The limited Windows Vista Service Pack 1 pre-beta release made available to a select group of testers in mid July was leaked to torrent trackers and is free for the taking. Under the rule of the PR "shy" Steven a.k.a. Codename Translucency, Sinofsky, senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group - the user experience of Microsoft Windows and Windows Live services, Microsoft has gagged all details related to upcoming releases related to the Windows platform.

Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, Windows Seven and even Windows Fiji are all under Windows Omerta. And with Sinofsky, Microsoft is striving to be translucent, instead of transparent. However, the Redmond company needs to choose its "select" testers more... selectively, as Vista SP1 downloads have been uploaded to torrent trackers worldwide.

At the time of this article, no less than three such websites were offering "Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 32Bit Build 6001 16549" for download. The torrent was made available initially on August 9, and is an ISO file weighing in at approximately 3.2 GB. "This is the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Build 6001.16549. Think of it more as a pre-beta build of SP1 than an actual beta build. Full Build tag is: 6001.16549.070628-1825," reads a fragment of the release notes adjacent to the download.

Toward the end of July, Microsoft confirmed the fact that a pre-beta test build of Vista SP1 had been dropped in the laps of what it has referred to as "a select pool of testers." Admitting publicly the existence of Vista SP1 pre-beta must have torn Sinofsky's heart out. However, Microsoft emphasized that a public beta of the first service pack for Windows Vista won't be coming anytime soon. Well, it seems that some of the testers failed to see eye to eye with Microsoft on the limited nature of the pre-beta version.