Windows Source Code Leaked!

[Tagrineth]

They already know where it came from.

It is indeed a real segment of 2k's code...

And tbh I don't think ANYTHING will come of this.

And further... how the fuck can people complain about MS's "shitty OSes" when they have two hundred fucking million lines of code? I'd say a fair number of bugs and security holes would be entirely forgivable, considering. O_O

 

[slinga]

Tagrineth: Having 200 million+ lines of code is poor security design in the first place. Of course there are going to be bugs and exploits. Forgivable? Why? For home users like us it's not a big deal, but companies pay MS top dollar, they should expect secure code.

 

[gameboy900]

Umm...200 million is way too much. Closer to 30 million at most.

Keep in mind that does include all the extra libraries like IE, DirectX and any other ADDON libraries MS has made over the past (ADO, MDAC, ActiveX, COM, COM+....and a ton more).

I'd say the core libraries for Windows are probably in the range of 3-5 million lines of code and it wouldn't surprise me that a good portion of that is in there only to allow support for older applications.

I mean shit minus device drivers and the explorer gui windows is essientially 3 files (6 if you count the loaders).

 

[Curtis]

30 Million is still a lot of code.

I mean, hell, Nedry from jurassic Park (or was it Arnold?) was bitching about the "system" being 1 million lines of code! And look what happened to them!

 

[gameboy900]

Yes but he was also by himself and not in a team of over 300 programmers. But hey the fat fuck deserved what he got anyway.

 

[slinga]

This explains the unix flavor of the code: Windows Source Leak Traces Back to Mainsoft .

 

[it290]

I think people have a right to bitch -- for the reasons listed above; but also, the linux kernel in and of itself has ~5 million lines of code- that doesn't include the stuff that makes up the rest of the OS, and the people working on linux obviously aren't as well funded as MS. I'm sure OSX has a fair amount of code it as well.

Although it's not generally the security holes themselves that people bitch about, it's MS's policy towards them. They've been getting better with the patches, but they still have a track record of denying the existence of holes for some period of time. I don't think their OSes are as terrible (anymore) as people make them out to be, but still, I don't see how you can defend a company with _nearly unlimited resources_ and say they couldn't have done any better.

 

[Alexvrb]

Could be as high as 40 million, but above that and you start wondering how many lines of whitespace are in it.

Err anyway, if there wasn't anything left to fix, why would you ever upgrade? Never ever fix all the bugs! It'll be 50% harder to sell them a new buggy version if the old buggy version isn't that old and isn't that buggy.

 

[slinga]

Err anyway, if there wasn't anything left to fix, why would you ever upgrade? Never ever fix all the bugs! It'll be 50% harder to sell them a new buggy version if the old buggy version isn't that old and isn't that buggy.

The sad part is, you are 100% right. The company I worked for last summer was upgrading their WinNT servers only for reason, because MS would no longer patch their machines when new vulnerabilities arise. There was no other business to upgrade, all of their exisiting servers worked fine.

 

[gameboy900]

Well they gotta stop supporting old software eventually. I think they just stopped support for Win98 and NT 4 just last month.

 

[slacker52]

i wonder how bad 1.0 was

 

[Curtis]

Originally posted by gameboy900@Feb 14, 2004 @ 02:41 PM

Well they gotta stop supporting old software eventually. I think they just stopped support for Win98 and NT 4 just last month.

I thought they were going to kill off 98 support, but reversed the decision soon after. Not sure about NT4 - thought they stopped that years ago...

EDIT: Just to update, Arstechnica have an article that is confirming that the source leak is relatively small (about 15% of the total code) and that the code was stolen from a computer running Linux. Make of that what you will.

 

[slinga]

And the first attack.

Pretty interesting actually, an integer overflow that's created by a well-crafted bitmap.

 

[it290]

Hmm, that is interesting, I wonder what the bitmap in question consists of.

 

[Alexvrb]

pr0n

 

[it290]

Somehow I had a feeling somebody was gonna say that.