Did Google Reverse-engineer Windows?

* As far as I can tell, the rev-eng EULA clause is never really enforced.

* Every closed-source vendor in the world --- and many open source vendors --- include this clause. They all get reversed.

* There are a number of rev-eng/copyright "outs" that apply specifically to security and compatibility research.

* It's unlikely that the Greenborder team did the original reversing work; anything having anything at all to do with Microsoft's runtime protections has been picked apart with tweezers ten times over.

* The code itself cites an external source (uninformed.org, a must read for systems developers).

* For all Microsoft's "documented" concerns about reversing, they go further than any other systems developer to help reversers, for instance by publishing the PDB debug symbols for the majority of all their binaries.

* Active, aggressive Microsoft reversers like Skywing also hold MVP certification.

* Other active, aggressive Microsoft reversers have been hired by the Sysinternals team.

I think this is much ado about nothing.

> True enough, Chrome's source code contains a link to uninformed.org's description of the DEP control on XP SP2 where the undocumented function is described.

But don't let that stop you from including DEP in your thesis. That would ruin the flow.

> there's the new V8 JavaScript virtual machine with its boasts of near-native code performance,

What does that even mean? Your JavaScript will run as fast as highly optimized assembly? Or even normally compiled C? I think not.

It does JIT JavaScript to machine code, so in that sense it's exactly "native code performance"