Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Stan Dale Pennington

Roger H Wynn

Peter M Wiest

Aaron L Culbreth

Keumars A Ahdieh, Ii

Roderick Michael Toll

Timothy Arthur Gill

John Michael Sheehan

Sermet Iskin

Scott B Graham

Robin C Speed

Brian L Trenbeath

John A M Hazen

An application based hardware identifier is generated for an application on a device. The application based hardware identifier is generated based on both information describing the application and information describing one or more hardware components of the device. The application based hardware identifier can also optionally be based on an identifier of a user of the device. The application based hardware identifier can be provided by the application to a service provider, allowing the service provider to associate the application based hardware identifier with a particular user or user account. However, as the application based hardware identifier is based on the application information, different applications on the same device will have different application based hardware identifiers. The application based hardware identifier thus helps maintain privacy by preventing tracking of the device across different applications.

Application based hardware identifiers

A compliance interface is disclosed that takes in queries from applications which may want to know if they are compliant with associated polices stored on a computing system. The interface can then interpret these queries and provide notifications and instructions to the applications. Notifications may give notice of how a policy may impact an application, and instructions may tell an application how to behave in order to stay compliant with the policies. In one aspect, the interface exposes policies set forth by parents. Via a management control panel, parents can set or alter various policies, stored in a settings store, to protect children from contact with undesirable content. The interface interprets these policies to ensure that applications, such as those provided by third party vendors, are compliant with the wishes set forth in the parents' policies.

Compliance interface for compliant applications

Mechanisms are disclosed for detecting protocols independently of the ports used by streams associated with the protocols or applications that may send out such streams. The detecting may entail using a content filter that is hosted on a networking stack, where the content filter may be composed of a stream buffer and handlers for detecting the protocols. The handlers may be further used to modify streams incoming to a port or streams outgoing from an application. The handlers can modify the streams in a variety of ways, including reading, inserting, replacing, deleting, and completing data in the streams according to some policy criteria, such as those set by parental controls. Individual handlers may be selected from a plurality or set of handlers so that they can be matched up to the appropriate streams.

Protocol-level filtering

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Newcastle, WA, United States of America

Stan Dale Pennington