Re:Windows XP source code has leaked
by kasabali on Friday September 25, 2020 @03:49AM
(#24587572)
That doesn't prove anything. People said it was crap because it was. Then SP1 was released with 1+ year and it became pretty good. By SP3 it was rock solid because that's 7 years of bug fixes keeping other changes to minimum. That's what giving bugs does to software, no surprise here.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Microsoft made a big security pivot during XP. Gates put his foot down and forced the company to reprioritize secure engineering over everything else during the SP(2?) timeframe.
They also made a pretty big push toward formal verification of drivers, which were often the culprit for insecure/unstable machines. Their SLAM model checker [0] was avant-garde (in industry terms, at least).
Re:Windows XP source code has leaked
by ThrowawayB7 on Friday September 25, 2020 @10:47AM
(#24590347)
Yep, the whole Trustworthy Computing initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing There was a huge investment in training, tools, and creating security specialists. It took a long time to turn the ship around but security issues started trending down a few years after that.
It's worth mentioning that WPA2 for WiFi doesn't work in XP unless you install SP3, regardless of the WiFi drivers you use.
As this leak is only XP SP1, it will be missing a lot of the bugfixes and upgrades that XP added by SP3 (and beyond).
Think of how easily it will be though to reverse engineer the patches in the SP and apply them to the actual source.