stream ciphers that were in the prior art because that was explicitly addressed by the patent Examiner as described in the patent prosecution history. The Examiner referred to three pieces of prior art that "all show systems that use pseudorandom sequences to encrypt and decrypt the data sent between the two communicating parties." If you look at these three patents you find that in all three the pseudo-random sequences refer to bitwise exclusive-or (or modulo-2 adder which is synonymous) that combines the pseudo-random sequence with the data (to be encrypted or scrambled). To get the claim allowed the claim language was amended to include block language, the most relevant being the following:
"said first and second sequences are identical to one another a new one of said key values in said first and said second sequences being produced each time a predetermined number of said blocks are transmitted over said link"
which only allows for ONE of said key values for each block (or number of blocks). Since a block has to be at least 2 bits, this precludes 1-bit encryptors such as exclusive-or since that would require more than one (1-bit) key per block (>= 2-bits). So the prior art stream ciphers are excluded by this claim language (i.e. this patent cannot be properly asserted against them, including RC4).
So how is TQP asserting this patent? They claim the encryptor is exclusive-or, but they also claim that the size of a key is one byte, not 1 bit. They claim this because keys in the RC4 cipher are generated one byte at a time and used one byte at a time (these keys are usually referred to as a keystream or bitstream). However, this is a processing efficiency since the exclusive-or (XOR) algorithm is still a 1-bit algorithm. Processing 8-bits (one byte) at a time in parallel is not functionally different. Prior art stream ciphers using block ciphers as pseudo-random number generators, specifically Cipher Feedback (CFB) Mode or Output Feedback (OFB) Mode, allow for 1 to 64 bits to be generated at a time so the idea of generating and using multiple 1-bit keys in parallel was not new. Furthermore, in the TQP v. Newegg trial, TQP's expert witness on infringement said that XOR combines a key and data "effectively bit by bit".
The Judge in the Intuit case did not rule based on the above, but rather on other language in Claim 1:
"said first and second sequences are identical to one another a new one of said key values in said first and said second sequences being produced each time a predetermined number of said blocks are transmitted over said link"
A literal reading of this language implies that key values are produced after blocks are transmitted, but the language in the Description gives further clarification:
"In order that the two generators switch from one output key value to the next in synchronism, m
Remind me to hire Intuit's law firm instead of Newegg's if I am ever in this situation.