Windows 95 code apparently killed Windows 9 before it got started

What's in a name? Quite a lot, apparently

Microsoft's decision to name its new operating system Windows 10 (rather than Windows 9) certainly came as a surprise, with many people suggesting that it was done to place more distance between itself and the not-so-well received Windows 8.

Now, one Reddit user has claimed to know the actual reason behind the curveball. Posting in the /r/technology subreddit, a self-proclaimed Microsoft developer going by the name of Cranbourne wrote that it was done to avoid conflict with third-party code that searches for "Windows 9*".

Cranbourne reckons that such code isn't referring to Windows 9, but rather Windows 95 and Windows 98, with the asterisk acting as a wildcard.

Early testing by Microsoft developers apparently revealed it would cause enough of an issue due to the oodles of programs that would search for code related to those two platforms, causing the company to take the "pragmatic solution" by moving to Windows 10.

Here is the post in full:

"Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form:

if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9"))

{ /* 95 and 98 */ } else {

and that this was the pragmatic solution to avoid that."

It seems like a plausible explanation, though we are taking it with a pinch of salt, but the question looks set to run judging by Microsoft's non-answer that it gave to Gizmodo, which recieved the following statement when questioning the claim:

"Windows 10 carries Windows forward into a new way of doing things. It is not an incremental change, but a new Windows that will empower the next billion users."

That totally clears that up, then.

Via Neowin

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Apple has apparently received at least one Patriot Act order

Google and many other tech firms have also fielded Patriot Act requests

When the first-ever Apple transparency report was published in 2013, the company included a note that it had never received any Patriot Act-related information requests from the government.

That's now changed, it seems.

That note about not having received any Patriot Act requests appears to have been something called a "warrant canary," which companies apparently use to indicate when they've received requests that they can't otherwise legally disclose.

When the "canary" disappears, it means the company has received a secret subpoena, Patriot Act request or other clandestine order - and sure enough, Apple's is nowhere to be seen.

The note in the original transparency report was originally identified on culture blog Boing Boing.

"Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act," it read. "We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us."

But Apple's subsequent reports, from the second half of 2013 and the first half of 2014, omitted the canary.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act specifically allows the National Security Agency to requisition companies' business records, and forbids those companies from disclosing such activity. It's likely part of the reason why PRISM was allowed to exist.

This development comes at a time when government requests to companies for data like user info has increased dramatically, so it's no surprise that Apple may have been subject to them as well.

Tech firms early this year struck a deal with the US Department of Justice that lets them disclose numbers of requests made through the US's FISA court, which include Section 215 Patriot Act requests and more.

The companies must wait six months to disclose these numbers, and there are other restrictions, but still, it could be just a matter of time before Apple is able to comment on this in some capacity.

Via GigaOM

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