Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Alok Sinha

Marco A Demello

Bill Begorre

Patrice Lynn Miner

David G Thaler

David T Jones

Aaron Wesley Cunningham

Scott C Cottrille

Sanjeev Katariya

Yoram Yaacovi

Marieke Iwema Watson

Deon Brewis

Robert Chris Hickman

Antony Halim

Some embodiments of the invention are directed to increasing security and lowering risk of attack in connecting automatically to networks by enabling client devices to verify the identity of the networks by, for example, confirming the identity of networks and network components such as wireless access points. In some embodiments, a client device may maintain a data store of characteristics of a network&#x2014;including, for example, characteristics of a wireless access point or other portion of the network and/or characteristics of a connection previously established with the wireless access point and/or network. Stored characteristics may include characteristics other than those minimally necessary to identify a wireless access point and/or wireless network. The stored characteristics may be compared to known good characteristics of a network (including characteristics of a wireless access point or other portion of the wireless network) prior to connection to the network to determine whether the characteristics match.

History-based downgraded network identification

Discovery of a network to which a device is in communication and classifying the network is disclosed. The network may be classified as a network already known or a new network signature may be created where the network signature is made up of a network id, a link id and a hop id.

API for network discovery

A scalable computing system for managing dynamic communities stores and provides access to community and member information. A community is a dynamic and virtual association of users. Some example features of a community include: a home page, membership, non-real time based messaging (threaded messages), chats, community calendar, annotations, and management tools for access control. The scalable architecture of the computing system for managing dynamic communities provides a computing system capable of handling the increasing number of community members and the community elements associated with the community.

Scalable computing system for managing dynamic communities in multiple tier computing system

A method and computing system for providing a highly reliable web site that is capable of handling millions of Internet users per day. The computing system is customizable on a per user basis yet seamlessly aggregates data from a number of information providers, such as news services, weather services, stock services, personal email, and even a community specific service. The computing system includes a plurality of personalization stores that maintain personalization data for a corresponding Internet user. The computing system is based on a federated model in which a single entry point spans to a plurality of web servers. Each web server has an aggregation module, such as an Internet Server API (ISAPI) filter, that retrieves user-specific data &ldquo;clips&rdquo; from the personalization store and passes the data to one or more provider objects. The provider objects receive data from the information providers and render the data to form the data clips according to the personalization data retrieved from the personalization store.

Scalable computing system for presenting customized aggregation of information

A massively scalable architecture for providing a highly reliable storage system that is capable of handling hundreds of millions of users and tens of billions of files. The system includes one or more clusters storing data elements that are received from a plurality of clients. Each cluster comprises a plurality of storage servers. A partition master assigns each client a unique partition within one of the clusters such that each data element is stored in the partition assigned to the client. The storage system can be easily scaled as the number of reads increases by adding individual storage servers to each storage cluster. In addition, the storage system easily scales to handle an increase in the number of writes, or as the number of files per cluster exceeds a predefined limit, by adding new storage clusters to the storage system.

Scalable storage system with unique client assignment to storage server partitions

Growing community of inventors

Redmond, WA, United States of America

Alok Sinha