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Windows XP source code has leaked

gizmodo.com.au

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Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#251

Post by noisem4ker »

taneq wrote: post #212
buran77 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The humorous but not wrong "consensus" was that you always had to skip a version. In this case 95 > not 98 > 98SE > not Me > XP (this was a bit of a departure because it was a successor to both the 9x and the NT lines) > not Vista > Win 7. And both XP and Win 7 were criticized at the beginning because they had to compete with very solid predecessors, and because they came with plenty of teething problems even if they…

This is because since at least ‘95, MS has alternated focus between base technology and polish/reliability/UX. The ones we think of as good (98SE, 2000/XP, 7) are the ones with the focus on polish. The ones we remember as flaky (ME, Vista, 8) are the ones with substantial new tech in them that hadn’t had the additional years of refinement.

I think Windows Me was just an attempt at making 98 more modern and multimedia-friendly. It was just bad, with no relevant upgrades at any layer of the stack.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#252

Post by beagle3 »

bayindirh wrote: post #183
shp0ngle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 has tons of under-the-hood improvements that are great, honestly. However, it also has a ton of advertisments everywhere, and those annoying auto-installing apps.

I don't use Windows day to day anymore but, my family has Windows 10 and I manage it. When I sit in the front of the computer, I feel like I'm inside the big space ship in the Wall-e. All the advertisements, forced consumerism and everything.

I had run tr0nscript on the computer I support for family a few years ago, and that made the experience almost reasonable.

I know tr0nscript has fallen out of favor since, don’t know the exact reasons. I did need to fix the hosts file to allow windows to get security updates - but otherwise, that machine still feels as usable as win7 except for the degraded shell (which could be replaced with classic shell, I guess, but I didn’t bother).

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#253

Post by Aachen »

cududa wrote: post #249
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it really does exist, the backdoor can simply be inserted during the last-minute compile before release. It would be invisible in the code repository, the vast majority of internal developers at Microsoft won't even see anything unusual. Also, I heard anecdotes that Microsoft already allowed governments to audit the source code of Windows under NDA on multiple occasions in the past. But if you cannot guarantee the…

This is correct. Back at least in the Vista days each public release had to be passed to the NSA to validate the encryption algorithms and implementation. I’d imagine they poked around a few other parts of the OS

> each public release had to be passed to the NSA

That sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory. Any references on this?

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#254

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #51
fimdomeio wrote: post #43

Forgeting about legality for a moment, this is great. Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached. It was also from a time where people still did not expect proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you. So it's great that this source will not be forever lost.

Nostalgia is, it seems, a hell of a drug.

I still have an XP laptop at work because it happens to have a serial port. Every time I use it I'm briefly shocked at how responsive everything is. That's on period hardware.

God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#255

Post by lou1306 »

optimiz3 wrote: post #135
kasabali wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't prove anything. People said it was crap because it was. Then SP1 was released with 1+ year and it became pretty good. By SP3 it was rock solid because that's 7 years of bug fixes keeping other changes to minimum. That's what giving bugs does to software, no surprise here.

Microsoft made a big security pivot during XP. Gates put his foot down and forced the company to reprioritize secure engineering over everything else during the SP(2?) timeframe.

They also made a pretty big push toward formal verification of drivers, which were often the culprit for insecure/unstable machines. Their SLAM model checker [0] was avant-garde (in industry terms, at least).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAM_project

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#256

Post by [deleted] »

oblio wrote: post #241
jononor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of user data collected in Windows 10 for example. Next to no user benefits, just value extracted for Microsoft. Automatic updates on reboot. For example when someone giving a presentation or class has to restart their computer for some reason (quite common in Windows still, or one just ran out of power). Boot up the computer, people waiting impatiently - and then have to wait for 5-30 minutes for the compu…

The telemetry is shady but the automatic updates are a... necessary evil. People would delay updates for MONTHS by clicking that postpone button. Windows is by design meant to be used by not very computer literate people and unfortunately these kinds of users need to be forced to do the right thing sometimes. As they said back in the day: "the user will do everything possible to see the dancing bears, including downl…

[deleted]

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#257

Post by christophilus »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #246
hnlmorg wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XP, when it was first released, was a more resource hungry and uglier version of Windows 2000. Win 2000 was amazing when it was released. Games (albeit not DOS ones) worked well, it was stable and really your only other options were worse (Mac OS 9 was less stable than Win 98, ME was a dumpster fire, Linux wasn't quite ready for the desktop and BeOS was awesome but barely supported). Then when XP was released, it had…

Yup. When saying "XP was great", people mean "XP SP2 and on" - for me, the move from W2k to WXP was "the same thing, now with Fischer-Price aesthetic!"

> Fischer-Price aesthetic

That is the perfect description. It’s one of the ugliest UIs I’ve ever experienced.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#258

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

oblio wrote: post #241
jononor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of user data collected in Windows 10 for example. Next to no user benefits, just value extracted for Microsoft. Automatic updates on reboot. For example when someone giving a presentation or class has to restart their computer for some reason (quite common in Windows still, or one just ran out of power). Boot up the computer, people waiting impatiently - and then have to wait for 5-30 minutes for the compu…

The telemetry is shady but the automatic updates are a... necessary evil. People would delay updates for MONTHS by clicking that postpone button. Windows is by design meant to be used by not very computer literate people and unfortunately these kinds of users need to be forced to do the right thing sometimes. As they said back in the day: "the user will do everything possible to see the dancing bears, including downl…

Da, it is for your own good comrade!

I really wish people who insist on claiming some right to control how users use their own computers would leave IT forever.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#259

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

sdfqasdghj wrote: post #83
rblatz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go months without needing to reboot windows, and have for over a decade. Typically if I need to reboot it’s due to an update or software that requires a reboot to install.

How? When I last used Windows it forced a reboot to do updates once a month. If I let it pick the time it was often a bad time.

O&O ShutUP 10. It will let you disable the automatic update nonsense (along with a bunch of other nonsense).

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#260

Post by beagle3 »

mindfulhack wrote: post #31

My immediate thought is whether researchers or investigative journalists will find cold hard US government backdoors. This is potentially big.

Plausible deniability where people can look is a huge thing. Even where people can’t Easily look - e.g. Intel ME “firmware”, it’s likely done as shoddy/buggy coding, so Intel can just look incompetent (and not downright malicious) when it does come out.

Russia and China aren’t buying any of this, and are fabricating their own chips. 5-Eyes are likely in on the thing so no reason for them to set up their own fab facilities.

But setting up your own software ecosystem is much easier (especially given Linux / BSD), even though it’s still expensive - so intelligence agencies would rather not give countries incentive to do so just because there’s a back door.

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