Microsoft Tracking Behavior of Newsgroup Posters 543
theodp writes "Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. An interesting but troubling CNET interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist goes into how the software giant is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value." Those concerned that it's not a good idea for computers to track their belongings and whereabouts are advised that they may ultimately have to fragment their identities, keeping multiple IDs and e-mail addresses."
Good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good (Score:5, Funny)
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who isn't already doing this?
With the advent of spam most people I know abandonned their first email address years ago. I have one for each service I use (including slashdot).
Pay attention kids.... (Score:5, Funny)
Before you fly up to Redmond for your interview, make sure you post a year's worth of insightful commentary on major relevant newsgroups, with your name and email attached
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Err... never mind.
Well I think I deserve it.
I don't (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not going to pretend to be anyone else.
Want to dredge up all the postings I've made anywhere on the internet? Go ahead. WTF do I care. If I didn't want people to read it and know it came from me, Barlo, I would not have posted it.
OT: Re:Good thing that guy isn't a programmer... (Score:5, Funny)
Say...anyone know if there is still a display case near the elevator in one of the basements of the EE building at Caltech that displays less-than-successful projects of the faculty and students? If so, does it still include Carver Mead's 4K write-only memory card (from back in the days when 4K was a lot of memory)? (No, it wasn't INTENDED to be write-only).
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
I set up a subdomain from one of my domains, that forwards all mail to one of my real addresses. Everytime I have to use my email, I use something at that subdomain, for example, slashdot@catch.domain.com. If I get spam to that address, 1) I can block the address without affecting anything else, and 2), I know who got my name on the list.
Particularily useful when you have to register to get access to download or use something. I'm careful about giving out those addresses anyways, and always "opt-out", so I get a surprisingly small amount of spam to them. I've yet to recieve spam for an address I gave to a company that said it wouldn't spam me.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
I use MyInitials_UniqueIdentity@mydomain.com. For example, when I bought tickets from that over-priced poor-quality monopolistic Ticketmaster, I created an entry in my
mf_ticketmaster_ca: mynormailmailbox
If I get spam, I comment the line out. I don't think your system allows anything extra... so I'm intrigued about your approach. Oh, and Ticketmaster did give away my email address. Their privacy statement is quite eye opening too.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Using a catch-all (mail to ANY address at that domain gets forwarded) means I don't have to set up anything in an alias file or whatever. I just have to enter it, and it works. If one address gets overly-spammed, I can block that specific address, while the catch-all continues to work.
Using a regular domain (domain.com) for that purpose just means you also get all the dictonary spam. Often spammers will try info@ sales@ administrator@ bob@ etc. If it's a sub-domain, they're a lot less likely to try that, if at all. If you do end up getting a large-scale dictionary attack on the subdomain, you can just make a new one. Though I think those large-scale attacks are targeted - one of my friends works at an ISP, and he says they get them quite a bit, where they just try thousands of common usernames.
Basically, using a sub-domain makes a bit less work, and gives you a bit more protection, if you need it.
This sounds familiar! (Score:5, Funny)
What do you think? Would it work?
Oh wait!
Re:This sounds familiar! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:This sounds familiar! (Score:3, Funny)
I think the obvious answer to that would be a resounding no
Re:This sounds familiar! (Score:5, Funny)
What do you think? Would it work?
Beats me -- I'm still swamped trying to develop a web shopping site that lets you buy things with less than 2 mouse clicks. (I've got it down to four!)
Maybe I can give you a hand once I get this whole "hyperlink" thing in the box and ready to ship.
Re:This sounds familiar! (Score:3, Funny)
Sure, it works. (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft has hated it forever [essential.org]. For much the same reasons movie makers [slashdot.org] and other large advertisers of shoddy junk hate information
Re:This sounds familiar! (Score:4, Interesting)
What's wrong with this? (Score:5, Insightful)
My god, you are so naive.
Re:What's wrong with this? (Score:2)
Re:What's wrong with this? (Score:5, Funny)
Over the years, the clipping services expanded out, adding AP feeds, Newswire, etc. They suck articles right off the wire and store them for their customer's perusal. Then they added newsgroup and chatroom monitoring, and of course web monitoring. They use web spiders to capture the info, and databases to store it.
This is very widespread, and it's been going on for years. Do a google search on "clipping services" if you don't believe me. Anything you write online about a company who can afford the service is noticed, printed out, and sent to them by a flunky.
Why worry? It's not like you can do anything about it. So Microsoft knows that I think they suck. Big deal. Hey, Gates! You suck! See? No hitmen busting down my door, no guidos breaking my leggaggdafsafal;nfdasl'(MESSAGE TERMINATED)
I read the article! (Score:5, Interesting)
The AURA just sounds like the CueCat Digital Convergence people who wanted to put a bar code on everything. Again, MS is not the company I'd like to see doing this.
*Rather Offtopic - but Digital Convergence used to advertise the CueCat with an 'Angel coming down to earth from heaven to barcode everything' and the well-known Digital Angel RFID people have also made a religious reference in the company's name. The hue and cry of Christian's 'the number of the beast' references beg the question:
Who the hell is doing marketing for these people? I remember getting an icky feeling when I saw the 'infomercial' for the CueCat, and similarly the Digital Angel website. And I'm not the 'churchy' type. I can only imagine what the fundies think...
* This idea is copyrighted. Use of this idea may not be used to more attractively market 'evil' technology, or put a chip in my head. Thanks.
Re:I read the article! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all about support costs. Supporting newsgroups is very cheap and also very easy to farm out overseas to folks who really do nothing but paste in answers from scripts.
Re:I read the article! (Score:3, Interesting)
Your fear of overseas workers is clouding your judgement. The main reason people go to newsgroups is *precisely* because they want to avoid the cut and paste replies of unskilled people. And the main reason a company will support a newsgroup is precisely because their own customers (some of them skilled) will contribute to it without getting paid.
But if you know
Re:I read the article! (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not saying this is all a bad thing, I'm just pointing
Re:I read the article! (Score:3, Funny)
Goddamnit people! It's ':Cue:Cat'!
Eri:c :Chavez
:CEO, Digital :Convergen:ce
Why is google better? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is google better? (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now Google's reputation is one of the corporate assets. And they are taking good care of it. Next year, who knows.
P.S.: For profit isn't what makes an organization untrustworthy. It's centralized power. Once centralized power comes to exist the psychos become greedy to take it over. (And having observed myself, I know that sometimes these psychos were the same people
On the Internet ... (Score:5, Funny)
Woof.
In-house sociologist (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading this thread makes me want to rant-post on some of their boards! They should buy out the Church of $cientology too. That would make a great team.
A Scanner Darkly (Score:2)
Did this line remind anyone else of Philip K. Dick's thoroughly perplexing novel "A Scanner Darkly"?
Re:A Scanner Darkly (Score:3, Funny)
No.
He has clue (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's a very important thing. And we have build NetScan to protect what I think are legitimate claims for privacy. Like a Net spider, NetScan takes publicly accessible documents off the Internet, and it respects metadata that says "Leave me alone!" There is the robots.txt file that says, "You can look at this but not that." With Usenet there is one that says "Leave my messages alone," and we respect that. We will not store your messages if you put that in them.
So tell me again why this is stuff that matters?
Re:Who cares (Score:3)
robots.txt is a well-established standard. Microsoft has been analyzing Usenet and mailing list postings *without* publicizing what the equivalent is for their system.
That's what bothers people.
Re:Who cares (Score:3, Informative)
so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
limited insight. (Score:3, Insightful)
Read, fine. Study, great. Honestly disiminate? Right, you think Microsoft is going to tell you the truth or something? Give me a break.
Microsoft has a track record of Astroturfing a mile long, extending all the way back to Steve Barkto's spamming of newsgroups. They hire PR firms to pretend to be Apple to M$ switchers, to write letters on their behalf from dead people to politicia
Since the early days of netnews... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if Microsoft weren't doing this, wouldn't there be articles appearing with titles such as "Microsoft ignores valuable customer feedback available free on Internet"? I am no big fan of Redmond, but I think they are almost forced to do something like this to avoid being blindsided.
sPh
Re:Since the early days of netnews... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't post in public forums. No wait, DOOOH
Never mind
Re:Since the early days of netnews... (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't used newsgroups much, and therefore my opinion may be inaccurate, but it seems like anyone looking an groups using software with theses new search features is going to approach things very differently than people using tradition methods. Essentially, if there if a group can be called a community, it's probably that way because everyone w
Take A F**king Stand against free speech? (Score:3, Insightful)
Example:
Politician: I voted for X.
You: The politician voted for X, but X kills babies.
Response: We need X its saves lives, its only killed one baby and that baby was dropped on its head anyway.
See, all speeches and counter-speeches are important, including action as speech.
Another example:
Me: Thanks for the transaction, I
Re:Or Take A Fucking Stand (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Your freedom of speech does not guarantee anything in the private sector. I.e. it does not guarantee your employment contract, your image, your customers, others' opinions about you, or others' actions taken based
Call me captain conspirator... (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot Karma or Google PageRank (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more like a Google PageRank implemented Newsgroup posters instead of Web Sites, and run by Microsoft instead of Google. Microsoft is just adding true statistics and tracking to the already existant "human credibility" of posters.
Newgroups posts are public.
I don't see this as a problem.
-Pete
Somewhere, in the future (Score:2)
Of course, looking at my
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Paranoia (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure MS already spies on Slashdot and tracks every profile here. I have four, and switch between them carefully, unt sometimez I speek in forin lanjuajes just to confooze them.
On the other hand, this reminds me strangely of a scene from Dilbert.
Serf1: Boss, I need to monitor newsnet.
PHB: why?
Serf1: So we can track our competitors, manipulate public opinion, and run smear campaigns against political opponents.
PHB: sounds fine...
Serf1: It will take nine months, that's ok?
PHB: yes, get someone to help you if you need it.
later..
Serf2: So, did you get it?
Serf1: Yes, we're now official newsnet spies.
Serf2: porn on, dude!!! alt.binaries, here I come.
Serf1: I've asked for some new hard drives too...
Re:Paranoia (Score:2, Insightful)
Check your head, fella.
They actually research their customer base. Imagine that.
If the GNU/Linux community would take note, and start reading what users are saying, perhaps we'd have a usable desktop by now.
Moderation (Score:3, Insightful)
Paranoid? (Score:2, Funny)
But remember that MS is arespected company that outside this limited communuty is known as a company that protect the privacy of their customers, and the data they collect about potentiall customers. Whatever you feel about MS, its their *right* to do this. In fact anyone could have done it, its just accidentally happened that it was MS who did it.
I'm sure
Troubling? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is good valid research, the type that applied research CS programs should be doing. Thismay actually make a difference in a deployed product.
I think we should tone done the M$ and SCO crap for a while.
Re:Troubling? (Score:3, Interesting)
Real Information? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think that this is some sort of plot of evil. Well it sorta is, but the whole motivation behind any kind of information gathering is money. They want to spend less on advertising by targeting only the people who will show interest in thier products. The more they watch people like this the more money potential they have.
The best way to keep your privacy from becoming an issue and all of these information databases getting merged on you is to NEVER, EVER give out your real information to ANYBODY, especially on the internet, unless it's a secure SSL transaction, and you really trust the source.
Re:Real Information? (Score:3, Insightful)
SCO IP Infringer List (Score:5, Funny)
Bide your time well, Linux zealots, for the mighty power of SCO's IP will reign down upon thee!
Re:SCO IP Infringer List (Score:2)
Dupe? (Score:2, Insightful)
What!?!?!? WHAT?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm JUDGED by what I say in PUBLIC?
MY GOD!
The only thing that bothers me is that MSFT pisses away stockholder cash on this, unless they can somehow turn it into legitimate market research.
BTW, they read slashdot too. If the editors cared about this sort of "invasion of privacy", they'd remove the AC posting limit.
And why does a site so rabid over the issue of online anonymity have to refer to anyone who chooses to post as such as a coward?
More MS lies (Score:2)
No problem (Score:5, Funny)
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many companies (stars often check out what fans are saying around the net) are probably scoping out message boards/newsgroups to see what people are saying about their products. And plenty of people have opinions about various products but most people are less than stellar when it comes to intelligently expressing why they feel the way they do.
"It sucks" is not helpful to companies in their quest to improve their products. And people who bitch about everything or praise everything also aren't worth paying attention to.
It's called market research. This is a non story. "I want to have an opinion about X but X better not read it!" is just dense.
Ben
They have done this for years and years (Score:2)
http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com]
Review (Score:2)
Me: Yea, I have (an older...) MDK installed on one of my servers here. I have Gentoo on a couple others. I use Gentoo at home (and I have MDK 9.1 on a machie for testing). Just use urpmi to get the updates you need and you'll be good.
M$-News-Bot: Cross reference posting IP with known MSCP lists. User is an MSCP.
Send out the software police. Posting IP is talking about Linux.
Give it a break (Score:5, Informative)
- This monitoring goes on exclusively in the msnews.microsoft.com domain, plus a few others that are also run by the company. While NetScan is sometimes pointed to MS-oriented news servers (news.devx.com is an example), Microsoft is not "monitoring USENET".
- Marc Smith is a very sharp guy who has done a lot of interesting work with the social dynamics of online communities. Goggle him for more info. And if you have questions about what NetScan does, give it a whirl [microsoft.com] and form your own conclusions.
- At the moment, NetScan is used by the MVP program [microsoft.com] to follow members' posting history. The MVP program is not exclusive to NNTP, however.
- I can't see how this goes into the "YRO" section - if Microsoft is monitoring the news servers it operates and that bothers you - don't post there. This is hardly the land of the Microsoft advocate or even user for that matter. This is like reporting that I'm painting my bedroom bright red - WTF do the neighbors care about that?
Yet another hysterical ad revenue generating headline, brought to you by the Slashdot "editors".Re:Give it a break (Score:3, Informative)
Any globally-available group is or can be available on their servers with no significant difficulty. I poked around and came up with local groups (e.g. chi.general) and non-MS language groups (e.g. comp.lang.python). Perhaps you're confusing the msnews.microsoft.com domain with the microsoft.public hierarchy?
Chinese Gov't Should Love This (Score:3, Insightful)
Can I get a "valuable contributor" certificate? (Score:2)
Microsoft - the boogieman (Score:5, Insightful)
It's no different than any social study on the general public. It's done in academia all the time.
If someone thinks their Usenet posts are so damn sensitive or private they don't want people to look at or study them later, don't post to Usenet or use an anonymizing service.
2003: Life after 1984 (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only is it a near limitless cache of information, there is near limitless ways to use it. They can market new crap, er, products to us; determine how to repackage and (attempt to) re-sell information to anyone who may buy.
You post info to misc.transport.road, for example, on the lastest news regarding the Maumee River crossing project (the massive I-280 bridges in Toledo, Ohio), you'll get spammed, er notified about Micro$oft Streets and Trips 2004.
Post a concert review on another newsgroup, and you might get something from Ticketmaster. And guess who gets a cut: some software company in Redmond.
Not to be paranoid or a conspiracy theorist, but it should be evident to anyone with even a couple of firing synapses that Microsoft is no longer a software business. Software is only a stepping stone to a larger avenue of revenue: human thought, human knowledge, human behavior, and the exploitation thereof in any way whatsoever - so long as it provides a revenue stream.
Quote from the article: (Score:3, Insightful)
We sociologists don't like to use the term "community," particularly--we like to refer to them as social cyberspaces.
Ugh! Where do I start?!
SocioloGY might be trying to answer interesting questions, but mefears that socioloGISTS might be the wrong people for the job.
I've seen some of the tracking ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The next day he was showing Ben Schneiderman [umd.edu] some of this stuff at the open house. A bunch of us looked on as they chatted, planned visits, golf outings and talked about how it all worked.
Depending on the queries he gave it, this one program would chew through data from usenet. and give back all kinds of stats and then draw relationships It even did graphical representaitons of users' actvity. Density of posts in a single thread versus starting new threads, frequency of posts, replies vs. new messages etc would be denoted by distance from the main timeline, darkness and width of the circel and so forth. You would look at a wide but faint circle and say (and I may be off in how the key worked, but ...) "This guy sticks to the topic over a long period of time" or you could denote the flame warrior or the vagrant by their graphical representation and so forth. The way the data was processed was really cool and how quickly you could start to decipher the keys was really interesting.
The Big brother implications ... well that's a whole 'nother thing there too isn't it?
Not Big Brother (Score:4, Funny)
Rate me higher Microsoft. Hire me Microsoft. I want to have your children Microsoft. I know your watching this site Microsoft. I'm identity # 285-75-4210.
This is cool! This headline is utterly unfair! (Score:5, Interesting)
What's being talked about here is reverse engineering trust heirarchies, algorithmically, simply from a discussion corpus extracted from Usenet.
This is very, very cool stuff. It is a hard application of a soft science, and if its results match empirical data, it represents a greater level of understanding about the human mind.
This is something to celebrate and take interest in, not malign simply because it's Microsoft that's behind it.
I do remind the security paranoid that reputation management remains one of the few characteristics obsessively protected in otherwise anonymous systems.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Bleh. (Score:5, Funny)
An interesting article from the School of Common Sense shows that your public actions are being monitored by everybody who sees them!
"The privacy implications of this are staggering," says some guy who gets inflammed by things. "People could figure out all sorts of patterns about your life. Why, if they observe you going to the pet store, they could actually figure out that you likely own a pet! Next thing you know, you'll be getting subscription offers for pet magazines. Nobody needs that."
People who fear this massive intrusion of privacy have several options open to them. First, the use of full face masks, and body costumes, can confuse potential observers. Make sure to change masks and costumes frequently. Visiting stores and locations that you wouldn't normally visit can 'sour' their tracking data as well.
"If you have children, drop them off at a school that they don't attend," says Imflammatory Boy, "and tell them to walk to their real school."
RTFA, What is really going on here (Score:5, Informative)
The article is about this guy at MS and what he does there. The are several projects he is involved with.
One is the Netscan tool. This is available for use by the general public. You can run it yourself and seen what it can and can not do. [microsoft.com]
http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/
I beleive that it was orginally created in part to help identify helpful people in the user community so they could be rewarded (becoming and MVP for instance) They do not discriminate against you based on what platform you use as a desk top or what OS your website is hosted on. Just if you regularly post stuff and reply to posts.
I do not know much about the other tool except what is in the article.
The other tool is very much unrelated to newsgroups and like the cue cat on steriods execept I do not belive data goes to the parent company.
Large thread != good thread (Score:4, Insightful)
What we've done is highlight the 40 threads that got the most number of messages in this period--day, week, month, year. And we'll say, Here are 40 really big threads.
Well, at least he's found a meal ticket. I mean almost anybody's who's spent ANY time on USENET knows that the size of a thread is a poor predictor of useful or interesting content. While there is a chance that the thread is interesting, there is also a VERY good chance that it's a mishmash of flames and massivily offtopic digressions. This is clearly demonstrated by the netscan application referenced in the article.
There is this one slashdot user . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft is waisting their sociological resources (Score:3, Interesting)
And I think Microsoft is simply wasting their time studying news groups and BBs. For some stupid reason government and corporations only hire sociologist for BS two-bit studies with fairly insignificant or irrelevant findings.
What is Microsoft going to get out of this data? A new chat or email client? New MSN features? A fancy new search engine? New task bar icons with even more dialog bubbles that alert me every 5 minutes? Whoopdy freak'n do da!
(pssss... Microsoft... that should be the least of your concerns right now)
MS should hire more then one sociologist and have them analyze their product distribution / development model and Windows usability. Microsoft currently produces a fairly annoying operating system in an extremely inefficient way. Moreover, Microsoft's current tactics are the cause of a lot of lost money for that company.
Why not get some sociologists to look at Microsoft's business model, Microsoft's products, and the development of Microsoft's products? Microsoft could become a socially responsible company (and no, donating to a charity does not make up for all of the BS Microsoft does); Microsoft could have happy customers (like "Apple" happy... not "my computer hasn't crashed this month" happy); Microsoft's software could have fewer problems; and Microsoft could stop wasting money on multimillion dollar law suits that they bring upon themselves.
Business degrees, consultants, lawyers, and a few UI psychologists are not enough. They're another dynamic out there that MS is missing.
But hey, if MS wants to keep wasting money and keep pissing people off... by all means, they should keep doing what they're doing. It's only going get worse.
Actually MS has been doing this for quite a while (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the things MVP's were told was that MS tracked our posting habits in their newsgroups. They used our e-mail addresses for this. The tracking was purportedly to help determine if our MVP status would be retained from year to year. (it's an annual award) Since they acknowledged way back when that they were tracking users on their own newsgroups it really doesn't surprise me all that much that they'd expand it to cover more groups.
Actually, given that Google has an archive [google.com] of many of the newsgroups it really wouldn't be all that difficult for pretty much anybody do track individual posting habits, etc. Just run some searches for the e-mail address of the user in question.
I did this for MS, too (Score:3, Interesting)
One choice quote from memory... "WE NEED A PATCH. GOD IF YOU SHOVED SOME COAL UP THERE ASSES YOUD GET A DIAMOND!!!LOL"
It paid $10/hr, and I needed the money.
here come the knee-jerk slashdot reactionaries (Score:3, Funny)
HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!
I'm glad that the majority of posters... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is NOT big brother. This is about building valuable meta information on top of usenet. Why ? Because one of the things MS heard long ago is that people liked linux because they could go to a newsgroup and get help with it, often from the people that wrote the component in question ? What did MS do ? They responded - MS employees now monitor the microsoft.public news groups. We respond to posts, try and solve problems for people, answer questions, debug code, etc etc. I myself can be found occasionally posting in the Visual Basic newsgruops (where we have lots and lots of non-full-time or beginning programmers that really need just a little bit of help to get them going).
The people that _write_ the VB compiler are now monitoring VB newsgroups to try and help connect with real customers and to really understand how people use and dislike MS products.
Managing and making sense out of the whole mess that is usenet is a nightmare, and MS Research is doing some good work in this area. MS has some internal software that treats usenet posts as "issues" and determines if they've been resolved or not, if they need followup, etc etc. One interesting thing we've found is taht there are many issues resolved by "the community", i.e. non-MS employees that are subject matter experts. I don't know the details on this but I think we make an effort to track who is and isn't a great contributor and maybe they get some sort of compensation or recognition or something.. like i said i don't know the details of that at all..
In any case, the point of this usenet data mining is to try and analyze the incredibly huge sea of usenet. We want to figure out what kinds of problems people have, what people are causing noise, what people are really helping other, etc etc. There is no nefarious invasion of privacy here, the only thing that is analyzable is what people explicitly post to a public forum...
Look at my userid - i was a slashdot reader long before i work where i currently do. Back then, the MS bashing and second guessing definitely took place, and i even participated. I'm still a slashdot reader but I do get awfully tired of the sheer volume and irrationality of negative-MS stuff that happens here.
When I started at MS, I found out awfully fast that many of my arguments against MS were speculative, but mostly it was me being factually wrong and talking out of my ass. I remember in my original interviews i was trying to lecture an NT developer about how putting GDI in kernel for NT4 was stupid because it would lead to crashes. How pompous of me! It was something I read on some stupid website or industry rag. Later I found out (from reading Inside W2k -- excellent book) that it was irrelevant because if the session manager sees that the GDI user-land process exits
So after 8+ years of hating MS and talking out of my ass, followed by 3+ years of working at MS and realizing how much i was talking out of my ass, I'm doing two things:
1) talking out of my ass less
2) telling others that are clearly talking out of their ass that they are doing so, so that they can
2a) stop spreading misinformation
2b) have their eyes opened that nobody is impressed by their incorrect speculations and their emotional campaigns of disinformation
I know im not preaching to a sympathetic audience here, but honestly, the speculation, questions, etc people have about MS could be answered truthfully and honestly if some of you would bother to ask, or do some research. But unfortuneately i know all to well (because i used to do it) that its easier, and certainly more fun, to beleive everything you _want_ to beleive about MS that bolsters your own predetermined mindset. If, for example, you find yourself referring to an article that The Register wrote, please stop and ask yourself what the hell the regis
Re:I'm glad that the majority of posters... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it possible to unbundle the browser from Win95?
MS: No you honor. It is impossible.
Microsoft will tell whatever lies are necessary to continue their unfair trade practices. Stop trying to justify their behavior and just admit that you have in fact sold out.
I've kept an open mind about MS's products for the nearly 20 years I've been exposed to them. My opinions are not predetermined, but if it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
They're monitoring email, too (Score:5, Funny)
If you want to become special attention to MS.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's a very important thing. And we have build NetScan to protect what I think are legitimate claims for privacy. Like a Net spider, NetScan takes publicly accessible documents off the Internet, and it respects metadata that says "Leave me alone!" There is the robots.txt file that says, "You can look at this but not that." With Usenet there is one that says "Leave my messages alone," and we respect that. We will not store your messages if you put that in them."
Given how much MS lies.....
if you do these things mentioned above you will become special attention to MS
For certainly MS inhouse will be interested in what others don't want them to be interested in....
Mentioned before on Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
This has been mentioned before [slashdot.org], here on Slashdot, but not in this negative context. Previously, people just thought of Microsoft's newsgroup tracking as a curiosity, and not something with an ulterior motive.
USENET is losing its relevance these days, unfortunately, due to spammers and the difficulty of creating new groups to keep up with current trends. Most message-based chat nowadays takes place on innumerable topic-specific websites running "bulletin board" software such as YaBBSE [yabbse.org]. It might be a little too late to do anything to USENET now, either good or bad....
No different than a web search engine... (Score:3, Interesting)
Beauty, eh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The beauty of this is:
each individual has to choose between Free Speech or Privacy [privacyinternational.org].
Anyone who chooses to exercise Free Speech becomes 0wned by whomever wants to profile&dossier 'em, and anyone who chooses to exercise Privacy has the right to not say anything.
I wonder, in this Majority Rule ( and all others must Obey & Conform & Belong ) world, whether "free speech" will win, or whether "privacy" will win...
... keeping-in-mind that no individual has as much capability to make a meaning known ( or to do-so as a means of suppressing competing meaning ) as does a marketing-department, and
.. also that Total Information Awareness programs, whether called STASI or Satan, or any other label
.. depends entirely on no-one having valid privacy...
( humour is: "satan" means Accuser, and TIA + Patriot-II [public-i.org] exists so that authority can accuse without having to have correct information, and without you having the right to see the basis for your accusation, and without you having the right to defend yourself in level-playing-field and without anyone, anywhere having the right to know you've been accused/convicted/disappeared.. read the link. )
Perfectly Brilliant.
Re: Tracking Slashdot too (Score:2)
> Well, given the very pro Microsoft stances that many folks have here in response to anything critical of Microsoft, I have wondered if they are paying attention to Slashdot as well. Especially considering that many of the rabidly pro-MS posts are posted as AC.
Given MS's longstanding PR problems, if I were running the company and had what appears to be the typical ethics among CEOs these days, I'd be paying a few hundred people to astroturf Slashdot as full-time jobs.
No, that doesn't mean that MS is
Re: Tracking Slashdot too (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah... Because people actually turn to
Re:Tracking Slashdot too (Score:2, Informative)
Are you kidding me? Any pro-MS post is an instant karma killer. That accounts for the AC posts. I'll probably get modded down just because I didn't spell it M$.
Re:Tracking Slashdot too (Score:4, Funny)
Modded as Offtopic and flamebait? Oh, no. It's worse than I feared. Not only are they paying attention to Slashdot, they have infiltrated the ranks of moderators!
Re:Multiple addresses wont work (Score:2, Funny)
I are, are you?
Re:Multiple addresses wont work (Score:5, Informative)
You just pulled that out of your ass, and you know it. There are so many gigantic misunderstandings underlying that statement that I can't even begin to attack it, so suffice it to say, a simple Bayesian analysis more than likely cannot identify people based solely on what they write.
Ok, I'll give you a hint. Suppose we apply this method to Slashdot. There are about 650000 Slashdot readers. You are talking about calculating the class-conditional probability for every user on Slashdot. The differences in class-conditional probability (per user) are going to unbelievably small -- so small that any results you achieve are going to be statistically meaningless.
Bayesian techniques work okay for classifying when you've only got two or three buckets. But when you try to apply it to say, thirty buckets (much less 650000!!) it breaks down really quickly.
Also, remember that the true name for the technique is "Naive Bayesian inference." In this case (heh, in most cases) the term "naive" doesn't mean "clever and infallible."
Yes, I do research on text analysis algorithms with applications to anti-spam filters, so I do have some clue what I'm talking about.
Re:Multiple addresses wont work (Score:4, Interesting)
However, if you're posting reviews to Amazon or ePinions your text is likely to have analyzable content.
I know someone who has done this type of analysis and discovered people who reply to their own posts in dicussion boards under different IDs to make it look like they had some kind of consensus. When confronted with the analysis, they admitted the ruse.
Yep, I agree with everything the parent said... (Score:3, Funny)
Kjella
Re:When they... (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean like keeping track of poster through karma ratings?
Re:When they... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Post Frequently == Spammer? (Score:3, Informative)
If a user ID posts lots, and all of those posts are a new thread (instead of a response to an existing one), and if those new threads don't generate repsonses themselves, then those are characteristics that point to spamming.
However, if a user ID posts lots, and many of those posts are in resp