Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: 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.