It's a real patent

In an earlier post, I mentioned that somebody managed to get a patent for the doubly-linked list. A friend told me it was a hoax, so I did a little research. Turns out, it was not a hoax - Ming-Jen Wang of LSI was awarded patent number 7028023. The friend who told me it was a hoax is no longer a friend.

On the other hand, it's not simply the doubly-linked list that was patented. It was a tertiary list of pointers for indexing on top of the doubly-linked list. That is, a doubly linked list allows you to iterate through the items forward and backwards by some key field. Wang's patent is on adding another key field that you can iterate through the list by something other than the key field. So it appears one of two things is going on here: 1) I totally don't understand the patent (entirely possible - feel free to correct me if that's the case), or 2) a patent was awarded to an incremental improvement of an existing algorithm by implementing the same algorithm a second time. Like making a brick wall stronger by using a second layer of bricks.

Patent Nonsense

Admittedly, I've not read the entire patent, but this guy managed to get a patent for the linked list. If you read only the Abstract, it looks like the patent would cover using a list of pointers to point to items in a collection - not the items in the collection containing pointers to the next item. Reading the details, though, shows this not to be the case (phew! Was thinking that even Blaise Pascal wouldn't be immune to this one!)

It looks like (only when you read the detail) that the patent would truly only cover doubly-linked (or n-linked) lists, not singularly-linked lists. However, this is still a really broad patent of a data structure. I told a buddy who is a transportation engineer that this would be akin to patenting the wheel. Not the tire. Not a particular type of wheel. The wheel.

Living in a capitalist society, the one thing that bothers me the most about the patent office is not the patents they allow through. It's that the patent office has a monopoly on the patent process. See, as security professionals, if we decide that a standard of measurement is inadequate, we can invent a new standard of measurement, get a bunch of other security professionals on board, and the standard is effectively changed. What we need is a new patent office. But if we were to start a new patent office, and everybody bought into it, it still wouldn't be the patent office.

Chinese government wants real names of bloggers

An article by that name was published on Ars Technica.

China is mulling a rule change that would require all bloggers to register with the government under their own names, though they would be permitted to keep using an online pseudonym. The move is part of a crackdown against what official news agency Xinhua terms "irresponsible and untrue information," which is a "bad influence" on society.

To preface, I will use the term "fact" many times in this article. "Fact" is something which can be proven or disproven, so "fact" doesn't necessarily mean a true statement. While untrue, 2+2=5 is a fact.

Now, strangely, I have mixed emotions about this. I don't want to get into whether or not it's un-American (not much of Chinese government is American), but I started thinking through it. What threat does a blog in and of itself pose? And what level of risk does the real name of the blogger mitigate?

For those who read blogs regularly, I would say that individual posts make little dent. Responsible adults who understand the blogosphere know that any information presented as fact in the blogosphere (or anywhere else, for that matter) could be untrue. However, what percentage of people actually verify facts? And how many people naiively believe information on a well-read blog as being true? I would guess that quite a few people actually believe information without verification.

That being said, the next question would be whether a large number of people believing false information or drastic opinion could somehow affect the security. I would assume that even in the US, if something were widely said that weren't necessarily true, we'd have a tendency to overreact. Since Katrina, there have been several "threats" to the nation's oil supply, each of which caused a massive drive to the gas stations, skyrocketing fuel prices, and ultimately a few changes in the economy. Fortunately, fears were assuaged. Anybody know if power threats are still making an impact in California, though? I suppose the question, then, is whose security might be at risk. China has a very rich tradition of humbly honoring authority, sometimes to a fault, but it's a characteristic very sadly missing from American culture. I suppose rotten things said about authorities there (true or not) could result in a weakening of that authority.

And lastly, does knowing the names of bloggers mitigate any of the risk? I would assume so - remember the statement about respecting authority. I don't know to what extent the government wants to go with their information knowing. But knowing that authority is concerned with what you publish about it would (in that culture) impact the way in which you present things.

All that being said, I can't say that this would be a bad thing. I would probably never stand for it in my own country (even though I don't think I blog anything that poses any sort of a national security risk), but in that culture, it seems to make some amount of sense.

This was a difficult post for me to write - I'm not a communist, nor do I like the idea. However, in America, we're not very submissive to authority - in fact we're mostly downright insubordinate. In China, trusting authority is a part of the culture.