Comment by crazygringo
7 days ago
> Microsoft included an encrypted copy of Bob on Windows XP installation CDs to waste space to discourage piracy.
This feels like an urban legend made up after the fact.
It would be way easier to just generate random bytes, and nobody could ever tell the difference.
Especially since no decryption key exists.
It's just a funnier story if that's the only thing Bob was ever good for...
> This feels like an urban legend made up after the fact.
Raymond Chen of Microsoft has this to say about that:
"... [the person adding 30 megs of random crap] could have just called the CryptGenRandom function to generate 30 megabytes of cryptographically random bytes, but where's the fun in that? Instead, he dug through the archives and found a copy of Microsoft Bob. He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file. The contents of the Microsoft Bob floppy disk images are not particularly random, so he decided to scramble up the data by encrypting it. When it came time to enter the encryption key, he just smashed his hand haphazardly across the keyboard and out came an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That's what went into the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD..."[0]
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...
I really want this to be true, but Bob came on six floppy disks, far less than 30M.
It's entirely possible the disk images were just duplicated multiple times to get to 30M.
It was added by David Plummer, who explains how and why he did it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXHu9OmLd8Y
On the other hand guy has history of lying and scamming the public https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
Is this why there was a copy of Weezer’s Buddy Holly music video was on there too?
IIRC that was the Windows 95 CD, not XP. Wikipedia seems to agree:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Holly_(song)
Missed the part about XP. Question still applies to the 95 disk.
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> It would be way easier to just generate random bytes, and nobody could ever tell the difference.
Programmers love easter eggs.
Edit: sillywalk's comment proves my point.
Without knowing the encryption key, it is just random data though. And since not even the creator knows, there sadly is no easter egg.
Isn't it still an easter egg though? Just one that is very hard to find.