Heh, sounds much better than my previous employer's way of occasionally sending company-wide emails along the line of "The employee who was responsible for the XXX leak was found and terminated. We remind you that leaks damage our culture and make it difficult to share ideas inside the company."
For some reason such emails made me feel like I was inside a tech cult. Guess my culture fit wasn't good enough...
Well, to be fair, I guess MS also utilizes these emails in addition to reverse psychology...
Oh, sure; I think the parent commenter's point was in thinking that emailing everyone about the termination of the leaker served as any sort of deterrence mechanism for people's use of the leaked build.
Well, emails are not exactly deterrence against people using the leaked "build": being an internet service company, that part is usually achieved by shutting down the server.
Emails are supposed to be deterrence against further leaks by reinforcing the "company culture". (Whether they work, I have no idea.)
Yeah, I really liked Google's internal openness too, but the way they protected it felt a bit overzealous. As if I'm live-action roleplaying a spy organization or something.
Almost nobody seemed to have any problem with it, so I guess it's just me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Another alternative is to work in an organization (most likely not a private company) that does not care about leaks. Non profits, administrations, many people work there and love it.
I never received an email like that when I worked at Microsoft. Granted, maybe they would send emails like that within a specific department, and my department was probably less prone to leaks.
>And there are some legal issues that are tied to the date a feature first becomes available to the public. Seeing a feature go public prematurely throws a bunch of scheduling into disarray because you now have to finish those legal documents in less time than you planned.
As someone who's never worked for a company that produces commercial software, I'm curious about what he's referring to.
A simple example would be adding a feature that collects user information before you update the EULA to tell people that you're collecting their information.
The EULA will likely need to go through multiple iterations between local and partner lawyers before the language is agreed upon - so expediting is not always an option.
This seems to be an urban myth that gets often repeated but I've never actually seen a concrete example. Could someone point me to an example of someone suing a property owner because of an injury received in the commission of a crime?
Wasn't it from that old Jim Carrey film Liar Liar?
Greta: Mr. Reede, several years ago a friend of mine had a burglar on her roof—a burglar. He fell through the kitchen skylight, landed on a cutting board, on a butcher's knife, cutting his leg. The burglar sued my friend. He sued my friend and because of guys like you, he won. My friend had to pay the burglar $6,000. Is that justice?
The justification for a lot of these frivolous injury lawsuits are often very similar. The person suing has thousands or tens of thousands of medical debt. They could spend years paying it off or they could look like a moron in the hopes of a settlement that will pay off the debt or at least make a dent in it.
Probably the most famous case, Bodine v Enterprise High School, involved a teenager who fell through a painted over skylight while stealing (or redirecting to play basketball) a spotlight off the roof. Because of the fall he became a quadriplegic, he didn't really have much to lose suing the school district because, well, his life as he knew it was over. He had a lifetime of medical bills to pay and no way to earn an income.
There are definitely plenty of scam artists or leeches or whatever you want to call them abusing the legal system because it's easier than getting a real job, but don't underestimate the people backed into a corner by debt.
> I'd love to see how the hell they justified that, much less if they won
There are general principles of responsibility of property owners for dangerous conditions on the property that apply even when the harm done by them is done to trespassers (and regardless of the purpose of the trespass.) IIRC, these are largely common law principles, and older than the US.
Of course, they don't relieve any criminal liability for crimes committed by the trespasser on the property, or any civil liability for torts committed on the property, but if you are already on the hook for those and can't try to claim that you weren't the intruder, there's no reason not to try to pursue any colorable claim you have.
So - if an intruder breaks in to your house, you can shoot him without repercussions; but if an intruder breaks into your house and trips on your loose stair carpet, he can sue for his resulting injuries?
> So - if an intruder breaks in to your house, you can shoot him without repercussions
In many US jurisdictions, not generally the case. The ones with a strong "castle doctrine" are notable because this is not the norm.
But, even so...
> So - if an intruder breaks in to your house, you can shoot him without repercussions
Your loose stair carpet was not created as a specific and immediate response to a particular unlawful act, and thus the relief from otherwise applicable legal liability attached as a result of self-defense doesn't apply to it.
> In many US jurisdictions, not generally the case. The ones with a strong "castle doctrine" are notable because this is not the norm.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your statement, it's actually the other way around. Most US states have a castle doctrine law of varying strength. Even the "gun-unfriendly" states like NJ, NY, and CA.
If you weren't the initial aggressor, and you are in your home with a licensed/legal firearm, you may shoot an intruder. Duty to retreat doesn't apply to your house...which makes perfect sense.
> Unless I'm misunderstanding your statement, it's actually the other way around.
You're misunderstanding my statement. And/or considering only the duty to retreat and not the threat aspect of self-defense.
> Most US states have a castle doctrine law of varying strength.
Right, key part being "of varying strength"; but, AFAIK, very few have a strong castle doctrine law that would make "you can shoot an intruder without liability" generally true; IIRC, the most common version is the very weak form where being in your home basically just eliminates the obligation to flee if able in preference to using deadly force in self defense, but does not have an effect on the level of threat (both subjective and objective) which must be posed before using deadly force.
> If you weren't the initial aggressor, and you are in your home with a licensed/legal firearm, you may shoot an intruder.
Generally, "licensed/legal firearm" is irrelevant to self-defense analysis (whether in the home or otherwise).
So you're saying that a loose carpet on stairs would be illegal (i.e. a booby trap of sorts), but a security system where I can hit an alarm button and then it'll deploy a loose carpet onto the stairs, would be just fine?
> but a security system where I can hit an alarm button and then it'll deploy a loose carpet onto the stairs, would be just fine?
It may or may not be "just fine" in general (e.g., it might violate building codes, etc.), but if you deliberately used it in a condition where you were legally authorized to use deadly force in self defense, you probably wouldn't be liable for that particular use.
Someone I know was away from home for an evening, and found the police at her door when she came back. Turns out some junky decided to break into her gardening shed to find something to force entry to the main house. Was so high he accidentally slit his wrist on the glass window he broke to climb inside the shed. Neighbours heard him cry and called the police.
Police told her she was very lucky he didn't die, as she was responsible for his well-being while breaking in.
In a related note, if you have a dog, you need a sign to warn burglers about it , as you have to safeguard anyone in your house, including burglars. If the sign talks about a dangerous dog, it means you knew the dog was dangerous and have a higher responsibility for injuries.
As far as I understand it (IANAL), the legal theory is that breaking in and failing to safeguard the burglar are 2 unrelated crimes, which each deserve their own punishment/damages.
>Police told her she was very lucky he didn't die, as she was responsible for his well-being while breaking in.
I doubt that. Just because a police officer says sth doesn't mean it's true. Perhaps people sued in the past but lost in court.
Otherwise I could break in somewhere, hurt myself (there is always a possibility) and sue the owner of the house.
Unless the owner builds traps to severely injure anyone who enters the house even if there's no danger to residents, I cannot imagine a court deciding in favour of the burglar.
It may be different if you have a dog that is trained to injure/kill anyone who enters the premise. That could lead to a court case, e.g. if the dog injures a child who wanted to retrieve a ball from the garden and there was no warning sign.
Do you have any links for cases that were actually won by the burglar?
Burglars suing the owner also happened to France, which has a very crime friendly legislation.
For instance if you break in a house while the owner is on holidays, and stay a few days, not only the owner would have to go to court for years to kick you out, but the owner is not even legally permitted to enter his own house until after the execution of the eviction, after all appeals have been exhausted.
This may be about squatting, rather than a burglar. A squatter can take occupation of an abandoned building if they do not break in, so if a door is open or something like that. Usually they break a window and replace it immediately to be able to support their claim.
They don't care that much about the pirated version doing things not mentioned in the EULA, they care about not being rushed to ship a legit version (that has not yet a ready EULA) because it has to get released in order to limit the spread of the pirated version or for any other reason.
Surely if the "leak" is the result of an employee acting unlawfully, i.e. maliciously leaking their employer's intellectual property in contravention of their employment agreement, then the leak does not constitute a disclosure.
If it did, then IP-based organisations would have an absurd level of exposure to the bad actions of any employee, and would have to impose equally absurd security measures - cavity searches at the exits, anyone? - on every employee with access to IP.
If you're talking about public leaks (rather than just private leaks to a few individuals), surely they're not that hard to find?
I wonder if you mean the leakers?
(for the record, I'm a moderator of a forum which discusses said "leaked builds of Windows"; and I help try to find and preserve those that leaked long enough ago such that they have almost disappeared)
Among other things, it creates revenue recognition problems. If you have publically promised a future feature, you sometimes cannot recognize current revenue for the associated product until you deliver that feature. It makes for a very bad day.
In Australia there are R&D tax concessions that apply differently based on whether something has shipped. That is, bug fixes on an unreleased feature are eligible as R&D, but once the feature ships work done on it is no longer R&D.
No idea if a leaked build would count as shipping for these purposes, though.
I was going to say that you had a year after disclosure to file a patent.
But then I remembered that there are other countries in the world other than the USA. Those other countries have different rules! It's sometimes difficult for Americans to remember that, since we're so insular here. E.g. I haven't been out of the USA in probably about 25 years.
I thought USA had moved to first to file, public disclosure then is prior art to your own application, except in limited circumstances (which usually means showing the invention at specific trade shows)?
How about: have a really cheesy wallpapers in the pre-release builds which conveys the message (perhaps with explicit text right in the wallpaper image) that this is not a released build. Also, how about making not-released builds simply expire. The build should know that nobody ought to run it past a certain date. (If such operation is needed internally, it can be rigged with an extension mechanism built into the expiry.)
Isn't that the thought behind the watermarks they've had since Win7-ish? I remember messing with beta builds and reading about people using them (again, to avoid paying for it for a bit as mentioned in another comment) and jumping through all sorts of hoops to disable or hide the watermark - aside from buying a license of course.
There's probably a point at which any more effort put into carrots (new features or wallpapers on official builds) and sticks (nag screens, watermarks, expirations, etc on old builds) just becomes more trouble than it's worth.
I like trying out leaked builds of programs or OSes as much as the next bored nerd but I can't imagine ever running something as primary OS on any machine I count on for anything. That stuff is for old computers that aren't being used or VMs.
Expiration has an additional positive effect in that it prevents use of the buggy builds and is also relatively easy to implement, especially when the prerelease build can phone home.
Developer builds do expire. Dealing with that with one of my customers. A slick little IT guy decided that he would put his developer copy of Windows on this particular non-profit's computer to save them money. All of a sudden 3 weeks ago they get a message about their OS being expired and it wouldn't boot up without a windows boot disc.
If I'm not negatively affected in any way, why should I upgrade?
Also, how does a user who doesn't upgrade notice a change in wallpaper which doesn't take place until after the upgrade? By looking at someone else's desktop which is running the release version?
What if the user has changed to a custom wallpaper, and doesn't remember what the original wallpaper of the leaked OS looks like?
>Also, how does a user who doesn't upgrade notice a change in wallpaper which doesn't take place until after the upgrade? By looking at someone else's desktop which is running the release version?
The type of person who is downloading leaked pre-release builds in order to have the latest and greatest generally follows the latest news about new leaked builds.
Rather than a hard cutoff, you could have the colours of everything on-screen desaturate as time passes beyond the expiry date, eventually ending up entirely monochromatic.
I think that would get the message across quite effectively :)
"Super secret preview version of Windows X leaked! Download here!"
(...3 weeks later...)
"People trying Super secret preview version of Windows X get their hard drives wiped out! Was this Microsoft's plan all along? Please tell what you think!"
The article mentions none of the evidence this strategy actually worked at all. Is it all just conjecture or are there more articles/evidence supporting this technique?
Oh c'mon not everything on this site has to be riddled with statistics, trials, and evidence of something working. The article gave me a chuckle, and plays on our instinct to gravitate to shiny new things. I think all we need to take from this is not every technical problem needs a technical solution. Understanding your audience, in any product, is crucial; use it to your advantage however you can.
Seems like you could've achieved the end-goal by just warning of the danger and coming across like their safety is your primary concern rather than finding the leaks, i.e.:
"Build 97241 contains a potentially fatal bug that could wipe your computer. If you are using Build 97241, please upgrade it to a more recent build or otherwise cease using this build immediately. We do not care how you acquired this build. We simply do not want you bricking your computer."
Have you ever taken a support phone call? Many people won't read a simple error message, let alone a message that includes numbers and other "technical mumbo jumbo"
customer: I'm trying print and it just says "error"
me: It just says error?
customer: yes
me: Are there any other words or error numbers?
customer: yeah, it says "No printers are installed. Add a printer and try again"
me: facepalm
Their solution works because it communicates a lot while saying very little
The problem is that no matter how hard you try, a lot of people will end up with both your unfinished software and unrealistic expectations about it. Just look at how some gamers talk about bugs in early access or beta releases of games.
I imagine in Windows' case, some enterprising individuals who don't know better will end up installing these builds on various computers, and you end up with a large group of users on the wrong build who:
1. Expect better quality than the pre-release build provides.
2. Blame Microsoft for their pre-release build breaking.
Raymond Chen also mentions a third case where the pre-release build messes up other parts of the network... so now you've got:
3. Somebody else blaming this guy for something he genuinely thinks is Microsoft's fault.
And then if you put out a warning message, it's typically ignored because the software is 99% working until catastrophic failure. And then you still get blamed by unreasonable users who then spread the word about how much you suck but conveniently leave out the "leaked pre-release build" part of the story. (If you sense some bitterness, yeah, I've had a few of my own experiences with much less consequential software.)
It's a lose-lose situation for Microsoft. I don't envy anybody in that position, regardless of the quality of the final finished product.
I was the first to upgrade from Ubuntu 15.10 to 16.04 in the office. I left my computer unlocked with a wallpaper slideshow on the desktop and when I returned everyone asked where I got my wallpapers from. Even though they were getting prompts to upgrade, they didn't until they noticed a changed. And I'm talking about developers here.
This may have been long before the Internet was the information channel for those kinds of things that it is today.
Even if it was today and such a note was published on the Internet, do you think that people who use leaked builds--in at least semi-production settings even--would see that note, much less actively seek it out?
There might be more reasons, but here is the author's answer to a similar question:
The imperative is that these machines can screw up the network they are connected to, so they’re affecting other machines. Generally, people don’t look kindly when a Windows system starts screwing up a network.
Bandwidth was a LOT harder to come by back then. You'd download a preview build if it had a feature if you were interested in. "Associated bugfixes" was typically not exciting enough to download an ISO file over a phone line.
The other approach is to use time limited builds, like Google does with many alpha and beta versions in their Android toolchain. After the timeout, force the users to update or fully lock it down. With a nice message why it is happening, of course.
Crackers will bypass any kind of protection or change anyway.
I work with big catalog data, and with lots of human input. We have these internal classifications but people mis-assign items all the time.
I was horrified when I learned about the state of our datasets. The only reliable features are the ones that are exposed to the customers on the website, because when they're broken people can actually see them.
Since those things are already so riddled with DRM, why not simply make the internal builds phone home to an activation server that only allows IPs assigned to Microsoft?
The story, like a lot of stories on the Old New Thing, appears to be from a now faraway time (in Information Technology terms). Think Windows 95 timeframe.
They are practically always worth a read, by the way. I'm a huge fan of the blog.
So, default wallpapers in early Windows 95 builds.
The first Preliminary Development Kit had an "Under Construction" wallpaper. The second one had the same wallpaper but tiled. Beta 1 had a different "Under Construction" wallpaper.
Of course, after PDK1 leaked far and wide, MS implemented some serial protection in PDK2 up to beta 2 (different from the one in the RTM; however the RTM's setup has remnants of it). Given that the leakers were involved with the warez scene, however, the skilled reversers that the builds were passed to easily found the backdoor that had been put in so that those on MS' internal network didn't have to enter the serial, and just patched a few bytes in the setup to abuse that.
The interesting part of this serial was that it was in two parts. One part was the "beta site ID" and half of the "password"; if this was valid, but the second half of the password wasn't, setup would appear to continue... until the point it would copy files, upon which it errored out with a message "General error 57, please contact your beta administrator".
This misdirection was discussed at the time, with some people believing the error at face value. This continued with the foundation of communities to preserve and discuss such builds several years onwards.
The last half of the password was the hex form of the first 16 bits of an MD4 hash (this code was written in around autumn 1993!) of the beta site ID, the first half of the password, and... a string inside the setup that was used as the titlebar text for the error message, which would be something like "Microsoft Chicago Preliminary Development Kit 2, November 1993".
This part of the serial algorithm was finally reverse engineered, and a key generator made....in 2014.
Afterwards, some early Internet Explorer 4.0 builds were discovered. They used the exact same serial algorithm as the early Windows 95 builds. And had the exact same "MS internal" backdoor.
(Um, I think I may have just ruined one of Raymond Chen's future blog posts.)
If I could buy the Pro version as an individual, and run it on an isolated machine, as I've done with every prior version of Windows I've purchased, I probably would have upgraded by now.
Since they don't offer that, and the non-pro version treats ALL users as imbeciles who cannot manage to keep their machines secure and up to date, and who are unable to decide for themselves if the benefits of participating in usage metrics gathering, voice-operation, and integrated web and local search outweigh the risks and costs, I'll be sticking with Win7.
Hmm, I am. Does the Pro version support turning off the privacy and updating features without being joined to a domain? If there is only partial control, that's not good enough. Otherwise I may owe you a beer :)
As much as I'm not a fan of misrepresentation, I think Microsoft's practices, in general, are deceptive and wasteful, and promote administrative and operational policies among IT and ops teams that perform comparably.
Not really your place to judge is it? What if they are in the middle of a long running task and the machine shuts down? Maybe it takes all day to run that process intensive task? Boom updates reboot the machine and a whole day's processing was lost. It is the users' prerogative on how they want to use their machine (poor software design choices and all) and if they don't want to take an automatic update and reboot then so be it. Or what if some people like to wait a couple weeks and see if Microsoft accidentally breaks something major with an update... pretty sure that has happened before.
In my case, I started a simulation running overnight. The next day I found that Windows had rebooted to install a patch and killed my simulation. (I'm now using a Mac.)
We're power users. We've already been burned by this, and we know how to defend against it.
That doesn't help my mom when she's writing a long letter and (rightly) expects her computer's RAM to hold the information and warn her before it does anything destructive. That doesn't help the middle-schooler who is suffering through their first 5-page essay.
Snark is easy but a lot of these stories are from long before the whole Win 10 upgrade and is explicitly from before Windows Insider which puts it at least before 2014.
But Windows Update is from way before all those stories... and if they needed help figuring out how to upgrade an OS, they could have looked at Linux (which I'm sure they did)...
Automatic updates started in about 2000ish and hard forced updates are even newer iirc. Before that the best they could do is a notification which people running a leaked build would probably ignore or not get at all, who knows what the Windows Update infrastructure is like for internal builds that get leaked.
Include a remotely-activated kill switch; and kill with plenty of warning.
What do I mean? I no longer use iPhone because I installed a beta iOS. When the official build came out, I kept "checking for updates" but I never got an update. One day, Apple remotely killed my phone.
Manually updating to the production iOS would be fine; but remotely disabling my phone without warning was not acceptable. This is why I refuse to buy an iPhone.
> Manually updating to the production iOS would be fine; but remotely disabling my phone without warning was not acceptable. This is why I refuse to buy an iPhone.
If you're savvy enough to manually upgrade to a beta OS (which comes with tons of warnings) you should be savvy enough to then update to the production release and get all the associated further updates. That's a really bizarre reason to refuse buying an iPhone.
You had warning. You just ignored it. You had plenty of warnings when installing the beta, and Apple typically does not provide updates from beta to GM. Just because you ignored the warnings doesn't mean they didn't exist. Stop blaming Apple for your own failings.
I no longer use iPhone because I installed a beta iOS.
...and didn't know what I was doing, nor did I read the well-documented warnings that are printed in multiple places. Then when things went down exactly as Apple warned me, multiple times, I went on the Internet to complain about it.
What warnings? Apple tells you up front that you can't upgrade to release from beta, you'll need to load it via iTunes or Xcode. Apple also warns that betas expire. And because "beta" is not "release", when Apple quits putting out betas, there is no "update" to update to. (How this currently works with public betas, I know not.)
>How this currently works with public betas, I know not.
Not sure about iOS, but for OS X public beta user are on the beta update channel even after release. If user happen to apply for OS X 10.11 Public Beta, then user will continue to receive beta for 10.11.1, 10.11.2, and so on, but not 10.12 Public Beta. To go back to release channel, user will need to switch off the beta update channel in System Preferences.
iOS Public Beta, on the other hand, seems to go directly from beta to release, per FAQ (Developer Beta seems to be different story, though):
> To get a shipping release of iOS on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can simply install the final version of the software you are testing when it appears in Software Update.
Once an iOS build expires, you can't take a backup, so you can do that to get the phone working again, but you lose any un-backed up data on the device like photos and app data. In the days before iCloud it was a huge pain.
Which is exactly why they (still!) plaster it with warnings to that effect. If you want to avoid any headaches the advice has always been to use multiple devices and keep the beta off your day to day device.
Can't speak for the OP, but in my case, I had it happen twice between beta 1 and beta 3 when I tried to skip beta 2 because I didn't care that much. It was also an iPad that left upstairs and was too lazy to carry it downstairs to update. Not a primary device, so all I lost was some progress in a few games, but I can see how someone could have suffered the same fate with their main phone and have lost a lot more.
The Mac solution is that nobody installs an OS X upgrade until it's at the .1 release because everyone knows the .0 release breaks everything. You only install a beta if you're suicidal.
For some reason such emails made me feel like I was inside a tech cult. Guess my culture fit wasn't good enough...
Well, to be fair, I guess MS also utilizes these emails in addition to reverse psychology...