Rick’s Playground

I just rushed back from this month’s Security meetup and finished attending a 40 minutes conference call with my teammates in US. Today’s meetup was really impressive because we have Rogan Dawes- the author of Webscarab in town and gave us an hour talk on Webscarab. It was really nice to meet up with these guys who created fantastic tools and brought tremendous values to the community. I also prepared a short presentation on Web Application Testing Using Burp Suite together with a little bit demo. However I encountered quite a few technical glitches with the projector and my Ubuntu laptop and wasted almost 30mins trying to fix them. It was really a pity that I couldn’t show all my materials although the guys in the group waited for me patiently. I shall find out the bugs and make sure my next presentation won’t be messed up.

Here is my presentation slide if you are interested: Web PT Using Burp Suite

This is absolutely ridiculous that a Singapore based company is trying to charge patent fees for web pages linking image to contact information. This is not the first time we hear that companies intend to charge patent fee for commonly known technologies. Just a few months ago, someone in China filed patent application for booting Linux OS through USB devices.

Claiming itself as “pioneers of visual search technology”, Vuestar Technologies started issuing invoices to various SME(Small/Medium Enterprise) websites owner to demand annual fees from s$500 to s$10000. It is such a blatant act of bullying - the company stated that they are not going after government agencies and big boys. Vuestar’s patent–tagged under publication number 95940–appears also to have been granted in Australia, New Zealand and United States. The company’s website shows no business related activities other than requesting people to pay for their license. Local lawyers urge clients to practice caution and seek legal advice before reaching any settlement with the claiming firm.

This scene is very similar to the domain squatters back in 90s. However Patent squatters are more aggressive and they like to use loopholes in current patent systems and obtain greater financial gains. But this also makes poeple ponder how did these patent squatters manage to get their applications accepted in the first place.  

Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuestar_Technologies