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Microsoft Opens Source to China
Posted by
michael
on Fri Feb 28, 2003 02:15 PM
from the not-part-of-the-axis-of-evil dept.
from the not-part-of-the-axis-of-evil dept.
angst7 writes "ZDNet is reporting that Microsoft has signed an agreement which would allow the Chinese government access to Windows source code. This is part of an effort to curb the shift toward Linux in China due to that country's concerns regarding the security of closed source software." Reader NZheretic points out that less than a year ago, Jim Allchin swore under oath that disclosing the Windows operating system source code could damage national security.
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Microsoft Opens Source to China
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That's shares source with China, (Score:5, Informative)
(http://domain.broken...registrar.joker.com/)
Not even sharing, just showing really (Score:5, Insightful)
"Governments signing up to the security program will be able to build systems that offer the high levels of security required for national security, Microsoft has said. However, government users will not be allowed to make modifications to the code or compile the source code into Windows programs themselves, according to Microsoft."
Yeah, real 'open'.
Re:Not even sharing, just showing really (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
MS can give them all the source code they want. They just have to 'leave out' the part that is the security risk. Which seems to be the point of this whole deal.
It only takes a few lines of code to inject a nasty spy bug/flaw into the system. And if China can't even build their own binaries, then MS can insert many flaws into the OS they give to them.
Re:Not even sharing, just showing really (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not even sharing, just showing really (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.webworks.se/)
Re:Not even sharing, just showing really (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/ | Last Journal: Wednesday September 05 2001, @10:28AM)
"Governments signing up to the security program will be able to build systems that offer the high levels of security required for national security, Microsoft has said. However, government users will not be allowed to make modifications to the code or compile the source code into Windows programs themselves, according to Microsoft."
Yeah, real 'open'.
Hmmm - So MS took their windows source, compiled it, modified the code to remove the backdoors, and sent it to China. To ensure that China aren't then going to modify the source, they make sure the source is not buildable - Have in the agreement that they don't give China some important part of the building process.
So China search through the code, find no backdoors (because they have been removed), but runs the original version of the code with the backdoors still in it, because they are not able to build fresh sources.
Seems like a good deal to me.
Re:That's shares source with China, (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://folk.uio.no/kjetikj/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 28 2004, @05:00PM)
I've said it before, we're about to discover that "open source" was a mistake, the battle of the words is important, and we should give it a lot more thought.
I realize that "Free Software" is not much better, but for those of use speaking Real Languages[tm], which is making the distinction between beer and speech clear, abandoning "Open Source" is, I think, a good idea.
Re:That's shares source with China, (Score:5, Insightful)
M$ lies (under oath) about security problems with OpenSource, due to its "open" nature.
M$ has FAR more security problems than OpenSource.
Countries (often those who hack into M$ computers) want the source opened, or else, so M$ complies....
M$ won't open their source to the public, who needs knowledge and a defense against those attacks.
Ergo, M$ opens the source to the wrong people, instead of the right ones. This is the difference between the "black hats" and the "white hats."
OpenSource realizes that BOTH can see their source, so the "white hats" patch the holes in anticipation of problems. M$ does not....
So Microsoft is (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
So now the Chinese have it!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So now the Chinese have it!!! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:So now the Chinese have it!!! (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.grnet.com/sc/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 17 2003, @08:57AM)
If it is, who gets the axe?
Re:So now the Chinese have it!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.infamous.net/)
Either treason or perjury has occured. Long-hair Linux hipies would go to jail for such action, but bribe^H^H^H^H^Hcampain fund producers like MS will not suffer at all. Welcome to America...
Re:So now the Chinese have it!!! (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday March 15 2006, @04:00PM)
--Aumaden
Damage national security, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://maverickbna.blogspot.com/)
Re:Damage national security, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.theoryint.com/)
And it was so hard for them to make viruses before (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And it was so hard for them to make viruses bef (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://dotfuturemanifesto.blogspot.com/)
Actually some versions of code red did have code to detect the language that a site's web pages were in and trashed the site if it wasn't in Chineese. Then a few days after this was discovered a second verison of the same worm appeared which did the opposite. Code Red hit at the time that the US spy plane was forced down in China.
There are plenty of examples of politically motivated hacking, the Palestinians and Israelis have been having an ongoing proxy war for some time. However almost all the events appear to be the work of independent agents working on their own rather than being coordinated cyber-warfare.
The only example of state sponsored cyberwarfare I am aware of is the attacks on Usenet by Hasan B-) Mutlu and Serdar Argic who roboposted thousands of anti-armenian propaganda messages. Mutlu and Argic were both pseudonyms used by an officer of thr turkish intelligence service which was concerned that reports on the Turkish massacre of Armenians during world war I were circulating on Usenet and damaging the image of Turkey abroad at a time when the post USSR CIS was fragmenting into racial warfare. So they roboposted claims of a bogus masacre of turks by armenians repeatedly in order to drown out and discredit the genuine claims that the turks massacred the armenians.
I wouldn't want it (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.adamboothonline.com/)
What good does this do (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What good does this do (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/)
Ultimately, if China cannot reproduce the binaries from the source, they will probably have to dismiss this as a marketting stunt.
Yes, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 03 2002, @01:58PM)
If not -- then how do they know that the code they are looking at is the same version that goes into the build on their desktops?
Re:Yes, but.... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://benandwen.net/~bwalton)
-Ben
Do they really think it will stay secure? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday July 06 2003, @01:45AM)
Just curiously... if all the linux users care about is open source, wouldn't the functionality of windows compared to linux IN SOME ASPECTS cause a flux of *nix users to use windows if they could fiddle with it as they liked? I mean besides server issues, windows is the way to go if your computer is really just a PC.
That IS a little creepy (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://g27.org/)
When he swore under oath that opening the source for Windows would be a threat to national security, I completely agreed. The number of security holes in Windows with the source remaining closed was bad enough. Now China gets to see the source, and we don't? Wouldn't that put them at an advantage over US companies that can't audit the code for security holes?
Treason? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.grnet.com/sc/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 17 2003, @08:57AM)
Re:Treason? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://g27.org/)
It's probably a huge fine amounting to about
Re:Treason? (Score:5, Funny)
Worst job ever. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.smoothbeats.com/)
Re:Worst job ever. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://fulcrum.org/ | Last Journal: Saturday March 29 2003, @08:41PM)
"Look, you bring up Tianamen Square ONE MORE TIME and you'll be reading the code for kernel32.dll the rest of your life!"
Microsoft policy... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/~$$$$$exyGal/journal/#naked | Last Journal: Tuesday January 04 2005, @04:23AM)
--sex [slashdot.org]
Purjury (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/ | Last Journal: Sunday December 09, @09:11PM)
So, does this open the door for a purjury investigation? I would think that a number of companies would look upon this with great interest.
Re:Purjury (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://bielefeldtpapers.blogspot.com/)
Not a big deal (Score:3, Informative)
(Last Journal: Saturday March 01 2003, @11:42PM)
ha! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://seventhcycle.net/)
This must be a covert attempt from Microsoft to destroy China by weakening its national security!
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.fredcom.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday March 02 2002, @12:41PM)
Don't worry (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it would compromise security if the vagrant open-source developers saw the Win32 source code. China, on the other hand, certainly isn't a threat.
Just replace "national security" with "microsoft security", and things make sense.
--
Release of source... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.xmission.com/~bryanw | Last Journal: Thursday August 28 2003, @07:56PM)
They often releases it to schools with various NDA's, as well as businesses under various agreements, but that's usually for educational or development reasons.
The deal with China seems to be a combination of PR and sales, rather than education and development.
frob.
Uh? (Score:5, Insightful)
An oh-so-typical I-hate-M$ post (Score:5, Funny)
(http://members.cox.net/rbstrickland/)
Re:Which crime is being committed? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://members.cox.net/rbstrickland/)
but can they compile and run? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wondering how this would work... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday December 10, @05:14PM)
I wonder if China and other governments will be tobuilding their own binaries and install CD's...?
Cynic's view (Score:5, Interesting)
Trade secrets: Beyond a doubt there are piles of things in the source code that could be considered trade secrets. One way to protect trade secrets is to make certain that they are widely available but not legally available. In the cynic's view (i.e. mine) M$ wants the code to be leaked by China.
If the code is illegally leaked, it is very easy for M$ to accuse other products (future Linux apps?) of using illegally acquired trade secrets. How can the authors, living in countries around the world, prove that none of them have ever seen illegally leaked material?
Based on what I have read about the development of the clone of the IBM BIOS, it appears that the burden of proof de facto lies on the defendant to show that they are not using trade secrets illegally.
This may give M$ a very big gun to point at any colloboratively developed code that they don't care for.
Re:Cynic's view (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://morningcuppa.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 25, @02:23PM)
You think anyone really wants to slop through IE code to replace the Opera rendering engine? The original request to make competing companies on par with the MS development. So for example, if you simply cannot get the performance you want out of your TCP/IP stack, you wade through MS's to find their undocumented kernel calls. Or, it lets you learn how to hook your own WM into the system instead of the Explorer WM, but only after you finish trying their published methods. It's on a case-by-case basis, and its certainly harder to read than their documentation, no matter how sparse.
The only thing I'd want to know about their code is examples of published APIs. Even then, I've not run into too many problems in the latest platforms. Microsoft is not an big innovator IMO, they simply tightly integrate their ever-growing OS functions for personal computer "simplicity of management".
mug
What's good for Microsoft ... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.doxagora.com/ | Last Journal: Friday February 28 2003, @05:39PM)
Although I've always felt that "cyberwar" scenarios were rather overblown attempts at giving backroom geeks frontline roles, the military certainly takes it seriously; one well-received military paper a few years ago warned that America's IT defenses were on a par with the ability of Task Force Smith (whose ignominious retreat from Korean forces showed how woefully unprepared America was for the Korean conflict).
As we know, China has been touted as the first great cyberwar enemy; allegedly, China does have a "hacker brigade" tasked with disrupting American networks and computer systems in times of war, to rectify the strategic imbalance between the two nations. Now, Microsoft plans to open to a strategic rival of the U.S. the internal code that will power the Navy's upcoming CVN-77 aircraft carrier [fcw.com], plus other "smart ships."
This raises an interesting question for the Administration: although, as Vann H. Van Diepen (Director of the Office of Chemical, Biological, and Missile Nonproliferation) told Congress, export controls to China are not enforced in "areas where the technology is widely available as commodity items ... such as low-level computers," the source code to a mission-critical operating system used by military C4 systems is certainly not a "commodity item," nor is it "widely available." Will the White House put national security over Microsoft's profits? Les Kinsolving, call your office!
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