Some Windows 2000 Source Code Leaked

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3485545.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/35564.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/35547.html

This is bad bad bad bad. :( I heard the news yesterday, and I was very worried. I'm glad to learn today that only part of the source code was leaked. There are still 7 secretly known vulnerabilities that have yet to be patched, and now they are much easier for black hat hackers to find. Plus I'm sure they'll find some other yet to be discovered flaws in the Windows source code.

All I can say is... back up your data, people!

Apparantly the source code for Mac OS X has been released too. Same with Linux. What are we going to do?

Revert back to DOS!

Apparantly the source code for Mac OS X has been released too. Same with Linux. What are we going to do?

Huh? I really don't understand your humor. :hmm:

Open Source... :D

ABF got it. OS X and Linux are both open source so their underlying code is readily available.

Haha, I missed that.

How? It was so obvious... unless you know nothing about Linux (or what OSX is based on)...

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/biztech/02/13/microsoft.source/index.html

Linux yes, OSX no.

Its based on Unix/Linux, I forget which...

OSX is actually based on Darwin, a form of Unix. And I'm no idiot. I know Linux is open source.

Microsoft's source code being open is vastly different than Linux's. With Linux, there is a whole community based on and devoted to its openness. It's a well esablished community and has a controlled environment for its openness. Windows source code is, however, not. For starters, the Windows source code is the holy grail for any hacker or experienced programmer, because of its secrecy, forbideness, and overall popularity. But due to it being illegal to aquire it, mainly only black hat hackers (who have no respect for software licenses) will seek to aquire it. They may just be curious to see what the code looks like, how well it was written, and the comments in it (which I hear contains some profanity from some disgruntled Microsoft employees), or they may scour for an unfound security flaw, and easily take advantage of it.

Microsoft did not want to release their source code. They were not prepared for this. This is not a controlled open source environment under the GNU license. Many hackers hate Microsoft and the people who use Microsoft's products. The source code is one of the greatest tools someone like that can have.

True... I guess we have to hope this 15% doesn't include too much bad stuff? But it could get Microsoft to actually work on fixing their code for once...

Yeah, although I agree with open source for the most part, it just wouldn't work for MS in the current environment. Too many people hate them and those people would far outweigh the people who would help MS fix problems before they were exploited by a black hat.

True... but MS deserves a lot of the hatred it gets...

Not saying they don't deserve the hatred. I'm one of the many haters because of what they did to Apple back in the day. I always wonder, though, if Apple would be just like Microsoft is today if they had gained the upper-hand in the 80s instead of Microsoft. Apple does a lot of monopolistic things, but they can't really be branded a monopoly with 5% market share can they?

Yeah, like not allowing anyone else to make Macs? Imagine if IBM had been able to do that with the PC and killed off Compaq somehow... would they have won? I don't know...