Friday, February 13, 2004
BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft probes secret code leak
Storm in a teacup? Conspiracy theorists, your time has come? Neither: somewhere in between. Microsoft's rivals can benefit? Hardly. Most people who are knowledgeable are aware of how Windows does its stuff - in order to program it effectively you get to see a lot of the inner workings. The source code is littered with profanities. So what? I get frustrated when programming, and whilst I don't put comments in my code that I wouldn't want others to read, I can understand a culture where it doesn't actually matter - and anyway, people were not expected to read them anyway.
Where it came from is a bigger issue, not least because Microsoft releases source code to its operating systems to select Universities and individuals for research purposes, and they tend not have such secure networks as MS itself. So my guess is that it was hacked, or leaked, from a MS partner, not from MS itself - and this mat result in an understandable if unfortunatel backlash from MS against it's University and other partners. They would be wise to consider the longer term effects of this, as these partnerships are mutually beneficial and good at developing MS's longer term relationships with other organisations, and a few hundred meg of old source code is hardly likely to be a significant issue. If it were Longhorn code that had escaped, then they might be worrying more.
Storm in a teacup? Conspiracy theorists, your time has come? Neither: somewhere in between. Microsoft's rivals can benefit? Hardly. Most people who are knowledgeable are aware of how Windows does its stuff - in order to program it effectively you get to see a lot of the inner workings. The source code is littered with profanities. So what? I get frustrated when programming, and whilst I don't put comments in my code that I wouldn't want others to read, I can understand a culture where it doesn't actually matter - and anyway, people were not expected to read them anyway.
Where it came from is a bigger issue, not least because Microsoft releases source code to its operating systems to select Universities and individuals for research purposes, and they tend not have such secure networks as MS itself. So my guess is that it was hacked, or leaked, from a MS partner, not from MS itself - and this mat result in an understandable if unfortunatel backlash from MS against it's University and other partners. They would be wise to consider the longer term effects of this, as these partnerships are mutually beneficial and good at developing MS's longer term relationships with other organisations, and a few hundred meg of old source code is hardly likely to be a significant issue. If it were Longhorn code that had escaped, then they might be worrying more.
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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