FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…
Just curious this seems like simple digital Steganography or maybe even even the same as Shannon's boolean gate work. Do you think the patent is defendable in court?
FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…
Respectfully: how the hell would that be a valid patent? Feels like patenting the idea of writing text in white on white on a Word document such that you don't lose it but it doesn't get printed. It's just insane to ever call that "an invention".
I think the magic is in the context of Unicode. Which also makes it almost twice as ridiculous from my point of view. Because it seems to be doing exactly what unicode is meant to do.
More generally, you can use encoding formats that reserve uninterpreted byte sequences for future use to pass data that is only readable by receivers who know what you're doing, though note this not a cryptographically secure scheme and any sort of statistical analysis can reveal what you're doing. The png spec, for instance, allows you to include as many metadata chunks as you wish, and these may be used to hold dat…
Lots of image formats store arbitrary metadata (and data data) either by design or by application-specific extensions. I remember seeing seismic and medical images that contained data for display in specialized applications and writing code to figure out if binary metadata was written in big-endian or little-endian byte order (the metadata often did not have the same endianness as the image data!) For example, TIFF files containing 3d scans as a sequence of slices, with binary metadata attached to each slice. If you opened it up in your system default image viewer, you'd only see the first slice, but a specialized viewer (which I did not have) would display it as a 3d model. Luckily (IIRC) the KDE file browser let you quickly flip through all the images in a directory using the keyboard, so I was able to dump all the layers into separate files and flip through them to see the 3d image.
So whoever now owns that patent (Google? maybe some patent troll picked it up?) could, in theory, sue the author of this article for patent infringement, right? Even though they invented it independently and never once used or looked at your patent. Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?
Do you think your comment made the world, and HN specifically a better place?
I think so , yes , it made me be re aware of the patent troll scam in the USA.
In fact it is your comment which to me seems a little hateful , yes the above comment also felt a little hateful
so.... in theory you should be able to create several visually identical links that give access to different resources? I've always assumed links without any tracking information (unique hash, query params, etc) were safe to click(with regards to my privacy). but if this works for links I may need to revise my strategy regarding how to approach links sent to me.
> I've always assumed links without any tracking information (unique hash, query params, etc) were safe to click(with regards to my privacy). but if this works for links I may need to revise my strategy regarding how to approach links sent to me.
Well, it was never safe, what you see and where the link are pointing at are different things, that's why the actual link is displayed at the bottom left of your browser when you move your mouse over it (or focus it via keyboard)
FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…
Respectfully: how the hell would that be a valid patent? Feels like patenting the idea of writing text in white on white on a Word document such that you don't lose it but it doesn't get printed. It's just insane to ever call that "an invention".
Companies acquire indefensible patents all the time. They are used in bulk to threaten smaller competitors ("we've got 500 patents in this field, better not bring your product to market"). This is one reason why patents can be terrible for competition.
So whoever now owns that patent (Google? maybe some patent troll picked it up?) could, in theory, sue the author of this article for patent infringement, right? Even though they invented it independently and never once used or looked at your patent. Do you think you made the world a better place or a worse place by filing that patent?
Do you think your comment made the world, and HN specifically a better place?
Yes, calling out unethical practices makes the world a better place by discouraging unethical practices.
FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…
FWIW, we considered this technique back at Pebble to make notifications more actionable and even filed a patent for that (sorry!) https://patents.justia.com/patent/9411785 Back then on iOS via ANCS, the watches wouldn't receive much more than the textual payload you'd see on the phone. We envisioned to be working with partners such as WhatsApp et al. to encode deep links/message ids into the message so one could resp…
Respectfully: how the hell would that be a valid patent? Feels like patenting the idea of writing text in white on white on a Word document such that you don't lose it but it doesn't get printed. It's just insane to ever call that "an invention".
Companies acquire indefensible patents all the time. They are used in bulk to threaten smaller competitors ("we've got 500 patents in this field, better not bring your product to market"). This is one reason why patents can be terrible for competition.
They are also used in bulk to defend against larger competitors using this type of threat. In a war where the ammunition is garbage, you either lose or you start hoarding garbage.