14 DAY TRIAL // With Twitter rolling out the two-factor authentication just a few hours ago, Kim Dotcom takes a step forward and says that he’s the inventor of this feature. And he has a patent to prove it.
The Megaupload founder didn’t come up with this type of authentication yesterday, but a long time ago. The patent was filed in 1998 and published two years later.
The name on the document is Kim Schmitz, which is Dotcom’s name before he changed in 2005.
“Google, Facebook, Twitter, Citibank, etc. offer Two-Step-Authentication. Massive IP infringement by U.S. companies. My innovation. My patent,” the man behind Megaupload said on his Twitter account.
While he says that he hasn’t sued them before because he believes in sharing knowledge and ideas for the good of society, he might reconsider his position now, due to what the U.S. authorities have been doing to him.
However, Dotcom then thought better of it and told Google, Facebook and Twitter that they can use his patent for free if they help fund his defense since all his assets are still frozen.
He even made a sarcastic remark about how the future was imagined and how it really is. "People used to imagine that 2013 would be full of flying cars & a cure for every sickness, but then patents happened," he wrote.
The two-factor authentication is a mechanism that intends to make it more difficult for hackers to access accounts illegally.
When someone attempts to log in to a service from an unrecognized computer, the service sends a password to an alternative device, such as a cellphone number that was attached to the account. Thus, hacking an account is made more difficult without that last bit of information.
There are numerous websites out there that use this method, but only several have been flagged by Dotcom, namely the biggest in the industry.
Google and Facebook have been using this type of authentication for a while now and Twitter has just announced this new feature last night after a number of accounts have been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.