Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Employee Allegedly Hacked AltaVista
An anonymous reader writes "Seattle PI has a story about Microsoft employee who worked on the MSN Search initiative having allegedly broken into AltaVista computers and stolen prorietary technology. However, the illegal break-in happened before he was hired by Microsoft. The question is, did Microsoft know anything about it? How much code was being written into MSN Search?"
The question is, did Microsoft know anything about it? How much code was being written into MSN Search?
And if you RTFA, those questions are still unanswered.
The man in question here was a former AltaVista employee, and he allegedly downloaded the secret source code for the crawling engine after leaving the company, but before working for Microsoft.
It seems that so far Microsoft has not been implicated in the investigation at all, and nobody's accusing him of having introduced AltaVista's code into MSN's project. It's an interesting possiblity, but so far there's no authorty making that link.
But, if the guy is such an expert inthe search field, isn't it posible that source code was his? How would that impact everything from a legal point?
When you write code in a work for hire relationship, you do not own the code you wrote. Your employer owns it, and when you and your employer break up you lose all access to it.
Besides, the charges right now don't center around the source code, they center arround the claim that he illegally accessed a computer system (by using a friend's account) and then caused electronic "damage" to it. This really is more of an ex-employee hacking case than a source code ownership issue right now.
Unfortunately for all, he was fired (and later died) after stealing & reselling large amounts of company software. Some details at http://www.compaqsucks.com/wwwboard/messages/545.h tml. But he'd been with MS for several years at that point.
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Not to mention that Microsoft offers much larger portions of their source code through their Shared Source licensing program. If they had stolen code in their software I doubt they'd let the world have a peak.
>Even if you didn't remember one single line, how'll you prove it?
Well, they also typically make you sign a non-compete. They don't have to prove that you are re-using source code you wrote for them, they can go and get a TRO to keep you from working at a company that they can convince a judge is their competition.
In my admittedly limited experience, this doesn't happen that much, tho. Only twice at the company I've worked for the last 10+ years.
Once two guys quit at the same time and the higher-ups found out they were going to work for a company in the same field -- they sent the lawyers out after them and threatened to make their lives miserable if they went to work at this other company (and made sure the hiring company knew about it). Both of them ended up staying here (and got a nice settlement offer, rumor has it).
The other case was a little different. Guy left and said he was changing careers, going into stock brokerage business or something (burned a lot of bridges too when he left -- lots of bad feelings with his boss). He turned up months later at a meeting with a client working for a competing company. Someone must have decided to make an example, because they went after him like he was OJ Simpson trying to join an all-white country club.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
It's also not a new practice for Microsoft. Examine the David Cutler case, where Microsoft hired away one of the core developers of VMS to help create a new, server class operating system. That new operating system was called "NT", and Mr. Cutler hired away his old team from DEC and pasted in quite a lot code from the planned but cancelled "Prism" release of VMS. The lawsuits were quite nasty, and DEC decided not to press for triple damages on every copy of NT sold in return for NT always being supported on the new Alpha chips from DEC. Of course, Intel then stole the technologies of the Alpha to use in the Pentium IV, so that guarantee became pretty useless pretty soon, and the NT on Alpha actually never worked well due to its lack of support. But hey, better to settle for a pittance in out-of-court settlement rather than actually make the thieves pay for it by breaking their fiscal back in court, right? After all, what's good for a big business is good for America, right? And it's better to let a thief get away with it and save your lawyer's fees than make sure they can never do it again and teach a valuable lesson to other large corporations, right? The hard lessons of David Cutler stealing VMS to create NT worked really well to prevent Intel stealing the Alpha technologies to create the Pentium IV, right?
Pardon my anonymity, but I did used to work with the guy. The speculation in the comments here is pretty disguisting, as is the implication that he would give/use said source code to Microsoft.
To be sure, he's a smart guy, and doesn't need to. He might have screwed up by doing what he did, but being code-smart doesn't make you common sense-smart.
The 'hack' was to demonstrate the insecurity of certain machines at AltaVista. The lost data was recovered in a couple days. He'd pointed out the insecurity of these machines a number of times and nothing was done about it until after he accessed the machine.
The alleged stolen source code was a backup of the tree on a FireWire drive he created when the source repo was being moved.
While I'm not condoning what he did, he shouldn't be crucified for it. The punishment in the US regarding [cr|h]acking does not fit the crime. In this case, the "victim" is a huge corporation (Yahoo) who was damaged far below the necssary $100k necessary for FBI involvement and stands little to benefit from this predatory proscecution of its former employee other than the PR stunt that is connecting him to Microsoft and the new MSN search.
I'm gonna be fucking sick.
I am sure this guy didn't list 'hacked altavista' on his
resume, or wait, maybe he did.....
Its ok though, if he was really top notch it would have been google.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Kinda what I thought, as in "so what" and "perhaps THAT'S why the new MSN test search is SO DAMN SLOW".
And if you read the story (RTFA?), you also learn that this guy was a lead developer of the codebase he hacked into, so it's probible he already knew enough to splice it into The New MSN, if he's like 99.9% of all techies, he already has copies of some of the code burned to CD from when he worked there.
This is really not a Microsoft issue, although Slashdotters will wet their pants over this, blind to the fact this took place YEARS before this guy came to M$, and his "excuse" is kind of understandable: He wanted to see how "his" baby had evolved since he left AV. Maybe, maybe not. But still not the "Micro$oft" smoking gun....
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Repeat after me. A spider is not a search engine. A search engine is not a spider.
You seem to be all up in alarm because Microsoft might come out and beat up google. I wouldn't worry about it myself. To begin with, all those videos are going to be mostly useless unless they do a "video search" similar to google's "image search". What good that would be I don't know. You seem to have forgotten that even though MS may have more content to search than google, they still have to sift through all that stuff. They still have to grep it, grok it, cull it, and then format the results in a high-availability high-performance cluster of database servers in order to compete with google. Even for MS that's a herculean task.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
Unless your contract says otherwise, any code you write for your employer is theirs under copyright law as a "work for hire". So if you want your innovative work to be yours, you should make sure your contract says so.
If I come up with a solution for a problem am I supposted to forget the solution and never use it again if I go elsewhere?
Unless the company patents the solution, you can use it. You just can't reuse the code. But if you write a reimplementation while having acess to the original code, you might have trouble convincing a court that your new code is not a derived work.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
I think he incorrectly stated Pentium IV. DEC did sue Intel over infringements on 10 of their technologies used in Alpha chips for the inclusion in Pentium Pro and Pentium II. They ended up settling the case by cross licensing and Intel's purchase of DEC's manufacturing operations.
What's more telling is this quote from DEC v. Intel: TRUE FACTS
Mr. Palmer quoted a passage from the Corporate Focus feature in the August 26, 1996 Wall Street Journal. In the article, entitled "Intel Shifts Its Focus To Long-Term Original Research," Intel COO Craig Barrett is quoted as saying, "Now that we're at the head of the class and there's nothing left to copy."
Said CEO Andy Grove, "We're a big banana now... we can't rely on others to do our research and development for us."
I am working from my memory here. IIRC, Intel was scared silly over the potential of IBM-Apple alliance (which then included Motorola over Apple's uneasiness to be allied with IBM alone) to create an uber-chip called PowerPC. Intel was stuck with 486 without having a clear direction where to go. DEC approached Intel and they discussed the possibility of Intel adopting DEC's technologies. But Intel decided to work alone and created the Pentium line, surprising everybody including AIM. It turned out that Intel managed to do so by using DEC's technologies.
Mozilla wasnt the first browser to use tabs...I cant say for sure but I think it was opera.And their implementation is still superior to mozilla`s.
How about something crazy, like, say, searching videos?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Examine the David Cutler case, where Microsoft hired away one of the core developers of VMS to help create a new, server class operating system.
Umm, Cutler quit DEC in a fit of pique over the amount of autonomy he had to run projects. He took his team with him.
Now, Microsoft aren't above poaching staff. They did it to Borland, everyone knows. But Cutler is a different story.
NT on Alpha actually never worked well due to its lack of support.
NT on Alpha didn't get much support 'cos no-one bought it! All the Alpha users were running their windows apps under FX!32 and running OpenVMS to use their CAD and CFD packages and whatnot. Same story with NT on MIPS and PowerPC, no-one bought 'em.
Don't even argue with me on this, 'cos I was one of those people. I-DEAS and Fluent most of the time, the occasional Word doc, that's how people used their Alphas.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)