Microsoft patents lawful intercept on Skype
appft1.uspto.govC'mon, you don't honestly believe in 2012 that a conversation held over public networks using free software that embeds itself in every browser on your machine, watches your searches, automatically talks to the mothership every night, and keeps real-time track of your contacts, is actually private do you?
How do you think Free got to be worth so much?
By charging for Not Free services like multiuser video calling and providing extremely competitive long distance calls on the PSTN.
It's unfortunate that Skype got sold to a U.S. company. Before that, someone asked Skype's CEO about compliance with U.S. wiretap law, and he said "What do I care about that? We're not American."
They seem to do it no matter what they charge.
I feel the need to state what is probably already obvious to the HN crowd: Microsoft did not invent the idea of lawful interception. It is used in full force for both fixed and mobile networks, and select government agencies can call carriers to get records and do live wire tapping.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception
Microsoft's premise is that the techniques used for VoIP are different then traditional lawful interception, but I don't think anything described in the patent is non-obvious. Nonetheless, they will probably get it awarded, as more then 50% of patent applications do (forgot where I got the statistic from), and even more when its from large tech corporations that have dedicated in-house patent lawyers filing the patent applications.
When you think about it, the USPTO gets money from awarding patents and collects yearly fees through the 20-year life of a patent, and the army of patent examiners they have on staff do not come cheap (starting salaries range from 52-79k), and for the most part they are self-funded and do not rely on U.S. Congress money - so there is every incentive in the system for them to award every patent applied for.
Patent examiner salaries are 52-79k? In Washington, D.C., the most highly paid metro area in the USA?
No wonder they can't manage to hire engineers who know any of the many technologies that have been around for decades and still get repeatedly patented every week. That's as bad as the continuing prohibition on admitting computer engineers and software engineers to the patent bar while software becomes an ever larger fraction of the case load.
Not to be confrontational, but where do you see that there is a "prohibition on admitting computer engineers and software engineers" to the patent bar? I have a CS degree, and work with plenty of others with software experience or computer engineering/software degrees, all of whom are admitted to the patent bar.
Last I checked there was a list of eligible engineering degrees and software engineering was not on the list.
Skype and Microsoft aside - what is there to patent to begin with? They effectively describe mangling the call setup to make the call go through a recording agent. This is obnoxiously trivial.
Someone found a way to bypass the PR dept to let you know that Microsoft's IM networks support lawful intercept (and that company policy supports this).
Yes, once this one is issued, Microsoft's competitors, both proprietary and free will be proud to proclaim Microsoft has a patent on lack of security!
Extremely important to note: this is a patent application, not a patent. That is to say, this has no legal effect, Microsoft cannot use the patent application to sue anybody, etc. etc. Also, the claims (which are the heart of any granted patent) are likely to change before this gets issued as an enforceable patent.
standard disclaimer: this does post does not constitute legal advice.
Patenting the man-in-the-middle attack ought to mark the end of software and business method patents. It's (1) obvious, (2) been done, and (3) making hacks patentable ought to be contrary to public policy.
I don't think this patent was specifically targeting Skype. If you search for the keyword Skype, it actually says that the method may or may not work for VOIP applications.
Besides, the patent was filed back in 2009, long before Microsoft acquisition in Skype.