Hasta La Gadget!

Passwords are sensitive stuff, and with so many user accounts for a person to hold these days, it can get rather tricky trying to remember all of them, as some sites require 8 characters minimum, while others want a healthy mix of numbers, letters and at least one uppercase character, leaving some of us to use the same password across multiple accounts where possible. While that makes life easier for you, so too, does it make life easier for anyone with nefarious purposes who want to hack into your accounts. Nikon recently filed a patent where a password is required to activate your camera’s lens, and here we are with Apple being granted a patent that allows owners of Apple devices to retrieve their respective passwords simply be hooking up to a specific peripheral, which could very well end the reign of current traditional password recovery methods.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Apple today U.S. Patent No. 8,429,760, which covers “a system and method for storing a password recovery secret.” This patent was originally filed for in July 2010, where it described a system which would tie part of the password recovery process to “a commonly associated peripheral device,” where something as a common as a power cord would do.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Apple’s WWDC Starts On June 10 With Focus On iOS 7, OS X, Tactilize: Create and Share Visual Cards from the iPad,

Earlier this morning, the folks over at ITC passed a ruling that obviously favored Apple from Cupertino, which would translate to another legal defeat for Motorola, as the ITC ruled that the iPhone did not infringe upon Motorola’s patents. This would mean it has been a couple of losses for the subsidiary of Google since Friday, especially when a German court then denied Motorola Germany an injunction against Microsoft concerning a rather dubious push notification patent.

The patent that Motorola alleged Apple’s iPhone to infringe was this – sensors which prevent a handset from dialing a phone number by mistake whenever a touchscreen is pushed up against a user’s face. Having arrived at this particular decision, it would mean that the ITC has finished their investigation, and arrived at a final conclusion, that no violation to the ’862 patent was made. Where do you think the next victory on Apple’s legal front would come from?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: FocusTwist iPhone App Gives Your Phone Lytro-like Capabilities, Purported iPhone 5S SIM Tray Suggests Gold And Gray Color Options [Rumor],

Amazon is working on an anonymous mobile payments system, a new patent filing has revealed, using a Western Union style process of temporary identifiers which allows transactions without handing over your name, email address, or other personal details. The PayPal alternative uses an intermediary payments provider with which each individual in the deal is registered, but rather than sending money to a user’s email address, a special code is generated which can later be redeemed.

The patent, filed back in 2009, argues that many users prefer not to give out personally-identifiable details as a way of avoiding potential data theft or spamming. In contrast, Amazon’s system uses a series of temporary tokens that can be exchanged, either with the sender triggering the payment or the recipient requesting it, but with no exchange of personal information.

“It is commonplace for entities to conduct an electronic payment to complete a transaction. In a typical transaction, information about each party is typically exchanged to facilitate the electronic transaction. Some of this information may be personal or private information that a person may not desire to share with a stranger. For example, a customer may have to provide their address and telephone number during execution of an electronic payment” Amazon patent

In practice, if you had to give a friend a payment of $20, you could send a text message to Amazon’s server with the text “PAY 20″. A return message would have a specially created code, tied to your account, which – when your friend texted it to Amazon from their phone – would credit their account with the appropriate amount. Amazon suggests that the code could contain part of the recipient’s phone number: not enough to identify them, but enough to ensure that it would be unlikely that someone else could use the code from their own phone.

More complex versions of the system, meanwhile, would allow limitations to be placed on the temporary codes. For instance, Amazon describes how they could be set with expiration dates, so that recipients would have to use them before a certain periods; alternatively, a single code could be valid for multiple redemptions (potentially a limited number) such as to operate as an anonymous payment plan. Something other than money could be exchanged, too; Amazon suggests tokens, download credit, or other virtual currency.

Of course, any such system would require the intermediary infrastructure be set up, and enabled for accepting payments in multiple currencies across multiple locations. Amazon already has such a system, given its retail presence across the world, while its mobile ambitions have already been revealed in the form of the Kindle Fire range and the upcoming near-200 country expansion of the Amazon Appstore.

Amazon anonymous mobile payments system revealed in new patent is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Microsoft has insisted for years that companies building products based on Android and Chrome are treading on ground covered by its patent portfolio, and it’s continuing to press that claim. Today it announced it’s agreed to IP licensing terms with another device maker — Foxconn parent Hon Hai. Perhaps best known for making many Apple products, the massive company manufactures more than 40 percent of consumer electronics devices in the world. According to the press release the deal covers patents for phones, tablets and TVs, and will result in Microsoft receiving royalty payments. We’ve already seen companies like HTC and LG choose to cut a deal over the technology, while Google-owned Motorola is continuing to fight. It’s far too soon to know how those court battles will be resolved, but while the team in Redmond may not have caught up to Android in mobile market share, that doesn’t mean it’s not getting paid.

Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Tablets, Mobile, Microsoft, Google

Comments

Source: Microsoft

Having your phone get stolen sure sucks, but we can’t imagine how much worse it would be to have your camera stolen, especially if there are expensive lenses in the bag as well! While it might be hard to try and recover a stolen camera, Nikon has a patent in which it will make it harder for thieves to sell stolen equipment. This patent basically describes a method in which lenses require a password to be entered before they can be used with the camera. Should the wrong password be entered, the camera would then refuse to shoot with the lens. It’s a pretty intriguing idea and like we said, since this does not necessarily mean you will be able to recover your camera or expensive lenses, it might deter those who would steal them, thus reducing the chances of having your equipment stolen in the first place.

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