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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?"
For years there had been idle speculation about how much stolen code (GPL or otherwise) was in Windows. Yet when the portions of Windows 2000 source code were leaked, MS was found to be squeaky clean. But don't let me stand between you and inevitable tin foil hats.
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Because, most companies make you sign an agreement that anything you write becomes the property of the company, so you just cant pick up and take everything you've written with you when you leave.
According to the FBI affidavit, Chavet told investigators that he worked on the AltaVista source code while at the company and logged into the AltaVista system after leaving because he "was 'curious' about the evolution of the source code after his departure."
Curiosity was framed damnit! Curiosity is always framed. It's ignorance that did it.
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Orkut code was claimed to be stolen recently.
Its completely the employees fault. I am no big Microsoft supporter but nothing they can do about this if the guy chose to do it by himself.
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The question is: Will AV pull a Darl McBride, and claim that MSN search was based on AV, and should cease and desist immediately, and start suing everyone who uses MSN search for IP infringements?
Naturally they will in that case refuse to show the sources of AV, making it impossible for Microsoft to prove the opposite.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I don't believe that source code theft is really such a problems for such companies - I really really doubt microsoft would use much of altavista's code even if they legally could! (It's so unbelievably much work to figure out someone elses mature code....)
However, employee education leakage is far more important. The raison d'etre for some of those architectural choices, or experiences with certain emergent pattern in large scale systems, and similarly complex issues are very, very valuable.
So really - feel sorry for microsoft... this just gives them bad PR, potentially opens them up for lawsuits (however unfounded), and generally doesn't do them any good..
I wonder where the claim of 5000 dollars damage comes from? The article says he claims he was curious about the progression of the product (which honestly, however illegal, I sympathize with - you put so much of yourself in these systems and then all of a sudden you're not allowed to know anything about them... arg!), so maybe it's all just much ado about nothing.
Let's call Uncle Darl! He's an expert on allegedly stolen source code. There has to be a money-grubbing lawsuit somewhere in this.
Are you an open source warrior?
There's a lot more to getting accurate, relevant search results than gathering cache. The question is, how will MS stand up to Google, not the other way around.
I've heard much whining from lawyers (often repeated by journalists) about the process of open source projects accepting code without doing exhaustive searches to ensure that said code does not belong to someone else.
This despite the fact that opensource codee can be seen by all, including those who own the copyrights, and project leaders can be notified, "These lines of code in these files are ours. Remove them please."
Alta Vista may have had their code stolen by a Microsoft Project.
How can Alta Vista possibly know?
If it were an open source project, it would be obvious, Alta Vista developers could verify by inspection.
Are microsoft going to allow Alta Vista, their commercial competition, to see their code?
Open Source code is the least likely to have infringed copyright, becuase the copyright owner can see it, at any time, under zero uncumberance to their daily work.
If proprietary software contains copyright infringing code, it takes rather obstruce mechanisms. Eg Andrew Tridgell noticing a proprietary company's accidental release note "Fixes bug xxxx in samba" or now this story.
Free Software code is less likely to be stolen than any other code you didn't write yourself.
Why don't journalists get that when it is obvious?
isn't it obvious that the reason they need to crawl the web MORE aggressive than googlebot is because msn doesn't have as much of the web as googlebot have?
i think it will slow done once it's reached X number of pages
Now be honest, how many software developers here have copies of source code from every company they've ever worked for? I sure do. I've never used any non-trivial portion of it (especially since each software job I've had has been in a radically different field) nor would I, mainly because I'd probably want to completely rewrite it anyway :), but I just hate the idea of "losing" something I worked so hard on, even if it justs sits on some dusty CD somewhere and isn't really "mine". They're essentially digital "trophies" I suppose. :)
On the other hand, if I someday go to work for a direct competitor of a company I used to work for, I'd sure as hell make sure I had deleted most of the code I had from the previous company. I definitely wouldn't keep the entire project tree at the very least.
I don't work in software, so let me throw out this question. Don't they make you sign an NDA when you work on something like a big search company's search technology? I know they do this in some other tech businesses, making it really hard for you to work for a competitor on the same sort of product without violating your agreement. The reason I ask is that I'm curious how they could hire him for MSN search in the first place.
As far as the stolen code goes, since it happened before he was hired by MS, you can't really blame them. I was also thinking, if he worked on it himself anyway, couldn't he probably replicate most of the functionality even without the actual code in front of him? Then again, the article says, "Chavet told investigators that he worked on the AltaVista source code while at the company and logged into the AltaVista system after leaving because he 'was curious about the evolution of the source code after his departure.'" so maybe he was just trying to steal the most up to date ideas possible. :-)
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
In a case like this, open-source is actually better. You could just look through the code to see if they actually stole the code and used it in a competing program. Quick, easy, simple. However in this case, if Altavista suspects their code is in MSN, they will most likely have to drag MS through a nasty long court case to see the code to check. They are not guaranteed to win. It will take a lot of money in lawyer's fees and drain people's attention from the business. It will take ages and ages (giving MS chance to use the code to make profit and take business from Altavista or to remove the code and hide the evidence). So in a code-stealing case like this, open-source is actually better than closed source as the case of "did they use the code" is something that can be resolved without an expensive long court case.
Well unless the company is like SCO I suppose...But if SCO had attacked a closed-source company, we'd still be going through a long arduous trial because it's just SCO's tactics, rather than a problem with open-source in general.
This utterly incorrect in any State of the United States, and probably in most first world countries.
C//
Yeah and also that damn Einstein who stole the work of Newton first then butchered most of the stuff and claimed that it was obsolete and gave us that relativity thingy. Because we all know that all the inventions and discoveries of human kind are never based on the previous discoveries of the people before us. Of course this is absolutely not the basic principle of existence of our whole civilization. We all Gates haters know that.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
I'm sorry, but when 90% of the population uses a word a certain way, that's what it means, even if the technical among us recognize vital distinctions among the different words.
Calling them morons doesn't help. Explaining the difference to newbies might help.
You're right that he's not got much common sense...
Feel free to bitch about your employer's poor security. If you're a permanent employee, and confident of your position, hack in to show it can be done and report your findings to the powers that be. (I'd still recommend telling your boss you're going to try, though.)
But for the love of God, don't leave a company, then hack in to their systems just to show them that it can be done. You've left - your responsibility to their security has ended, and if you do it then, people will merely suspect your motives.
I wouldn't dream of hacking into an ex-employer's systems, no matter how benign or helpful I thought I was being, unless I had their express permission to try.
Maybe it's just me. And anyone else with some common sense.
Umm.. how exactly would the guts of Dartmouth Basic (a compiled language, written for the PDP processor composing hundreds of K of source) help MS create Altair Basic (an interpreted language, in 8080 assembly that was less than 4k in size and was only barely similar to DM Basic)?
Methinks you've been listening to too many urban myths and jumping to conclusions.
I have read a comment from gates in which he admits to dumpster diving for operating system listings to understand how others wrote code, but nothing that says he used Dartmouth Basic listings as his basis for BASIC. Are you going to suggest that looking at the Linux kernel formed the basis of Slashcode?
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