Gadgetopia

Microsoft came out and admitted yesterday that portions of the source code for Windows NT and Windows 2000 had been made available on the Internet.

They’re not sure just yet who is at fault — source code is made available to third-party vendors for development purposes, but those developers are sworn to secrecy, but somebody hosed the program. MS is not yet sure just how serious the breach is.

In an article on The Register, John Lettice comments that…

The impact of the leak is however massively more important for Microsoft than it is for the rest of the world, as it effectively blows the company’s ‘security via obscurity’ approach to smithereens. Over the past year or so it has, with much pomp and ceremony, unveiled its shared source programme as a counter to open source, while in the same period it has repeatedly stressed that it cannot disclose some aspects of its code to rivals for security reasons. If they could see it, it would leak, and then evil terrorists would be able to break into Windows more easily. Microsoft, incidentally, currently has the shared source web site as a ‘related link’ on the leak statement page. Are you entirely sure about this relationship, dahlinks?