Problem: ping is complaining of ping: icmp open socket: Operation not permitted".
Solution: Run sudo chmod u+s /bin/ping (or whatever which ping points to).
I encountered this bug today just after having installed Raspbian on my Raspberry Pi from the latest NOOBS-image (version 1.7).
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ ping example.com
ping: icmp open socket: Operation not permitted"
It was still working fine with sudo. It turns out that this is actually a known bug on this particular version of Raspbian, and the solution is to change the file permissions of ping.
Lets have a look on the before and after:
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ ls -la /bin/ping
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 38844 Feb 12 2014 /bin/ping
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo chmod u+s /bin/ping
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ ls -la /bin/ping
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 38844 Feb 12 2014 /bin/ping
As you might see if you look closely, the priveliges for user is rwx rather than rws.
This is a file permission I'd never used before, so, as always, I headed to the man page for more details. Apparently s is the "set-user-ID-on-execution and set-group-ID-on-execution bits" (depending on whether it appears for user or group). They are called the setuid and setgid bits for short.
When these bits are on, executable files will run with the effective user ID (or group ID) set to those of the files owner. Since ping is owned by root, this means you're elevated to super user every time you ping something. (Which is quite neccessary, since you need to send and listen for control packets on a network interface).