Fake?
> But the weighty 2.17GB download is a bandwidth-sapping
> waste of time composed of fake ISO disc images containing
> nothing but a string of zeros.
Finally, a significant improvement to Windows!
Mine's the penguin-skin coat...
Pranksters have taken advantage of interest in the next version of Windows to post fake - but reportedly harmless - builds of Windows 7 on BitTorrent. A supposedly leaked "internal milestone 1" Alpha version of Windows 7 (previously codenamed Blackcomb) is easily found using Torrent search engines. But the weighty 2.17GB …
So you mean to tell me that people are downloading a leaked Alpha version of a M$ operating system when not a single one of the retail OS's that has come out has been worth a damn in the beginning? How the hell could you think that an alpha version of new M$ anything could be better than even the crap we know as Vista? The brilliance of people amazes me.
Whats the bets MS are keeping nice logs of the folks who download this "unlicensed" OS. Provides the legal hawks with a few file sharing scapegoats and a ton of evidence to slap ISP's with take down notices of those customers with super fast broadband and huge file servers. Oh and the i spent-all-night-d/l-that anger is sure to fuel some legit purchases (of dvd burners)
Not the posters. I don't care about that.
But who'd be dull enough to download and install an operating system from a disc they found on the internet?
Sure, for something that's out and you can verify filesize and whatnot, maybe it's worth it, but anyone getting a pre-release OS or service pack deserves everything they get, TBH.
M$ could have done this. It would make a good tactic for any software company. Flood torrents with dummy downloads of equal size and it makes hard work for users to get the genuine article. Just add "this is the real version" to the file to muddy it up some more.
The fact that they release a real seed for testing and this happening about the same time would make sense. After all how often do these seeds end up being leaked. Often.
If I ran a software company I would do this to help protect for sure.
>> But who'd be dull enough to download and install an operating system
>> from a disc they found on the internet?
Only got a couple of Linux CDs (books/mag covers) from anywhere other than Internet - never had any problem installing the internet ones - so who are you calling dull :-p
The thing with ISOs is that sometimes they contain some pretty big padding files consisting of nothing but 0s. A good trick to use when downloading none compressed ISOs is to set your client to pre-allocate, start the download, stop the download then force recheck. Any piece consisting entirely of null bytes is now labeled as complete.
Using that method, you'd have saved 2.17GB of download and known it was fake within seconds.
Oh come on, don't complain about alpha builds. (I'm looking at you "but who and why") I remember trying out Whistler when XP meant "extreme programming" (duuuude), and I can only assume that was an alpha build - purely out of idle curiosity and to see what the future was like.
A pre-pre-pre-release OS download is not remotely dangerous - let's face it you're not going to shaft your machine as it would be on a rather empty hard disk cos it's the only way it would install, or better yet, a virtual machine.
Admittedly, it was foolish for anyone to assume it was real, but had I seen it without the warnings that it was fake, I'd likely given it a whirl just to see - the joys of being on an ISP that doesn't charge by the byte.
"Whats the bets MS are keeping nice logs of the folks who download this "unlicensed" OS. Provides the legal hawks with a few file sharing scapegoats and a ton of evidence to slap ISP's with take down notices of those customers"
Just because somebody downloads a file that suggests from it's name that it's copyrighted software when infact the file is a hoax doesn't mean that they've committed a crime. Ok there is intent to commit a crime but they havn't actually committed one.
Therefore there would be no point in Microshaft logging anything as the log would just list idiots who have been hoaxed. There's nothing for the Legal hawks to do.
Now if Microshaft was logging downloaders of WindowsXP and Vista then the Legal hawks would be rubbing their hands together.
There's stuff floating around on the P2P systems which is designed to distribute malware. Large, and ultimately useless, .avi files which tell the suckers to download a special codec, which is used to load malware when it is first run.
Something like this might be a better trojan delivery system, since you don't have to provide a download site for the codec. The instance I heard about was using a porn site as a download source: I ended up explaining the tech to three elderly WI members, including my mother. I should never have offered to put the kettle on.
Oh, the embarrasment!
Bit of a tangent here...
XP's codename was Whistler. Win7's codename is Blackcomb. Whistler and Blackcomb are mountains that sit right next to each other (so close in fact that there's a gondola being built between them).
With a strong link between the codenames, perhaps win 7 will be more closely related to XP than to Vista, which was named after a bull.
Am I reading too far between the lines here? In my experience, many project managers like to keep a link between their project names so I'd hope that there's something in the naming convention. I like XP and haven't yet seen the need to upgrade.
Hi Chris - it's less sinister than that unfortunately. Whistler-Blackcomb was where the MS engineers went skiing during the early days of XPs planning/development.
Blackcomb/Vienna/Win7 was meant to be the successor to Whistler/XP but was delayed, resulting in an "interim" release called Longhorn, turning eventually into a major release (Vista). So you could liken Vista to ME in that respect...
Whilst I use Linux for many things and love it. On the desktop, even in the latest funky supposedly "idiot-proof" versions, it is still a million miles away from being actually useable for the mass public and so called "idiots".
See the problem is you still need a degree in Geekdom to configure the damn thing for your particular hardware, and even then support for many bits of kit is frankly "alpha" quality (WiFi and laptop support in particular).
I keep trying every now and again, running Linux on my laptop. It's just not there. Still. The basics work out of the box and looks nice, but half the hardware is just not supported and involves a lot of googling very technical geek forums for help. I got hacked off eventually with things like WiFi connections that take an hour to establish and then drop again, flakey touchpad and keyboard input, "updates" that corrupt USB drives, and went back to XP (which when kept pretty much to the basic install which supports everything out of the box, and avoiding the likes of system killers like Norton, then loading up loads of open source software like Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office, works a charm).
Sure, when it comes to hardware and Linux you can just buy stuff you know is compatible. Indeed, that's called an Apple Mac ;-)... and of course you pay through the nose for the work that has been done to ensure it works with only that hardware. What people fail to realise with Microsoft is their software has the immense task of having to run with just about every bit of hardware that exists. Linux is always playing catch up and depending on 16 year old Russian geeks in their bedrooms, and Macs are more like games consoles with fixed hardware. All valid for their purposes, but there's a reason why MS has an OS on almost all desktops.
Then of course there is the development environment. No question there. MS all the way.
No, Microsoft's OSes hardly support any modern hardware out of the box. Everything from chipsets to video cards to soundcards come with drivers the hardware manufacturers ship. It's actually a pretty good system for something as ubiquitous as Windows, because you don't have to rely on Microsoft to support everything. In effect, instead of the OS supporting the hardware, the hardware is supporting the OS.
If the hardware manufacturers all supported Linux as well as they do Windows, then less Linux development time could be spent playing catchup with the hardware. That time could be spent on making the kernel even better than it is, or on other portions of the OS.
Tux sits beside this post to encourage broader hardware vendor support for all major OSes.