I don't see how this patent got issued, because its subject matter falls squarely into "obvious to the skilled in art" category.
If anyone has an access to the supplimentary filing materials, it'd be interesting to look at the applicant-reviewer exchanges. I've seen cases when the application was initially rejected, then adjusted to include one, very specific (albeit also trivial) implementation detail and this *combination of an idea and the detail* is what led to the grant of the patent. It also obviously narrowed the scope of the patent substantially. Alex -----Original Message----- From: p2p-hackers-boun...@lists.zooko.com [mailto:p2p-hackers-boun...@lists.zooko.com] On Behalf Of David Barrett Sent: August 11, 2009 2:31 PM To: theory and practice of decentralized computer networks Subject: [p2p-hackers] Some Microsoft chump patented my innovation Or, to be more accurate, some Microsoft chump patented something that was pretty obvious to me at the time, and probably obvious to a bunch of others. More interestingly, he did it years after I open-sourced my iGlance application *and* presented the exact algorithm at Codecon, the premiere P2P conference of the time. It's patent #20080205288, named "Concurrent connection testing for computation of NAT timeout period". It's abstract is: > Concurrent testing of NAT connections using different timeout values to compute a keep-alive value for the NAT device. Computation of the approximate timeout value is accomplished concurrently over multiple test connections within about a time equivalent to the actual NAT timeout value. The architecture validates the computation of the approximate timeout value by distinguishing NAT connection failure from external failure using a control connection. Moreover, computation of the keep-alive value is performed only once for a given NAT device rather than being an on-going process for that NAT device. When one of the test connections fails, it is determined that the NAT timeout value is less than the test timeout value associated with the failed test connection. Accordingly, a smaller test timeout value is then selected as the keep-alive value for keep-alive processing of the NAT device. This sounds remarkably similar to the discussions we've had on this list over the years (including very recently), and that is available in my iGlance application here: http://www.iglance.com/ Also, note that iGlance has been open source since 2005 -- you can download a 2006 snapshot of the code tree here: http://www.iglance.com/code.html You can also see iGlance in the 2006 CodeCon schedule here: http://codecon.org/2006/program.html#iglance Can anybody suggest a good place to record prior art (other than this list) such that if anybody wants to contest this patent in the future they'll be able to easily find it? -david _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers
