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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'."
Sure, if you have the USD500,000 to field the court case. Most people cave first.
Wouldn't this patent also cover setuid, as that's a way you can have an app run under superuser privs for a regular user?
That seems setup makes sense under Windows, but seems utterly useless under any Unix variant. It's almost as if Microsoft is defensively patenting just to make sure nobody else weasels in and trys to cut them off from a concept they want to use.
Why would they patent something which has been around for years in the competition's OS? There's no way they can actually patent sudo...not on my watch.
i'm sure 20 years ago ibm's dos/vse, vm and mvs used to do this to allow an ordinary user to run one program which required the services of another so could invoke the other program to run with elevated priviledges. the priviledges were associated with the program not the user.
The underlying premise of patents will no doubt survive, as it makes a lot of sense in some areas (like engineering). But software and business process patents will probably disappear.
And exactly what evidence do you base this assumption on? Corporations are patenting everything under the sun right now, *and getting away with it*. In fact, Congress is entertaining legislation that would further benefit such action.
Seems to me they're doing a damned fine job of blowing potential competition out of the water, while fucking over the consumer, via the patent system. I don't see this changing any time in the foreseeable future, except for things to get worse than they already are.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
This is not about being unenforcable. This is about having a HUGE cabinet of patents that you can throw at whoever and use to stop them. Now, many of MS's patents are nothing but rip offs. But, if you were hit with more than 1000 patents, just the reading and understanding of them could take a year or two.
Very scarey
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Companies are getting rich by stealing the future inventions of people with these generic fucking patents.
I think many people have speculated this for a while: a business world governed by patents and licensing where individual incentive to create is effectively unlawful.
This is why I think it's important to support open source, the GPL, and open scientific research.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
"Why would they patent something which has been around for years in the competition's OS? There's no way they can actually patent sudo...not on my watch."
They can patent it just fine, all the USPTO has to do is not notice the similarity. It's when they get to court with somebody about it that the problem actually exists.
I had to sound like an arrogant ass here, but maybe you should go work for the Patent Office? Not because it'd teach you a lesson, but because it is pretty clear that whoever approves these doesn't understand the area they're in. I mean, look how technical the patent is. Either the patent office picked up on a subtle nuance that makes it different from *nux, or they just didn't connect it with something it does already.
"Derp de derp."
If the summary is correct, sudo doesn't count.
At least, normal sudo use doesn't count.
This looks more like a daemon that will accept
commands to run. With sudo, you don't have a
privileged process performing actions on behalf
of a user process. It's a privileged process all
by itself, plain and simple.
Maybe xcdroast+cdrecord would count, if cdrecord
is setuid and xcdroast is not. That's key. You
have to have two processes, one of which is not
privileged. Knowing the way Windows would likely
do things though, a daemon may be required.
"Whose brilliant idea was it to give corporations the same legal rights as an individual?"
k ers/
You hit the nail on the head. Additionally disturbing: the documentary "The Corporation"
http://www.thecorporation.tv/filmma
makes a strong case for defining a corporation as the perfect psychopath.
Schedule your world with ScheduleWorld.com http://www.ScheduleWorld.com/ (Java Web Startable)
Who needs to prove prior art? Obviousness is also an impediment to a patent. Even if the existing prior art cited here doesn't quite match, the reaction of everyone on this page is that there must be some that does: a fairly good indication that practitioners versed in the art regard the idea as obvious.
That's not what su or sudo do (say that five times fast). They use no separate root process waiting to receive and proxy privileged calls.
The patent specifically says that the request comes from a non-root user and goes to a root process; that the data sent across particularly describes an OS call and its arguments; and that the root process makes that precise call on behalf of the user.
Now, I'm not going to claim that no one has ever done this in the history of the universe. But it's not what sudo does, and the RPC based utilities that I can think of don't fit this exact pattern.
A bunch of comments here are exclaiming that
1) This patent is identical to sudo! Prior art!
2) Microsoft will use its patent on sudo to attack Linux.
Obviously both statements cannot be true. If Microsoft ever attempted to enforce this patent on distributors & users of sudo or a sudo-like device, they would have no case. They would have proven that the patent is invalid, because the product that they are attempting to block is considerably older than the patent.
1) This is like sudo, but different enough to merit a patent.
2) Microsoft will never attempt to enforce this patent on something that is older than the patent.
And I don't even have to read the patent. Keep in mind that "different enough to merit a patent" is barely different at all. Even the dumbest programmer does 200 patentable things per day. If you're the first person to do any of them, you can file. If you're the second person to do any of them, you're liable. That's the problem, not that Microsoft has gotten away with patenting some existing feature of Unix (and Windows, for that matter).
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Let's be fair, if you had to read these at the rate they do at the USPTO, then figure out exactly wtf all this double-talking techno babble means, eventually things would start blending together and crap like this would filter through. I thought it was generally accepted that the main problem is not that the USPTO people don't know what they're doing, it's that 1) the patent process has been turned from a means to protect innovation into a profitable business model, and nobody seems to want to stop it, and 2) the USPTO itself is understaffed.
Moo
USPTO itself is understaffed.
It doesn't matter how well staffed the patent office is. It is humanly impossible for a government office to realistically assess all of human knowledge for prior art. To say otherwise is dishonest.
More precisely the patent office examiners a liars if they can say with a straight face thay have checked all possible places for prior art on an invention they have never seen before. Only a scientist who has spent a lifetime working in a very narrow area can do this, and even then they make mistakes all the time. It is financially impossible for the patent office to employ a scientist in every narrow area. Just look at their understanding of even one area like software. Absolutely hopeless.
In any case prior art is a necessary but not sufficient evidence of inventiveness.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA patent/copyright abuse.
It really angers me that anyone should get patents on such an obvious thing.. how in the world can the USPTO possibly pretend to know that no one in the world of software has ever done this before? Software differs from making airliner parts, in that anyone with a computer has all the pieces required to produce any piece of software they can think of. There have been probably millions of programs written over the last 50 years, and since software wasn't considered patentable during the vast majority of that time, there's an enormous corpus of prior art that should rightfully be extremely difficult to discount.
When the average cost of patent litigation is on the order of $3 million dollars, it's way too much to Microsoft's advantage (yes, even taking the Eolas patent into account) for the USPTO to allow any but the most extremely novel software patents to be granted.
Gah!
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I think the USPTO's problem is that they've adopted a default 'innocent until proven guilty' mantra where all patents are valid unless proven otherwise. They need to turn their thinking around and adopt a default 'guilty until proven innocent' mantra where all patents are invalid until sufficient (or a certain amount of) time has been spent or research done to prove otherwise. If a patent application comes in for a supposed "computer/electronic technology" and some guy looks at it for a couple hours (days, weeks, etc), but doesn't know what he's looking at, how can he actually justify that this is a new, unique, novel idea by accepting the application? If a patent reviewer doesn't react with an "ah ha!, now that is interesting" that indicates he/she understands the topic and what is unique about the idea, then it shouldn't be accepted.
Stop making excuses for the incompetent. We all have to pay for their screwups, and it's about freakin' time they were held accountable.
Sue them. Sue them for your legal fees, your lost revenue, your lost potential revenue, damage to your corporate image, and anything else you can think of if you get caught in a bogus IP "lawsuit" by some vulture corp because of USPTO incompetence.
If they can't do the job, don't do it. Let the backlog build up until industry screams and starts pushing for Congress to increase the budget. As long as you push incompetent crap through instead, the funding will never be increased because corporate America does not see just how much damage you're doing with your negligence at the USPTO.
And believe me, it is emphatically negligance.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
So, I guess the prior art will be easy to show... right?
Absolutely,
however, if you want the prior art to have any legal meaning, you will have to affort a costly legal process with the evil empire's lawyers.
You see, it doesn't matter so much who is *right* any more. It costs a awful lot of money just to have your case heard.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Most people just won't care. The patent will be enforceable only in the US. Like in many other IP issues the rest of the world will just go their merry way while the US gets yet a little bit more stucked in its legal big company swamp.