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Microsoft Patents Sudo's Behavior
Foofoobar writes "Just when you thought all was safe on the crazy patent front, Microsoft has come out of the obvious patent closet to file patent number 7617530, which basically duplicates the functionality of 'sudo' which is found in all Linux systems. PJ over at groklaw has a wonderful writeup on the entire fiasco."
I don't condemn all software patents. Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.
But sudo with a GUI? A quick fix I'd suggest to get rid of those bogus patents is to have a rule that says that if a patent is proven obvious later on, then the company (Microsoft in that case) would lose all their patents for the year. That would make them think twice before filing junk...
---
the Co-FoundersMeetup in Mountain View is next week
As usual, you need to look at the claims of the patent. For example these points dont really cover sudo:
1. One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to present a user interface in response to a task being prohibited based on a user's current account not having a right to permit the task, the user interface comprising: information indicating the task and an entity that attempted the task; a selectable help graphic wherein responsive to receiving selection of the selectable help graphic, the computer-readable instructions further cause the computing device to present the information; identifiers, each of the identifiers identifying other accounts having a right to permit the task, wherein the identifiers presented are based on criteria comprising: frequency of use; association with the user; and indication of sufficient but not unlimited rights; one of the identifiers identifies a higher-rights account having a right to permit the task, wherein the one of the identifiers comprises: a graphic identifying the higher-rights accounts associated with the user; and a name of the higher-rights account; an authenticator region capable of receiving, from the user, an authenticator usable to authenticate the higher-rights account having the right to permit the task, wherein: the authenticator comprises a password, and the authenticator region comprises a data-entry field configured to receive the password.
2. One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform acts comprising: determining multiple accounts capable of permitting a task not permitted by an account of a current user wherein the determining is based on criteria comprising: frequency of use; association with the current user; and indication of sufficient but not unlimited rights; receiving indicators for the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task; presenting a graphical user interface, the graphical user interface having: multiple account regions, each account region identifying one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task; an authenticator region capable of receiving an authenticator for one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task; receiving, through the graphical user interface, the authenticator for one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task; and responsive to receiving the authenticator for one of the accounts capable of permitting the task, packaging, into a computer-readable package, the received authenticator and the account capable of permitting the task associated with the authenticator, the package effective to enable authentication of the account capable of permitting the task.
3. The media of claim 2, where the each account region comprises a name identifying one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task.
4. The media of claim 2, where the each account region comprises a graphic identifying one of the multiple accounts capable of permitting the task.
5. The media of claim 2, further comprising permitting the task.
6. The media of claim 2, further comprising authenticating the account capable of permitting the task and, responsive to authenticating the account capable of permitting the task, temporarily elevating rights of the current user to that of the account capable of permitting the task effective to permit the task.
7. The media of claim 2, wherein rights of the account of the current user are limited by controlled-access software.
8. The media of claim 7, wherein the task is prohibited by the controlled-access software prior to authentication of the account capable of permitting the task and wherein the controlled-access software refrains from prohibiting the task in response to authentication of the account capable of permitting the task.
9. One or more computer-readable media having co
If I'm reading the patent right, they've actually applied for protection of the UAC popup system that appears in Vista and Win7. There's no unqualified patent on user account privilege escalation. Indeed, "su" would be explicitly outwith this patent's claims, as it's specifically about bringing up an interface to escalate when the system determines that escalation will be required, not about escalating manually before the task is attempted.
Top marks to the Groklaw article for providing a thorough explanation for how they can't get a patent on something they're not trying to get a patent for.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What rock did you just crawl out from under?
without "sudo". My thanks to Micro$oft for inventing that great program! --Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
...because I couldn't bothered reading all that shit.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Groklaw posts an article against some action by Microsoft! Slashdot reports on it!
Doubters abound! Questions Arise!
Who's right? Who's wrong?
Nobody cares.
Interestingly, the word of the day is accuracy.
$> sudo bill make me a sandwich
The big industry writes them up just as protection from patent trolls and then collude to keep small competition out (ie Microsoft was threatening that Linux was stepping on its patents back in the day).
Patents were made to spawn innovation - bypassing secretive guilds by incentivizing the opening of knowledge to public domain in exchange for a limited time monopoly. Projects and society are way too fluid now to keep many inane details secret anyway. There needs to be a study of which types of patents coming in provide useful knowledge to the People, and which majority are just wastes dumps of text - and amend the system accordingly.
I would urge the USA to do this now, while it is the leading superpower in which others follow suit. It may have been to our advantage in the past, but not so in the future, imo.
I know Slashdot loves to exaggerate things in headlines, but this is absurd. Microsoft has not patented sudo's behavior. At most, it has applied for a patent who's claims could be twisted to make it look like they're trying to patent sudo. Calm down, everybody, it's just an application, the patent hasn't been awarded and, if it's as ridiculous as the summary claims (and I have my doubts about that, too) it's unlikely to be granted.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Patent Office: "Rejected."
Microsoft: "sudo patent this obvious idea"
Patent Office: "Okay."
With apologies to xkcd.
MS: Grant me this patent.
USPTO: No!
MS: Sudo grant me this patent.
USPTO: Okay...
Microsoft walked up to the patent office, and said "Give me a patent." The patent office said "No, there's prior art." Microsoft asked again "Sudo Give me a patent." The patent office replied "OK."
http://xkcd.com/149/
http://xkcd.com/149/
In an attempt to patent a thing rather than the software itself, they say:
One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to perform acts comprising:
In other words, it's not the operation itself, or the software, but the actual _disc_ that they're claiming. The medium, not the message, as it were. At least it's a physical thing.
I don't know if "downloaded software" would violate the patent, or if they'd try to claim that having it on the server's discs would violate it. (Surely they wouldn't try to claim that your hard disc on which you've downloaded it would violate the patent, would they?)
Patent troll has been a business model for some time now, just wondering if Patent Troll was also a job title or at least the name of a department? Are they kept in the basement or is Microsoft upscale enough to build them their own bridge to live under?
Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.
The suggested punishment might be a little extreme, but the idea is sound. We need some kind of penalty for companies filing junk patents for the electronic equivalent of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide across a thin, moist membrane.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
when you attempt to mount a drive that is not defined in fstab. Ubuntu pops up a "enter your password" dialog. M$ maybe up to some dirty old tricks here...
Look at Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.10 and tell me how this is different? It isn't.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
...with Windows' lax control of permissions allowing just about anybody to run as a super user, surely they should have a patent for "sudon't" which would probably be infinitely more useful?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Come one now - your bias is showing... sudo existed on UNIX before Linus Torvalds was a gleam in his father's eye....
There are thousands of patents for devices that duplicate the functionality of another. Hell, the diesel engine has exactly the same function as a petrol engine, and much of the functionality of a Newcomen engine (pressure difference driving pistons to provide a motive force).
The patent is on the process. Not the end result.
Now the process is pretty much indistinguishable from sudo as well, but if you're going to criticise at least criticise for the right reasons.
And I'm not just talking about sudo/gksudo etc....look at "Policy Kit". This is EXACTLY what this Patent describes. EPIC FAIL Microsoft! The FREE SOFTWARE WORLD has OUT INNOVATED YOU AGAIN! Been doing this for at least more than a year. Been in design/documentation/talked about for even longer.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Didn't OS X do this already?
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I am the original author of "priv", which came before sudo, and I didn't see any mention of it. This utility was published in Unix World back in 1987, and basically did the same thing. Does this mean "priv" is exempt from this patent?
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
Company X patents government.
;)
Company X today has patented the business process know as 'government'. Governments are now required to give X dollars in license feeds per year to Company X in order to stay a sovereign country. Failure to pay fees will result in abandoning you right to sovereignty and becomming a subsideary of Company X. USPTO's response said that this will spur inovation and development of countries by helping them all work as one instead of all the different types there are today.
Comments:
Well....(Score: 5, Sad)
Aparently America has already forgot to pay the fees....lol, i kid,i kid....maybe
I couldn't bothered reading all that shit.
Oddly enough, that is exactly what the patent examiner said.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Since when do programmers need to be patent lawyers? Patents are written in fluent legalese, not plain $HUMANLANGUAGEOFYOURCHOICE.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
If using an Administrator action on a Linux system you already get a GUI dialogue to see if you wish to elevate your privileges for that one action, that involves putting in a password but it is the same action.
However the real reason the article is correct is because the patent is actually patenting the notion of elevating your privileges, it chooses to describe how that might work in terms of the UAC of Vista/Win7 but it does not limit itself to that implementation.
So, in effect, Microsoft is patenting sudo
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Operating systems for gourmets: Linux make coffee, and now Windows make sandwichs (not sure what makes OS/X, but it Cocoa flavored)
Thanks for telling us that those claims are too complicated for you to read. Please make sure to put that on your resume, because if I was a potential employer looking to hire you for anything even remotely technical, I'd want to know that you give up whenever a discussion gets remotely above the complexity of "M$ sux0rz."
That's not a technical description: it's legalese. I've done my share of technical writing, ranging from scientific journals articles to user and developer documentation, but I'd never be able to get away with producing such incomprehensible gibberish.
This patent is a moot point anyway, because it falls under my patent for a system where a user authenticates his identity by means of a unique user identifier and a secret password, before the system allows him access.
the idea of sudo is probably completely new to them even after decades to think about it.
we will trap them in their own greed:
Just pitch the idea to the government, to put huge fines invalidating stupid patents like these. Like 10% of the business's sales volume. Then tell them, how to easily make money, by invalidating such a pointless patent.
Now just let the greed work its way...
With huge holes in the goverment budget, and them making more money this way, then the companies could ever bribe them with, this could actually work.
Now all we need is someone hot who can meet for a dinner with some politicians.
Let's all put some money in a anonymous account, and pay a escort girl to turn their heads, until they obey like dogs. ^^
Damn, that could actually work! Hormones are always a safe attack vector. And since you can buy them for money...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Pretty much any patent analysis by people who have not read the claims and specification is worthless. Slashdot should just ban all articles about patents, since said articles are uniformly worthless.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
(Independent innovation can be affected by the patent system. That in itself is absurd.)
HAND.
Actually, that's a *furore*.
I, for one, never understood why programmers have such a hard time with legalese. Quality programmers should make sure their software is as computationally universal as possible, which is exactly the reason for having "legalese."
Thanks for telling us that those claims are too complicated for you to read.
It's not just those claims. There are MILLIONS of software patent claims in existence. In theory, every developer needs to check every piece of code they write against all of those millions of claims. Otherwise they could be infringing on someone's patent. It's a completely unreasonable burden.
This isn't the old days where if you invent a new cotton gin, you could just look under "cotton gin" in a card index to find out if you're infringing.
Read the first claim. It's far more specific than what sudo does. Sudo is just about elevating rights via a command, this is much more specific.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I think a better solution would be for the patent to be described using pseudocode or some variation thereof. Since this is afterall a software patent, the application should be written in a form that is legible to others in the field. It would also lead to easier settlement of a dispute since previous art could more easily be compared with pseudocode.
... and then there was the time Micro$oft and Apple both stole the windows GUI concept from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (a la smalltalk) and then paid their lawyer$ million$ to fight about which of them (minus Xerox, of course) owned the "look and feel" of it?
Until you find references that actually can be used to reject those claims, instead of just making some crap argument like "OMGZORS IT'S SUDO WITH A GUI", you can sit and spin, buddy.
I just patented the BSoD! Take that!
Individual patent claims may be stupid and a waste of time, but it is the huge numbers of patents that really makes the system fail.
A way to fix that would be to drastically increase the required inventive step, so only extraordinary inventions would get patent protection at all. Those extraordinary inventions would be much less numerous and it would be possible again to do an exhaustive search if your code was already patented by someone else.
But I don't think that will happen anytime soon. It would be easier to remove the patent system completely.
C - the footgun of programming languages
"sudo" as in "run a single command as root and furthermore examine the commands before running them and restrict them to a set, and furthermore examine the user trying to run sudo to select the restricted set" was developed after Linux was popular.
I seem to recall using it long before Linux appeared.
http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/history.html
http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/readme.html
Unless there's some nuance in your quote that I'm missing.
BTW - gratisoft.us appears to mirror sudo.ws
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
I don't know that I'd use the test of patent language understanding to identify good technical job candidate, not for most jobs anyway, not yet anyway... unless every programmer will be required to be a patent lawyer too. ... a selectable help graphic wherein responsive to receiving selection of the selectable help graphic ...
Nobody knows what it means, but it's there to make it confusing and sound like they "invented" something.
That is how the US Patent system works. Anybody can patent any BS. Then, if you do not agree with the BS, challenge it in court and prove there is prior art etc. MS would not be able to enforce that BS so easy.
they did disclose sudo as art to the examiner during prosecution.
If you're going to claims something copies 'sudo' with 'Linux' please realize that sudo copies su which was around long before Linux.
sudo has more features than su, yes. Everything that 'copies' sudo has more features as well.
Although the patent in this case does not copy sudo, or gksudo or OSX. The patent covers something that detects an authorization (NOT AUTHENTICATION) failure and gives an opportunity to elevate privileges and continue rather than denying the request.
su, sudo, gksudo and the OS X applet all require knowledge in advance that elevated privileges are required.
Do I think the difference is worth patenting? No, its the next logical step. However, if you're going to rant and rave about what Microsoft is patenting, at least realize they aren't patenting a clone of something you've been using for years.
You only make the rest of the OSS world look stupid to the powers that be when you rant and rave and you are completely ignorant of whats being done. We lose credibility and get written off as raving lunes when you respond like this. So please, shut the hell up.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If that passes as something technical where you work, you can keep that job... I'll keep working on actual technology instead of fucking with gibberish like that. I know it may limit my work options but so far I've been happy.
Sure, it's a neat idea and all, but why should I agree not to implement the same idea in my own way. If I can figure out how to do something in a different way (for example with different code) then I don't see why I should be prevented from doing so. The same goes for the car starter analogy. I don't see why the public benefits from being told how to do these things. If someone had put an electric starter motor on a car and kept the details secret about how he had done it, someone later would have figured it all out without the help of the patent. I just don't see what valuable rights the patent holder is giving up in exchange for the monopoly. The obviousness criteria should be applied to the method of doing something, not to the thing being done IMHO.
Nullius in verba
Yep another one of those reasons to move to Linux.
Dennis Ritchie patented the setuid bit in what was probably the first software patent ever, and released the patent to the public domain. I think that counts as a slam dunk prior art, no?
As other posters have mentioned, this is different because it's kind of an automated watchdog system that lies in wait for someone to run something that needs elevated permissions--and then it prompts them to give those permissions. Sudo doesn't watch for a place where it might be needed. You have to call it specifically. If you try and run something that you're not allowed to, it says "you can't run this", and you say "darn--okay, sudo program". This patent is for software where when you run any program that needs high permissions, it says "you can't run this, unless you give me an admin password, so please give me an admin password".
That's true. It's still a crappy patent application though, since it basically covers showing a password dialog box with eligible user accounts (along with some details about their associated privileges) when an operation requires elevated privileges.
Indeed. In fact, this patent reminds me more of PolicyKit (which is GUI-based) than sudo. See screenshot, which almost exactly matches how I visualised the patent after reading the initial claims.
And a bunch of others. Just an FYI the world does not circle around the LInux/Microsoft rivalry. Some of us are in neither camp and just want to get our jobs done, without all the bickering.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Law is the programming language for the system of society. The problem is, rather than doing exactly what you told it to do, regardless of whether that's what you wanted it to do, the system makes every possible effort to interpret the code in such a way so that it doesn't have to do what you instructed it to do.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The patent office needs to be revoked of sudo access.
You have no room to complain for the following reasons:
1.) The GNU/*NIX community knows MS is a patent troll.
2.) You know MS is out to get you.
3.) You have had tech out since 1979 that is open sourced, but not patented or
copyrighted.
Your argument sounds something like this:
1.) I live in a neighborhood filled with thieves.
2.) I saw some thieves casing my house.
3.) Hey, I will leave my front door open while I'm out, it will be great.
4.) Oh no, I've been robbed! How could this happen to me!
Here's the obvious question: Why hasn't someone in the GNU/Linux or Unix world
patented their stuff? Patent it, give it to a community trust of some sort, and
protect civilization from Microsoft. It doesn't take a genius.
The claims presented on their web page do not conflict with sudo.
sudo works in a very different way: sudo is about the user saying "i need to be a different user so I can run command Y"
This feature is about the operating system saying "user X, in order to do Y, you need more privilege."
The two concepts are quite different.
Maybe Groklaw folks should use Vista/Windows7, as well as Unix, and try to understand the difference(s) between the roles of the two.
I will say it again. Let companies keep their trade secrets. I would rather see companies come up with something and pay their engineers money to improve it over the competition than have to throw money at the USPTO and Lawyers. Hell, I would rather see the Marketing department get some of that money to advertise why product X is better than Y than to hold a monopoly and sit around collecting money. Look at the vast amounts of money that get thrown around on patent litigation whether a patent has obviously good standing or clearly has prior art. If you want to contest another's patent or defend your own, you are going to have to cough up a lot of money, money that could be going into R&D making your product even better. Businesses should be constantly innovating with the fire of innovation on their asses. Everyone wins in this scenario because the person with the best product makes the most money and the losers can try again next time to come up with something that is either cheaper, faster, or of higher quality (pick 2). The consumers would also win because they would have a constant slew of people actually putting on a song and dance for your money rather than the business-as-usual methods of expecting consumers to pay tribute to you because you're the only game in town.
Imagine if the Internet had come out in the time of software patents. The Internet in its current form started in bits and pieces. Imagine how long it would have been to have an internet where half the technologies we have didn't exist and the other half cost a prohibitive amount of money. Microsoft, Apple, Oracle/Sun, Adobe, and a lot of other tech giants owe a lot of where they are now on not having a nuisance patent system.
From the OP description:
"the functionality of 'sudo' which is found in all Linux systems"
Why is it you Linux boys always think everything was invented on Linux?
Unix
This has been on unices not quite forever, but you can see it from there. Prior Art baby. If they try to press this at all, it will flop like a house of cards. Is this '48 patents'? If the others are like this one, they have nothing, but some strange desire to fund the US patent office by getting patents that obviously cannot hold water.
heh heh heh
command not found? your laggin.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, we just need to disable Microsoft's access to run /usr/sbin/grantpatent as root in /etc/sudoers. ;)
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
There are multiple issues getting mixed up in the Groklaw article and the discussion on Slashdot.
A patent application has three hoops to jump through to be patentable:
35 U.S.C. 101 - the claims must be patentable subject matter. The question of "is software patentable" is what the Supreme Court is deciding in In Re Bilski. This is the largest issue most of the Slashdot community seems concerned about, and it's obviously a big issue right now. These claims, as written, may be patentable subject matter under current 101 criteria. This is why there were written with all the "computer readable media" language.
35 U.S.C. 102 - the claims must be "novel" subject matter. This is what people object to when they yell "BUT I DID THIS BACK IN 1990!"
35 U.S.C. 103 - the claims must be non-obvious subject matter. This is what most people appear to be objecting to in the present discussion....if sudo existed before this patent, then laying down Microsoft's GUI idea on top may be obvious. (This is NOT a Section 102 issue). This is the part where the patent office (and examiner) screwed up. Even if the examiner couldn't find a reference that taught exactly what Microsoft claimed, he/she should have at least rejected the now-issued claims as obvious. Maybe he did, but half-assed the rejection...who knows.
The Groklaw article points out an "obvious" patent and yells that is shouldn't be patentable subject matter. Those are two separate issues. Yes, it's probably obvious. Depending on your view of software patents, it should or should not be patentable subject matter. That fact that it's an "obvious" idea will NOT in any way be affected by the Supreme Court's decision in Bilski (that case is about patentable subject matter under Section 101).
Good job disagreeing with the slashdot groupthink, now you are a troll. The proper response to anything rgarding patents and M$ is outrage. Nothing else will be accepted.
If you wrap your program with a shell script roughly as
It violates the patent?
That's stupidity on so many levels
More and more bullshit keeps on coming from msft. I wonder where is the limit.
They should get some recognition, maybe an award or something
Surprised haven't seen this mentioned yet ... look at the file date (2005). This likely was submitted during Vista's development:
"Cancel or Allow"?
But doesn't the numerous back doors and severe drive by invokable kernel security flaws already allow arbitrary privileged execution.?
It would be fine if legalese actually did that, but it doesn't. Mathematics is clear and concise. Legalese appears to have been designed primarily to be incomprehensible by normal people without extensive effort, thereby increasing the demand for people who are fluent in it (ie lawyers).
sudo isn't installed by default in *most* Linux systems. I believe the program you're looking for is su.
"Andy Rathbone, "Windows XP for Dummies", 2001, Wiley Publishing Inc., pp. 62-64, 66, 106-107, 128 and 314. cited by examiner ." ... Really?
Actually, the examiner rejected the application three times and forced the applicant to amend the hell out of the claims before allowing it.
and with all the "M$ is evil!" fanbois here continually claiming that UAC is nothing like sudo - they've even got some (albeit) flimsy support for their claim.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
That's why all competent lawyers are excellent programmers.
Nah, real programmer use his own secret LISP code to transform legalese into Klingon automatically.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
As an ex-programmer/technical writer who is now a lawyer who's also worked at the USPTO as an examiner (during law school), I feel I must weigh in on the language issue. Patents and patent applications are neither technical documents nor legalese. They are a unique and bizarre hybrid of the two which, quite frankly, I think no one understands. The claims, specifically, since the specification is sometimes actually intelligible in a meaningful way. Everyone (examiners, phositas, judges, lawyers) has trouble dealing with claims and their meanings. The fact that we require pre-litigation court hearings to determine what a claim means (Markman hearings) AFTER the USPTO has already reviewed and approved the claims, which requires determining what the claim means, should be a sufficiently strong indicator that the current style of writing for patents is uncommunicative and ineffective.
To speak more directly to software patents, the USPTO doesn't recognize such a thing literally. Moreover, in general the PTO doesn't look upon the software field as a true technical/engineering discipline, and so looks down upon software/programming expertise in it's examiners. If it appears that the PTO doesn't know a thing about how software works or what is out there as prior art, it is because generally it doesn't know a thing. The field of endeavor isn't recognized or utilized, and examiners often interpret claims to avoid dealing with software (as they don't have the background knowledge to know how to begin researching the prior art).
Software may or may not be patentable ideologically, but as long as the field is given short shrift and basically sneered at by the PTO, no patent process will make sense for the majority of software/business method patents.
AC for obvious reasons.
You can still argue over whether it meets the obviousness criterion, but trying to spin this a "Microsoft patents sudo" is deliberately spreading FUD.
I couldn't bothered reading all that shit.
Oddly enough, that is exactly what the patent examiner said.
True, but it was even worse than you think. The patent examiner, barely 7 pages deep into Microsofts EULA for patent reading, said: "Oh, fuck this."
I'm Steve Ballmer, and sudo was MY idea.
I, for one, never understood why programmers have such a hard time with legalese.
We learn many languages. Legalese is not one of them.
Could you read C code before you studied C? Did you know Java before you knew Java?
If legalese documents would include some sort of comment or remark before each section summarizing what the section's about, I think we could get people to understand the document before they decide it's tl;dr.
. . .
brb, patenting commenting. ;P
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
--William Shakespeare
Microsoft must be suffering from Cryptomnesia.
I don't condemn all software patents. Just because it's software doesn't mean that it can't be brilliant and stunningly innovative.
I do. Software is already protected, it's called copyright. Software does not need to be patented.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Just so, Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer (with a couple brownie points to SUNY Buffalo) apparently have the prior art on sudo itself...
while slapping a happy face on things (GUI) should go to Xerox PARC.
The only difference between us and the "cave men" is knowledge. They had all of the same stuff. They just didn't realize what could be done with it.
Now THAT would make an interesting successor to Brainf*ck.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Law is the programming language for the system of society.
Well it's syntax is obscure and imprecise, it's practitioners are mostly B-Ark material, and people write horrible code with it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
the system makes every possible effort to interpret the code in such a way so that it doesn't have to do what you instructed it to do.
So law is interpreted. Wonder why our justice system is so slow...
You do something by barring software patents, Once that's done listen to the economists who have studied patents and encourage innovation by ending patents.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I can't speak for all programmers, but THIS programmer has several problems with it.
Firstly, it is the world's most ill-defined "programming language". Show 1000 competent programmers a given body of source code and you will recieve the same description of what it does 1000 times. Show 1000 lawyers the same contract or law and you will receive at least 100 different descriptions of what it means, none guaranteed to stand up in court.
Next, unlike legalese, programming languages absolutely must pass "the compiler test". If it won't compile, it cannot ship. As low as that standard may be, it's higher than the bar for a boilerplate contract. I've read legalese that doesn't even parse being used on "standard contracts" for utilities, apartment rentals, etc.
Legalese combines the wordiness of COBOL with the spaghetti nature of the original BASIC, line numbers and all.
The users of legalese routinely and shamelessly apply patches to patches of patches until nobody is actually sure how it might read if they were all applied in order or even what order they should be applied in. They don't even try, they just throw a few more patches in and see what sticks. It's no wonder that all a legal "code review" can ever manage is an opinion or five.
Computer code must at least tip it's hat to usability. Legalese doesn't even pretend to try to be comprehensible to those it applies to.
Computers and their programs have the good sense to give up and core dump when all hope of correct execution is lost. If computers operated the way the legal system does, a segfault would cause the offending pointer to be loaded with the nearest technically legal address (correct or not) and execution resumes.
Programmers have enough sense to recognize that all programs have bugs. We also recognize that if a computer program spews a bunch of nonsense, we should ignore the result and fix the code until it makes sense again.
Finally, all you have to do to avoid ever having to deal with source code is don't be a computer programmer. There are many fine jobs available where you need never see it nor pay someone else to help you out with it. To avoid ever dealing with legalese or having to pay someone to wrangle it for you, you must go live in a cave cut off from all human contact.
In fact, even that may not be enough. Someone may find you and wave a bunch of legalese at you claiming it says you have to move. If you attempt to ignore it, eventually law enforcement will show up and if you press the point drag you into court LITERALLY at gunpoint where you will be forced to deal with it or be imprisoned until you capitulate.
before we scrap software patents, we need to provide developers with an alternative.
There are alternatives such as trade secrets and first mover advantage. Actually by scrapping patents you may encourage innovation, if a business wants to it's market share then it will innovate. As it is patents may discourage innovation. Tell me, why should I spend millions of dollars to invent something if I can be slapped with a lawsuit claiming infringement? Because patents are issued companies have to horde them just to use for self protection. With a thousand patents if another business comes along and threatens a patent infringement lawsuit then one of those patents may save the business because of mutually assured destruction. This forces businesses to spend more on defense than on innovation.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
They're trying to patent what sudo does with a GUI interface.
Systems and/or methods are described that enable a user to elevate his or her rights. My 2 plus year old Mac did that when I got it. "Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at SUNY/Buffalo."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Somebody should mod this AC up. Interesting, at least.
He tried. You obviously didn't.
$ patent sudo
-bash: patent: command not found
$ sudo patent sudo
password:
$
So I want to escalate my privilege but don't want the hassle of attacking the professional administrators' accounts?
No problem - Just try to do what I shouldn't and see what names the system gives me...
Brilliant! Brenda from accounts has the elevated privilege because she had her boss harass the admins until they gave in.
I'll just wander over to her desk and check her monitor and under her keyboard for post-its with her password
And Microsoft are so proud of this that they patented it?
Although sudo is available on all Linuxes, it was derived ultimately from (I think) a BSD creation dating from about 1980. Oh, hang on, Wikipedia says it was written by "Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer ... at the Department of Computer Science at SUNY/Buffalo. The current version is under active development and is maintained by OpenBSD developer Todd C Miller".
I'm sure Apple must use some functional equivalent to gksu in OS X for privilege escalation when required. I know sudo is available from the command line in OS X by default if one has "enabled" the root user, which I guess just about every command-line cowboy must have.
So if anybody's got any money to fight the patent in court, I guess Apple might be a good candidate if the BSD developers can't.
And here I thought sudo did the opposite of that.
Sudo let's you say "I know I need more privileges to run this program. Here is the user I would like to run it as instead."
this patent let's you say "Run this program" and have the OS respond "That won't work, you probably want to run as Steve or Administrator. Shall I run it as one of them?"
This is very, very different, no matter how little you notice since behind-the-scenes, a program is calling "sudo" when it guesses it needs to. This is another thing, like one-click-shopping, which was probably "obvious" to everybody, but discarded as poor UI ("I'd rather the user need to explicitly ask for privileges, to prevent mistakes.")
But this is not what sudo does.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
if someone patents an invention but then poorly implements. Say MS gets a patent for a "completely secure system" but it ends up being found that their is a bug in the code. Can people then reverse engineer/distribute something that implements the same thing? After all the product doesn't do what the patent claims so IMHO it isn't covered by the patent.
We keep hearing this meme and it's as wrong now as it's ever been.
MS trolled 238 patents against Linux.
No court case.
Just FUD.
Still trolling patents.
I know this is petty - but what the heck.
CajunArson, what hope is there for me reading 20 odd points of a complicated patent application, when you can't even read 9 characters of a user name?
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
su isn't sudo, su makes your effective userid different until you change it again or log out.
sudo makes your effective userid different for the actions of one exec().
Law is the programming language for the system of society.
Thou shalt not kill
Thou shalt honor thy mother and father
Thou shalt not steal
etc, etc... somewhere along the line, this got converted into "Whereasmuch as the first party causes the cessation of breathing functionality in the case of the second party, said action is expressly forbidden..." then rattles on for six pages...
You should read manuals and you will find out, that sudo is the derivative of su, and su is not 'super user', but 'switch user', so that it allows you to act or perform actions as any other user in the system, if you know the password. Only when not specifying -u option it defaults to 'root' user.
Microsoft's patent is to elevaiting privilegies, that is only a part of sudo or su.
--
disik
denis1482@yandex.ru
sudo allows a permitted user to execute a command as the superuser or another user, as specified in the sudoers file. I have never used UAC which seems to be what the patent is about, but it seems to me that the process described lowers the security of the system. As usual, Microsoft puts ease of use ahead of security.
But to elevate his or her rights to perform a task, the user will often need to find or remember an administrator account name. This may be disruptive; a user may need to call someone to figure out the name, find some scrap of paper somewhere on which the user wrote it down some time ago, and the like.
I created Sudo for Windows (sudowin) in 2005. It is a free, open source project available at http://sudowin.sf.net/.
-- -a
1. One or more computer-readable media having computer-readable instructions therein that, when executed by a computing device, cause the computing device to present a user interface
This has prior art for some time now, the rest is obvious and trivial.
End of Discussion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not to say that this is a duplicate story, but am I the only one that remembers this Slashdot post from years ago? It's obviously a new patent, but is it not essentially the same patent?
My lame blog.
This doesn't sound like it would cover sudo to me, or even a GUI-wrapper for sudo. While I am not a patent attorney, I have been hacking on sudo for the past 15+ years.
My reading of the patent indicates that it is geared towards GUI-based environments where the user may need to perform some action (such as setting the clock in a control panel) that requires increased privileges. The actual "invention" appears to be that the user is able to perform an action as a different user without having to type in the name of that other user when authenticating. One example given in that patent is the ability to click on a name in a list of privileged users as opposed to having to type in a user name.
Sudo simply doesn't work this way. When a command is run via sudo the user is actively running the command as a different user. What is described in the patent is a mechanism whereby an application or the operating system detects that an action needs to be run with increased privileges and automatically prompts the user with a list of potential users that have the appropriate privilege level to perform the task.
None of those are computationally universal. Is euthanasia considered killing? Is self-defense exempt? What if your mother and father are trying to kill you? What is the penalty for stealing? It needs to rattle on for six pages in order to cover all the bases.
And as the GP said, that's why we have lawyers.
Feel free to essentially study the law yourself and become your own un-barred lawyer, but thats an investment in time and energy I'd rather put into other things and pay a lawyer for those bits of advice when I need them.
There are chronic do-it-yourselfers out there, and more power to you, but that doesn't make changing your own oil better than paying a mechanic (or lube tech) for the job instead either.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I thought it was Human Action. Law is nothing more than the exit 1 function with questionable error handling.
the system makes every possible effort to interpret the code in such a way so that it doesn't have to do what you instructed it to do.
So law is interpreted. Wonder why our justice system is so slow...
The Garbage Collector only runs when there's a revolution.
Should I quote you or someone else when I use this paragraph?
I did read the patent application. The only thing different I see is that what MS did was add a list of users who have the required permissions. Sudo doesn't do that but I wouldn't be surprised if there were utilities for OS X and *unix that does the same thing. Now I'm no expert in reading the legaleses of patent applications and I may of missed something.
As it is I don't think it's enough of a novelty to qualify for a patent, if I believed in software patents but I don't.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
sudo = Program to run when YOU know you need more privileges.
MS thingy = Program that runs when it decides you need more privileges.
MS thingy = receipe for dumb users to give permission when they shouldn't.
sudo = way to stop dumb users (just don't add them to the sudoers file).
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
but don't have the necessary privilege, I am presented with a list of users who do have such privilege and I am prompted pick a particular user and to provide that user's password.
Thanks, I thought there might be a utility that does that. This is better. And worse. I want to install Ubuntu on my Mac and I don't want to need to set privileges for each user to mount drives. Right now I have 3 user accounts on my Mac, only one is an admin account and the only reason that account is used to update the system and for installations. I also have external hard disk drives I use as backups, currently I keep a running backup by copying saved files to an external drive. I want to set up rsync for that though, I also clone my drives.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This sounds awfully familiar. Oh yeah! They already patented this back in 2004.
Problem is most lawyers don't write comments in their "Programs".
"the system makes every possible effort to interpret the code in such a way so that it doesn't have to do what you instructed it to do"
Na, it just hasn't been tested in every possible environment. It probably worked very well in the limited scope of testing that the original programmer did. 5 years from the creation date, society is using "society environment 2.1" instead of 2.0, and the code has unexpected errors in the new societal operating system.
Your post is long and informative. You appear to be saying the USPTO is clueless. Personally, I think they know exactly what they are doing every time they award an obvious patent to companies such as Microsoft. I believe the USPTO has a political and trade agenda, and is not as clueless as you say.
You're missing the poi--
Wait, you're a troll. Nevermind then. Hope you'll contribute something more interesting next time.
I am not devoid of humor.
fluent legalese
Wait a sec, I think we have a new candidate for best oxymoron since 'Military Intelligence'.
I like it!
Law is the programming language for the system of society. The problem is, ...
My gut tells me the problem with your analogy (no offense, it is a nice effort; at least you didn't use cars in it), is more profound:
The vast majority of users of a programming language view it as a *tool*, where normally (outside of obfuscation contests) one of its most valuable traits is considered to be *clarity*.
The vast majority of users of Law's legalese language view it as a *weapon*, whose ability to completely avoid clarity altogether is considered to be its most valuable trait. Indeed, it would be utterly useless to its practitioners, considering the purpose for which they use it, if it could *not* do this.
No, we just need to disable Microsoft's access to run /usr/sbin/grantpatent as root in /etc/sudoers. ;)
I have a simpler, quicker solution that doesn't even require messing with any conf files:
'rm -f /usr/sbin/grantpatent'
Or find whichever idiotic package that installed that crazy-ass binary, and nuke *it* from orbit...