The US Patent and Trademark Office has issued two patents for security company Network Associates – one for “cleaning a computer” and another for filtering packets on a wireless network.
Patent 6,671,812, “Computer cleaning system, method and computer program product”, covers McAfee’s QuickClean software which removes unwanted data and software from a PC. Patent 6,693,888, “Method and apparatus for filtering that specifies the types of frames to be captured and to be displayed for an IEEE802.11 wireless Lan”, covers the monitoring of wireless data to ensure that it comes from a known and/or trusted source. However, as with numerous other patents passed by the patent office recently, both patents appear to give rights over basic approaches to technology that have been around for years and are widely used by a number of different companies. Full Story
