Re: Hobson's choice
Presumably they would have to provide the data/software for the time of the 'crime' - or have they deleted evidence?
Where I work (a very small company) we have changed VCS at least twice since 2006. Only for the latest upgrade (from tfs to git) did we manage to retain the commit history.
Presumably google has more developers to throw at problems like this, so hopefully they actually still have this history intact.
In that case, I would have thought that a simple "this is our commit history for 2005-2006, feel free to look for the smoking gun" would have sufficed. And, since this is 14 year old source, it should not matter who gets to read it. (that goes both ways... find anyone proficient in the dev language google used at the time, and they should be able to make some heads and tails out of this)
That said, it would surprise me if they don't have some sort of blacklists. And that does not necessarily have to be part of the main source repository. It could easily be maintained by a different department. (if so, the code to read said blacklist would still be there)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
