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Microsoft Wants Patent For Secure On-line Voting
from the who-needs-secure-online-voting? dept
theodp writes "The USPTO has voted no on Microsoft's just-published patent application for a Method for secure on-line voting, although the software giant can appeal the decision."
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After actually reading the thing..
whew that was a lot of actual reading, but the interesting part is the specifics of the rejection. many of the "claims" are rejected because the reviewer seems to have just not liked how it was done. not due to pre-existing systems (like one by someone by the name of McClure) having a better implementation, but the reviewer is poking at the flaws in the submitted invention (or at least percieved flaws). to me, the rejection is without merit.
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Re: After actually reading the thing..
I'm not sure I agree with that -- it seemed to me that every claim was rejected because it failed the obviousness test. The reviewer included many different patent cites (Chung, McClure, Biddulph) as well as some instructional programming cites (Petersen, Clasham). Nearly every rejection's last paragraph opens with "Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of invention to..".
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microsoft patent
Microsoft??? Security patent??? HAHAHAHAHA!!! That is the funniest news I have ever heard!!
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Re: microsoft patent
microsoft patent
by R Bernal on Friday December 30, @11:02
Microsoft??? Security patent??? HAHAHAHAHA!!! That is the funniest news I have ever heard!!
Gotta agree with you man. I wouldn't trust my vote to Microsoft; much rather spend that 15 minutes it takes to go to some elementry school ;)
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No Subject Given
Hmmm, that's odd. It seems that Bill Gates has been elected King by a landslide...
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Microsoft and Voting Patent
That was close - just what the voting process needs more exploits.
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No Subject Given
Microsoft and security? Why that's like Army intelligence, what a perfect marriage.
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Re: No Subject Given
Citizens of the world, I give you the supreme world dictator... Bill Gates, who won with no votes against him! ... What was that? ...You voted against him? ...Well, the numbers didn't show that! ...Of course the results are accurate! We used the Microsoft application to count them! ...No, I'm sure it was just a coincidence that the owner of the company that made the software won, dispite the fact that he wasn't on the ballet.
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As opposed to the current level of fraud ...
Given the level of voter fraud that has been going on for years (the most notable was Richard Daly's giving the election to Kennedy) ... and the 100% turn out in the some districts that traditionally had less than 5% (that amazingly enough voted 100% for Gore) ... electronic voting can't be much worse than the fraud prone system we have now that doesn't even require ID in order to cast your vote.
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Talk about poor quality patents!
There are two mistakes in just the single-paragraph abstract:
"A voting application on a computing device of a voter sends a challenge including data identifying and verifying the voter, the challenge is validated to ensure that the identified voter [is] allowed to vote, and a response is sent with a vote identification value identifying the voter as being activated. A ballot is then sent to the voting application and presented thereby to the voter based on which voting information is gathered from the voter. The voting application then sends a vote package with the vote identification value and the gathered voting information, and the vote package is validated to ensure that the vote identification value matches the vote identification value matches. The voting information from the vote package is then tallied."
As for the main content, this is be an utterly obvious way of using pre-existing security mechanisms to implement secure voting, albeit with mistakes such as not confirming the vote back to the voter after tallying.
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Yes, but...
... one of the problems of Diebold refusing to show the code for their voting machines was that part of it (namely, the operating system) belonged to Microsoft.
Well, I said, this just shows that Microsoft will soon start to be in the e-voting business, and they will be able to show all of their code...
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