Microsoft’s Longhorn has spyware plan — This will not be a popular idea. And it will probably flood the Microsoft servers.
PERVASIVE SOFTWARE giant Microsoft says that it is planning to install spyware into the next version of Windows to help it work out why its operating system crashes.
According to Cnet, Chief Volester, Sir Bill Gates announced a plan to install a ‘black box’ recorder into Longhorn. Then when the operating system crashes it will send details to Redmond as to what you were doing when the crash happened.
I don’t get it. What you are quoting is obviously not a news item or press release, and obviously skewed by personal opinion. Just goes to show…you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Please…show some integrity.
George
Just another nail in the coffin of a desperate M$. The sad part of this is that most clueless consumers will have no idea this is even going on. Trustworthy computing indeed!
Doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, IF MS can prove no private data is being sent to MS. Otherwise maybe big suits would be headed in MS’s way?
And IF, of course, MS ends up doing something to improve stability in Windows and Office. Which are much better today than in Win 95 and 98 days, btw.
Lordy!! This _is_ desperate. We can’t figure out why our OS crashes all the time so we’re going to invade your privacy to find out. It’s kind of like admitting they don’t know what they’re doing. A product that needs that much hand-holding never should have made it out of QA.
Why don’t they just install that spyware crap on the 50,000 of their developers computers? Or better yet, everyone in the company. A sample size of 100,000 should give them some idea of what’s going on.
Seems ridiculous to thrust their innadiquacies on the buying public.
If it exists, someone will figure out how to disable it in the first couple of weeks after Longhorn’s release, I’m sure.
For a long time I have allowed Explorer’s default reporting system to send info on a crash back to M$. I stopped when the same conditions kept repeating itself and M$ never had any solution(s). I have no idea on what info is being sent. The messages are in code.
Maybe if M$ had some feedback then I, and many others, would cooperate and help. But somehow, I get this queasy feeling that anything I do will not help XP, but end up in Longhorn which M$ will expect me to pay more megabucks for.
I think this is hilarious. I love the honesty. Implicit in this is an admission that even Longhorn will still be prone to crashing.
Believe it or not, even I’ve been thinking about switching to OSX. I’m going to buy a used Mac, upgrade it a lot, install tiger, and see what happens.
Oh no, quick – everyone over-react! They’re introducing something that just may be doing the same thing their machines are doing now! Granted, the current method of detecting when a program or the OS crashes and then generating an error report with the details of what was going on (what was running, etc.) to be sent to MS is cleverly named “Error Reporting” so as to throw people off the track of what it does, but still…
Amazing, if true. Can M$ really be THAT out of touch? Reminds me of the old joke about Ma Bell: “we’re the phone company; we don’t care – we don’t have to!”
Actually, I may need to correct myself. I use OSX and, when it crashes (har!) it asks me if I want to send a trouble report to The Central Scrutinizer. Which I always do, because someone told me Macs never crash … (hehehe, they call it a “kernel panic”). They certainly never crash the way a PC crashes ~rendering itself (hopefully) momentarily useless~ but sh*t still happens. Can’t blame Apple for trying to make luck look like foresight.