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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.
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."
"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.
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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.
In fact, I did (well, at least the claims). There are two processes: a non-privileged process such as your shell, which starts sudo (a privileged process). Sudo uses its command line as a request and executes it. Clear now?
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
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
In the patent context it's hardly a OS process, more a "description of collected steps performing a defined functionality".
If you think sudo does not count you're definitely incorrect. The sudo program is a process (performs defined steps) under an authorized level (setuid root) goes after privileges (grouped by user/computer/group/whatever) and allows or denies privileges.
That's the patent.
What M$soft does right now is write zillions of patents, no matter if they have previous art - they sure know it exists. Their straegy appears to be to get as many patents as possible and then one has to go to court to get it revoked. They got billions of $$'s in their war chest ant they are using it in this manner - one day we'll see how this turns out.
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.
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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.
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