Posts by charlesy 6 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Sep 2014
Well, the code tests the platform on which it running. So, if it is running on an already infected machine, and that machine is a Windows 9x box, the infection will spread no further.
Stuxnet, we are told, is a very complex piece of software, and the claim that this would have led to a BSoD on Windows 9x (an OS routine that hooks into CPU-level faults - e.g., double faults) suggests that it is low-level code (i.e. Kernel mode on an NT-based system). My expectation would be that the code probably wouldn't run at all on anything but an NT kernel, so the issue would never arise anyway on a 9x box.
If you haven't used Windows since the early 90s, you may not be aware that 'Windows' confusingly refers to three distinct and very different operating systems (we won't mention Windows CE). It is a very common and understandable confusion amongst Unix and Linux developers. The long-obsolete 9x and NT families share similar 32-bit APIs and could run a fair number of common 32-bit applications back in the 1990s. However, they have (wildly) different kernel architectures written by entirely different teams. David Cutler, who originally wrote VMS and went on to lead the NT effort at Microsoft never worked on 9x, to the best of my knowledge. The Stuxnet code tests the platform to make sure it is running on just one of those families - NT - which has evolved into the only Windows codebase Microsoft now maintains and evolves.
Yes, I spotted that as well! What a strange mistake for the presenter to make. This code would never install on Windows 95, 98 or Millennium. It would not install on Windows 3.1 either. The bug with the version numbers means that it would, however, install on later versions of Windows (e.g., Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012), which was presumably not intended.
Yawn. Microsoft seems happy, at a corporate level, to leave decisions like this to individual teams, so there are a range of approaches across the company. The use of GitHub has been a big feature of the Microsoft world for several years now, so this really isn't news. CodePlex was a step, several years ago, on Microsoft's evolutionary path to adopting open source, and its main benefit at the time was that it offered a TFS-based forge in the days before TFS supported Git. GitHub is a much bigger world, and Microsoft doesn't appear to be investing significantly in CodePlex, which is understandable. There have been a few welcome changes in recent times including Git support and a GPL3 option. Big deal. Yawn. Move on.
@thames - Microsoft cut the Codeplex , now Outercurve, Foundation free years ago. Not their animal to shoot, anymore. The Outercurve Foundation certainly isn't trying to 'control and direct open source development and licensing' these days, and I don't think they ever were back in the days of the Codeplex Foundation. People claim all kinds of conspiracy theories when it comes to Microsoft, but they generally don't stack up.
I do wish people would take care to state things accurately. Bill Gates described GPL and 'copyleft' as a cancer and 'un-American', and as akin to communism. That was almost 14 years ago now. He did not describe open source, per se, in this way. The company was always careful to make this distinction. You fail to mention that Richard Stallman, who wrote GPL played a crucial and very personal role in the campaign to get Silicon Valley companies to lobby the DoJ to start Antitrust proceedings against Microsoft. You say nothing of the attempt at that time to use the courts to force Microsoft into a compromising position in the hopes that the Windows OS might prove vulnerable to copyleft, requiring it to be re-licensed under the GPL. Microsoft was under attack from the ideological wing of the open source community and fought back.
The reason Microsoft is embracing open source to a much greater degree is not because the company has undergone some kind of ideological conversion. It is because the industry is currently in the middle of profound change driven by the adoption of cloud-based platforms. Microsoft is as commercially-minded now as they have always been. It doesn't take much thought to realise that, in this new cloud economy, open source often makes more commercial sense than traditional licencing models. For PaaS, and even IaaS to some extent, you don't rent software directly any more; you rent CPU cycles, bandwidth and storage instead. Microsoft doesn't do ideology. It aims, as best it can, to win.
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