Top patent applications from the companies you love [October 2012]

Welcome to this new monthly series here on Ghacks. Each month I'll be looking through all patent applications submitted by Apple, Google and Microsoft to find the most interesting applications from a user perspective. Patent applications may provide us with information about technologies that are already in use or will likely be used in the near future by the companies that applied for the patent.

Each patent application is described in one or two sentences that capture the main idea of the patent. Links point to the full patent application where detailed information are provided.

Apple

• Image capture using display device as light source - Using a display to improve image capturing under poor lighting conditions.
• Detachable wireless listening device - Providing users with an unencumbered media listening experience with the help of a detachable listening device.

Google

1. Click disambiguation on a touch-sensitive input device - The surface of a touch-sensitive device may be used as a physical button, and this patent application describes a system how left and right-clicks can be distinguished.
2. Ranking blog documents - Ranking blog documents based on relevance and quality of the documents. This may mean that the most relevant document may not be ranked first if another beats it because of its higher quality score.
3. Customizing mobile applications - Describes a method to use user input to create a personalized application based on the user's preferences.
4. Aggregating product review information for electronic product catalogs - A method to aggregate product data either by product identifiers if listed on a document, or by performing an Internet search to find an identifier that can be used.
5. Mobile device-based bandwidth throttling - Moves the bandwidth throttling to the device based on instructions by the wireless provider. Currently, throttling is executed by the provider itself.

Microsoft

1. Detecting script-based malware using emulation and heuristics - Running scripts through a virtual environment using emulation before it is executed on the user system.
2. Phishing detection, prevention and notification - Among other things, detecting a phishing attack by parsing the web browser history and notifying the user via email or other forms of notification about it.
3. Automated malware signature generation - Analyzing a file using various methods to determine whether it is malicious in nature. If it is, creates a signature automatically that anti-virus software can use to detect, block and disinfect.
4. Self-sterilizing input device - Using a chamber and UV light to sterilize an input device.
5. Remote disabling of applications - Revoking software licenses on machines, for instance those that get stolen so that the rightful owner of the license can use it on another system without having to purchase it anew.
6. Taskbar media player - A system to control a media player via the taskbar.
7. Reordering document content to avoid exploits - Reordering document contents to block embedded malware from being executed.
8. Human user identification - Identifying human users with captchas.
9. Speaker identification - Describes techniques to identify a speaker based on sample data.
10. Using a proxy server for a mobile browser - Using a proxy server to improve the overall web browsing experience on a mobile client system by reducing the processing load on the device with the help of the server. Looks to me like an advanced version of Opera Turbo.

Would you like me to add another company to the list? Let me know in the comments.