Microsoft has gotten into a lot of trouble in the European Union about the way they force Windows users into using Internet Explorer. In the end, the European Commision told Microsoft to get it’s act straight and give users a choice.

And now it looks like that choice is finally here.

Microsoft’s Famed “Browser Ballot Screen” Fnally Makes an Appearance

Microsoft has finally revealed it’s new browser selection screen – users will be informed that there is “an important choice to make: your browser”, and will be shown a screen with twelve browser options, and the famous five will be displayed first – Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and IE, in a random order.

This change will be rolled out over the next week for Windows users in the UK, Belgium and France. The selection screen will most likely be delivered through Windows’ update mechanism, which means that those who have turned off automatic updates won’t get to see this screen.
The screen will hit the shores of other European countries on the first of March.

When the browser choice screen is run, an icon is created on the desktop, and the IE icon is unpinned from the Windows taskbar.

Another small point is that the selection screen seems to be made with IE, and so has the IE branding on it. Was this deliberate?

Whether this will begin to remove Microsoft’s monopoly from the browser market is yet to be seen, but I certainly hope that happens! Let us know what you think about this in the comments.

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Microsoft has done it again. They’ve filed a patent (Patent #7617530) about a “method to present a user interface identifying an account having a right to permit a task in response to the task being prohibited based on a user’s current account not having that right.”

In other words, they’ve patented sudo.

What is sudo? A little background…

Way back in the old days (before Apple and Microsoft existed), there was UNIX, and there was BSD, and they were multi-user systems. That is, there was the concept of user accounts. There was a user root, that was the system administrator, and there could be other users, say A and B. On such a computer, A could not access B’s and vice versa.

Suppose A wanted to run a program as B, (ie), B wanted to run a program under his account on A’s shell, he would use the su command. He could say su - B and enter his pasword, and lo!, he would be logged in as B.

And so came sudo, or su – do, which allowed a user to run a program as another user, typically the root, without having to login to that’s user’s shell.

Those with a little bit of Ubuntu experience would have typed in this command before:

sudo apt-get install somepackage

All that does is run the program apt-get as the root user.

Now, this program was invented way back in the eighties. In fact, the official sudo page, maintained by Todd Miller, has a Brief History section, which reads as follows:

Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at SUNY/Buffalo. It ran on a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD. An updated version, credited to Phil Betchel, Cliff Spencer, Gretchen Phillips, John LoVerso and Don Gworek, was posted to the net.sources Usenet newsgroup in December of 1985.

In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released an enhanced version of sudo. For the next 5 years, sudo was fed and watered by a handful of folks at CU-Boulder, including Bob Coggeshall, Bob Manchek, and Trent Hein.

If you’ve never used the command line, then you might have noticed that when you try and run anything from Ubuntu’s Settings > Administration menu, you get a box that asks you to enter your password to run administrative applications. Well, that is actually gksudo, a graphical frontend to sudo.

What Microsoft has done

Microsoft has copied this design and incorporated it into Vista and 7 (remember UAC?). Not only that, they went and patented it! That’s right. Microsoft patented sudo as their own design.

Here’s what the patent in question has to say:

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.

The page of claims goes on, but you get the idea.

In essence, Microsoft has patented a design for a graphical sudo. And that’s not all, they have made it very clear that it is the idea they want to patent, not just their implementation:

Although the invention has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological steps, it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or steps described. Rather, the specific features and steps are disclosed as preferred forms of implementing the claimed invention.

How do you like that?

And they have been granted the patent!

If the fact that Microsoft filed such a patent is not disturbing in itself, the fact that the USPTO granted them the patent is. Microsoft never ever heard of sudo? Or of the fact that it is licensed under an ISC-style open source license? And even if Microsoft has not heard of it (which is itself impossible to believe), what in the world was the USPTO doing?

As PJ from groklaw puts it:

Obviously, if they could figure that out, they’d never have issued this patent in the first place. The fact that they did, without realizing the implications, or the obviousness, or the prior art, tells us that the USPTO simply lacks the foundational technical information, or the awareness of technical history, to make wise patent decisions about software and patents.

You can read her entire article here.

The future

What will happen if you give a company that already has a market monopoly the right to monopolize things that aren’t even theirs? Maybe this!