Microsoft To Add A Black Box To Windows 514
An anonymous reader writes "According to ZDNet, Microsoft plans to add the software equivalent of a 'black box' flight recorder to Windows. According to the article, 'The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the contents of documents that were being created.'" Commentary available via C|Net as well.
Not on my system you don't (Score:5, Interesting)
Why call it a black box? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Your realize what this means? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's In Your Box? (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is an excellent point. So where does this diagnostic data go?
Suppose I was some insensitive clod sitting around a computer lab at school, experimenting with my wargame stuff, trying to figure out whether the US could invade India or China, in some far-fetched scenario and my process died... next thing you know someone sifting through debugging data in Bangalore or Shanghai gets the idea that the US has the Theo Roosevelt off the coast just for that actual and imminent purpose and it gets forwarded to all the necessary wrong parties ...
Or maybe closer to the pocket book, didn't we just see something in the news about some outsourcing thing in India playing around with people's bank accounts in New York? Can't find the story right now...
Shouldn't that be illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
If sending your computer's configuration to Microsoft in the background was found to be illegal by the courts back in the Win95 days...
Wouldn't sending configuration information PLUS document contents be considered illegal today?
I mean, come on now, this couldn't possibly be happening, and out in the open to boot?
Re:Strange press... (Score:3, Interesting)
What about spying on the competition? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't care... (Score:3, Interesting)
It should prompt you to turn it on only after the initial bootup and default to no. Aside from that, it should be mandated to be in the off condition until an administrator turns it on. Finally, it shold send it to a central server of the organizations choosing, and then the administrator can remove/alter the files, and send only corporate approved ones.
Re:Privacy Alert! Maybe not. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Privacy Alert! Maybe not. (Score:5, Interesting)
Which brings up HIPPA concerns, here in the US.
HIPAA (Score:5, Interesting)
You can a floor nurse working at the same time next to another nurse who has a patient with an unusual disease. If you log in and look up the patient's record--or even look over the shoulder of your coworker when he logs in--the hospital is liable under HIPAA for privacy violations. They can be fined, and they can be sued, and enforcement of these rules happens frequently. Now imagine what could happen if THIS system is used in a hospital computer!
Re:Not on my system you don't (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, you may give "informed consent" to send the data to Microsoft, but can you be sure that it's really going there?
Re:Privacy on the job (Score:3, Interesting)
I work in IT, and I always tell everyone, if you don't want me reading it, don't send it through company e-mail. I tell everyone up-front. Just don't.
Now the reason for this isn't because I like to snoop. In fact, if I wanted to snoop, I wouldn't tell anyone, I'd just snoop around reading e-mail. However, other things come up. For example, I once ended up catching an e-mail about an extra-marital affair an employee was having. I wasn't looking for it, but I was browsing our spam filter to make sure we weren't getting false positives, and the mistress used a dirty word, which meant she got caught in the filter. By the time I was sure it was a personal e-mail and not spam, it was too late. I already knew too much.
Or some more examples:
I could probably come up with more situations where an IT guy might be in a position to read your e-mail without intentional monitoring. Hell, I've caught people visiting naughty websites because I was monitoring traffic for unrelated security purposes.
My point is, it's not all snooping. I'm not the sort to want to stick my nose in other people's business, and in fact, when I stumble across some personal information, I generally wish I hadn't. I don't want to know, so please, everyone, for the sake of your IT guys who don't want to know about your personal lives, don't send revealing personal e-mail through your company's servers.
Not legal under Canadian law (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't see too many of our clients agreeing to let the confidential contents of their documents be sent to Microsft to figure out why our PCs crashed.
Black box for windows? hmmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
If this tool is really to catch errant drivers, it's usually pretty serious for the OS to throw up its hands.
I wonder if the OS will maintain enough smarts to flush the BSOD information and other stuff to disk properly.
For that matter, if it's not a critical driver (e.g. a sound card driver or network card driver, etc), that goes wonky, why BSOD completely? Why can't the OS log a critical message stating 'This driver encountered an unrecoverable error and has been disabled'. Please close what you were doing and reboot *NOW*'.