Windows XP SP1 + Server 2003 source code has apparently leaked - WARNING ! Your system have been encrypted by Rensenware !

[Ponchik]

https://twitter.com/NTDEV_/status/1311030848632885248

 

[Temporal Refugee]

It's beautiful. Successful compilation of WS2k3 is huge. It's not far removed from XP, with most of the differences in terms of compatibility being (to the best of my knowledge) artificial in nature and thus easily circumvented if you have... you know, the friggin' source code.

It's a shame the Service Packs didn't make it into the leak, but honestly I'm sure some clever folks can extrapolate from here and make up the difference.

 

[Kosher Dill]

It's a shame the Service Packs didn't make it into the leak, but honestly I'm sure some clever folks can extrapolate from here and make up the difference.

The service packs and patches are what's going to kill this as far as the mythical "Modern XP" is concerned. Who's going to look through thousands of KB and Technet articles to guess at what needs patching, find the corresponding code, and patch the code?

 

[XYZpdq]

There's also the sources for paint and the maze screensaver.

OH HELL YEAH

 

[WonderWino]

They will, the way ReactOS works is that no one who's touched a leak is able to write code, but they're totally allowed to document how various things function.

Then they're idiots because that won't offer any legal protection if microsoft finds out anybody involved in any manner has so much as seen it or anything derived from it. They could easily cause all kinds of legal problems for them and force them into a very difficult position of having to definitively prove nobody was inspired in any way by anything anybody saw from the xp source. and god help them if there is anything in their own code that even coincidentally looks or operates similar to anything in the xp source

The only thing they can do to protect themselves legally is don't touch the source, don't view it and don't get involved with anybody who has had access to it in any manner. Its the same reason why production companies for tv shows send back scripts unread and why nobody involved in writing said shows has any access of any kind to them, its the only way to avoid legal problems and to be able to claim coincidences are just that

this subject has come up a lot in the last year whenever some big ass software leak gets dumped online, and yes obviously reactos and emulators like dolphin are clean-room projects. i'd imagine that they're absolutely going to look through this shit and take notes (and microsoft would have an incredibly hard time proving it), they're just not going to directly ctrl+c/ctrl+v lines of confidential ms code into .c files because i doubt any of these projects are that braindead

Again, that won't protect them. Just viewing microsofts code or anything generated as a result of it when you're working on a project like that is enough to screw you majorly if they get wind of it and send the lawyers after you. Microsoft doesn't have to prove you used their code verbatim. If you've seen it and are working on a project along similar lines you'd better be able to prove you were in no way influenced by it. To say nothing of getting nailed for having it in your possession at all in the first place

It wouldn't, they did it before with the Windows NT source leak and they were fine

Didn't and wouldn't are two different things. All that means is microsoft either didn't know about it or didn't care. It doesn't mean they can' make a very serious issue about it. Don't press your luck with companies like microsoft, let alone with such flagship products

"there is absolutely no way on earth this was written from a clean sheet only from the available public documentation"

It wasn't. It was written from a clean sheet from documentation of the leaked code. That's legal. The code itself is protected by copyright, but what it does isn't protected by copyright.

Thats not an argument you want to make in court when you're going up against a multibillion dollar company or their army of lawyers. There is nothing legal about it and arguing otherwise won't end well in court for anyone trying to claim it is. Lets not forget that documentation only exists because someone made it by going through illegally obtained, illegally leaked source code. You have to break the law to generate that documentation in the first place

Anyone involved in a project like that in any capacity is insane if they think its a smart idea to have anything whatsoever to do with the leak or anything derived from it

 

[Kosher Dill]

Another interesting bit: Microsoft actually wrote their own arbitrary-precision (or, at least up to INT_MAX "digits") rational number library for Calculator
NT\shell\osshell\accesory\ratpak
You can see their implementation of Taylor series, "rounding", etc.
There's a "number" struct which is sort of like an extended floating-point with a mantissa and exponent, and then a "rational" struct which is effectively the ratio of two NUMBERs that represent integers.

By the way, hit me with some puzzle pieces if I'm just duplicating things people have already come across, I don't follow this elsewhere.

 

[Kosher Salt]

@WonderWino If you're really going to take the "Microsoft's lawyers could make their lives so miserable that it's not a risk they should take" angle on this, by that logic they shouldn't bother to exist in the first place.

 

[billgates3]

https://anonfiles.com/b1F6mbc4p3/Microsoft_leaked_source_code_archive_2020-10-04_torrent

Hi, guys. I'm the uploader of the original leak collection torrent. Link above is to an updated version, because last torrent included a file called 'windows_xp_source.rar', to which no one had the password at the time. The password was later cracked (it's 'internaldev' without the ''), and it turned out to be fake. So, I removed that file, and added a few files in 'media/'. Otherwise, it's the exact same content as the 2020-09-24 torrent.

You have the actual XP SP 1 / Server 2003 source code in the file called 'nt5src.7z' (included in the torrent).

If you've already downloaded the 2020-09-24 torrent (or even the 2020-09-20 one), follow the instructions below:

You don't have to re-download the other files. Just remove the old
torrent from your torrent client (without deleting the data), rename the
directory to 'Microsoft leaked source code archive_2020-10-04'. Add the new
torrent to your torrent client and force it to do a re-hash / re-check of the
files, if it doesn't do it automatically.

You can remove 'misc/windows_xp_source.rar', and also 'windows_research_kernel' (since that folder was accidentally included twice in the last torrent). Remaining copy of the 'windows_research_kernel' folder is in 'misc/'.

***

That fake RAR was not the only fake file I came across while collecting leaks, but since it had a password there was no way to tell if it was genuine or not at the time.

Hope you're all having an excellent day!

 

[Basil II]

https://anonfiles.com/b1F6mbc4p3/Microsoft_leaked_source_code_archive_2020-10-04_torrent

Hi, guys. I'm the uploader of the original leak collection torrent. Link above is to an updated version, because last torrent included a file called 'windows_xp_source.rar', to which no one had the password at the time. The password was later cracked (it's 'internaldev' without the ''), and it turned out to be fake. So, I removed that file, and added a few files in 'media/'. Otherwise, it's the exact same content as the 2020-09-24 torrent.

You have the actual XP SP 1 / Server 2003 source code in the file called 'nt5src.7z' (included in the torrent).

If you've already downloaded the 2020-09-24 torrent (or even the 2020-09-20 one), follow the instructions below:

You don't have to re-download the other files. Just remove the old
torrent from your torrent client (without deleting the data), rename the
directory to 'Microsoft leaked source code archive_2020-10-04'. Add the new
torrent to your torrent client and force it to do a re-hash / re-check of the
files, if it doesn't do it automatically.

***

That fake RAR was not the only fake file I came across while collecting leaks, but since it had a password there was no way to tell if it was genuine or not at the time.

Hope you're all having an excellent day!

keep safe from the glowies and microsoft hit squads.

 

[Kosher Dill]

You have the actual XP SP 1 / Server 2003 source code in the file called 'nt5src.7z' (included in the torrent).

The original Anonfiles link I pulled it from upthread had only nt5src.7z and no other files. I imagine everything else is fake.

 

[billgates3]

keep safe from the glowies and microsoft hit squads.

Word. I'm all VPNed up.

Created a mail account specifically for this, and have been having a great time spamming the torrent link in various forums. Reddit was great until they shadowbanned me.

It's fun watching Microsoft trying to put the genie back in the bottle, by removing NTDEV's compilation videos and also DMCAing a GitHub repository that hosted the files. I don't think Microsoft understands how torrents work, or how information spreads on the Internet in general.

 

[billgates3]

The original Anonfiles link I pulled it from upthread had only nt5src.7z and no other files. I imagine everything else is fake.

The material in my torrent is genuine. That's all I can say. I wouldn't spend months collecting fake shit or spread fake shit to others on purpose. I've checked all the source code in the torrent and it's genuine. The collection consists of leaks that have happened throughout the years. The XP leak is not the first leak of Windows source code. Other versions were leaked in the past.

When the XP leak happened, it was posted in my thread. I had been creating threads on 4chan (/g/) for a couple of weeks, talking about the collection I was making, and asking people to contribute source code if they had any. Finally, someone who's probably been sitting on the file for years decided to leak it.

Here's a link to the thread:
https://archived.moe/g/thread/77874231/#q77874482

 

[The Fool]

ReactOS is religiously against referencing leaked source, it's even taboo to even mention it on their forums. If you admit you've so much as even peaked at any leaked NT source you're basically blacklisted from the project. It's not even a debate on whether they "could" have the reverse engineering team look at it. They won't allow that.

Like others said, this is going to give them more legal headaches, not help them.

Anyway, normally I'd be very excited about this, but, like @billgates3 said, we've had full OS leaks in the past. Absolutely nothing came of the NT4 leak or OpenNT, I don't see how this can be any different. No service packs, extremely outdated driver framework, probably missing some new important APIs that all modern software relies on in general. I'm not even sure how much NT changed between 4 and XP but I don't think there's that much from what I recall (unless someone actually looked at them and can confirm any massive changes).

 

[billgates3]

ReactOS is religiously against referencing leaked source, it's even taboo to even mention it on their forums. If you admit you've so much as even peaked at any leaked NT source you're basically blacklisted from the project. It's not even a debate on whether they "could" have the reverse engineering team look at it. They won't allow that.

Like others said, this is going to give them more legal headaches, not help them.

Anyway, normally I'd be very excited about this, but, like @billgates3 said, we've had full OS leaks in the past. Absolutely nothing came of the NT4 leak or OpenNT, I don't see how this can be any different. No service packs, extremely outdated driver framework, probably missing some new important APIs that all modern software relies on in general. I'm not even sure how much NT changed between 4 and XP but I don't think there's that much from what I recall (unless someone actually looked at them and can confirm any massive changes).

They could do a clean room engineering of the code, one team to look at the code and document it in natural language, then a second group which reads that documentation and writes code based on it. They can do it if they really want to, and it's not illegal. Just because some code does the same thing and looks vaguely similar doesn't mean it was stolen. You need to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that it was based on the leaked code, and the only way to prove that is if you copypaste the code into your project verbatim.

Of course, even if projects like ReactOS or Wine did make use of the leaks, they would never admit this publicly for obvious reasons. I think they'd be stupid not to make use of that opportunity, but it would probably be a good idea to keep it within a small team of the most trusted developers in the project.

 

[Ponchik]

Word. I'm all VPNed up.

Created a mail account specifically for this, and have been having a great time spamming the torrent link in various forums. Reddit was great until they shadowbanned me.

It's fun watching Microsoft trying to put the genie back in the bottle, by removing NTDEV's compilation videos and also DMCAing a GitHub repository that hosted the files. I don't think Microsoft understands how torrents work, or how information spreads on the Internet in general.

i have absolutely no idea what you expected from reddit, especially after including le ebin bill gates conspiracy docs in the torrent that redditors would call fake news (i understand the sentiment but that probably didn't help your case very much)

if ms was seriously pissed off about this leak existing they probably would've nuked everything even remotely related to it the second they learned nt5src.7z was a. legit and b. being publicly distributed. i'm inclined to think there are plenty of nt 5.x era bugs and vulnerabilities left in nt 6.4 """nt 10.0""" so they probably don't want to make a big fuss about this

ReactOS is religiously against referencing leaked source, it's even taboo to even mention it on their forums. If you admit you've so much as even peaked at any leaked NT source you're basically blacklisted from the project. It's not even a debate on whether they "could" have the reverse engineering team look at it. They won't allow that.

Like others said, this is going to give them more legal headaches, not help them.

Anyway, normally I'd be very excited about this, but, like @billgates3 said, we've had full OS leaks in the past. Absolutely nothing came of the NT4 leak or OpenNT, I don't see how this can be any different. No service packs, extremely outdated driver framework, probably missing some new important APIs that all modern software relies on in general. I'm not even sure how much NT changed between 4 and XP but I don't think there's that much from what I recall (unless someone actually looked at them and can confirm any massive changes).

lol this one reactos dev was being really fucking anal on their forums about this, and funnily enough someone's porting their implementation of msgina.dll to server 2003 anyway... i've said it a thousand times before but i'm confident that some code influenced by this leak is eventually going to sneak its way into reactos, no matter how many times they proudly boast about reactos/wine being totally legit 100% clean-room projects

and yeah it's very rare that these leaks turn out to be anything other than nothingburgers, but nt 4.0 is just too old to be used for anything seriously modern and it's too obscure (for a windows release, at least) for classic windows diehards and zoomers to really be interested in fixing it up. nt 5.0/2000 was actually a pretty big leap, and one of the few genuinely decent versions of windows ms has ever shat out (even gnutards agree!), but even then the old 2004 leak was seriously incomplete. i truly want to believe that something rad is eventually going to arise from this leak - xp is probably the most fondly remembered version of windows, it supports newer hardware than 2000, it still receives limited software support on top of being compatible with virtually everything released up to 2015, and this is the first mostly complete windows source code leak people have easy access to. (server 2003 is close enough i guess) maybe i'm just spergy and delusional but i can't not see something eventually surfacing because of this, even if it's just a bunch of nasty security vulnerabilities that both tech outlets and microsoft use as an excuse to funnel the entire planet onto the latest vesion of windows 10 home(tm)

i doubt a small group of enthusiasts would even be able to maintain a hypothetical updated frankenstein version of xp, but that doesn't stop me from wanting to see it. if anything, modern day windows 7/8/10 source code has been made accessible to the usual suspects like universities and so on, and some assholes in china or russia probably have their hands on it, so i'm waiting to see if someone ends up leaking that shit sooner or laterrr

 

[billgates3]

i have absolutely no idea what you expected from reddit, especially after including le ebin bill gates conspiracy docs in the torrent that redditors would call fake news (i understand the sentiment but that probably didn't help your case very much)

I expected to get banned. I was surprised they let me have at it for days.

Commenting on the difference between NT 4 and XP... It's probably greater than the difference between XP and Windows 10, to be honest. Windows 2000 was a huge jump forward from older NT versions, and XP is even newer than that. Vista was really just XP with a new fancy GUI and some extra security. They were working on another code base to begin with (Longhorn), but as usual Microsoft fucked up and turned the code into such a mess it was easier to revert back to the XP kernel rather than try to fix whatever was wrong with the new one. From what I understand, all modern versions of Windows are descendants of XP.

XP in turn, was a clean break with the past, merging the consumer and professional releases of Windows. Before that, the Win9x (and earlier) versions of Windows used a DOS-based kernel. That garbage is what Microsoft thought consumers deserved. The technology in Win9x was outdated even when it was first released. The only positive thing about it was the new GUI. An actually stable version of the OS (NT) was reserved for companies, because for them errors in the OS have downright financial consequences, and they don't accept just about any kind of garbage.

Releasing the abomination known as Windows ME (Millennium) was a bad move. I tried to use it. Big mistake. It was even more unstable than Windows 98, and that's saying something. Downright unusable. They even fucked up the name. Why would they use such a similar name for such vastly different systems? Most people probably couldn't even tell the difference between Millennium and 2000, and thought it was the same OS. That's the impression I got from talking to my normie "friends" at the time.

I can go on and on about Microsoft's fuck-ups, but this is it for now.

 

[The Fool]

Commenting on the difference between NT 4 and XP... It's probably greater than the difference between XP and Windows 10, to be honest. Windows 2000 was a huge jump forward from older NT versions, and XP is even newer than that. Vista was really just XP with a new fancy GUI and some extra security. They were working on another code base to begin with (Longhorn), but as usual Microsoft fucked up and turned the code into such a mess it was easier to revert back to the XP kernel rather than try to fix whatever was wrong with the new one. From what I understand, all modern versions of Windows are descendants of XP.

The difference between XP and Vista is massive. It was a restructuring of the entire system, internally dubbed "MinWin". A lot of things changed, the driver framework being one notable mention in this thread. Other notable differences is the advances in security, like locking out Session 0. Several other technologies were also introduced, including SuperFetch.

the Win9x (and earlier) versions of Windows used a DOS-based kernel. That garbage is what Microsoft thought consumers deserved.

This is flat-out ignorant, sorry. Yes, 9x is garbage and was intentionally created to be garbage. However, this was an industry demand, not Microsoft being lazy, in fact the exact opposite. Microsoft created NT before Windows 95 was even released, being finish in about '93 or '94. But NT did not run DOS drivers, it was a completely different architecture, it couldn't. They went out of their way to make 9x an entire new product they had to maintain in order to create a bridge between DOS and NT for developers to adapt their software to. Instead of just outright telling the industry "get fucked, rewrite everything for NT or go fuck yourself" they made a whole new product just to let DOS software developers incorporate the WinAPI and new driver framework (introduced in 98 ) into their software.

ME was a weird product but I think people shit on it too much. From my experience, it was just as shitty as any 9x release. I think a combination of all the shitty eMachines and Gateways coming out at the time with faulty hardware, and the fact that the 9x architecture was just starting to show it's age as the demands of software increased evermore and demanded more functionality and internet access, made the entire 9x architecture start to reveal it's seams, not just a fault of ME in and of itself. It was definitely a strange release, though, and they really should have just released 2000 as the next consumer desktop OS.

I find comments like this very concerning. MS goes out of their way to make life easier for developers so much so that it may even inconvenience end-users, and then people still give them shit for that. It makes me worry that comments like that will just make them wonder why they even bother and give up completely, then just turn into Apple or Google and tell developers to go fuck themselves.

 

[billgates3]

I find comments like this very concerning. MS goes out of their way to make life easier for developers so much so that it may even inconvenience end-users, and then people still give them shit for that. It makes me worry that comments like that will just make them wonder why they even bother and give up completely, then just turn into Apple or Google and tell developers to go fuck themselves.

You say that as if Microsoft was ever trying make good things.

I'm pretty sure that if they could trick people into buying plastic-wrapped dog shit, then that's what they would sell. Looking at Bill Gates and Microsoft overall, it really looks like it was never about technology, but only about using the technology as a means to make money. Bill could've made money in other ways, and he probably wouldn't mind, as he was never passionate about technology or about making good products. Him being truly passionate about technology would never have translated into the kind of subpar products Microsoft typically makes.

I'm sure there are many talented programmers working for Microsoft, but does that matter if the company itself is stupid? Why would you as a talented programmer want to stay at that company? I have a hard time seeing smart and creative people actually feeling at home there, in that kind of corporate culture.

I've used Microsoft's systems since the DOS days right up until Windows 7. Back when I was stuck in the Windows ecosystem I always felt like I was fighting my computer. It was as if I was working for my computer, not the other way around. Windows was always an unstable, unreliable and insecure, bug-infested mess. It's been gradually been getting ever so slightly better since they fully moved to NT, but the overall quality is still lower than what you'd get on macOS or Linux.

The only thing they have going for them is overall market share (install base) and backwards compatibility. That's why they have more programs and games than for example Linux.

I think releasing Win9x was a mistake. Not only was ME a mistake, but that whole line of systems was a mistake. It's so unnecessary to create a whole new family of Windows systems that they were planning to abandon right from the start. Developers would get used to those systems, and when 2000 (and later XP) was released they had to rewrite lots of drivers and programs anyway. Why can't they take lessons from Apple? They successfully transitioned from OS 9 to OS X (without creating an intermediate OS), and it wasn't long before nearly all programs had been rewritten for OS X.

 

[The Fool]

I think releasing Win9x was a mistake. Not only was ME a mistake, but that whole line of systems was a mistake. It's so unnecessary to create a whole new family of Windows systems that they were planning to abandon right from the start. Developers would get used to those systems, and when 2000 (and later XP) was released they had to rewrite lots of drivers and programs anyway. Why can't they take lessons from Apple? They successfully transitioned from OS 9 to OS X (without creating an intermediate OS), and it wasn't long before nearly all programs had been rewritten for OS X.

That's an understandable thought. The difference between MS and Apple is that Apple controls their hardware, MS doesn't. If Apple changes something, whether it's going from OS 9 to OS X, or going from AMD64 to Apple Silicon, the developer has to change their software. Not developing for the latest and greatest Apple product may as well mean you simply don't exist at all. MS didn't have this luxury, they knew the PC ecosystem was the wild west, that's how they came to even dominate the platform and they knew they had to maintain that domination, so they were practically forced to develop an intermediate product, lest they totally ruin their marketshare by releasing a new, incompatible OS which could be a vector for a competitor to swoop in and make their own compatible product to collect their market base. It already happened with DR-DOS. MS was in a really unique position that companies like Apple simply didn't need to concern themselves with.

Unfortunately, I can't really sympathize with the feeling of Windows being a prison. I know a lot of people say that, and, shit, with Windows 10 I'm also starting to feel it, but, with previous editions, I never felt constrained by the system. Windows is plenty customization options if you understand it's internals and know how to get around the Registry and Group Policy.

I also can't agree with the lack of quality compared to other OSes. Windows goes out of it's way to make a ton of quality-of-life features like side-by-side assemblies, which Linux still doesn't have. SxS is actually one of my favorite things to complain about with Linux. If Linux had it then I wouldn't have bricked my Arch and Ubuntu installs by not updating in a timely fashion. Which I think is bullshit.

 

[billgates3]

That's an understandable thought. The difference between MS and Apple is that Apple controls their hardware, MS doesn't. If Apple changes something, whether it's going from OS 9 to OS X, or going from AMD64 to Apple Silicon, the developer has to change their software. Not developing for the latest and greatest Apple product may as well mean you simply don't exist at all. MS didn't have this luxury, they knew the PC ecosystem was the wild west, that's how they came to even dominate the platform and they knew they had to maintain that domination, so they were practically forced to develop an intermediate product, lest they totally ruin their marketshare by releasing a new, incompatible OS which could be a vector for a competitor to swoop in and make their own compatible product to collect their market base. It already happened with DR-DOS. MS was in a really unique position that companies like Apple simply didn't need to concern themselves with.

I hear you. Your point makes sense. But at the same time you seem to agree with me that it was all about money and market share rather than making a good system that people would enjoy using. Keeping their market dominance seems to have been a higher priority, than actually making quality products. Microsoft knew right from the start that NT was the superior technology, in relation to DOS, and still they kept making DOS products when they knew that was an inferior design.

Of course there's going to be certain features that Windows has that Linux doesn't have (and vice versa), but I'd still argue that the overall quality is higher in Linux, partly because it's based on UNIX which is a very good and well thought out design philosophy. You could see it with Apple, how the quality bar was instantly raised the moment they moved to OS X. My brother who had never even thought about buying a Mac bought a Power Mac G4 pretty much as soon as OS X was released because he knew it was based on UNIX. When he showed me his Mac (and OS X) it looked like a spaceship from the future in comparison with Windows at the time. It was so far ahead. I think most people today don't realize just how far ahead Apple was back then. I think macOS is still better than Windows, but perhaps the gap between them has become smaller as Microsoft has made Windows better.