Microsoft apparently used pirated software in the creation of parts of the Windows XP distribution, and the evidence is right there on the Windows XP disk (I just verified it myself)...

http://www.macwelt.de/news/szene/29407/

(sorry, only German language article right now, but just use a translator, or wait a few hours until this baby hits the fans internationally... )

OMFG........ I hope the translation aint true

Woodmann

Hope it isn't true?!

Dang man, I want it to be true . I am amused to no end by this article.

As I said above, I verified it myself, it's right there in the files alright, check it out yourself:

Look at any of the WAV-files in this dir in your Windows XP:

C:\Windows\Help\Tours\WindowsMediaPlayer\Audio\Wav

In the last bytes of the files, you will find the name "Deepz0ne", which is a founding member of the famous audio warez group Radium...

Hehe, amazing. Not the first time MS have been caught out either, anyone here remember the "Netscape Engineers are Weiners" thing in one of the IE dll's?

hahahaha, I would call that funny (by the way, who on earth discovers this... i mean, these wav files are the last files on my harddisk i want to view with a hex-editor)

I wonder if theres something similar at executable code level. That is "third part" code in the deeping sections of MS Apps, the Windows inclusive.

Well duh, this is the advantage of closed-source code, who knows where it "really" came from? Ever see the movie Antitrust?

It wouldn't be that hard either, with appropriate cracker tools, to for example, rip code from an app you like, and create a new GUI for it, and sell your own alternative.

An what about those virus companies - perhaps creating the illness AND the cure? Who can really know?

-nt20

My paranoid self has been asking that question for some time.
Do you know what happens to McAfee and Norton sales every time some one scores big with a fast spreading virus or worm?

What about commercial software protectionists. Do they hate or love crackers and RCE?

Closed source? Depends how "closed" you mean...

L:\Download\MICROSOFT.WINDOWS.2000.AND.NT4.SOURCE.CODE-SCENELEADER

Hmmm....so, potentially, with enough experience, I could rip the iPod transfer code from iTunes and make a Linux version?

My horizons sure are opening up :-D.

Yeah, sure, of course you can. While moving code between operating systems there are potentially a lot system calls and similar that would have to be translated in this process though, but I guess that's where the "enough experience" part comes in.

both. doublethink in full effect. The adversary is the cracker (at least according to their websites), yet ...

there's no reason to believe that they
- don't pirate their development tools
- don't download movies when they get home.
- don't crack & release competitor's product to make the other products look weak (and steal interesting protection ideas)

These things are still developed by humans, after all.

And I thought the were still putting all those Chimps into a room with manual typerwriters and computer junk and they were still waiting for the next great novel and the next great innovation in software.

Regards,

Yes, I've wondered from time to time if all these "holier than thou" developers that put such strong anticrack words out there really own their developement software.

-nt20

All these discussion could have a big end if all soft. related people in the world change their view forward open source development. All of us know that is perfectly possible make money with open source and after all software is something that "everyone" is able to put their hands and work with, making changes that he/she like.
No more fear, ideas is something that must be owned by humanity. After all nobody is owner of original work, so nobody must believe to be owner of something!

Ok, easy there now Stalin...

Plus, no one would buy their products if it wasn't for crackers. If crackers didn't exist, the shareware developers wouldn't need any fancy protection system.

False argument IMO disavowed. If crackers didn't exist, there would be no protection. So we're back in the 1980's when people just "borrowed" floppies from each other. Which is what caused the creation of copy protection. Which is what created crackers. So it's a vicious circle.

All together now: "Don't copy that floppy!"

Hehe, and for the people who don't know what Silver is referring to with that quote:

http://fnarg.com/floppy.html

Actually, it's not a circle. There's a difference between copy-protection and cracker-protection. Most shareware coders can write copy-protection, but can't write cracker-protection. The cracker-protection is what's (supposedly) offered by the commercial software protection products.

If a shareware coder can implement copy-protection and there were no crackers, then no one could illegally copy the shareware, and thus there is no circle.

Hm, but if we step back 15 years. People were copying floppies, and there were no crackers because there was nothing for them to crack. A few years on and protection started to appear to stop people copying. The challenge of defeating this protection is what created crackers, thus I think it's fair to say that creation of protection caused creation of crackers. There was definately an evolution though, through trainers and bootloaders (eg, fairlight's amiga bootloaders/trainers etc)...

I guess all the crackers were always here, they were just doing something else for a challenge. When copy protection appeared, they thought it would be fun to start on that.

Howdy,

Interesting discussion. What came first, the cracker or the egg

Woodmann

Or the broken cracker or the omelet?

Regards,