False positives suck, and it hurts when it happens.
The publisher account for Material Theme and Material Theme Icons (Equinusocio) was mistakenly flagged and has now been restored. In the interest of safety, we moved fast and we messed up. We removed these themes because they fired off multiple malware detection indicators inside Microsoft, and our investigation came to the wrong conclusion. We care deeply about the security of the VS Code ecosystem, and acted quickly to protect our users.
I understand that the "Equinusocio" extensions author's frustration and intense reaction, and we hear you. It's bad but sometimes things like this happen. We do our best - we're humans, and we hope to move on from this We will clarify our policy on obfuscated code and we will update our scanners and investigation process to reduce the likelihood of another event like this.
These extensions are safe and have been restored for the VS Code community to enjoy.
Again, we apologize that the author got caught up in the blast radius and we look forward to their future themes and extensions. We've corresponded with him to make these amends and thanked him for his patience.
Scott Hanselman and the Visual Studio Code Marketplace Team - @shanselman
Yes, that’s what happened. They’ve been asking for a while, and I’ve tried a couple of times. But their last tweet got pretty good pick up, so I made another run at it. I asked the right Vice Presidents, found the right people to agree to the new license, retrieve the source from our company archivist, found two developers who worked on the actual project, and then worked with the Microsoft open source office to finalize everything, then released it. It took just about a month. I like doing things that people don’t think are possible. It’s literally as simple as that.
That’s not related to Microsoft the company. That’s a result of the archivist systems that I had to mess with to get this stuff restored from tapes and CDs. I didn’t feel like changing it too much. So blame me.