oops

perhaps they filed this by mistake.

I say it's still possible for the hammer to smash google. Once we have a change of administration here, if we have a president that doesn't like 1984 he/she may just take a look at google.

theres alot of talk about google being in bed with various governments (and they are) but we all know how soon big brother can also turn on you.

you would have to have been born yesterday not to connect the dots that google has been able to form it's empire because of the data it collects either legally, or illegally.

once in awhile, they get caught.

Baffling

I'd still like to know *why* they wrote the software in the first place. what information could you possibly glean from drive-by snooping on household wifi networks?

And how on earth did they even remotely imagine it wouldn't be illegal? (aside from the fact they obviously thought they wouldn't get caught, esp. after 3 years...)

Prior art?

Am I missing something or are they trying to patent wardriving, which has been around since people started having wifi?

If so, I'll patent the wheel, the inclined plane and the lever fairly quickly

Patent wardriving?

This art is so prior, they even coined a word for it.

Possile to Patent?

Prior art aside, I thought you could only patent something new, they've already done this and it's now public knowledge, surely you can't retrospectively patent something?

Readdthe patent and see what they're patenting.

I haven't.

Apparently the declared intended and/or implemented application, which may or may not be legitimate, we'll come to that, is to make a useful device that can go, "I am within range of these home or business computer networks at these signal strengths. Therefore I am halfway along Main Street, Hope, Arkansas." Or wherever.

It's just geolocation.

Now: imagine a device that can mysteriously sense the location and species of all trees within a 100 metre radius, with sufficient accuracy that the reading can be matched against a map of all the trees in the world to calculate where in the map you are.

Some of these trees are privately owned and on private property land. Is it a breach of privacy to plot the locations of all privately owned trees? And to use the map to find out where in the world you yourself are?

It isn't exactly the same thing, of course!

Maverick Software Engineer

In order to stop this type of war driving technology from being abused and unauthorized, the smart man would patent it and defend and control it's use under theses patents. As it has come to light, a maverick engineer created this program without the consent of Google. Patenting it is the only way to control it.