Monday, October 22, 2007

Trash patent watch

It the USPTO grants this one its in even worse shape than imagined.

The latest graphics processor cards are essentialy general purpose SIMD processing units. nVidia releases a compiler for making use of the processors on general tasks. People start applying for patents for the blatantly obvious idea of using the general purpose SIMD computer for tasks that it is best suited for.

Lets see if the USPTO is stupid enough to grant this.

Password cracking is a pretty idiotic application to patent since the people most likely to use a password cracker are blackhats and they are not noted for paying license fees. On the other hand it might be purely defensive.

I know there are people who use password crackers to see if passwords are strong enough, I think its bogosity on bogosity, if you want to check password strength you can do it more usefully and much more easily when the user selects their password. There are also folk who use crackers to break lost passwords, which is OK so long as you don't mind bad guys being able to do the same.

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