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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?"
Microsoft acknowledged yesterday that Chavet is a Microsoft employee but declined to name the team on which he works.
Too Obvious
However, three other people with knowledge of Chavet's Microsoft employment confirmed that he has been working on the MSN Search effort
Too unconfirmed
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?
Sounds like someone in this Monopoly(TM) just landed on Go To Jail.
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.
Someone tell Ken Brown of AdTI. I hear they're very interested in exposing the truth of this kind of thing. nonliteral copying, thieving code, stolen from__ oh it's OK if it's given to MS and they'll ignore it?
RST
AltaVista demands that anyone using MSN search pay them $699.
This is an example of what can happen when you don't have a centrally controlled company bearing the responsibility and managing the Intellectual Prop... oh wait, nevermind.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
In other news, school-age child packs own lunch.
way to go, they could at least have attacked a good search engine if they wanted to be better competitors.
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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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.
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
What ... Microsoft stealing ideas from other people ? Never .. Next thing we know IE will come with tabbed browsing ...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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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I always make sure that I have copies of the source code of applications I have worked on so in case something happens with my employer I WON'T have to use nefarious means to retrieve what is mine.
I know many might say that employers own the intellectual property that you generate while working for them, but I don't agree. If I develop something innovative whiile working there, it's mine. 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?
Let them sue me. Hard to get water from a stone.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
The headline misspelled "embraced and extended"
Sincerely,
WH Gates
A certain site I help run has shown what many other people are seeing: MSN's search robot is absolutely going crazy lately. It purposely retrieves files of all kinds - it's done about 4.5GB of traffic on my site because it's downloading large videos! What's a search engine going to do with all these videos?
Besides that, it visits the forums as often as many of the regulars do. It's FAR more aggressive than googlebot.
It's rather obvious that MSN's new search engine is going to be both more complete and more up-to-date than anything else that's out there. I love google right now, but I wonder how they're going to stand up to MS.
--
Ikaruga scoreboard (supports netranking)
Never used Altavista? I thought [i]I[/i] was young. Noob. :p
Lalala
Reuters
katu
Microsoft is already appealing a $0.5 million fine for pircay of other people's code in France.
To cut a long story short, IIRC, MS bought a company X. Company X had a license to USE some code from Company Z. MS effectively began to assume they owned it, so Company Z had to court to stop MS pirating their software.
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.
Free XBox, PS2
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.
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'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?
Now if Linux really had some code in it that was unknowingly copied in by someone, is this how you would want it and its creators treated, because of the acts of one morally deprived individual?? No, most would say it wasnt their fault.
Id have to side with Microsoft on this one, They obviously knew he had Altavista knowldege but i wouldnt hold their feet to the fire because i dont think they knew the extent of what this mans "experience" was.
Microsoft is in a real tough spot with keeping their secrets secret while ensuring that Altavista is treated fairly. People who steal software source code suck.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
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
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
Shame on the AltaVista legal and personnel departments for not making their employees sign non-compete clauses to prevent employees from working on the exact same type of technology for competitors.
How much code was being written into MSN Search?
Obviously not enough...
Do you have ESP?
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.
Searching "Laurent Chavet" on google, I found some of his posts to the Linux-Kernel mailing list.4 .2/0589.html
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/010
His e-mail address is @av.com, that is altavista, so it must be him.
..that means the meta-keyword 7X trick should get me to the top of the search results on MSN Search as it did back in the late 90s. Anyone want to bid on the first 10 positions of any English search term? I'm your daddy.
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.
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.
Moderators, please mod parent as -1 "Dick".
Whilst Cutler may have been one of the people that wrote VMS he did so for DEC. It doesn't matter if he wrote it or not, DEC owned the code, and probably also owned many of the ideas that the code contained in the form of patents. Since Cutler did not own the IP here if he did cut and paste in code from an aborted version of VMS then he, and by extension Microsoft, did steal, unless DEC sold had the rights to that code and the patents to Cutler or Microsoft. I don't believe such a sale was made.
As for Intel and Alpha, as has been written elsewhere the parent post was wrong about it being the P4, it was the Pentium that this issue revolved around. Whilst Intel may now own the Alpha they didn't when they made the Pentium, and chronology is important here.
Besides some bad decisions by the management of DEC this stealing of IP by Intel and Microsoft were major contributors to the downfall of DEC.
"However, the illegal break-in happened before he was hired by Microsoft. The question is, did Microsoft know anything about it? "
Yeah, I'm sure that was a bullet item on his resume.
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