Alta Vista Company

Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.p.

Compaq Computer Corporation, Inc.

Digital Equipment Corporation

Compaq Information Technologies Group, L.p.

Steven Charles Glassman

Mark Steven Manasse

Andrei Z Broder

Jeffrey Adgate Dean

Krishna Asur Bharat

Monika R Henzinger

Charles Gregory Nelson

Geoffrey G Zweig

John William Court

Andrew M Palka

Nigel Norris

Edmund J Grohn

When a user successfully logs into an account, the user is provided with a first-class login token, which entitles the user to one or more unsuccessful login attempts without experiencing delays the user would otherwise experience. If attempts with a second-class login token or an expired first-class login token is impermissible, a subsequent login attempt is subject to delays the user would otherwise not experience. The delays minimize the effectiveness of dictionary attacks. Additionally, if the user attempts to login without a login token or an invalid login token, the login attempt is impermissible and the user is provided with a second-class login token for use in a delayed, subsequent login attempt.

System and method for providing multi-class processing of login requests

An electronic commerce system and method has a number of computer systems connected by a network, including a broker computer system having a database of scrips representing a form of currency, a vendor computer system having a database containing products which may be exchanged for the scrips, and a consumer computer system with which a user may initiate transactions to obtain the products contained in the database of the vendor computer system in return for scrip. The broker issues scrip to the consumer having a Customer ID including a Hash subfield containing a value produced by consumer identifying information hashed with a nonce. When the scrip is exchanged for additional scrip, the value in the Hash subfield is hashed with another nonce. The consumer stores the nonces used to produce the Hash subfield in a wallet. If a vendor issuing a refund for scrip wishes to verify the identity of the consumer, the consumer provides the vendor with the identifying information and the chain of nonces used to produce the value of the Hash subfield. The vendor recreates the value of the Hash Subfield to verify the identifying information. Then, the vendor issues a refund coupon having the same Customer ID as the scrip being refunded. The consumer provides the refund coupon to the broker along with the Customer ID of the scrip used to purchase the refunded scrip. Then, the broker issues the consumer new scrip having the provided customer ID.

Anonymous purchases while allowing verifiable identities for refunds returned along the paths taken to make the purchases

An electronic commerce system includes a broker computer system having a database of scrip representing a form of currency, a vendor computer system having a database containing products which may be exchanged for the scrip, a consumer computer system with which a user may initiate transactions with the scrip, and an agent computer system to which the consumer can delegate rights to perform actions with the scrip. To delegate actions on scrip, the delegator provides the delegatee with a delegation having a list of the delegated actions. In addition, the delegator determines a delegation scrip secret (DSS) and a delegation pass phrase (DPP) and securely passes these to the delegatee. The delegatee uses the DSS to authenticate itself to servers accepting the scrip and uses the DPP to encrypt the DSS while the scrip is stored by the delegatee. To perform an action with delegated scrip, the delegatee sends a request for the action to a server. The request includes the action, the scrip, the delegation, and a request stamp (RS) calculated using the DSS. The server validates the request by recalculating the RS. When server provides the delegatee with new scrip having multiple delegations, the server encrypts the new DSS's for each delegation. The delegates uses the old DSS's to decrypt the DSS's for the new scrip. The delegatee stores the encrypted DSS for delegations for which the delegatee does not know the DSS.

Delegation of permissions in an electronic commerce system

A method and system that detects mirrored host pairs using information about a large set of pages, including one or more of: URLs, IP addresses, and connectivity information. The identities of the detected mirrored hosts are then saved so that browsers, crawlers, proxy servers, or the like can correctly identify mirrored web sites. The described embodiments of the present invention use one or a combination of techniques to identify mirrors. A first group of techniques involves determining mirrors based on URLs and information about connectivity (i.e., hyperlinks) between pages. A second group of techniques looks at connectivity information at a higher granularity, considering all links from all pages on a host as one group and ignoring the target of each link beyond the host level.

Method and apparatus for finding mirrored hosts by analyzing connectivity and IP addresses

An electronic commerce system and method enforces a license agreement for content on an open network by restricting the number of consumers that can concurrently access the content. A consumer initially acquires vendor scrip, either from a broker or the vendor itself. The consumer presents the vendor scrip to the vendor along with a request to access the content. In response, the vendor gathers information about the consumer to determine whether the consumer belongs to the class allowed to access the content. The information may be gathered from the scrip or from other sources. If the consumer belongs to the class, then the vendor determines if a license to access the content is available. Generally, a license is available if the number of other consumers having licenses to access the content is less than the maximum specified in the license agreement. If no licenses are available, the vendor provides the consumer with an estimate of when a license will be available. If a license is available, the vendor directs the consumer to obtain license scrip which allows the consumer to access the content. The license scrip expires after a relatively brief period of time. When the consumer uses the license scrip to access the content, the vendor provides the consumer with new license scrip having a later expiration time.

Method and system for enforcing licenses on an open network

An electronic commerce system and method includes a broker computer system having a database of scrips, a vendor computer, and a consumer computer system having a wallet protected by a pass phrase. To strengthen the pass phrase, the wallet adds a nonce and a random phrase having a length determined by the processing speed of the computer system. The internal phrase is hashed with another nonce to form a checksum, which is stored in the wallet. A portion of each scrip is encrypted by hashing a unique nonce and the internal pass phrase. XORing the scrip with the hash, and storing the encrypted portion and nonce in the wallet. The wallet adds another nonce and random string to form an internal pass phrase. To use the scrip, the user provides the pass phrase, The wallet verifies that the phrase is correct, and if so, decrypts the scrip.

Encrypting secrets in a file for an electronic micro-commerce system

A computer-implemented method determines the resemblance of data objects such as Web pages. Each data object is partitioned into a sequence of tokens. The tokens are grouped into overlapping sets of the tokens to form shingles. Each shingle is represented by a unique identification element encoded as a fingerprint. A minimum element from each of the images of the set of fingerprints associated with a document under each of a plurality of pseudo random permutations of the set of all fingerprints are selected to generate a sketch of each data object. The sketches characterize the resemblance of the data objects. The sketches can be further partitioned into a plurality of groups. Each group is fingerprinted to form a feature. Data objects that share more than a certain numbers of features are estimated to be nearly identical.

Method for clustering closely resembling data objects

A method and apparatus that detects mirrored host pairs using information about a large set of pages, including URLs. The identities of the detected mirrored hosts are then saved so that browsers, crawlers, proxy servers, or the like can correctly identify mirrored web sites. The described embodiments of the present invention look at the URLs of pages hosts to determine whether the hosts are potentially mirrored.

Method and apparatus for finding mirrored hosts by analyzing urls

Provided is a computerized method for monitoring the content of documents. A set of documents is stored in memories of server computers. The server computers can be connected to each other by a network such as the Internet. Entries are generated in a search engine for each document of the set. The search engine is also connected to the Internet. The entries are in the form of a full word index of the set of documents. The search engine also maintains a first abstract for each document that is indexed. The abstract is highly dependent on the content of each document. For example, the abstract is in the form of a sketch or a feature vector. Periodically a query is submitted to the search engine. The query locates a result set of documents that satisfy the query. A second abstract is generated for each document member of the result set. The first and second abstracts are compared to identify documents that have changed between the time the set of documents were indexed and the time the result set is generated.

Growing community of inventors

Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Steven Charles Glassman