Windows 7 Alpha Placed on Bittorrent By WinHEC Attendee
By: Dan Morrill
Better physical security might have helped here.
ITWire, Dark Visitor and Windows7center are all reporting the new Windows 7 Build 6956 has made it into bittorrent over the last couple of days. An attendee at WinHEC China is apparently the source of the software as well. While this is great for Microsoft, as it causes much news and blogging, it also allows people to get their hands on the software to write articles about it. Windows7center has screen shots (Chinese) of the software in action as well in case you are doubting this happened.
An attendee from the conference managed to slip a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) image of Windows 7 Build 6956 onto a portable device and upload it via torrent to the world. You’d think that Microsoft would have some sort of security enforced to keep this from happening after how hard they’ve been trying to prevent any leaks. The uploader from the PCBeta forum uses the alias Edward_Han, and is seen by the Chinese Windows community as a hero. Source: Windows7Center
The size of the file (on the pirate bay, and this might not be the right version as it is labeled 6801 not 6956, the new one is probably bigger) is 2.73 Gigs, that would have taken at least 10 minutes to download on to a USB device. You would have thought that someone would notice, unless the person plugged it in, used an automated script, grabbed the image, and then moved it over. There are going to be warning signs on the computer that something happened. Would you give someone unrestricted access, or would you have shut down the USB devices; there are a lot of things here that Microsoft could have done to secure the virtual disk and the computer.
In the mean time, at least people are interested in Windows 7 enough to take a huge risk in pirating it. Although someone should be questioning Microsoft about physical and computer set up security, it is already out there and being traded actively. The good part is that there are many people who are impressed with it, meaning this might just get Microsoft back in the saddle again with operating systems. They recently fell below 90% market share for the first time in a very long time, Windows 7 has to be something special.