ReactOS Forum

Here the news at OSNews
https://www.osnews.com/story/130275/rea ... -engineer/
which links to the TheRegister-article at
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/0 ... _engineer/

Greetings
theuserbl

Axel Rietschin, kernel engineer at Microsoft,

Is the Kernel Engineer the same person, who have written the FastPictureViewer ?

http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/
http://arsd.cloudapp.net/FPV/Telemetry/

In Microsoft every person changed steadily its position. A graphics expert changed to a kernel expert and so on.

Greetings
theuserbl

theuserbl wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 11:36 am

Axel Rietschin, kernel engineer at Microsoft,

Is the Kernel Engineer the same person, who have written the FastPictureViewer ?

Yes he is.

https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think ... -Rietschin

is it anything more than a private opinion? Does he have any proofs?

erkinalp wrote: ↑Thu Jul 04, 2019 2:47 pm
https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think ... -Rietschin

Judging by this, it seems he is completely unaware of the U.S. standards for reverse engineering and believes it should all have been done using only public documentation.

At least one jurisdiction in the world has such a restriction for reverse engineering a copyrighted or a patented work.

"using only public documentation..."

Axel Rietschin, the kernel engineer at Microsoft who is making these accusations, is unaware that there's more public documentation of Microsoft Windows than even Microsoft knows. Alex Ionescu spoke about that in his keynote speech to OffensiveCon19, "Reversing Without Reversing". (YouTube video)

It seems that finally now there are some problems to ReactOS...but I hope that they will be irrelevant...
ReactOS is Open Source and it can be easily probed that the code is clean and original, right?

Otherwise how can anyone probe that the code written is "ilegal" ?

Don't panic, Quim. Axel Rietschin offered no evidence in support of his claims. Yes, some bits of ReactOS use the same internal names that Microsoft Windows uses but long ago Microsoft made those names public. Microsoft appears to have no copyright or trademark rights to those names.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342763 wrote:
I think it’s highly improbable that a reimplementation of that magnitude came so close from the original in so many respects. I’ve been conducting interviews for years and screened some of the best and most promising future engineers coming from the best universities and I always ask the same coding questions. I was given many decent and correct answers, but never the actual implementation was similar to the level I can observe between ReactOS and the leaked Microsoft code.

If I understand Axel right, he's using his own experience interviewing freshmen graduates from colleges using stale corporate interview questions (where you're not allowed to look up any references unlike in an actual working scenario) as his basis on why ReactOS developers could never possibly reimplement Windows code as similar to the original. This seems more of a provocation and clash between a stubborn corporate elitist and FOSS programmers than a genuine concern for possible unclean-room reverse engineering.

middings wrote: ↑Fri Jul 05, 2019 1:12 pm Don't panic, Quim. Axel Rietschin offered no evidence in support of his claims. Yes, some bits of ReactOS use the same internal names that Microsoft Windows uses but long ago Microsoft made those names public. Microsoft appears to have no copyright or trademark rights to those names.

Well. he did offer.
He mentions some hack:

Funnily, I had a conversation with a very seasoned kernel engineer (I report directly to him) about ReactOS and my Quora reply. He told me the team looked into ReactOS some time ago and reached the exact same conclusions: impossible.

In particular, this person distinctly remembers a hack he implemented (I’m not going to reveal any details, but suffice to say it was in response to some assertion by some 3rd parties that something Microsoft declared in a court of law as very difficult). He explained the hack to me in full details and, boy, hacky that was, and they found the same hack in ReactOS’s code, except that the présumer authors of that “clean room” implementation probably have no idea regarding why the hack was there.

You do realize, that you can pull off the private names from the leaked/mistakenly distributed builds, but you can't recreate the hack this way? Apparently he didn't show what exactly hack it is. But are you sure, that they won't show what they mean when it comes to the real investigation? will you be as brave as now then?

Also, many (user avgalen's comment, the quote is below) pointed out that taking the names out of mistakenly released builds is far away from a "clean room" approach:

... It also explains how he (Ionescu) could have gotten the Macro-names: Basically leaked/mistaken-builds that shouldn’t have become public but did. This isn’t what a “clean room” implementation means and it is clear from this video that this guy has a questionable morality*

Of course, there is no reason to panic - Rietschin said many times - it's his opinion, MS seems to not care. So no suing issues here. Reputation issues instead are quite obvious. Apparently, all over here are going to attack, mock and ridcule him, no matter what, but what good it will make? except self satisfying? you probably alread know, just look at ReactOS related comments elsewhere on the Web - people not exactly trusted in "clean-roominess" of it. And now, it only strengthens those doubts. This is the real danger. Personally, I am unpleasantly surprised, because, maybe I am too naive - I believed in ReactOS "made from scratch" assurances.

So a "news" outlet picks up what was said on Quora, a Q&A site that I believe from firsthand experience supports defamation against certain groups of people, and censorship. In the interest of fair disclosure, I was banned from Quora because I dared to question the status quo and establishment views on certain things. I was falsely accused of giving "insincere answers," which seems to be code for "trolling." No, I answered according to my beliefs and experiences, which do not align with "experts" who are clearly driven by a social-reengineering agenda that directly harms individuals such as myself. I am not hijacking the topic, only disclosing my connection with Quora and saying why I don't believe it is a credible source since the alleged news outlet used Quora as a source.

As for the claims against ROS, I see them as bogus. Certain things can only be done a certain way to maintain compatibility. And most of the internal names are simply intuitive. It only makes sense to name things after what they do. So it only makes sense that we coincidentally have the same names.

In addition, 3rd parties have made a lot of the internal names public, and in ways that don't leak code to us. Just naming structures or functions and what they do is fair game.

As for Quora, we could use someone to debunk his claims there.

Don't panic, irony. When I wrote "long ago Microsoft made those names public" I wasn't speaking of leaked builds but of Microsoft's intentionally published product documentation.

middings wrote: ↑Sun Jul 07, 2019 2:20 am Don't panic, irony. When I wrote "long ago Microsoft made those names public" I wasn't speaking of leaked builds but of Microsoft's intentionally published product documentation.

oh well. it's cool, of course, but the MS employee talks about the hack, that is not part of any "published documentation" and macro names that aren't either. they were only in the leaked Windows sources. but anyway, seems you know it better, than that guy. I don't panic. I've said, what I think is the biggest problem for ReactOS out of this scandal. I am sure, those aggressive dudes attacking Rietschin do a very bad service. They suggest him to "STFU", whereas it's them, who need that desperately. The sooner this will calm down, the better it is for the project.