Microsoft Developers Hid a Secret Puzzle in Windows Backgrounds as They Knew Images Would Leak (betanews.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft developers working on Windows 8 created a puzzle and embedded it in the wallpapers used for internal builds of the operating system. The team knew that the images would leak out to the public -- and probably the internal builds of Windows -- so they decided to have some fun with it. Over the course of numerous builds, the puzzle was developed -- but only one person ever solved it! Over the weekend, Jensen Harris -- a former group program manager of Microsoft Office and Microsoft director leading the team working on the redesign of Windows 8 -- took to Twitter to come clean about the secret puzzle. He explained that it was common for internal test builds of Windows to have wallpapers that were not intended for public release, but said that messages tended to be included to discourage leaking: "Traditionally, these wallpapers included text embedded in them threatening to throw people in jail if they leaked the build, blah blah, substantial penalty for early withdrawal, not all coins go up in value (some go down!), etc. etc. We wanted to try a more elegant tact. So early in Windows 8, we created a wallpaper that was a combination of the text the lawyers wanted us to use with an attempt to appeal to people's better nature...thus the "shhh... let's not leak our hard work" series of wallpapers was born."

Comments

Re:Wow

[damn_registrars]

Pirating earlier versions of windows had a purpose, as there was generally improvement with each iteration. Windows 7 was a marginal improvement over XP (which was hardly at all an improvement over Windows 2000). But Microsoft never gave any reason to expect 8 to be an improvement over 7, and indeed it wasn't.

Sure, some people pirated it just to pirate it. Make some sort of pointless statement or something. I can see that. I'm just really surprised it was pirated in large enough numbers - and at that with enough people pirating it repeatedly through the development cycle - that anyone noticed this.

I guess that's a better hobby than cooking meth or clubbing baby seals, but I can imagine plenty of more productive things one could do with time.