QinetiQ mail virus patent attracts barbs An anti-virus expert has poured cold water on a patent from British technology firm QinetiQ that supposedly offers a new technique for tackling malicious email attachments. New Scientist reports that the researchers at the defence technology firm have patented a technique for blocking malware in email attachments without …
"Patents are designed to allow developers to stake out areas of technical innovation. However, in the fiercely competitive anti-virus market, they've more often been used as legal and marketing weapons."
Erm, no. Patents have been created as "legal and marketting weapons" with the much touted (but never achieved) aim of protecting inventors (a category recently -and much controversially- extended to developpers).
Think someone should have researched this properly.
If you look at the US Patent application you will see that is started life a year before as a GB patent application. If you look up the GB application on ipo.gov.uk you find that the "Application terminated on 14th August 2007" so it never got to be a granted Patent.
So they have reduced the problem of finding viruses to the trivial problem of finding a piece of code that does the same thing when executed on all known operating systems and CPUs while being completely ignored by all existing file formats and applications.
Similarity I have a list of the code numbers of all terrorists, ( 1,2,3,4,5,6.....) all that remains is the trivial task of matching this with names and addresses.
"Think someone should have researched this properly.
If you look at the US Patent application you will see that is started life a year before as a GB patent application. If you look up the GB application on ipo.gov.uk you find that the "Application terminated on 14th August 2007" so it never got to be a granted Patent."
That doesn't mean that the grossly incompetent don't-give-a-shit USPTO won't grant it......
So does this mean that any program that I email will be infected by the anti-virus and can potentially cause silent failures that make the user wonder why? Am I the only one thinking this is a bad ideea? It's a lot worse then preventing the user to send binary files completely because the user won't know he sent a worthless file.
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