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

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.

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?

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

[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!

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.

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.

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 "$*" {} \;

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?

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.

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.