Windows NT4 and 2000 code leaked to the Internet

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Geeky | 0 Comments 

Several sources have reported (this was the first) that part of the source code of both Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 was leaked a few days ago from Microsoft to the Internet. Some analysts have acknowledged the source code as the real one though they have confirmed that very little could be done with it since some parts are missing. The code seems to have come from MainSoft, according to this other article. MainSoft is a partner of Microsoft and they are one of the two partners that have access to the source code of Windows. MainSoft specializes in porting Windows software to Unix platforms, and for example they ported IE and Windows Media Player 6.x to Unix. The code was stored in a Linux machine but it is still unclear how that machine was compromised.

The consequences are plentyful: the easiest thing one can derive from this is that more bugs that could help to spawn more deadly and dangerous worms than ever. That'd be cool (ok, maybe not), but let's not forget that the MyDoom worm and its variants (the fastest spreading Internet worm ever) were developed without needing to even look at such source code. Also, this proves that security through obscurity is not the way... Let's look at the success of the Linux operating systems and other successful open-source projects: the more eyes looking at it, the better and faster bugs can be fixed and new features can be added. Perhaps Microsoft is ashamed that the whole world will be able to clearly see how things are done in there, and why Microsoft Windows has such bad track of security holes and bugs.

There are more consequences that can even do good to Microsoft in the not so distant future. Now that everybody has been able to peek at the code, any notorious improvement in projects such as WINE (a Windows emulation layer for Linux), Samba (free and better implementation of Microsoft's file-transfer protocol) or even ReactOS (an OS trying to achieve binary compatibility with Windows 2000), could be stopped by Microsoft alleging that they have made use of copyrighted technology. If they can in any way prove that any of those projects used the stolen code, even if only for "inspiration", they would be able to completely stop the project. And *that* is really the scary part. To tell you the truth, I don't give dog shit about any new worm targetted at Windows system: after all, people have it well deserved for being so unconscious and for helping a company like Microsoft to dominate the market. I for one am glad that left the world of Windows many years ago...

Anyway, people believe that Windows is the cheapest alternative out there because let's face it, for most of them it costs nothing. As some of you know, I work for quite a big company and they are standardized on Windows 2000 but just this week we received an urgent email from the IT service letting us know that our machines were going to be remotely and automatically updated before two days unless we manually did it ourselves. Can you imagine how many man hours the service desk guys had to work to download the patches, test them, make sure that they work in all the possible configurations of laptops that we all have? And then, they must have had lots of fun seeing the remote installation servers crawl to its knees when thousands, literally, thousands of people tried to pull those patches (the update was about 140Mb) Believe me, the premium price you pay in money for OS X of the premium price you pay as a little bit more of your time for configuring Linux is later on worth the effort...

And now, let me briefly show you the safest and more secure to run Windows XP in a computer: in an emulated sandbox in my PowerBook G4, running OS X 10.3.2. Look below:

Yes, that's really Windows XP running in a Mac. The speed is of course not as fast as when it runs natively but it works and it is usable. And even if I get a worm, I don't care that much