Altnet goes phishing. Again.
p2pnet.net News:- Altnet’s bid to ‘persuade’ anyone, or anything, with p2– (fill in the blanks) in its name to pay for its elderly TrueNames hash patent is starting to look like it’s a phishing exercise akin, almost, to Nigeria’s 419 scams.
Under the latter, industrious scribes in the African country send out messages designed to hook the unwary into paying for, well, nothing.
Under the former, an industrious scribe representing Altnet sends out messages designed to hook the unwary into paying for, well, nothing.
The owners of the open source p2p application Shareaza were among the first to receive an Altnet circular email implying that if they didn’t fork out for Ron Lachman’s TrueNames patent, licensed to Altnet / Brilliant Digital Entertainment, they’d be in trouble.
Reactions ranged from WTF to helpless laughter.
One of the latest recipients is Ran Geva, creator of P2M (Peer2Mail)
“Data Distribution Patents and Peer2mail,” says the Altnet letter, continuing, “Dear Sir or Madam”
Dear Sir or Madam?
heh. It goes on: I write on behalf of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Inc. (“BDE”) and Altnet, Inc. (“Altnet”), the exclusive licensees for use in peer-to-peer computing of U.S. Patent No. 5,978,791, entitled “Data Processing System Using Substantially Unique Identifiers to Identify Data Items, Whereby Identical Data Items Have the Same Identifiers” (“the ’791 Patent”) and U.S. Patent No. 6,415,280 B1 entitled “Identifying and Requesting Data In Network Using Identifiers Which Are Based On Contents of Data” (“the ’280 Patent”) (collectively the “Data Distribution Patents”).
It then waffles on, Based upon our investigation, we believe that other peer-to-peer applications, including applications offered by your company, use the technology claimed in the Data Distribution Patents for identifying, accessing, and distributing data items between computers. Accordingly, we believe that your company requires a license from BDE and Altnet to continue practicing the ‘791 and ‘280 Patents with your company’s peer-to-peer application.
But, “P2M doesn’t use any hashing technology,” Geva told p2pnet.
And as LimeWire’s Greg Bildson said when news of the Altnet phishing lure first surfaced, “One interesting thing about LimeWire code is that we explicitly don’t do searches by hash. We only do searches by keyword.”
In short, Altnet / BDE research is on a par with the rest of its ’services’.
Freenet’s Ian Clarke is looking for prior art, so if you know of anything ……
Stay tuned.
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See:-
first surfaced – Altnet tries TrueNames on p2p ops, p2pnet, January 1o, 2005
prior art – Altnet ‘extortion’ attempt, p2pnet, January 12, 2005
