32TB of Windows 10 internal builds, core source code leak online

There are two levels of debugging symbols. One is released with every Windows build, for end-users reporting back stack traces and the like. These are of the second more granular level - private debugging symbols available to developers only.

1. How would Microsoft prove that they saw the code?

2. If microsoft sued wine devs it would be horrible for Microsofts public image. They won't do it.

3. I hope the WINE devs don't listen to you.

Hiya - I wrote the article. What's happened is that the Beta Archive folks have now deleted (or in the process of deleting) the private material that was uploaded to the BA FTP. There most definitely was non-officially-released internal Microsoft files in the archive, regardless of BA's intentions, such as the Shared Source Kit, the ARM64 Windows Server build, the Mobile Adaption Kit, and various prerelease versions of Windows.

We've updated the story to explain why things aren't what they seem. Essentially, the files at the heart of the matter were there (we screenshotted them and saved copies of the forum posts) at time of writing, and they were removed later on Friday.

In terms of the 32TB: that's the full decompressed dump of Windows files uploaded to BA. From what I understand, Microsoft hasn't released 32TB of public Insider material, so obviously there's extra sauce in the mix.

That includes, yes, copies of officially released Insider builds plus confidential private stuff that should never have left Microsoft, let alone turned up in BA. We make this clear in the story - I'm starting to feel the headline could have been better to make this clearer rather than grabbing the biggest figure. I am beginning to regret this.

BA can twist and complain all it likes - but stuff that was confidential within Microsoft ended up in their FTP archive (and some is still in there, such as the ARM64 stuff). The next stage of this story will be to uncover how exactly did this material escape Redmond.

C.

> 1. How would Microsoft prove that they saw the code?

Get the court to order discovery on all of your computers. They could probably also get subpoenas for the source code hosting sites to reveal relevant access logs. Or someone could admit to reading the source code someplace public, like a bug tracker. Or they could argue that the choice of variable names and minor details of algorithm details are too close to be coincidence. A jury convicted Google because of rangeCheck, after all.

> 2. If microsoft sued wine devs it would be horrible for Microsofts public image. They won't do it.

No it wouldn't, particularly not if they had a strong case (e.g., someone bragging about it). If you think MS looks bad for suing people for stealing the code, then you'd have to think the FSF looks bad for suing people for violating the GPL and stealing the code of, say, Linux.

> 3. I hope the WINE devs don't listen to you.

I hope they don't listen to you. The repercussions are quite large--it's not unimaginable that shutting down the WINE project could result from a lost case. These cases do happen, and defendants do lose (Oracle v. Google is a notable recent one, and that's based on IMHO fairly weak evidence). There's a reason that projects that do major reverse engineering for interoperability have rather elaborate procedures for doing so.