5 ms·

inside a single system available to just about every engineer inside the company Can someone explain why there have never been any leaks?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
leaks of what exactly? It's billions of lines of code spread amongst millions of files which make up thousands of services... It's not like there 10 files with all the magic sauce.
- zeven7 4y ago
  To add to this, it's not all on every engineer's machine. It's not like they can just walk out of the office with a computer with all the source code. It's on a virtual file system that requests files as needed, and you can bet there are systems set up to detect if someone is just downloading the whole thing for no reason.
  - chii 4y ago
    it's not even that. if you assume that the entire codebase was leaked verbatim, it would still take entrenched knowledge of many google engineers to replicate the same services and infrastructure to support those services. If any state actor who stole that code could deploy such engineering capabilities, they don't really need the source code tbh.
arebop 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_conviction_and_pardon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_c...
xfs 4y ago
From Steve Yegge: What really happened is that China hacked Google, and it pissed Google off when they finally discovered it, many months later. This wasn’t some small intrusion or data breach. It was a systemic, coordinated, widespread, very deep hack, which among other things, gave China all of Google’s source code. It was very similar in scope and ambition to the Solar Winds hack recently out of Russia. It forced Google to completely rethink their security, which at the time was an Igloo model (hard on the outside, soft on the inside, a Gary Larson reference I think), and they had to migrate to where internal access was also limited, which took years. I’ll share with you, confidentially wink wink, that most companies way overvalue their source code. It’s actually their engineers who are their biggest asset, because the engineers can reproduce the source code if it’s lost (quite quickly at that), whereas the source code can’t do fuck-all on its own. Moreover, most source code bases are so ugly that you couldn’t give them away. But Google had what they now call “HIP” (High-value Intellectual Property) scattered through their source code, which are the tuning parameters and constants for various algorithms and AI models which are the true Secret Sauce to Google’s Search and Ads dominance.
- ComradePhil 4y ago
  > because the engineers can reproduce the source code if it’s lost (quite quickly at that) Does anyone really believe this?
  - dijit 4y ago
    I can believe it. There are even advantages from a clean slate methodology; if there’s sufficient buy in from management. Reason being: if you have done things before and bore the weight of architectural misgivings, you can clearly reproduce the software. The biggest barrier to doing this normally is: A) time pressure. B) pressure to use existing log available tech C) pressure to be cheap (which is manifested most often in A&B but is it’s own thing too). This causes “large rewrites” to be rushed, subpar and lesser quality as the emphasis often isn’t on getting to feature parity. Regardless, if google lost their code- entirely, we would probably have search by next week, auth in a fortnight, mail by next month and something approximating google cloud by the end of the year. Because a lot of the really hard lessons have been learned, a reimplementation is just time.
gravypod 4y ago
(Opinions are my own) Most of snippets of Google's code wouldn't be usable without the entire ecosystem around them. Most things are doable because of libraries, internal infrastructure, etc.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

leaks of what exactly? It's billions of lines of code spread amongst millions of files which make up thousands of services... It's not like there 10 files with all the magic sauce.

zeven7 4y ago
To add to this, it's not all on every engineer's machine. It's not like they can just walk out of the office with a computer with all the source code. It's on a virtual file system that requests files as needed, and you can bet there are systems set up to detect if someone is just downloading the whole thing for no reason.
- chii 4y ago
  it's not even that. if you assume that the entire codebase was leaked verbatim, it would still take entrenched knowledge of many google engineers to replicate the same services and infrastructure to support those services. If any state actor who stole that code could deploy such engineering capabilities, they don't really need the source code tbh.

arebop 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_conviction_and_pardon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_c...

xfs 4y ago

From Steve Yegge: What really happened is that China hacked Google, and it pissed Google off when they finally discovered it, many months later. This wasn’t some small intrusion or data breach. It was a systemic, coordinated, widespread, very deep hack, which among other things, gave China all of Google’s source code. It was very similar in scope and ambition to the Solar Winds hack recently out of Russia. It forced Google to completely rethink their security, which at the time was an Igloo model (hard on the outside, soft on the inside, a Gary Larson reference I think), and they had to migrate to where internal access was also limited, which took years. I’ll share with you, confidentially wink wink, that most companies way overvalue their source code. It’s actually their engineers who are their biggest asset, because the engineers can reproduce the source code if it’s lost (quite quickly at that), whereas the source code can’t do fuck-all on its own. Moreover, most source code bases are so ugly that you couldn’t give them away. But Google had what they now call “HIP” (High-value Intellectual Property) scattered through their source code, which are the tuning parameters and constants for various algorithms and AI models which are the true Secret Sauce to Google’s Search and Ads dominance.

ComradePhil 4y ago
> because the engineers can reproduce the source code if it’s lost (quite quickly at that) Does anyone really believe this?
- dijit 4y ago
  I can believe it. There are even advantages from a clean slate methodology; if there’s sufficient buy in from management. Reason being: if you have done things before and bore the weight of architectural misgivings, you can clearly reproduce the software. The biggest barrier to doing this normally is: A) time pressure. B) pressure to use existing log available tech C) pressure to be cheap (which is manifested most often in A&B but is it’s own thing too). This causes “large rewrites” to be rushed, subpar and lesser quality as the emphasis often isn’t on getting to feature parity. Regardless, if google lost their code- entirely, we would probably have search by next week, auth in a fortnight, mail by next month and something approximating google cloud by the end of the year. Because a lot of the really hard lessons have been learned, a reimplementation is just time.

gravypod 4y ago

(Opinions are my own) Most of snippets of Google's code wouldn't be usable without the entire ecosystem around them. Most things are doable because of libraries, internal infrastructure, etc.