IBM Wants Patent For Regex SSN Validation 281
theodp writes "What do you get when you combine IBM contributors with the Dojo Foundation? A patent for Real-Time Validation of Text Input Fields Using Regular Expression Evaluation During Text Entry, assuming the newly-disclosed Big Blue patent application passes muster with the USPTO. IBM explains that the invention of four IBMers addresses a 'persistent problem that plagues Web form fields' — e.g., 'a social security number can be entered with or without dashes.' A non-legalese description of IBM's patent-pending invention can be found in The Official Dojo Documentation. While IBM has formed a Strategic Partnership With the Dojo Foundation which may protect one from a patent infringement lawsuit over validating phone numbers, concerns have been voiced over an exception clause in IBM's open source pledge."
Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Informative)
Online Prior Art at the Regex Library [regexlib.com] from 2004:
Put that into your favorite Javascript regular expression object and write a stupid onChange reference to it in your HTML and ... tada! Too complicated? Here's some more prior art [internet.com]. Or here [breakingpar.com]. A little bit of Googling [google.com] must be too much for the USPTO.
Are we suddenly shocked to discover one line of code can be patented when a whole mess of code can be patented?
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Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Informative)
The amazing part is that IBM is wasting this kind of money applying for a patent that has no chance of standing up in court, if they're even dumb enough to grant it in the first place. I'm in the process of applying for a software patent myself (I know, summon the chorus of boos; but having it could be the difference between being able to raise VC and not being able to raise VC for my starting business; loans, too, are often secured against your IP). These things don't come cheap -- mostly in terms of legal costs. As in a $5k retainer, $5-10k total for a single patent, more if it takes multiple patents to ensure sufficient protection, and if you want international protection, it can go up to $100k or so. Also, from discussions with my attorney, it's really hard to get away with the "bloody obvious" software patents anymore after all of the blowback from things like the Amazon 1-click patent.
I'm surprised they'd waste the money trying. Perhaps their legal department didn't have enough work to do but they didn't want to cut staff.
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These things don't come cheap -- mostly in terms of legal costs. As in a $5k retainer, $5-10k total for a single patent, more if it takes multiple patents to ensure sufficient protection, and if you want international protection, it can go up to $100k or so.
What makes you think that's anything more than pocket change for IBM?
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, from discussions with my attorney, it's really hard to get away with the "bloody obvious" software patents anymore after all of the blowback from things like the Amazon 1-click patent.
Somebody mod parent up. The days of the patent office just rubber stamping software patents (if there ever were such days) are over. Those guys have gone absolutely freakin' nuts with KSR. Seriously, you could send them an application for a working FTL drive, and they'd just shoot back an obviousness rejection combining one of Einstein's publications with an episode of Star Trek. I'm not saying it's bad to treat obviousness as a hard fact question where we have to actually use our heads rather than mechanically use the Teaching/Suggestion/Motivation test. But these guys have gone totally the other way. They don't use their heads. They just mechanically reject everything as obvious if they can find the pieces in any prior art, regardless of whether it was obvious to put them together (and for those who think this is a good thing, the result of this line is there's no such thing as an invention, because everybody builds on what's already there).
And now with Bilski, the examiners are all hot to reject any software claim as not patentable subject matter. Really, the landscape has changed. Anybody sitting around posting on Slashdot and grousing about the USPTO rubber stamping software patents really has no idea what they're talking about.
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Interesting)
More true than you know. A friend of mine started working for the the patent office not too long ago with the explicit instruction to reject everything that comes across his desk.
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:4, Interesting)
But in the end, as long as the applying company has the money (like IBM) and people willing to explain the spin on their patent, the USPTO is basically powerless to stop them. The USPTO does not hire talented people who can actually assess patents and understand what is obvious and what is not (such people would rather be working for a start-up or a big corporation or whatever). I know this because of the questions on the patent I applied for as principle (and got). They asked the wrong questions -- where I was being innovative they challenged me on prior art (clearly not the case) rather than obviousness.
Nothing changes the fact that the USPTO is in way over their heads. All because they allow software patents in the first place, and there are too many cynical software engineers trying to get their little bonus incentive to file the patent and throw it on their resume. (I should know, that's what I did.)
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Interesting)
Haha, how clever you are. Seriously, I'm stunned at your masterful retort. But here's the problem. The patent office rejecting an application is GREAT for my business. Every time the patent office sends me a rejection, whether it's legitimate and well-reasoned or flat-out crap, the client has to respond. That means I keep getting paid. So it's not like KSR put patent attorneys out of business.
My entire point, which you seemed to have missed, is that this notion that the USPTO rubber stamps patent applications (and especially software patent applications) is absolutely, demonstrably false. Now, that said, yes, it would be great for my clients if the USPTO only issued legitimate rejections. And I wouldn't really mind seeing it either, because maybe then I could help more people get patents. But in the end, even the most craptastic, infuriating rejections aren't harming my personal interests.
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Funny)
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Your bias is showing.
Says the guy with the .sig "The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving."
You're right about one thing. A patent != invention. A patent is an exclusive property right in an invention. But I'm not sure what that has to do with anything. I am not "assuming" that they are the same thing. I am well aware of how they are related. For example, the title of 35 U.S.C. s. 101 is "Inventions Patentable." The text is "Whosoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufactu
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If you trace the history of software patents
This is the trap lots of people fall into when discussing software patents. They see obvious software patents and use those as an argument against all software patents. I have seen reasonable and logical arguments both for and against software patents as a class. But obviousness is not one of them. KSR was not about software patents. It was about a brake pedal. The point of KSR was to strengthen the obviousness standard overall. I happen to agree with the conclusion (and that's certainly not herd me
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I'm in the process of applying for a software patent myself (I know, summon the chorus of boos; but having it could be the difference between being able to raise VC and not being able to raise VC for my starting business; loans, too, are often secured against your IP). These things don't come cheap -- mostly in terms of legal costs. As in a $5k retainer, $5-10k total for a single patent, more if it takes multiple patents to ensure sufficient protection, and if you want international protection, it can go up
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It doesn't matter if they don't have to pay a retainer; they still have to pay them.
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No this is akin to his VCs wanting him to draw out elaborate plans to torture puppies, as long as he doesn't sue anyone over the patent no puppies have been harmed.
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Insightful)
as long as he doesn't sue anyone over the patent no puppies have been harmed.
And when the company gets bought out and the puppy-torturing plans get put into action by the new owners, and he screams, "But I didn't mean this to happen!" he will not be forgiven.
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Indeed, it's all about preventing *commercial* competitors. VCs and angels want to know, "Why should I give you, who have no track record, money to develop and market this product instead of your established competitors who would have a higher chance of success and don't need to build a business from scratch?" It's almost impossible to start a non brick-and-mortar company that requires significant capitalization these days without IP to back it up.
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Funny)
So if your VCs wanted you to torture puppies to death before they'd give you money, would the "chorus of boos" have any effect on your actions?
I assure you that my company, Puppy Waterboards, LLC, does care about your concerns about our patent, "Method and apparatus for puppy euthanasia utilizing superheated corkscrews", and will direct them to the appropriate staff.
There are many ways to get money. Some of them are right, and some of them are wrong. People with consciences know there's a difference.
On a more serious note, you don't even know what my patent is about, and yet you're positive it's "wrong". People with consciences try to find out the facts before they criticize.
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Irrelevant. Whether you're a big company or not, you can't afford to waste money on frivolous things. You have to balance your expenditures versus what else you could be doing with that money.
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:4, Informative)
If it gets granted, how much lawyer time will it take to get overturned later?
This is a setup for a denial of service attack on the budgets / legal resources of smaller companies in future legal engagements.
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In the 1990s at Cranfield University, Peter Lister developed a mod_perl Apache handler for creating web forms. (I wrote the documentation and trained people to use it). At one point we added the ability for form creators to list perl regular expressions for validating input. This was in the UK, so social security numbers were never an issue, but we did provided a general mechanism for this kind of input validation using REs.
Somewhere I probably have an old hard drive or tape with the code, but I really
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really, i'm not trying to defend IBM here, but you realize that the prior art you list at regexlib.com fails *Claim 1* of the actual patent application don't you?
the patent claims that the specific character(s) that breaks the regex is flagged. which the method at regexlib.com (as well as your other examples) does not do.
you recognized that the patent also claims real-time checking, but passed that off as trivial. but if either or both of these differences are really trivial where are all the examples of
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Except this system doesn't actually do that. If you read the patent application, they're simply checking for invalid characters being entered before you click submit.
And I'm pretty sure I've had games check if the key I entered was valid as soon as I finished entering it, not needing to submit it, so this has already been done, by other people, in the wild. Seems like it should fail on that merit alone.
Re:Prior Art so Prior It Hurts (Score:5, Informative)
It's not trivial, but not impossible.
The first 3 digits are the area (state) code.
The next 2 digits are the group.
The last 4 digits are the serial number.
There is no check digit, so no further math is required to validate it.
State codes are listed here http://www.socialsecurity.gov/employer/stateweb.htm [socialsecurity.gov]
The highest issued group as of May 01 2009 is listed here: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/employer/ssns/highgroup.txt [socialsecurity.gov]
You can pull the high group file back to November 2003 from the SSA site here: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/employer/ssnvhighgroup.htm [socialsecurity.gov]
The group numbers are used out of order for "administrative" reasons.
The groups are assigned as:
ODD 01 -> 09
EVEN 10 -> 98
EVEN 02 -> 08
ODD 11 -> 99
Area 000 is never issued.
Group 00 is never issued.
Serial 0000 is never issued.
The Area (state) code is based on where the card is issued, not where the person was born. If you were born in NYC, but your number was issued in California, you would have a California area (state) code.
Now, the SSN is generally requested by the hospital, so if you have a baby born in the US, part of the stack of paperwork includes the SSN request form. In those cases, obviously the birth state and SSN state should match, unless for some odd reason the request is sent to another state.
When I was born, there was no requirement to get a SSN issued immediately, and my family moved when I was 5, so my SSN was issued by the second state.
The logic to test if a SSN has been issued is pretty easy with a couple tables in a DB, or a whole lot of hard coded crud that has to be updated monthly.
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There is no check digit, so no further math is required to validate it.
Whatever happened to check digits?
Seemed like a good idea to catch typos at source.
What did I miss? Why did they fall out of favour?
What bullshit? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is this buillshit? "A persistent problem is dashes in SSNs"???
How fucking hard is it to strip non-numeric characters from a string?
I cannot believe there could be such programmer incompetence; no, it has to be some managerial cluelessness and hard-headness.
Re:What bullshit? (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe if we put it in a format IBM can understand:
SOCIAL-SECURITY-NUMBER PIC 99-999-9999
Re:What bullshit? (Score:4, Funny)
I'd say this was funny, but you got the format wrong.....999-99-9999
Re:What bullshit? (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry, your post was in ASCII, so we couldn't understand it. Could you try resubmitting it in EBCDIC please?
Thanks,
IBM
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I once worked on software for a campus e-store for a large university. The credit-card input didn't accept spaces. I find it difficult to visually check credit card numbers without spaces. Unfortunately, I had no control to fix that particular issue. A real head-slapper.
That being said, the idea of character "input templates" is quite old. These templates are kind of like regula
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How fucking hard is it to strip non-numeric characters from a string?
So you're suggesting we write one for loop with one switch statement in it, instead of a complete general-purpose parser library and a syntax that makes programmers a bad name? Now what's the fun in that?
Re:What bullshit? (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly.
Being mostly a Perl hacker now, I'm as guilty as most in trying to find the perfect regex solution to a blindingly simple problem. It's seductive, it's cool, it's mystical, it's insider cant and sacred dweomer and secret handshake all rolled together.
I have, posted on my cube wall, a particularly good quote from Jamie Zawinski:
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I still see the old "1 object(s) processed" (in multiple forms, of course). How hard can it be?
"%d object%s processed", num, num == 1 ? "" : "s"
I even see the odd "1 objects processed" every now and again. How hard can it be?!
I see these things on the PS3 and my blood boils - with the price of the hardware and the games, how can they justify this incompetence? How can a usability tester pass this "object(s)" non-word? Do they also talk like that? "I take two b
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spaces in credit card numbers? (Score:2)
Damned hard, based on my testing over the last few years.
As an exercise in futility -- the next time you're buying something online, try entering your credit card number with spaces in it, so it's legible, and easier to compare to what's on your card.
It used to be that it'd occasionally work -- but I don't think I've had a single success in the last year or two. They either put in limits so I can't type enough characters, or it gets rej
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onkeyup='this.value.replace(/[^0-9]/,"")'
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What. The. Fuck. (Score:3, Funny)
Are you fucking kidding me? Did they just really patent the format "###-##-####"? I didn't RTFA because I didn't want my head to explode.
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I think they're trying to patent the regex /\d{3}-?\d{2}-?\d{4}/. ...Waits for the patent infringement lawsuit...
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That's what I thought. If that's true I'd better go file my patent for email address validation and sue the internet for infringement.
Actually (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, they're trying to patent "A system for providing real-time validation of text input fields in a Web page comprising:a validation-enhanced text input element configured to contain an attribute for a validation expression for a text field in a rendered Web page, wherein the validation-enhanced text input element is contained within a source code document corresponding to the rendered Web page; andan input text validator configured to validate a user-entered character of the text field against the validation expression in real-time and visually indicate invalid user-entered characters," and "A method for providing real-time validation of text input fields in a Web page comprising:receiving a user-entered character in a text field displayed in a Web page;immediately validating the user-entered character against a validation expression contained within a validation-enhanced text input element associated with the text field, wherein the validation expression defines a set of acceptable characters and character positions for the text field; andwhen the user-entered character is determined invalid, visually marking the user-entered character," and "An input text validator for validating a text field of a Web page in real-time comprising:a partial input expression generator configured to generate an expanded version of a validation expression, wherein the expanded version of the validation expression defines a set of acceptable characters and character positions for a text field of a Web page; andan invalid text highlighter configured to visually highlight a user-entered character in the text field when the user-entered character is determined as invalid for the expanded validation expression."
Remember, patents are all about the claims. You don't know what they're "trying to patent" until you have read and understand the claims.
psst... hey buddy! (Score:2, Funny)
^\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}$
ahh thats right baby, patent infringement!
I live on the edge...
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You mean:
^\d{3}[ .-]?\d{2}[ .-]?\d{4}$
Cuff me... (Score:2, Redundant)
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<input name=ssn id=ssn onblur="if (!this.value.match(/^\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}$/)) {alert('Invalid SSN, blah blah NNN-NN-NNNN.');this.focus();}"
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Success!
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Seems like you need to read more. You completely missed the point of the patent. The idea is not to validate a field against a regexp. That's easy. This patent will check to see if a partial string will EVER be able to match a regexp and if not indicate what prevents it. (See line 0007 of the application).
Let's take email addresses:
These will validate DURING typing:
cmdr_ta
cmdr_taco
cmdr_taco@sla
cmdr_taco@slashdot
This will fail DURING typing:
cmdr_taco@slashdot,
In addition, the "," will be highlighted a
As a programmer at a federal agency that uses Perl (Score:3, Insightful)
We parse SSNs all day long. I think WE may have prior art.
Not likely (Score:2)
Look, it's easy (Score:2, Redundant)
How is that a persistent problem?
What if we assume they *are* on our side? (Score:2, Interesting)
I see lots of comments coming up about how ridiculous this is. Maybe that's the point. Maybe the best way to bring out patent reform to to patent every simple thing there is. You have to remember that IBM is paying to patent something as simple as:
s/(^[0-9])+//g
which most certainly has prior art all over the web. Why would it be worth IBMs money and time to do such a thing? The best reason I can come up with is that they want to prove a point. There's probably quite a bit an open-source firm can gain
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But congress has the power to invalidate software patents because the patent system was created by congress.
Yes, but for that to happen, Congress would have to do something other than posture, and that's "above their pay grade."
Everything Congress does is solely for appearance's sake. Any actual consequences of their actions are completely unpredictable.
What if We Assume They *Are* Idiots? (Score:5, Funny)
Web Programmer: It's the users, sir, one of them put dashes in their SSN on the form!
Program Manager: I don't have time for this mumbo jumbo geek jargon
Web Programmer: Well, you see the dashes are inside the string.
Program Manager: Inside? How is this possible?
Web Programmer: Well, the user must have paused to push the dash key, sir.
Program Manager: So if the dashes are inside the string, we have to get them out. Is there someone we can pay for this service?
Web Programmer: I'm afraid it's too complicated for that. But maybe if we had it write to a file and one of us kept refreshing a text editor on that file
Program Manager: Goddamnit! Why didn't testing find this?!
Web Programmer: Well, they did but to fix this bug we just removed the dash keys on their keyboards.
Program Manager: Can we do that to each of the users?
*IBM employee enters with massive box labeled "Enterprise SSN Dash Extractor"*
IBM Sales Rep: Gentlemen, let IBM solve all your SSN problems for a mere $2,000 per site license!
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Only $2000?! That's like giving it away free! Surely it would be closer to $200,000 or even $2 million from IBM.
Have you read the patent application? (Score:5, Informative)
You didn't read the patent application, did you?
They are not patenting a regular expression to validate social-security numbers, they are patenting an entire validation system for web application, in which there is an API for a developer to specify a regular expression, and the framework will then validate the user input in real-time, while the front-end highlights the specific characters that caused the failure. The particular problem they are trying to solve is the user confusion when they submit a form which tells them that a field was rejected without telling them what's wrong with the input.
This is not to say that there isn't prior art for that, but as you can see it is much more than just a patent on a simple reg-exp pattern.
-dZ.
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Penn Jillette got a patent on masturbating in a hot tub [uspto.gov] in 1999. A patent lawyer's kid got a patent on swinging sideways on a swing [uspto.gov] in 2002. If neither of these made enough of a point to bring about any patent reform, how will this?
How is that an issue? (Score:2)
How is it an "issue" that SSNs can be entered with or without dashes? Just strip the dashes in post-processing, then add them back if you absolutely have to have them...
Real time is the key claim (Score:4, Informative)
The first claim mentions the real time nature of the validation. The example regexes are for validating a completed string. This is still silly and obvious but you may have a harder time finding specific prior art for this case.
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I think that the patent concerns itself with character-by-character validation. In other words, as soon as you enter a character which would make the validation fail, it let's you know it is invalid. I assume that most Javascript validation waits until all of the text has been entered. I know some medical infusion pumps work this way, but I think it sucks.
Re:Real time is the key claim (Score:4, Informative)
I assume that most Javascript validation waits until all of the text has been entered.
Your assumption is false. It's called an OnChange event: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_onchange.asp [w3schools.com]
I am not a "Web programmer" but anyone with even a passing familiarity with JavaScript has seen this.
The first claim in the patent is: "1. A system for providing real-time validation of text input fields in a Web page comprising:a validation-enhanced text input element configured to contain an attribute for a validation expression for a text field in a rendered Web page, wherein the validation-enhanced text input element is contained within a source code document corresponding to the rendered Web page; andan input text validator configured to validate a user-entered character of the text field against the validation expression in real-time and visually indicate invalid user-entered characters."
So these losers have filed a patent application in which the first claim is exactly nothing but a completely standard bit of JavaScript code. People have been doing this kind of real-time validation and response for years and years and years. JavaScript is designed to do it.
This is by far the most egregiously stupid patent application we have seen on /. in a long time.
Why IBM is doing this is a complete mystery, although "never assume venality where stupidity will do" comes forcibly to mind.
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My understanding is that the onChange event doesn't fire until the input field has lost focus. That means that it wouldn't support character-by-character validation.
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Stick the RE ^\d{3}-?\d{2}-?\d{4}$ in a QRegExpValidator in Qt and you have real time validation. Nokia has an example of this in their Qt course materials.
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So it seems they ar
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More to it than that. (Score:5, Interesting)
You can read more about it here [usrecordsearch.com]
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I see nothing like that in the application. Granted it was long, and I did a quick scan, but nothing jumped out at me as being more complicated than checking for numerals and hyphens.
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Re:More to it than that. (Score:4, Informative)
Strictly speaking, it does, but it might be large. As a quick and dirty test, here's the result of evaluating (regexp-opt (loop for x from 0 to 700 collect (format "%d" x )) nil) in Emacs:
"1\\(?:0[0-9]\\|1[0-9]\\|2[0-9]\\|3[0-9]\\|4[0-9]\\|5[0-9]\\|6[0-9]\\|7[0-9]\\|8[0-9]\\|9[0-9]\\|[0-9]\\)\\|2\\(?:0[0-9]\\|1[0-9]\\|2[0-9]\\|3[0-9]\\|4[0-9]\\|5[0-9]\\|6[0-9]\\|7[0-9]\\|8[0-9]\\|9[0-9]\\|[0-9]\\)\\|3\\(?:0[0-9]\\|1[0-9]\\|2[0-9]\\|3[0-9]\\|4[0-9]\\|5[0-9]\\|6[0-9]\\|7[0-9]\\|8[0-9]\\|9[0-9]\\|[0-9]\\)\\|4\\(?:0[0-9]\\|1[0-9]\\|2[0-9]\\|3[0-9]\\|4[0-9]\\|5[0-9]\\|6[0-9]\\|7[0-9]\\|8[0-9]\\|9[0-9]\\|[0-9]\\)\\|5\\(?:0[0-9]\\|1[0-9]\\|2[0-9]\\|3[0-9]\\|4[0-9]\\|5[0-9]\\|6[0-9]\\|7[0-9]\\|8[0-9]\\|9[0-9]\\|[0-9]\\)\\|6\\(?:0[0-9]\\|1[0-9]\\|2[0-9]\\|3[0-9]\\|4[0-9]\\|5[0-9]\\|6[0-9]\\|7[0-9]\\|8[0-9]\\|9[0-9]\\|[0-9]\\)\\|7\\(?:00\\|[0-9]\\)\\|8[0-9]\\|9[0-9]\\|[0-9]"
What regular expressions can't do is match strings that aren't described by a regular language [wikipedia.org]. Roughly speaking, if what you're trying to match has a maximum length, you can match it with a regular expression. (For a more formal description, see the Pumping Lemma [wikipedia.org].)
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while that is true.. the SSN was only and example of a possiable aplication.
what they are trying to patant is the idea of validating input durring input..
aka you have a number only field and onKeyUp you check that the char is numeric (that is a most basic way of doing it)
either way the simple or more indept lookup is nothing more than input validation during input..
everyone here seems to get hooked on the SSN thing..
but really this is anything..
which is just fucking stupid..
while finding prior art for this
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700-xx-xxxx was for the railroad retirement society... but yes, otherwise for states and/or territories (puerto rico, guam, etc)
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On the positive side... (Score:2, Funny)
We need more overly-broad patents on embarrassingly horrible user interfaces. In fact, someone ought to patent *all* the common mistakes. That way their lawyers could run around suing everyone building crap.
Revolutionary Patent Idea!!!1! (Score:5, Funny)
Patent Application 973255489
"Method of enhancing sarcasm through the intentional introduction of typographical errors within multiple exclamation marks."
Within a set of not fewer than four (4) and not more than eight (8) Exclamation Marks ("!"), an Erroneous Character from the set of characters [1, 2, @, #, ~, `] is inserted after the third or fourth Exclamation Mark. The Erroneous Character is perceived by the reader as a typographical error consistent with hurried, careless typing, reinforcing any sarcasm contained in the textual comment preceding the Exclamation Marks.
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Masked Input Plugin (Score:2)
The Masked Input Plugin [digitalbush.com] already solves this pretty nicely.
$("#ssn").mask("999-99-9999");
is pretty easy to implement.
Yes, regular expressions are more powerful. They are also - sorry o mighty nerds of slashdot - completely confusing to the majority of more casual developers who want to be able to drop in a line of quick code and move on to making their drop shadowed corners even rounder.
Heck Why not.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Heck a lawyer patented the method for swinging on a swing [google.com]
Why not IBM patenting something stupid like this! Maybe enough of these will bring the patenet system into reform or it's destruction...
Ref:
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6368227 [google.com]
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6368227.html [freepatentsonline.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reexamination [wikipedia.org]
Awesome (Score:3, Informative)
Is this enough to disqualify IBM (Score:2)
as an Open/Free software hero? This action seems quite consistent with the IBM of the 1970's.
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I'd say no... since these kind of things are very helpful in showing how screwed up things are.
phone numbers too (Score:3, Insightful)
I run into this problem with entering phone numbers into web forms. Some want them as xxxxxxxxxx, some as xxx-xxx-xxxx, some as (xxx)xxx-xxxx, and even other weirdness. Some sites take whatever I put in and mold it to their desired format; others tell me my input is invalid and make me enter it again (some even tell me the desired format). Some sites actually break it up into three input fields with appropriate limits on the number of characters.
I've seen similar cases with SSNs.
It's pretty obvious that some sites have no trouble parsing the input data and making it fit what's expected. How is this a novel concept to be patented?
Not just regex, but real-time regex. (Score:2, Informative)
If you read the patent application, they aren't patenting just validation of a text field. They are patenting the idea of validating a string, one character at a time, as it is entered by the user. As the string is entered, when invalid characters are found using regex, a "visual change" is made to the input to let the user know they made a mistake.
An example they give is that in an email input field, as soon as the user enters a comma, the comma would change colors.
It's still not groundbreaking, but it's n
Slashdot true to form (Score:5, Informative)
Wow! All this steam and no one read the patent. It's been a while since the Slashdotter stereotype was so well validated.
The patent is for incremental validation as the characters come in. The text input widget is primed with the regex and validates each character as it is keyed, and reacts immediately if it gets an invalid-in-context character. The effect is that it's not possible to enter an invalid string.
Whether you think this is novel or not, it's not ordinary.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Whether you think this is novel or not, it's not ordinary.
One of the first forms I programmed for a commercial company would delete non-numeric characters and commas onKeyUp. It's extremely ordinary, and the practice is probably a day younger than javascript.
Re: (Score:2)
though its a bit more, only resetting the value if the stripped one is different (avoiding moving the carat when unnecessary) with length checks, etc
Re: (Score:2)
Well, in fact many applications I've wrote for several companies or agencies uses this kind of client-side as well as server-side validation and I'm not sure but I think that many of my colleague uses this method also. So it is not novel and it is probably quite ordinary.
But I don't live in USA and our applications aren't used in US market so I'm not sure if this counts as prior art. Probably not.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Whether you think this is novel or not, it's not ordinary.
Handling a JavaScript OnChange event is not ordinary? What about a button click event?
Can I patent "1. A system for providing real-time information in a Web page comprising:a retrieval-enhanced button input element configured to contain an attribute for a retrieval expression for a button in a rendered Web page, wherein the retrieval-enhanced button input element is contained within a source code document corresponding to the rendered Web page; and
The patent is fairly narrow (Score:2)
The title--surprise!--sucks. They're not patenting the use of regular expressions to validate anything. They're patenting a field that validates itself as you type, and highlights invalid characters:
Validators aren't new - but the word Validator is (Score:2)
Also, the patent uses the term validator which is not a word according to most spell checkers that I use. I know this because I type this word frequently when documenting
Its one thing to patent an existing idea, but don't steal the made up words from an existing im
Obligatory regex. (Score:2)
(\d{9}|\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4})
Aren't they repeating themselves? (Score:2)
Are you pondering what I'm pondering? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why don't we try to get USPTO's attention over to Slashdot? Then, if they think they don't understand what's going on with a patent, they can find other peoples' interpretation of it over here. They're bound to understand at least one of a hundred different wordings of that patent in Slashdot's comments.
Any ideas?
Two Things: (Score:2)
2) It takes 4 IBMers to figure this out?
I'm pretty sure this "problem" has already been solved. Perhaps it's still an issue with the Lotus application-to-web server. Since no one outside of IBM actually uses it, no one would have noticed that.
Re:Even bigger problem (Score:4, Insightful)
put a damned example on your site, like this: nnn-nn-nnnn
You can put as many examples on your site as you want but your users will still find a way to fuck it up. You need code that checks for this and either corrects their stupidity or kicks it back and makes them re-enter it.