November 17, 2004
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BIG
They Might Be Giants, But…
…even giants can’t get away with this: Microsoft Red-Handed Using Pirated Software: software giant may be guilty of intellectual property theft, says German computer publication PCWelt.
Thanks to Wizbang who discovered this article yesterday, this PCWelt.de gem won’t go unnoticed. According to the German article, Microsoft used illegal copies of Sound Forge software to create .wav files used in their Windows Media Player help documentation.
PCWelt has offered a translated copy of their article in English, for those of you faint at heart with reading anything, dass ins Deutsch geschrieben steht.
The article explains,
Has it ever crossed your mind to use the (note pad) editor to open a WAV file installed with Windows XP? Nobody will do that – that’s what Microsoft probably thought. After all, countless WAV files are stored on a computer, and they are to be heard, not to be watched, right? (This is an english translation of the article “ Erwischt: Hat Microsoft für Windows XP Warez genutzt?“)
No, not exactly. Our colleagues over at Macwelt gave us the idea. We tried it and examined some WAV files that are stored on a drive with a newly installed Windows XP. And we made a stunning discovery.
In fact, we didn’t even have to search for very long, as coincidence lent us a helping hand. In the Windows system directory, we had our first find, in the directory
“WindowsHelpToursWindowsMediaPlayerAudioWav”.
Located there are exactly nine WAV files, with a size between 80 and 360 Kilobytes. They serve as background sound during the Windows Media Player Tour. When you open one of these files with the notepad, you at first only see scrambled letters. Of course, you think, it’s a sound file, after all.
But things become interesting when you scroll down to the very bottom in notepad. Located there is a type of watermarking, which records the software that the Microsoft musician used to create the WAV files
We found the following text there:
LISTB INFOICRD 2000-04-06 IENG Deepz0ne ISFT Sound Forge 4.5
The article goes on to explain that this particular copy of Sound Forge was tied to a software cracker by the name of Deepz0ne and explains just who he is:
DeepzOne is (or at least was) member of the Warez group Radium that had specialized on cracking music software. Along with a person using the alias “Sandor,” he was also co-founder of this group, which was established in 1997( see in this interview ). In addition, it was DeepzOne who started circulating the cracked 4.5 version of Sound Forge a few years ago.
While most users (including me) found the Deepz0ne reference in the file code, some XP users haven’t, which may be due to either Service Pack, Media Player version or other version variances.
A Spooky thought though that one can easily derive from all of this is the long-pondered (and previously matter-of-factly debunked) theory out there that if Microsoft is cutting some corners, what if employees knowingly have also left backdoors for themselves or other hackers, or malware in the OS code…
There indeed seems from this to be some sort of gap between delegation and oversight at Microsoft, or in the very least weak hiring standards.
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