More prior art around US patent 7,743,336: Widget security

Seems you can just replace the word "widget" with "java applet" in this whole patent. And Java Applets predate Dashboard by several years. 

Also, the patent doesn't define what DashBoard is (so seems to apply *only* to Apple's Dashboard). Maybe that is why such a broad patent was issued? Rigo? 

There is also this paper from 1997:

"A security model for Aglets" 
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=612220

"Mobile agents offer a new paradigm for distributed computation, but their potential benefits must be weighed against the very real security threats they pose. These threats originate not just in malicious agents but in malicious hosts as well. For example, if there is no mechanism to prevent attacks, a host can implant its own tasks into an agent or modify the agent's state. This can lead in turn to theft of the agent's resources if it has to pay for the execution of tasks, or to loss of the agent's reputation if its state changes from one host to another in ways that alter its behavior in negative ways. Aglets are mobile agents developed at IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory. The article describes a security model for the Aglets development environment that supports flexible architectural definition of security policies."

Received on Thursday, 22 September 2011 16:40:34 UTC