So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night
I hate to go and leave this pretty sight

If we have to believe Jasim Saleh Al-Azzawi, his latest invention will put us all out of business. He has ‘invented’ a harddisk with additional features making past, present and future viruses harmless. You can find the full text at the United States Patent & Trademark office.

His new type of harddisk has additional switches that will turn on and off the heads of any of the arms. His basic idea is to redirect all disk I/O to a safe location, protecting the confidential data. When the system is disconnected from the Internet, the safe location is switched off and nor reachable anymore and therefore viruses that got into your machine when connected to the Internet will not pose a problem.

Let us forget the prior art as several others had ideas like this in the past and none of them worked. Reading the full text of his invention, it was easy to come up with at least a dozen situations where the new solution would not work. Just think of an Internet worm that settles into the operating systems memory due to a buffer overflow. This worm will remain dormant until the user is logging off the Internet. At that moment the read & write heads to the confidential information are enabled and your precious data is stolen. The next time the user is logging onto the Internet, the stolen data is transmitted.

Or the worm waits until the user wants to install a program and the write heads to the programs folder are enabled. The worm will use that to either copy itself there or, if it was a parasitic virus, infect other programs.

It is very easy to see several implementation faults in this ‘invention’. It would be difficult if not impossible to fix these as it would create an unworkable situation comparable with not turning on your computer. Safe but not desirable!

Weirdly enough, Jasim Saleh Al-Azzawi is selling his patent for just $92,000,000. Peanuts compared to the ultimate solution, which will earn billions of dollars over 20 years, according to Al-Azzawi himself. Does he not believe in his own invention?

Al-Azzawi also has patents on some other ‘inventions’, which also happen to be the final solution in those areas. We won’t comment on these other ‘inventions’, but they are comparably weak. It does however basically show that anyone can file for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark office and it will be granted, provided that no one there is able to understand it. This is almost a guarantee that prior art is not investigated. And if you are able to find someone to buy your ultimate solution before prior art is proven, you may happily retire on a Caribbean island.

But to reach a conclusion:
Norman can assure its users not to panic. It seems we will not be taken out of business (again...) by this invention. Next invention please!