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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

They won't. Such backdoors would have to be hidden from Joe Average Coder at Microsoft first and foremost. Coding for MS is not a livelong thing, you know? So any backdoor would a) be obfuscated and b) have some form of plausible deniability. If I would have to make them, they would look like strings of two or three bugs.

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Likely you're right, but let's see if anything can become plausibly demonstrable after obsessive scrutiny. Like many situations in life, it may depend on whether someone determined / resourceful enough wants to do this. There may be no one with sufficient motivation.

Also, it's not just (allegedly) all of XP source that's been leaked:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/the-windows-...

It's also Windows Server 2003, MS DOS 3.30, MS DOS 6.0, Windows 2000, Windows CE 3, Windows CE 4, Windows CE 5, Windows Embedded 7, Windows Embedded CE, Windows NT 3.5, and Windows NT 4!

That's a huge amount of stuff to analyse.

Do you know if there is source code for classic Windows apps like the Calculator, Notepad or Paint? Would love to recreate those simple apps and chuck the lousy Linux/Mac equivalents.

I am not sure if it is what you are looking for, but the calculator is now open source under the MIT license https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator

As a recall, making notepad is like a homework assignment for a visual basic class. You just drag the text editor window and add the menus, there isn't a whole lot there!

Paint would probably be a bit more work, but there are a few clones out there already

Notepad is simple to build in Visual Basic because it uses the controls that are inherited from... notepad.

What GP meant, is whether the source for those controls is available.

Notepad is simple to build in Visual Basic, Delphi, heck even assembly because the controls are inherited from Windows[1].

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/indi...

There is no reason to build them for Windows. I just use the ones already available for Windows. I want to build it for Mac so I can get the great simple tools on Windows but on the stability of Mac. For Paint I have resorted to buying a Mac Store app called Paint2 made by some Chinese developer. It is still too complex but is the best I can do now.

Really looking to build a tool with the same look and feel. Launches fast, can just paste text stripping formatting and then allow you to save it as txt or copy it as is to other apps. A typical Ubuntu install gives you something like gedit2 or pluma. Too much for a text editor. Same goes for Paint. I can't believe that I have to install a heavy app like Gimp, Pinta or Krita. They are significantly more heavy and less stable in my experience. The simplicity of these tools make their brilliance.

The same goes for Mac. Mac has "textEdit" and "Notes" apps but it handles formatting, is slower to launch and is more of a Wordpad clone. For Paint, their Preview tool is terrible. I just want to take a screenshot, paste it in a file, maybe add a red circle or square and save it as png. Quick and fast.

It would be nice to have a Github repo where you can browse the history like for Unix at https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo . Not going to happen, of course.

There's always Ken Thompson's hack of the compiler to insert a backdoor into the login program on Unix. See Reflections on Trusting Trust: https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html .

Obfuscated like NSAKEY?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

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