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?"

Comments

Seems like this is happening a lot lately...

[rd4tech]

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?

Re:Seems like this is happening a lot lately...

[arieswind]

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.

Re:Seems like this is happening a lot lately...

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Seems like this is happening a lot lately...

[Antique Geekmeister]

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?

Re:Seems like this is happening a lot lately...

[wideBlueSkies]

My company gets around this by forcing you to forfeit your options and other vested financial incentives if you quit and move to a company that they label as a competitor.

More corporate bullying. So since we're a banking firm, folks are forced to leave for mostly insurance, and other financial (like mutual fund houses), and even shipping companies like UPS. But nobody ever leaves our bank for another bank.

Unless the other bank wants you so badly that they compensate for the lost incentives. And they'd probably only do this for someone who's an expert at what they do. This brings us back to the original question..once you're there, how do you (or ou new employer) avoid getting sued because you're writing the same or similiar stuff?

wbs.

Bored of these games.

[Masque]

Sounds like someone in this Monopoly(TM) just landed on Go To Jail.

Microsoft not involved yet.

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Microsoft not involved yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that so far Microsoft has not been implicated in the investigation at all

Oh come on, why let the facts get in the way of bashing Microsoft? You're aware you're reading slashdot right?

Quick. someone tell

[rebeka thomas]

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?

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

AltaVista demands that anyone using MSN search pay them $699.

Warning

[ultrabot]

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.

Been there before

[m00nun1t]

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.

Re:Been there before

[stubear]

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.

Re:Been there before

[DrEldarion]

You just stop right there, mister. This is our Microsoft-bashing party and we're not going to have any silly things like "reason" and "logic" get in the way of our unbased accusations!

Why steal?

[m00nun1t]

Why steal - Microsoft hired one of the key guys behind Altavista, Daniel Feussner. He worked on microsoft.com search.

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.

Typo

[Anonymous Coward]

The headline misspelled "embraced and extended"

Sincerely,
WH Gates

MSN's new search will be HUGE...

[jerkface]

and this Altavista thing probably has nothing to do with it. As others have pointed out, Altavista doesn't have anything to offer anyway.

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.

Re:MSN's new search will be HUGE...

[Alan Hicks]

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.

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.

Already convicted

[csirac]

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.

Altavista source code

[Anonymous Coward]

#!/bin/sh
# (c)1988 Altavi^H^H^H^H^H^HMicrosoftCorp 2004
sleep 5
find /cache_last_updated_1994 -exec grep -i -l "$*" {} \;

what really happened

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:what really happened

[Tim Browse]

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.

You're right that he's not got much common sense...

Federal authorities allege that Laurent Chavet, a former AltaVista employee, illegally accessed the California company's computer system in March 2002 and June 2002, after he left AltaVista

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.

Do unto others...

[segfault_0]

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.

/. readers wets pants, reaches for new Depends...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Stealing is wrong, but AltaVista kinda sucks.

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....

Re:What in P4 is stolen from Alpha?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[ArcticCelt]

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.