...in which I get corporate bullied

An unsolicited FedEx package was trying to find me on Friday. It finally did at work after they called me. It was addressed to:

Me
Cable Car Lane
Wellington

I think this is because FedEx don't take PO Boxes. Amazing that it arrive did really.

Anyway, back on topic, it turns out that a certain Terry A Overby filed a US patent application No. 11/465,086 on MEID serial number validation and conversion while working at CellStar. CellStar was then purchased by Brightpoint.

The nice little lawyer letter will be posted here in due course. It is actually a reasonably polite warning, but the basis for the pending patent must surely be bullshit. The online version is not available (it is optional to make it available pending approval) but I have part of it included in my, ahem, warning. It is a spreadsheet implementation of a standard, claiming (by my cursory reading) to cover any implementation of MEID to pESN conversion and associated LUHN check digit validation. FFS.

Never mind that this algorithm is trivial (take SHA-1 hash, lose most of it, prepend 0x80 prefix), and must be implemented by any CDMA backend system that needs to cope with MEIDs. It tries to be all encompassing by saying (more or less) "hey, if you do this in a web page, application, remotely over TCP/IP, embedded in your code, or in your dreams it is covered by this patent". Okay I added the dreams bit. It is based on a spreadsheet implementation (!). I say again, FFS!

What makes it worse is that the individual claims to have participated in the CDMA standards/reports process for MEID. I think the CDMA Telco community will take dim view of this.

Outrage aside, I've taken the damn page offline. It is not worth getting stressed over a simple page I created in less than half an hour two years ago. It still grates though, the less sensible part of me does want to poke this dog with a stick.

Grrr.