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'."

Re:Prior Art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, if you have the USD500,000 to field the court case. Most people cave first.

Setuid?

[chrispyman]

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?

Re:Why do they even try?

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Prior Art?

[rubz]

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.

Re:"in a data store"

[Stormgren]

Technically you could call a directory a "data store". If so, this is no different than setuid/setgid, right along with sudo.

prior art - ibm mainframe

[geraint-nz]

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.

Re:What Next?

[maxpublic]

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

It is not sudo or suid

[engywook]

With sudo (an instance of using the suid capability of UNIX), the process itself is priviledged, with privs based upon information in the data store and command line arguments.

This patent sounds more like there's a root daemon running in the background and I send it a message asking that it mount a CD-ROM for me; it looks me up in a database of users permitted to mount CDs; and performs the mount on my behalf.

Re:Why do they even try?

[WindBourne]

So of course this is completely unenforcable...I wonder if they'll even try. What is the process to go about for getting this patent revoked?

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

Re:This is getting ridiculous

[whovian]

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.

Re:Prior Art?

[NanoGator]

"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.

maybe not so easy

[r00t]

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.

Re:You know something...

[MarkSwanson]

"Whose brilliant idea was it to give corporations the same legal rights as an individual?"

You hit the nail on the head. Additionally disturbing: the documentary "The Corporation"
http://www.thecorporation.tv/filmmak ers/
makes a strong case for defining a corporation as the perfect psychopath.

Re:A brief history of SUDO

[Citizen of Earth]

Is there any penalty for filing patents for which you KNOW prior art exists? If not, there definitely should be.

It ought to be fraud, and the patent examiner should be prosecuted as an accessory.

Re:What Next?

[NanoGator]

"This just hastens the end of the patent system. Seriously -- the American patent system is going to fall apart soon, and things like this are the reason."

Soon? Nah. These patents aren't a problem until somebody actually starts using them to extort money. What's preventing that from happening is fear of losing in court. MS hasn't sued Palm over the double clicking of hardware buttons in PDAs, for example. Why? Because they're slow? Nah. Because they risk losing. Just a money pit at that point.

Frankly, I think this trend of attempting to patent anything they can has more to do with self defense than with messing with anybody else. Tit for tat. If somebody approaches MS claiming they violate a patent, MS can searc through their patents and look for something to countersue with.

Polite rebuttals invited. I'm not exactly the most knowledgable person on this topic, so I'm open to discussion. But right now, as it stands, I'm not convinced that the patent system is in that much danger for the foreseeable future. Revolution? Maybe. But I'm not sold on it falling apart. Something to consider: Slashdot's sensationalizing it quite a bit.

Re:Prior Art?

[hardcode57]

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.

Claim seems valid

[SiliconEntity]

You guys are all wrong. Here's the text of claim 1. Read it carefully.

1. In conjunction with an operating system configured to limit access privileges in accordance with defined privilege levels, said privilege levels including at least an administrative privilege level under which a plurality of administrative methods can be initiated and a non-administrative privilege level under which at least one of the administrative methods cannot be initiated, a method comprising:

executing an administrative security process under the administrative privilege level;

the administrative security process accepting a request from a user process executing under the non-administrative privilege level to initiate a particular administrative method, the user process calling the administrative security process with parameters comprising (a) an identification of the particular administrative method and (b) arguments to be provided to said particular administrative method; and

the administrative security process calling the identified particular administrative method on behalf of the user process and providing the arguments to said identified particular administrative method.

What this is describing is a proxy process (it very specifically says process) running as root/admin which accepts RPCs (remote procedure calls) for privileged operations, and then makes the call as root, on behalf of the user.

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.

Wake up. Obviously not patenting SUDO.

[Elwood P Dowd]

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).

Re:A dangerous precedent...

[st1d]

Oh, not just men, there are "agreements" in place with a number of countries to accept US patents, copyrights, trademarks as law. In fact, that's one of the more endearing items in the EU patent attempts. Similar to extradition agreements, many countries might as well just consider themselves "Lesser States of the Union".

Re:maybe not so easy

[sploo22]

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?

Re:Prior Art?

[The Kow]

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.

Re:maybe not so easy

[no-body]

I don't think you are right with this. You're taking the word "process" too strict. I have not seen that it sasys in the patent that it needs to be a daemon.

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.

Re:What Next?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love your optimism.

Unfortunately there are a lot of companies with large stakes in patent portfolios. You think they are going to let their nest egg be wiped out like that?

Corporations are never going to let patents get abolished. The worlds only hope is for the Far East to continue to ignore the US patent & copyright rules, while the US continues to marginalize itself.

Once people realise that the US has become a technological 3rd world, THEN something may happen.

Re:Open Patents: How to fix the system for $50.

[waferhead]

I would prefer a ~6 month public comment period, after full public disclosure.

Also infers requirement by PO to listen and follow up.

It's going public anyway...

cheap, almost free, and if noone cares, it gets approved.

Also would disseminate the "new" ideas, which is the REAL point of patents in the first place.

One more requirement: must be comprehensable to the average HS graduate, and provide FREE links to all references. (implies HTML)

Re:Prior Art?

[bit01]

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.

If not Hurd, will do

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIAK hurd has such a kind of deamon?!
(sirously)

Makes my blood boil

[jonabbey]

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!

Re:Prior Art?

[bleckywelcky]

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.

Re:Prior Art?

[The Kow]

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.

A patent reviewer's immediate grasp of a technology should absolutely *NOT* function as the crux of whether or not a patent is given to an applicant. The fact is, these patents are complex, but even though you may understand them, you still have to go and find out if someone has patented anything similar or identical. That's simply too much work to do in the period of time they're given to do these things, a problem which could be mitigated by proper staffing.

Additionally, the patent system has grown to encourage frivolous patent applications, meaning the load just increases.

Re:Prior Art?

[msobkow]

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.

Absolutely !!

[AftanGustur]

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.

Re:Prior Art?

[Halo1]

You're completely right. And the patent system was never even designed with the idea that it would be possible to assess all possible prior art. The non-obviousness and usefulness requirements are merely filters to take out a number of a priori "known" bad patents. They know they can't get all bad patents out, but the idea is that in the end, the positive effects of the granted "good patents" outweigh the negative effects of the granted "bad patents".

This is however merely a hypothesis and most certainly not true per definition or because of some economic law. As Fritz Machlup said in the fifties, when he studied the patent system for Congress:

if we didn't have a patent system, it would be irresponsible to create one; but since we do, it would be irresponsible to get rid of it.

So what clearly is irresponsible, keeping extending the patent system into fields it was never intended to cover without any economic rationale to back it up, such as mathematics and business methods. The non-obviousness becomes even harder to check (who's going to e.g. data mine all open source software out there to check whether a particular algorithm hasn't been published before), innovation happened just as well before there were software patents etc. And now we even have tons of studies [ffii.org] to back up our gut feeling that software patents to more harm than good.

Therefore, just solving the non-obviousness problem and making patents easier to appeal, or going after some annoying patents like EFF is doing are not real solutions. The problem is the subject matter itself. The actions of the EFF are merely detracting from the real problem, and I would contend it may even do more harm than good. After all, they legitimise the system by saying that only annoying software patents with prior art are bad, while every software patent can be used "to steal IP" from all software authors, by forbidding him to rightfully profit from his copyright (to use a catch phrase of the other camp).

Someone who publishes something, should never have to worry about patents. The act of publishing should never constitute a patent infringement.

Re:Prior Art?

[Pharmboy]

You could have a period where the public are allowed to submit objections to the patent.

While your idea makes sense theoretically, in practice there are some serious problems. First, there will several groups that will simply object to every software patent because they are against them as a whole. Second, this means that the patent employee, who is already overburdened, now has to sift through 10 times the paperwork in order to issue a patent.

The net results would be 10 times the paperwork filed at the patent office, and it would be easier for Big Corporations to file extensive objections than it would for average users. This would make it harder for individuals to file patents, and easier for corporations.

It would be easier to simply not allow software patents in the first place, and use copyright law to protect them, but this isn't necessarily a great solution either.

Re:Not really a patent

[fishdan]

My shops have always said Sue-Doh, as in I'm a fake super-user. I'm not sure what the etymology is, but I think that Sudo has become one of those words that the pronunciation of will vary depending onn where you heard it first, like "Data". Pseudophed rine [ivillagehealth.com] is given a phonetic spelling "soo doe e FED rin" and sounds like this [akamai.net] There have been other discussion of this subject too: http://www.kottke.org/remainder/04/02/5050.html [kottke.org]

Short of a posting here on the official sudo site by Todd [courtesan.com] or Chris [utk.edu] (both of whom I bet could care less) I'm gonna keep saying "Sue-Doh" out of homage to Homer Simpson. Perhaps MSFT's patent is based on the pronunciation?

You don't see junk patents in other countries

[Nice2Cats]

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.

As true as that is, you don't see the patent offices of other countries passing out patents to everybody and his dog for things that anybody with five minutes of experience in the field knows are an old hat. This is getting ridiculous. Next thing you know, Microsoft will be patenting the use of nine inch nails for fixing people to two wood beams set at right angles and demanding money from Trent Reznor.

There is some systematic failure in the American patent process that is responsible for these junk patents, and the longer it is left unfixed, the more expensive it is going to be to go back and clear out the deadwood. Now how much staff is that going to take? How high will the bill be for all the lawyers, judges, and clerks be that it will take to return the system to sanity?

Then again, the U.S. has money to burn, don't we. It's not like we're paying for a war halfway around the globe or are losing business to India and China or have a poverty problem...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What Next?

[keyslammer]

Ok, let's consider the dynamics of this situation: there are companies in the business of collecting patents and threatening other companies with lawsuits if they don't submit to licensing. Large companies like Microsoft feel inclined to patent everything they can conceive of just to protect themselves from the patent arsenals of other companies (I don't recall hearing about any truly ridiculous patents by MS until after they were sued over the Eolas patent).

So we have a situation where large companies have enormous patent arsenals that they can use in their defense (or as part of an attack on their competitors), smaller companies who use trivial patents as a primary revenue stream, and developers who actually want to produce something caught in the middle.

It seems to me that this will produce the following results:

1) more high-profile lawsuits between big players (unfortunately, low-profile lawsuits are probably unlikely because the cost of giving in to licensing demands is much lower than the cost of defending yourself in a patent lawsuit)
2) more patent extortion against individuals and corporations, effectively raising the entry barriers of software development from "got a computer and a dream" to "got the backing of a multi-million dollar corporation with a formidable patent portfolio"
3) pushing open-source into the underground. OSS developers will have to hide their identity and exchange software through channels that preserve their anonymity. Since OSS is now very much a part of the corporate universe, this entangles the business world with a software "black market".
4) More corporate anxiety over the use of patents in their software, resulting in lots of efforts to insure that software is patent free. This goal is of course impossible in an environment where every trivial idea is patented, but it will raise the cost of development to an astronomical level and make the lives of IT professionals unbearable, causing many of us to leave the industry.

So basically, lots of people will get pissed off (and not just Slashdot readers). And when lots of people get pissed off in a democracy, laws get changed. Hopefully they will change for the better.

So patent everything you can! Can we patent the for loop? Let's do it! Stoop to the level of our oppressors! :-P Seriously, I want to see the FSF or EFF form an initiative to patent every dumb idea we can think of and just start suing people at random. I would donate to that cause.

Re:Prior Art?

[Sun Rider]

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.

Re:Prior Art?

[elhedran]

Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA patent/copyright abuse.

My idea is when you patent something, you also submit your expense reports for the time the patent was developed. can't submit the same expenses for more than one patent.

Then, all license fees are accounted for, and once you have made back 3 times the amount of money you spend in development back in license (net?) then the patent is disolved.

If you make no money in the first two years, the patent is disolved.

This way, if its a sit back and sue patent, its stopped because you have to actually license it. and if its a valuable patent, then it will be out of patent and into public domain sooner. and no one can complain that innovators don't get a return on investment.

Re:Prior Art?

[emeitner]

Of course, if the citizens of a country decide to ignore a law, the law ceases to exist. Governments such as the one in the US exist only because we(US citizens) allow them to. We are not subjects. We can change the course of nations if we choose to.

Re:Prior Art?

[LifesABeach]

I don't know about anyone else, but I get this visual image of an empty desk and chair at the Patent Office. On the desk is a box of patent applications. Next to the box is a rubber stamp labeled 'Patent No.'. Next to the stamp is another box to put in your patent. In front of the desk is a standing secretary, (for some big software company), listening on the cell phone writing, and stamping furiously.

Who ever is working at the U.S.Patent office is?