Microsoft Patents sudo

Jimmy O Regan writes "Justin Mason (of SpamAssassin fame) has this blog entry: US Patent 6,775,781, filed by Microsoft, is a patent on the concept of 'a process configured to run under an administrative privilege level' which, based on authorization information 'in a data store', may perform actions at administrative privilege on behalf of a 'user process'."

Comments

Re:Prior Art?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Please, PLEASE do not mod the parent "troll" or "flamebait". It's at the very least, funny (thought REALLY, it's not very funny at all). Remember: the consept expressed in the parent is what a lot of people think.

Hahaha you lose again /.ers

[tsphere]

Listen up feckers, this isn't a patent for `sudo (8)!' Another poster said it was a patent for "runas" but that's not true either. If you read it carefully, it's for an administrative _process_, not a _program_ like sudo. So this means that there is a single system-wide "security process" that you request to perform restricted actions for you.

It's a slight destinction, I agree, but that's the whole point of patents. You only patent a specific way of doing things, any slight change in the implementation is a different (patentable) innovation! So we should patent the FUCK out of sudo(8) and chmod(1) and all the rest of them.

Tangentially, we can all agree that the implementation this patent covers is a piece of shit. One long-lived process responsible for all authentication? Can you imagine the attack surface it's exposing?

Re:Why do they even try?

[severed]

Why not, that's sort of what they did with Xbox. Sell the hardware for less than it costs to make because they can afford to take a loss for several years if they feel like it.