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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.
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.