Type of Article: MacTech Blog

An Apple patent (number 20120199455) for a keyboard design has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. It’s for a backlit keyboard with controlled halo brightness and contrast.

An Apple patent (number 20120201374) for systems and methods for implementing block cipher algorithms on attacker-controlled systems has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. In other words, Apple is working to it harder to hack or attack its various devices — or reverse engineer them.

The patent is for systems and methods for an implementation of block cipher algorithms (e.g., AES) to use lookup tables to obscure key information, increasing difficulty of reverse engineering efforts. The inventors are Mathieu Ciet, Augustin J. Farrugia and Filip Toma Paun.

Ben Kunz writing for “Bloomberg Businessweek” (http://macte.ch/rLG6B) thinks that Apple devices will soon project holograms “like you’ve never seen.” Sounds a bit out-there, right? But Kunz may be onto something.

Kunz notes that in November 2010, Apple patented a three-dimensional display system that would “mimic a hologram” without requiring special glasses. The patent notes that one current market gap in screen technology is the ability of a device to project stereoscopic 3D images to multiple viewers at the same time.

An Apple patent (number 8239748) for a synchronization manager synchronizes multiple media streams. has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. It relates to synchronization of media streams, and more specifically to utilizing clocks on multiple media devices and on a single host to synchronize multiple media streams.