Apple 'Safe Deposit Box' Patent Revealed Ahead of Mac OS X Lion
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
On a related note, Mac OS X can already create password-protected encrypted disk images with a few clicks in Disk Utility. These are great for creating a "safety deposit box" yourself on an existing system.
Maybe your parents are just more sophisticated than you and know the difference between redundancy and backups.
(1) Redundancy - All files in your Dropbox are saved on every computer and stored on Dropbox's servers
(2) Accessibility - Files in the Dropbox can be reached from any computer with internet access via a browser and downloaded
(3) Versioned Storage - Every saved version of every file in the Dropbox going back thirty (30) days is available online
(4) Deletion Protection - Every file in the Dropbox is available online and can be restored, even after the file is deleted from the computer and removed from the dropbox
With that said once a month I copy my DropBox directory to an external hard drive and call it good enough for my data.
With that being said my backup dataset is way too big to make Dropbox a cost-effective solution so I also have Backblaze account that backs up everything including the local copies of my Dropbox, so personally I'm ok.
Time Machine is a form of generational/chronological backup.
Apple has stated that Time Machine is not archival. I wonder is this new patent is referring to an extension of TM, to the cloud, to provide something as close to archival as can be achieved.
There's a major annoyance with these. The dialog that accepts the password does not support paste. You actually have to type the password. I don't even want to know my password--that's the job of a password manager.
I've been using TrueCrypt instead.
but once you do type the password into that dialog you can save it and password manager will do its' job from then on.
IIRC, Apple broke the first responder chain, and there’s workarounds to paste into it. [1] Most likely this was to prevent any script-based brute force attacks as the disk mounter does not lock down after any number of failed attempts.
[1] http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004012018442215...
I will be quite peeved if something I have been doing for years with combinations of tools like Dropbox and Truecrypt becomes more difficult or costly to me or my customers due to a patent like this one.
If your device/method doesn't exactly match the claim elements of the independent claim(s) in Apple's patent - even one little difference in implementation is enough - then your device/method is not infringing. Don't worry, be happy.
It annoys the crap out of me when people call it a "Safety deposit box"
how did they miss the prior art on THAT one?
Just because something is used in an invention doesn't mean that component is now part of the patent; for example if somebody uses a gear in their patented design, it's OK for others to use gears.
I agree a patent on a gear does not allow others to use the same gear, but said gear would need to have a uniquely defining quality which differentiates it from the other gears already in existence.
This sounds very similar to DropBox, but this is just a high-level description. It's extremely unlikely that they could describe their system in sufficient detail without distinguishing it from DropBox in some way.
There's a tendency to hear the title of a patent and think that it covers all systems that could possibly be described by that particular title. This is not the case! Also, there's a tendency to hear about a patent and think that because your system does something similar, it would be infringing against a patent, but that also is not necessarily the case. The patent system can be abused horribly, but not every instance of a patent is an instance of abuse, and each patent should be evaluated on its own merits rather than the abuses of others.
Right. You can often dodge patent claims by doing just one little thing in a different way. When you see a very specific claim, it means the patent lawyer was forced to write it that way by the examiner. A patent application starts out as generic as possible and becomes increasingly specific in response to push-back.
Of course, non-infringement is no guarantee against getting dragged into a costly legal battle.
An animated "safe deposit" box icon that you can drag a file onto, and it will then be encrypted, and stored in a secondary location (such as the cloud). They were pretty specific about the animated icon too... (claims 1-4)
Actual patent application (20110040980): http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...