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Microsoft Tracking Behavior of Newsgroup Posters
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."
Leave my messages alone
When they outlaw newsgroups only outlaws will post in newsgroups... errr..uh, yeah.
Greetings Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League...
Hopefully the general contempt for proprietary, inferior solutions will drive them towards some better stuff.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
" 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."
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).
Hmm a system that tracks who's posts are of value and who's are not. I would suggest a scheme where they mark people's post as "Interesting", "Informative", and other such words. Maybe some way to mark them as "Funny" and even "Flame bait" or "Troll" if they are just obnoxious posters trying to get a fight going.
What do you think? Would it work?
Oh wait!
My god, you are so naive.
BOO! TERRO
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.
Story a: MS can't code anything original amd they mess up everything they try to do so badly that we will always be able to hax0r it.
Story b: MS is making uberl33t people control devices that I can't do anything about except put on my tinfoil hat and shiver in a corner.
may ultimately have to fragment their identities
Been there, done that.
On comp.os.*.advocacy I'm {5-11}of12.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Woof.
Although sometimes I do get the odd feeling like other people may be reading my posts. I guess I'm just being paranoid.
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.
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.
Did this line remind anyone else of Philip K. Dick's thoroughly perplexing novel "A Scanner Darkly"?
making posts on the internet allows others to read what you wrote, and draw conclusions about a person based on multiple posts by that person.
For example, Fucky The Troll seems to someone to avoid based on what he posts, while Bruce Perens seems to be someone to pay attention to.
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
It seems that once Microsoft starts tracking the behavior of individuals, you're asking for trouble. What about privacy?
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?
Don't tell me that you post on Usenet and expect those posts to be "private"! Give me a break. If ANYONE wants to read and study how people interact on this most public of forums, I fail to see how anyone can object.
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
So in case Billy ever wants to send me some dough, I'm gonna get on their good side!
Microsoft rocks!
Visual Basic is the best language EVER!
I love Steve Ballmer's pep rally's!
Windows is the best operating system EVER!
Bill Gates is a cool guy!
but.. this reminds me of something the government would do with TIA.. Perhaps there is some sort of connection here?
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
So it's like Karma on Slashdot, but on a more stealth level, like Google PageRank.
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
Soccer Goal Plans
Hrm, anyone else thinking that this database will be used by Skynet so that it can help identify John Connor's lietenants (and potential replacements) so that the femme-bot can come back to destroy them? /. posting history, I've nothing to worry about. I think we've all established that /. posters have nothing of value to offer anyone.
Of course, looking at my
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Anyone can do this.... But since it's Microsoft, it's doubleplus ungood.
Is a suitable state of mind when large and powerful groups decide they want to spy on you.
:)
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...
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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 that the collection of this data will benefit the coputer community as well as it will benefit MS. People shuld learn to trust Microsoft just as most people trust their computer systems.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
How is this "troubling"? They are researching a way to make USENET and such more effective. They aren't interested in the fact that cmdrtaco@slashdot.org posted to alt.sex.unicorns 10 times last month.
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.
> 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 actually doing it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Okay, anybody who signs up for a message board with thier real information, or creates a mail account with thier information, or posts to newsgroups with real information is just asking for this sort of thing to happen. I'm pretty tired of going to websites and having to sign up. I NEVER put in any real information, and encourage EVERYBODY to put in fake information. Why do they ask for this information? So that they can do exactly what MS is doing.
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.
...tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value." What about the people who don't have value?! Are people who haven't ever posted to a newsgroup without value?! "You have no value to the collective. You will not be assimilated. You will be melted down and used for gear oil." I'm going to go join some newsgroups....
One of the more upsetting things in the article was the assumption that someone who posts a great deal is a spammer.
I'm on several yahoo e-mail lists where that's exactly the opposite - the people who post the most are the ones who are actively doing research into the field, reporting their findings, discussing it with other enthusiasts... the spammers are the ones who post a single "Russian Girls Waiting For You" message which is ignored.
By the definition of this article, I'm a 12th century women's clothing spammer... because I send about 4-5 messages per day on the subject.
Tepp
Bide your time well, Linux zealots, for the mighty power of SCO's IP will reign down upon thee!
Darl McBride
Chief Executive Officer
Caldera International, Inc.
Microsoft to do for Usenet what it did for Email & The Web OK, no way they could have remembered this one, when they don't even remember posts on the main-page. ;-)
Just how is this new or surprising?
Bayesian analysis can match writers to messages regardless of the email address.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
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.
/. for advice on purchasing decisions. That's about as likely as people turning to /. for life and death advice on hig powered wiring. Er, wait.
Yeah... Because people actually turn to
People READ my public POSTINGS?
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?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This article isn't about spyware that microsoft is using. It's about how they hired a sociologist to help them improve their online influence by studying the "communities" in newsgroups and email lists. It's really nothing more. I'm sure that any company with a presence online would love to have the money to study the exact same thing. I credit microsoft with researching the communities that we love. Information is bliss...
I REQd that XP corp ISO TWO WEEKS AGO!
After all my X-Box bashing in alt.games.video.sony-playstation2, I'm betting that "the system" will determine I am "without value". When Microsoft controls everything, I suspect I will be free()'ed at the first opportunity.
It was nice knowing you all...
-- Bander
What we need more of is science!
The true application is obvious. They're tracking alt.binaries and other warez newsgroups, tracking users and what they post, with an eye towards eventual law enforcement (remember the Business Software Alliance, owned by MS?).
I figure we have nothing to worry about. If Microsoft wrote the tracking software, then it probably doesn't work anyway.
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
I tried to talk my mom into analyzing newsgroups while she was working on an anthropology degree - don't remember all the parallels, but there were a lot: shunning = killfiling, and so on.
AOL-user1: yea, LOL, me t00!
AOL-user3: thatz whut i sedm me too!
M0nkeyMan-mod: hey fellas; what is this "LOL" you are always talking about? is it a outlook virus? you should know, you may be prosecuted under the patriot act merely for starting a rumor of a virus named "LOL"
AOL-user1: LOL means we "Likes Our Lapdances"
monkeyman: me t00, my wife Billie LOL! we take turns on eachother and LOL!
In a word: no.
I often check my logs to see where visitors are comming from and if it's a message board I stop by and read what people are saying to see what motivated them to go to my site.
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
Work Safe Porn
http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/
Jack The Ripper being the parole officer for Charles Manson
Enron overseeing the bank account of the Godfather
SCO maintaining the GNU archives
Insert humorous analogy here...
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Perhaps M$ is behind an evil scheme to FIRST POST, GNAA and GOATSE? Trusted computing would help, but only if it is able to demonstrate there is a big enough problem!
Microsoft can see your PUBLIC USENET and email list posts! What a scary thing!
You rights online: So in other words, you rights to say something publicly and not have it read or stored by anyone is being squashed?
He's the ONLY one ? Does MS discriminate against sodomites ?
Post to alt.os.linux
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.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
man, slashdot really sucks lately.
and then my eyes glazed over and I gave up.
...on how much Robitussin I had to drink to trip out was well received. Microsoft MVP, here I come!
- 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 and form your own conclusions.
- At the moment, NetScan is used by the MVP program 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".Just repackage it as the dissident locating and tracking service. Heck, I bet the US gov't already bought an Enterprise license.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
information should be free.
It is, they are using it, so what?
If MS were to give me a nice, shiny "valuable contributor" certificate I could hang on my wall, I'd probably be okay with this. Officially being told "I am valuable" by billy G would be the highlight of my life. That is, as long as they don't give one to those assholes who always post spam on usenet. Knowing MS, that's probably what they mean by "contribute."
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Yeah... Because people actually turn to /. for advice on purchasing decisions. That's about as likely as people turning to /. for life and death advice on hig powered wiring. Er, wait.
That's what ask slashdot is for!
Apparently.
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$.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Now I know it's Microsoft.
Why do interviews from Microsoft employees come across so strangely? Like CorporateSpeak or something.
It's like there's a list of terms they must use a lot, like: enhance, investment, and strangely for a person who says they don't like the word, community.
Then there's this one:
This is potent. We accept that and hope we can offer people good prophylactics against loss of privacy.
Did they mean to refer to potency and prophylactics one behind the other? Seems like a Freudian slit. Loss of potency? Personally I wouldn't want to by prophylactics from a company whose name I've heard translates too literally in some languages as "small and soft".
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
What's so alarming about this?
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.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
This is old news. With .Net, Windows Update and Lord Knows what else, it should be no suprise to anyone that Redmond is poring over any and all soft-content being created using any of their apps.
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.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
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.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
It's an extremely rough "back of the envelope" type calculation. Even so, you could argue that the writers must read too, so they are included the group of readers.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
BTW, for those people say "I wouldn't mind if google did this", google does much worse. They have tried to implement tools to track people's web page history, there was useful intent behind it, but that data could be much more misused.
Perhaps he is assuming that most posters also read other posts, which makes them readers as well as posters.
if you textualize opposition to the phonIE payper liesense stock markp scams of the naykid furor, you are located with intent to discover your source of income, followed buy attempts to interfere with same. we tolled you that before.
robbIE just gets all huffIE, & gives us a mynuts won again, so far. we'll keep you postdead.
I'm sure Microsoft already has a pretty good idea how I feel about them from my posting to /. alone! Sorry Bill, I didn't mean it, honest! You'll certainly let bygones be bygones when looking over my employment application, won't you?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Do you think they got the inspiration from this name from one of the alt.binaries groups?
The next day he was showing Ben Schneiderman 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?
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
United We Bet or whatever you want to put on your stupid
bumper stickers for your gas guzzling SUVs:
Bet Against The Liar
Thanks and have a John_Ashcroft_free day!,
W00t
This article annoyed me in so many ways...
Firstly, Email lists are not Usenet. Usenet is Usenet. Secondly, the article makes me wonder why Microsoft thinks there's any benefit to gained from entering this space; Usenet has been chugging on quietly for years and I don't see how it can be levered other than by something like Google's archiving service. Lastly, the service that the article talks about ignores kill files: kill files are vital in Usenet, and I don't see how any other centralised server can be used, or how it can be made fair and unbiased, and immune to gaming. The service they talk about is a novel way of applying views to the threaded data we all see on a newsreader; I'm happy to see a reader than can cope with "Show me messages sorted by content by regulars, where regulars post > 10 times a week" - I'm not happy with a central repository saying "David Kennedy is [something] on [newsgroup]" as it will be measured by criteria which are going to give different results in different threads.
Mmm, example. I am a troll; I post every day or so, an offensive post. Two or three people reply saying, "Don't feed the troll". I am a regular; I post every day or so, revelant comments. Two or three people reply saying, "Good point, fixed the problem." or "If you liked that book, try this one." Same metrics, different value to the readers of the group.
At least they're not big brother.
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.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
One would assume that the writer himself is a reader, and therefore counted on both sides of the 10:1 ratio. Sets often intersect; this is especially true of demographic sets.
Perhaps these same programmers to which you refer are the ones who use "write-only-memory".
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Looks like slashdot trolling is going to cost me my future career (noodles with that sire?).
So watch it kids. Don't troll, don't widen pages, post goatse links. It will be your ass in the end.
That's it for me.
"When we say "community," perhaps what we really are looking at is a special case of a broader phenomenon that sociologists call collective action, when a group of people do something together. And this turns out to be the No. 1 thing people do with their computers: It's to send each other e-mail. The No. 2 thing is to send groups of people e-mail--to join the list of people who like to knit, or who like Microsoft products."
Is he trying to play pyscho-babble mind games on us?
One of the first tasks of any individual joining a group is to determine the pecking order within which authority is distributed. This is a critical task that humans have been doing since before they were human.
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
"Microsoft is watching all of us. .NET will be the ONLY development platform.
Windows
Longhorn will be the next killer app.
4 servers for every small application."
Just as I'm about to give up hope and run scared, I notice someone down the hall yelling for tech support to help with their Outlook mail. And then, as I've just re-installed Office, I remember to turn off Clippy.
My mind settles and I get back to work.
What is the world coming to when a sociologist studies people in a public environment?? How frightening!
Seriously...how is this even remotely troublng? Microsoft isn't tracking you. Some researcher is simply studying email lists to get a better understanding of online communities. Quit your whining and RTFA.
"I strongly urge both the faint of heart and the faint of butt to leave the room at this time."
- Strong Bad
Microsoft are a bunch of johnny-come-latelys. Kibo was doing this 12 years ago. MS is just a little more sophistimacated. (OK, it's not quite the same, but I thought a little credit should be given to He Who Greps).
Any tracking system is going to have problems drawing valid conclusions from an inherently non forced-id based system, or one that is abused by bots/scripts/spammers with semi-random and constantly changing id's. This covers usenet and a lot of other 'communities' mentioned in the article. Of course, all spam would be eliminated, all communities would be solid, rated and useful, and the world would be a generally lovely place if Microsoft implemented a new protocol from the ground up which had embedded traceable and secure id's wouldn't it... I can so see where this is all going
Now that they've confirmed that they do this, there's only one thing to remember:
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
--
Use Vobbo for Video Blogs
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."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Next Up: Your Rights Online: Microsoft Tracking Behavior of Slashdot Posters
I think it's more likely that Apple employees are astroturfing, after all, every pathetic mac boosting comment is modded up +5 insightful. Wow! That guy likes his iPod! What insight!
Frankly MS exec probably just say "so a handful of linux zealots dont like us, hand me a billion dollar bill i need to dry my sobbing eyes"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It seems to me that Mr. Smith has given it a little more thought than you give him credit for.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Before this whole thread turns into a rabid Microsoft bash, this actually sounds like a cool idea. Also, it not light-years away from what google do with their pagerank system. In fact, it's almost a 'pagerank for newsnet', and I don't see many people screaming about google's system. (Apart from SearchKing :) )
From reading the article, it sounds like they're dealing with the privacy issues fairly well, although obviously, precautions would need to be taken in case a tool becomes available for, for example, potential employers to judge your worth by your newsnet postings.
The ZX Spectrum Book 1982-199x
Regardless, the following line of the post raised a blip on whatever passes for my interest.
Naturally, I'm posting before reading the article (What, you fools, it's the blog for god's sake, knee-jerking is required; just call it "immediate reaction commentary" and pass it off as a "feature" of blogging.); but regardless of the article author's position on identity fragmentation, an important fact leaks out in the statement.
If trackers expect, and adjust for identity fragmentation by tracked, then they are likely to ultimately rely on measures built by society to avoid identity theft for purposes of their tracking (For example, determining that fooyoutrackingguys@hotmail.com is also bararegularguy@hotmail.com would be beneficial for whatever purposes the original tracking and correllation system was intended for. Determining that the fragmented identities represented by those monikers are in fact one identity by appealing to data that may not be legally falsified by the identity creator is likely. Think about the real reason companies ask for a US customer's SSN if they can). The ability of the trackers to appeal to a legal device that the tracked may not falsely state clearly gives an advantage in the "identity fragmentation game" to the trackers.
But everyone knows that.
The real question is, in the hue-and-cry for legislating barriers to identity theft, will any rights to non-fraudulent identity fragmentation be protected?
Brought to you by the
Wake up, people. If Microsoft (or you, or me, or the US Government, or frickin' aliens) want to track what people post on Usenet, then so what?
It's a public forum, not person to person email or a mailing list!
How else do you think Google archives it?
I had one, but the wheel fell off.
I mean really, they have absolutely no oversight, have a spyware toolbar that somehow doesn't get flagged by adaware (I think they fear google, or are just a bunch of idiots) although nobody knows what they do with their data. Google is very powerful, and should be eyed with as much suspicion as any other for profit corporation.
Microsoft is not the only company that is tracking usenet contributers. There are consumer products companies that engage in this practice as well.
The idea is astoundingly simple. There are net.personalities that are considered trolls and their are net.personalities whose advice is largely regarded as "gospel". These companies are basically trying to figure out why it is that some people are listened to, almost religously, so that they can apply what they learn to their own advertising.
Cheers.
This is not some conspiracy thing where Microsoft is trying to collect secret data on individuals.
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.
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.
Frankly MS exec probably just say "so a handful of linux zealots dont like us, hand me a billion dollar bill i need to dry my sobbing eyes"
Classic.
Does anyone know of any newsgroup reader software out there that will filter spam? And does a good job at it? Or is there some sort of plug-in or patch for Agent that allows for intelligent filtering? The vast majority of messages with content tend to look one way, while the vast majority of spam tends to look completely different with a bunch of random characters and such.
"people who the system has shown to have value." Those who the "system" does not show to have value are to be decompiled immediately and there code intergrated with the windows kernel.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
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).
Am I the only one who immediately thought of the movie Antitrust?!?
If you haven't seen it... DO SO!
Awesome flick, and 100% appropriate for this crowd.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
It has been determined that your use of the USENET service is in violation of the Microsoft USENET License (MUSEL). According to our records, you have repeated to such groups as comp.os.linux, alt.php, and other non-Microsoft approved newsgroups. According to the terms of the license you agreed to by turning on your computer, you are only allowed to post to Microsoft-centric and/or owned groups.
Since this is a serious violation of the terms of MUSEL we are revoking your use of the USENET service and have already automatically updated your computer to reflect this change. As of 7:00am CST today, your computer will not allow you to access anything related to USENET (including GOOGLE Groups, Newfeeds.com, etc). Any attempt to bypass this restriction will result in a compliance violation being filed against you, a fine of up to $250,000, and up to 5 years in prison.
Thank you for your understanding in this matter. And thank you for allowing Microsoft to choose you as a user.
Sincerely,
The Microsoft USENET Compliance Team
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
We however here at /. are a wonderfull mix of dedicated computer gurus, intelligent social misfits, unix centered geeks, social activists, proffessional people and just about every other kind of online addict. So we can start trends to create new speak that can confound MS in the effort to search for intelligent life and crackers on Windows.
So lets develope some new speak counter measures that will screw them up big time. After all alot of you guys are responsible for software language extentions that make writing code a real joy! I am sure that we can come up with layers of obfuscation that will be clear to none but those that are in the know (IHMO)LOL WTF are we talking about. The new speak gurus of online jaberwocky can do better than a piece of software written by Microsoft any day with new prosumer infospeak.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
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.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Looks like they are trying to determine what is valuable on usenet.
By checking how the posts and ids relate it appears he is trying to figure out how to determine.
I'd guess MS is looking for ways to hide the flamewar threads, and the spam, and promote the informative threads and posters.
This data sorting would be quite valuable not only to usenet, but in all sorts of messy data. Finding relevant information is the current problem.
this is exactly what google does, but for websites. This is a necessary step for automated systems to extract "knowledge" from the Internet. Otherwise it is just a bunch of information that cannot be filtered to determine legitimacy or relevancy.
".Net Passport .NET Passport participating sites and services."
You can use your Hotmail or MSN e-mail address and password to sign in to all
Makes me want to run out and sign up for one of these.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
When I started Usenet around 1988 it was with a university address and my own name. Computer managers did not allow psuedonymns in those days. In those days you'd run out of disk in a week, so I though messages were transient. Little did I know that some guy in Canada keep comprehensive tape backups which eventually came into Google's control. Nor that computers would become powerful enough to store everything online and search it in seconds. (What about exponential dont you understand? :-) So up to 1994 there may be some less than flattering material out there. (Even though google has an opt-out mechanism.)
So few here actually see what this could be used for (and obviously didn't RTFM).
/. would have had a collective orgasm at this story...
This is a basic data-mining operation that can identify regulars to newsgroups, spammers, and transient posters. Just think a minute: your newsreader sits and thinks for a few seconds, and automatically identifies and filters out spam from your favorite newsgroup. And cross-posted flames. Then it highlights posts from oldbies and regulars, since they're more likely to be topical.
This ISN'T about The Man tracking you. Or MS assimilating Usenet. Or a system that assumes that other people in the community are going to moderate fairly (sure, all moderators are fair, yup). Or a proprietary system that will embrace and extend anything I've ever seen released. It's intelligent spam filtering via data-mining. Now, if the interviewee had used the phrase "Bayesian Spam Filtering",
I'm not generally a big fan of MS, but this is actually pretty cool. I wish I had a copy of that software to apply to my favorite NGs.
Lots of folks already do this. Some folks do it by hand. Many usenet stalkers, for instance. I'm sure there are other companies doing it, too, though most are probably doing much less sophisticated (but possibly more perturbing) analysis. And anyone who doesn't think many, many government agencies (from most countries) are sifting through usenet data has their head in the sand.
This has always gone on. Once there was DejaNews (now Google) more was inevitable.
If you don't want your public data tracked and analyzed, you'd better not have any public data!
We(the slaves) have to pay to do anything. We have to pay the RIAA. We have to pay the IRS. We have to pay for everything. But Micorsoft can use OUR data and use it for their own agenda.
I see how it is.
Now, as long as we have the Second Amendment we are alright. That's the last thing left protecting Microsoft et al from just assigning an agent to every family in the Urinatedon States of Ashcroftica.
"Microsoft has a big investment in online communities, and has not had until recently many tools to enhance that investment."
Huh? M$ has an investment in USENET news groups? How? Because they let customers use their software products?
http://saveie6.com/
Don't forget that a single Social Psychology textbook can be titled any of the following: "Methods for Dictators: Ways to Win The Next Election", "Essential Marketing: Get People to Want Your Product Without Them Knowing It", and "Management Made Easy: How to Make Your Miserable Employees Enjoy Being Miserable".
Social Psychology is about studying populations of people and how they react as a group. Case studies in these textbooks range from Central-American cults to product marketing to organized crime to mobs to politics and so on. It is clearly a discipline used for both good and evil (like physics) but sometimes with very subtle personal consequences. How many people vote along their party line without knowing why? Why do young women wear low-cut jeans even when their gut spills over making them look foolish? Why do people seemingly never realize that MS Word is a proprietary and closed application? What is the basis behind genious marketing slogans like "Do more with less?"
When a company employs social psychologists, it is typically to find ways to get masses of people to buy their products regardless of rationalization. Basically, it is a sign that consumers should be more cautious than ever. But with Microsoft, this is certainly nothing new.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
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.
:-)
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!
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Funny. I thought my computer was tool for, I don't know, doing my job ??? This must mean that I've had it all, horribly wrong for all this time.
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
...welcome our new Microsoft overlords. I'd like to remind them as a skilled Java programmer, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground .NET caves."
Horror! Horror! What's next? Slashdot tracking people's behaviour and sticking them with Karma rating?
My initial reaction was, cool, where can I query this thing to see how they rate my value to Usenet.
identity is the 'you', put forward in a forum.
privacy is the expectation that certain details about your identity that are not publicly shared, are not publicly known.
anonymity is the expectation that your given identity is not connectable to your 'official' meatspace identity (the hydrocarbon aggregate who pays taxes)
microsoft is supposedly tracking the value of a given internet -identity-.
your 'anonymity' isn't going to be affected unless you happen to drop information about who you really are - and they happen to be looking for it, and are making an effort to piece it together (not their stated aim, and entirely under your control to avoid).
your 'privacy' is -not- even remotely affected:
1: all usenet posts are made in a -public- forum.
2: your anonymity is maintainable.
this may lead to the paranoid no longer posting on usenet directly under their real identities - but as usenet conversations hold no illusions of being private, there is no 'invasion' or 'privacy loss' occurring.
publicly shared data is being aggregated about an identity that can be anonymous.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Dilbert's meeting with pointy haired boss:
PHB: We have a gigantic database full of customer behavior information.
DILBERT: Excellent. We can use non-linear math and data mining technology to optimize our retail channels!
PHB: If that's the same thing as spam, we're having a good meeting here.
See the cartoon here.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
YUO == TERRORIST!
"people who the system has shown to have value."
So if I say good things about Microsoft on Usenet, they'll hire me?
I would have a hard time using a term like "social cyberspace" with a straight face.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
"we will deliver interfaces that will find people who are debators"
Yes, but will you identify the master debators?
How MS are paying this bloke to carry out all the pseudo-scientific bollocks yet they still can't understand what makes Open Source tick?
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
I've been hoping for a long time that companies are monitoring my slashdot posts, and then offer me a job based on my geek status... The only problem with the idea is that so far it isn't working. :^(
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
without them having to monitor Usenet groups. Saves both MS and me some time. I'm on Usenet looking for porn.
Consider that what MS is doing is analogous to what TRW,Experian and Equifax do for consumers, or what Dun&Bradstreet do for corporations. They are trying to mine information from a publicly available source. There's nothing really wrong with that. The question becomes what do you do with that information? I think most people are concerned about what someone can do with that sort of information when it can be correlated to other tangential information.
Consider:
MS mines a news group - the FBI comes in and subpoenas the records of Joe Looser as "part of an on going investigation". (Joe isn't notified of this because the Patriot Act allows them to serve a search warrant and delay notification to the targeted party that the warrant is being served) Afterwards, they go to the library and pull the records of the books that you just checked out. Been doing a little studying on microbiology have we? Oh, and last year, you checked out a copy of the Koran. They then tap into your health records (which are now electronic, but protected by HIPPA) and see that you've filled a cipro proscription 3 times in the past 4 months. Couple this with your high school and college records that comment that you are a "troubled" loner and you get arrested on suspicion of terrorism. Given that you may or may not be allowed to talk to your attorney... who knows how long you could be detained.
In reality, you're high school records indicate your a troubled loner because you didn't get along with your guidance counselor, and you made the mistake of showing the school librarian how easy it was to crack into her macintosh. (And we all know "those Hacker types" are all social miscreants.) Plus, you wore a "Free Kevin" shirt as a frosh. The books you got from the public library on microbiology were actually for a report you were doing on computer genetic algorithms, comparing and contrasting DNA in organic organisms vs. electronic programs. The Koran was required reading for your comparative religion class (damn those humanity requirements) but you were smart enough to get the book via inter library loan, and not have to buy a copy from the school bookstore. ($36 for a paperback? Yikes.) Your cat knocked over the first bottle of cipro and it spilled into the sink; you finished out your prescription and then refilled it, just in case... you never know when you'll end up with strep throat, and waiting three weeks to get a doctors appt. at the campus clinic sucks.... oh yeah, as it turns out, the "terroristic" posting on the Al'Queda message board was made by someone who had an email address that was identified by another computer as a likely email alias of a known terrorist.
Granted that this is a contrived scenario, but I think this could become "the rule" as opposed to the "exception". As the old saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you have all this "data" it's very tempting to assume that you can turn it into knowledge.
what it really is is microsoft is going to collect the behavior of bot's not humans.
We were having a lot of trouble tuning our psychoanalysis routine. There was this one user on slashdot that kept crashing the system. We finally decided that the user is one of the worst recorded cases of multiple personality disorder. Some of the personalities were found to be incredibly psychotic and anti-social, others brilliant. Basically all over the map. Finally we just had to filter out all messages from Mr. Coward.
I've received e-mail from Cisco:'Answer this questions, and you'll get a Cisco T-Shirt!'.
The questions was something like 'How do you rate Cisco routers', 'how do you rate Cisco switches', how do you rate your cisco sales rep on your site'.
My answers: 'The Cisco routers are the best routers in the world! The Cisco switches switch whatever you feed them!' Our Cisco sales rep is the sexiest sales rep I've ever met. Now PLEEEZE send me that bloody t-shirt, would ya?'
I got my t-shirt and still wear it, as I'm typing this. I has a nice cisco 'bridge' (not the router or switch) logo infront.
This matters because it is a much better way to do "karma". The usenet client would have access to an information repository about the people posting in a thread. You or I could then tell Mozilla to "filter out messages from spammers" or "filter out messages from flame warriors who post more than 5 times per day".
Honestly, I am more excited about this than paranoid about my privacy. I already knew that posting to usenet was giving away my e-mail address to thousands of spammers.
If MS eventually sells this as a web service, I would pay per use.
You goatse lovin ba5t4rd. Thats my SSN. I'm ruined. Ruined I say!!!
Whooptie doo. If they are monitoring USENET looking for any insight into how the public thinks, they are in for a big surprise. I'll bet their results indicate that most people are either complete idiots (aka noobs) who ask the dumbest and most obvious questions, or they are insufferable jackasses who love to belittle people for being the former.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This is a TROLL, people. The parent poster is a KNOWN TROLL. Very cleverly disguised, but a troll nonetheless.
"cmdrtaco@slashdot.org posted to alt.sex.unicorns"
"I think we should tone down the M$ and SCO crap"
*sigh*
But my name really *IS* "Anonymous Coward"
My parents were very much future-sensing!
The relivant bit in the article:
We're similar but different [to the eBay moderation system] --eBay is an explicit feedback system, and we are an implicit feedback system.
This doesn't have people rate people, it has microsoft software rate people.
Quoting the article...
And this turns out to be the No. 1 thing people do with their computers: It's to send each other e-mail. The No. 2 thing is to send groups of people e-mail--to join the list of people who like to knit, or who like Microsoft products.
Lies! Everyone here knows what the real No. 1 thing that people do with their computers...
-ShelbyCobra
Living life in the right side of the s-plane
ultimately have to fragment their identities, keeping multiple IDs and e-mail addresses.
This is why i sign up for anonymous Hotmail email accounts!
do() || do_not();
But of course, I already have multiple on-line identities. No I don't. Yes I do.
Shut up, don't tell them...
I passed the Turing test.
Who here doesn't enjoy commercialism?
:)
Just as I thought. Everyone just loves spam. Spam, spam, spam, baked beans and spam. Mmmmmmm.
I am Barlo Mung. Barlo Mung is me. It's my email address. It's my counter strike nic.
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.
Gee, this thing about scanning through all of Usenet reminds me of something.... It's just on the tip of my tongue...
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
"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.'"
Of course. The largest threads are rants about the latest crapware-security theat-EULA limitation-boneheaded activation scheme-code bloat-ad nauseum originating in Redmond
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
I think that one quote is particularly interesting:
I don't know how hard Microsoft is going to listen to this sociologist, but he groks what a young Finnish grad student understood twelve years ago...
It implied it was only interested in who provides community support to whom, which implies they are only tracking the microsoft.public.* groups, which they own, host and propogate.
I don't think they're interested in who's posting to alt.binaries.linus.naked. More Slashdot FUD folks, nothing to see here.
Have any of you heard of the Microsoft MVP program? It is a way to recognize the people who provide free peer support in the MS newsgroups. To be nominated as an MVP you must have a certain number of correct and relevant responses in the newsgroups. How else are they going to pick someone to be an MVP if they can't track?
when i post on usenet, i use the e-mail address of a person i dislike.
There is no statistical relationship between a poster's knowledge of a subject and the number of times they post about it. Go google the following: - reflexology - 24/96 audio - chiropractic - Reliv - general relativity Can you imagine basing your daily life on advice of the average Usenet poster? Hoi!
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
Now, I'm a geek with a Soc degree...
:/
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.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Even so, you could argue that the writers must read too, so they are included the group of readers.
Doesn't Slashdot demonstrate that writers do not have to read anything at all? :)
In the article, it says:
-----
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.
-----
How do you specify "Leave me Alone" on a Usenet post?
Been hitting Usenet for many years now and never heard of such a thing.
- information on who participates in a group,
- how much they participate,
- how often they originate threads (and how those threads go),
- how often they terminate threads (particularly short ones - those 2-post threads mentioned in the article or 3-post threads where the third post is also from the originator),
- how many different people participate in threads with them (particularly direct responses),
- how many groups they participate in,
- how diverse those groups are,
- assorted other metrics
It should be possible to eventually build a fairly powerful scoring system for both threads and authors, based on scores calculated for those who participate in those threads. The system doesn't even have to know whether the threads in question have good content or not - once you determine who the top 10-15 people in a group are, you can take a look at a representative sample of their posts and classify them as "guru," "solid contributor," "joe everywhere," "clueless n00b," and "troll," or just rank by the general value of that person's posts perhaps on a scale of 1-5.Once you have rankings for the most significant posters you can actually generate very meaningful scores for threads, and you can most likely generate likely scores for other people as well - for example, the person who posts in every thread but whose posts are never followed is probably just being ignored; the person who posts a lot but mostly in response to someone classified as a troll is probably also going to get a low ranking.
fencepost
just a little off
At least on their own newsgroups (the microsoft.* hierarchy) they've been doing this for years. Back over 6 years ago I was a Windows programmer (don't worry, a long time ago I saw the light and now am a linux programer!) Anyway... Because of the work I was doing at the time with Windows and was also answering a lot of questions in the microsoft.* newsgroups I attracted MS's attention. They made me an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) back around '95.
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 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.
...and you should too. Otherwise your ass is soilent green.
He's at Microsoft research. Research labs at wealthy companies tend to do a lot of stuff that's completely unrelated to products. Furthermore, the kind of analysis he does has a long history and it would be surprising if MS didn't have some people working on it.
:-)
However, he doesn't seem to be too smart:
It turns out that two-thirds of all threads in Usenet, in 2002, had a whopping two messages. And two-thirds of all authors are the people who write a message, post once one day, and never again.
They probably use a throwaway E-mail address and account. People do it all the time. Why put up with spam for every informative question?
USENET is just not a good source of data for this sort of research; corporate E-mail archives are considerably better. But I suppose Microsoft doesn't keep those anymore, right?
Further, since you have now pissed me off by ignoring my very apt Dilbert reference, and bringing the subject back to Linux vs. Windows instead of the much more valid and interesting discussion of "why MS is interested in newsnet approx. 10 years after it became principally a vehicle for porn", I will remark that your pro-"MSFT" (I assume you own shares?) remark should be moderated down as a troll. The rational moderators in Slashdot still outweight the "MSFT" serfs, I hope.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
alt.binary.pictures.erotica.billgates_and_a_sheep
alt.binary.pictures.who_is_melinda_boinking
alt.binary.mapquest.directions_to_bills_house
alt.linux.doesnt.get_all_those_fucking_worms
alt.welchia.is_god_taking_a_karmic_shit.on_you
Since the early days of netnews (now Usenet) is has been fairly clear that everything you post is being saved, and anything you post if fair game to be responded to, analyzed, and/or held against you at a later date. If this disturbs you, don't post in public forums.
Or take a fucking stand for freedom of speech.
I mean real, honest, what-the-founding-fathers-intended freedom of speech, not Baby Bush style "freedom of speech has consiquences" (such as harrassment, death threats, destruction of one's livlihood, and other sanctions both official and extracurricular). We have all, over the years (since the 1980s in any event, perhaps longer) been selling out this fundamental principle everytime we hold our breath and don't speak for fear of "consiquences" (like losing one's job) and don't speak out when these sort of sanctions are brought against another.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean you don't have consiquences: others may disagree, yell at you, argue, even dislike and avoid you. It does, however, mean you should be able to speak without sanctions being taken against you, whether it be by an employer, an organization, or a government. Indeed, those who organize boycotts based upon people's speech ("Boycott X, he's a Baby Bush basher!", "Boycott Y, he's a right wing facist!"), while free to do so, are most assuredly taking a very firm anti-free speech stance, and should themselves be shouted at for doing so.
Were freedom of speech respected and upheld, not just by the government, but by the people, the sort of information tracking Microsoft is engagin in, while despicable, wouldn't really matter all that much, and one wouldn't have to fear for one's livlihood merely because one has a controversial opinion. Which was what the founding fathers wanted and intended, and what we as a society betrayed a long time ago.
Perhaps, slowly, as things grow worse, we'll rethink this, take a step back, and start upholding the concept of freedom of speech again rather than just paying it lip service, and tell idiots who fire employees, organize boycotts against country music singers who express their disdain for Baby Bush, organize boycotts against Rush Limbaugh (or his affiliated radio stations) for being a right-wing pundit, or endorse the harm and even destruction of lives of those whose views they don't share (Mr. Bush, are your goons reading this?) with such inane comments as "freedom of speech has a price."
The alternative is freedom of speech concentration camp style: i.e. using Bush's argument, and those put forward by those who either advocate or are ambivelent about our restricted freedom of expression, one can just as easilly argue that soviet Russia had freedom of speech: after all, under Stalin you could speak your mind freely, it is just that such freedom has consiquences (like spending 20 years in the Gulag).
Enough already. It is time we reasserted our fundamental right to freedom of speech, and damn any employer, government, church, or other organization to hell who tries to take it back again.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't remember where I saw it, but I seem to recall that at least one company selling a business workflow product (e.g. expense reports, etc.) would do pretty much the same thing with email - attempt to analyze it to determine the structure of the company. That may've been vapor or marketing fluff, but I know this sort of thing's been discussed in the past.
fencepost
just a little off
wrapped up in /. paranoid delusion.
For a few months I did this for MS Games. I searched newsgroups and fan message boards to see what players were talking about. If everyone was pissed off and wanted a new patch, that's what I reported. If people were excited about a certain feature, I reported that, too. If you ever flamed MS for something you didn't like, I might have sent it to them.
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.
I worked at DA for over a year until they laid off 70% of developers ;-)
;-)
Anyhow, as far as I can remember it was this japanese girl that did th site in-house (kiko,tiko or something like that)
Anyhow, I would't worry about digital angel. They have no capital, no employees, no customers, devices never worked, no marketing, and their 'international offices' are one-man sales shops. Oh and they have $90 mil credit with IBM Credit that they have to repay this year
This isn't news, the NetScan project at Microsoft Research has been around for years.
Slashdot even had a previous story about this project, but I can't be bothered to look things up every time someone at Slashdot hits the FUD Panic button.
HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
All those insults I threw at Bill Gates in newsgroups may actually reach him
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
That you can search on google?
I always knew having nothing to contribute would come in handy sometime!
I never say what I'm actually thinking, most often I post things contrary to what I beleive.
If Microsoft wants to use this technology to make its internal support forums more useful, power to 'em. If it becomes bundled into Outlook Express, it fundamentally changes USENET. And no one likes when Microsoft does that.
If you post to usenet, unless you use something like easynews (which posts more or less "anonymously") or operate your own server so you can craft headers, you can change "identity" all you like and you will still be tracked. Most ISP servers include an IP address at minimum, and many many more even include stuff like hashed user IDs. If a hashed UID is included in your headers it won't matter how many "nicknames" you use, your posts are still unique enough to be easily tracked. Style is another matter. Even if I posted this as an AC many people would still have a good idea it was me, just as many "regulars" in various newsgroups can be readily identified. Then, of course, there is cross referencing data even between e and meatspace. And linking users by email address - many of those free email addresses need an old address to send credentials to, which means you can be linked as you hop from space to space (you don't really think free email providers don't sell their user info lists, do you? So what if they protect THEIR mailbox service from spammers - they're not going to care about protecting the other guy's). I have seen flamefests in newsgroups turn into online detective matches with the result being everything from names and street addresses to complete resumes being posted - most always tracked down starting from nothing more than an IP address. You think the corporations, with all their resources, can't do this - and much more?
Looks like the astrotufers are comming out of the wood works.
I guess have to when they are paid suck up and support stuff like MS's big brother like profiling software.
The Internet is a public place. Everything you do there is subject to scrutiny. Studying newsgroup behavior is as legitimate as, say, studying the behavior of fans at sporting events.
If you wouldn't put it on paper, sign it, and tape it to a wall at your favorite local hangout, don't post it on the Internet.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
...and mod him up too. We all agree on this one.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Here ya go
"One of the first tasks of any individual joining a group is to determine the pecking order within which authority is distributed."
/cheery/ opinion about article --jeesh.
/think/ are legitimate claims for privacy, sounds pretty weak, especially if I assume your thinking will of course be realitive to the society around you at M$, which I can since you don't know about right or wrong etc. (he,says so in article) Makes me wonder how you know anything, since you can never know if your right... but I guess its rude of me to say.... kinda like its rude to say a social-science isn't a real science. Can't think much of privacy since he says "claims for privacy", instead of "arguments" or "reasons" Also its a thinly vailed insinuation that there only
Hmm. I don't agree, some people do that, some don't. To me, truth/knowledge is the ultimate authority, and I have generally have disdain for the obvious pecking order peons. You can give them a proof, and they'll go ask around, logic is wasted on them, they need to figure out the authority figures, because they only have the intelligence for a by-authority argument, but authority is only authority if it is right, otherwise it is simply power. ( or they don't care to troublethemselves to use the brains they were born with)
I am very distrustful of this field, since to tends to reduce human beings to "very bright cattle" and generalizes away any individuality, I think humanity would be better served if social science would find ways to help society evolve beyond "group-think," rather than make it easier for those who would use or abuse it.
Also the phrase "engineering trust" troubles me. If someone "engineered my trust", they probably are a social-engineer or confidence trickster, and don't deserve it.
And the idea that notions of truth or good and evil are completly relative to society is historically false. History is full of instances of a small number of individuals fighting against an injustice that the majority/society was "ok with". There were people against slavery since the beginning of slavery. If those individuals had accepted the social-science view point, we'd still have those evil institutions today. But first it's 1, then its a few, then is statistically relevent enough for a social-scientist to squint at, then it's the majority view point.
And yeah, I'm flaming, but to have such a
Let me direct some of my ire toward the article, How about this qoute:
"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 I have a choice of being ignored by archivists, or codified by a computer program,
I think we need a new header here, ASAP.
Its a strange world we live in, where people can go to jail for info about to hack a device, but the info to better hack/engineer the personalities of your fellow human beings ???
Hacked e-books don't hijack airplanes, or commit genoicide, or exploit people in general.
And, how is this for a qualified statement?:
"What about privacy?"
"I think it's a very important thing. And we have build NetScan to protect what I think are legitimate claims for privacy"
-- So only the protect what you
claims for and not reasons for. Also insinuation that there are illegimate claims for.
I guess those illegitimate claims would be any he doesn't agree with... And if everything's relative and theres not right or wrong... theres not way of proving or disproving whether anything is legitimate or not --- why is it in his lexicon? Who knows?
Of course, if theres no truth, then theres no logic either since given A->B. A has to be true to imply B, if you can't never know if A is true, then you can't ever do anything useful with the implication-- it's meaningless. Seems like an unacceptable paradox to me, but I guess I'm not statistically significant...
I, uh... for one..., err... WELCOME our new, umm... Borg overlords! Yeah..., I really do..., um... Go Bill!
Mr. Bill? Can I please have my data back now?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
The idea is really cool. Imagine being able to troll just slashdot for answers and what you could do with that. Frankly, CmdrTaco would be a fool if he wasn't banging code just like that out right now...it's the future of the net. With simple tracking of the DB of slashdot posts, one could figure out which posters are knowlageable about which subjects, and "pre-mod" up the posts thru the noise. Better yet, hidden gems of posters could be found...people that post very little but with great answers. This would also help for "newbie" posts; newbies with common questions could be answered by the bot first and given a choice of answers without tons of searching...also saving time and energy of the pros for the really hard stuff.
The joke I find is that the very best uses of this tech are for OSS purposes. Who wouldn't want a bot trolling the Linux newbie forums...with the ability to forward the hard questions to people with answers! It would be a killer-app for bug tracking also. Many people could post and get simple, cheap answers without bothering the devs, and if the devs needed answers, they could also troll for the most common questions and bugs reported!
The very best use for this would be in conjunction with something like Gentoo. Allowing newsgroup users to ask questions [pumping for more info as necessary] but with some access to the code, would also allow developers to squash bugs quicker and respond to user needs faster. If 30,000 people ask for a spell checker, there could be a reward posted for it..or just a simple change to a text editor that bugs everyone. Coupled with a compiled-source distro like Gentoo, advancements could happen in days or weeks, not months---making OSS even more competitive, and utterly squashing a slow big company like MS.
Seriously, the coders here should be looking into this and learning as much as they can. Slashdot has really usefull information from a group that repersents a fairly even cross-section of the population bottled up on it's servers. [I'd trust slashdot more than ZDnet or Cnet responders] They could start a whole new business with that kind of tech applied here.
Did you destroy this animal while you were at it?
http://saveie6.com/
Um protesting someone's speech is also free speech. Why do you want to shut down the reaction? This would be the goal of someone who doesn't want their arguement to be challenged.
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 like how you do business.
Another: Yeah, and its because I only do business with white people.
Me: You what? I'm sorry, I can't support that, this will be our last transaction.
Yes, speech does and should have the potential for very real tangible consequences. Just never from the government. Thats what Free Speech is truly all about.
There is nothing to fear from reaction speech. If you listen to the counter-point, you may actually find out you were wrong in the first place. Then where would we be without the counter-point? Free speech does not stop with the initial speaker.
Now since you got off-topic a bit: The point I think you were trying to make about consequences...My arguement to that is, if you put it on the internet, expect it to be read and recorded. If you don't you are just dangerously naive. And if you didn't want it to be read, why did you put it there anyway?
track the homeless Usenet posters?
Who knows? Maybe they are looking for postings of SCO's stolen kernel code.
are seeing this for what it is: "No big deal"
/crashes for some reason, it reboots the box anyhow, i.e. a problem with GDI reboots the box either way.
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
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
They've been doing it for years. If this one email will just get around to 25,000 people, Bill Gates will send everybody a $1000 check. It shouldn't be surprising that they're monitoring Usenet, too, probably just to send checks to people there.
Do you have ESP?
"Ever get the feeling your Usenet newsgroup list is being watched? By Microsoft? If so, consider yourself right. An interesting but troubling CNET interview with Microsoft's in-house sociologist goes into how the software giant is keeping a close eye on newsgroups and other public e-mail lists, tracking and rating contributors' social habits and determining "people who the system has shown to have value."
I don't see what is disturbing about this. Notice the word "public" here. What's wrong with a corporation trying to figure out a little more about how humans interract with the services and software it's customers use? Especially when they never tried to hide it.
I'm sure if the Linux Project hired a sociologist to examine the uses and interractions between Linux developers and users, in public forum, you would think "Wow, what an innovative idea!".
As for privacy on Usenet, every action you perform gets logged on a big RAID array at your ISP. Most ISPs back that data up on tape and store it offsite for a couple of months. Paranoid now? Oh, this includes your downloads too.
I'm no supporter of M$ by a long shot, but I think it's silly when everything they do gets treated like some nasty conspiracy when it just boils down to building data for marketing and development purposes. Notice how he's been there for ~4 years, that's about the time most big companies started taking extra measures to get inside their customer's heads.
This is about as disturbing as "A sociologist from Microsoft may have visited your public website, and read it too!"
It looks like they want to do for Usenet (and other public forumns) what Google is doing for web pages. Or as someone else said, what Slashdot does with karma. It's a way to sort the cream from the crap. Google Groups just dumps them all out - there is no value added to the search, AFAIK.
Random is the New Order.
understand, & must deny the existence of. attempts at analysis of the power are futile.
.asp for va lairIE's whoreabull pateNTdead PostBlock(tm) devise?, used against the truth/to protect robbIE's payper liesense stock markup bosses/corepirate nazi 'sponsors'. yuk.
more about the real power, later.
what's wrong with folks selling their kode? if it causes convenience, & interoperates with all the other kode on the planet, we say, no harm, no foul, so long as you fail to employ gangsterious/felonious practices to asphyxiate the 'competition'. sabotaging your free version of anything is a tad dastardly. if there's value added, without FUDging up the compatability, we'll pay. same with music. no more gouging dough though.
fortunately, mr stallman et AL, etcetera, is now offering comparable/superior software, to the payper liesense spy/bug wear feechurned models, in almost every circumstance. there'll be few, if any more softwar billyonerrors, as if there's a need for even won. tell 'em robbIE. you are won of the last wons whois soul DOWt, right?
what might happen to US if unprecedented evile/the felonious georgewellian southern baptist freemason fuddite rain of error, fails to be intervened on?
you already know that too. stop pretending. it doesn't help/makes things worse.
they could burn up the the main processor. that would be the rapidly heating planet/population, in case you're still pretending not to notice.
of course, having to badtoll va lairIE's whoreabully infactdead, pateNTdead PostBlock(tm) devise, robbIE's ego, the walking dead, etc..., doesn't slow us down a bit.
that's right. those foulcurrs best get ready to see the light. the WANing daze of the phonIE greed/fear/ego based, thieving/murdering payper liesense hostage taking stock markup FraUD georgewellian fuddite execrable are #ed. talk about a wormIE cesspool of deception? eradicating yOUR domestic corepirate nazi terrorist/gangsters will be the new national pastime.
communications will improve, using whatever power sources are available.
you gnu/software folks are to be commended. we'd be nearly doomed by now (instead, we're opening yet another isp service) without y'all. the check's in the mail again.
meanwhile... for those yet to see the light.
don't come crying to us when there's only won channel/os left.
nothing has changed since the last phonIE ?pr? ?firm? generated 'news' brIEf. lots of good folks/innocents are being killed/mutilated daily by the walking dead. if anything the situations are continuing to deteriorate. you already know that.
the posterboys for grand larcenIE/deception would include any & all of the walking dead who peddle phonIE stock markup payper to millions of hardworking conservative folks, & then, after stealing/spending/disappearing the real dough, pretend that nothing ever happened. sound familiar robbIE? these fauxking corepirate nazi larcens, want us to pretend along with them, whilst they continue to squander yOUR "investmeNTs", on their soul DOWt craving for excess/ego gratification. yuk
no matter their ceaseless efforts to block the truth from you, the tasks (planet/population rescue) will be completed.
the lights are coming up now.
you can pretend all you want. our advise is to be as far away from the walking dead contingent as possible, when the big flash occurs. you wouldn't want to get any of that evile on you.
as to the free unlimited energy plan, as the lights come up, more&more folks will stop being misled into sucking up more&more of the infant killing barrolls of crudeness, & learn that it's more than ok to use newclear power generated by natural (hydro, solar, etc...) methods. of course more information about not wasting anything/behaving less frivolously is bound to show up, here&there.
cyphering how many babies it costs for a barroll of crudeness, we've decided to cut back, a lot, on wasteful things like giving monI
Soon I will be telling my grandson "Sunny, I remember the old days before these information gathering technoidiots when I could surf the internet in peace. Now you turn the PC on and it watches your every movement. Well, that was the old days . . . those sweet memories."
So what is write only memory, anyway? Memory that verifies that the write was successful for the duration of the write, and then gives no useful information on read, or memory that causes physical failure on read but succeeds on write?
This is an important question that I think needs answering. We need a standard for what qualifies as Write-Only memory. I suppose it could be like WORN memory, Write Once Read Never, where you can detect if something has been written but can never succesfully read it back...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
...they have infiltrated the ranks of moderators! :-)
At least at one time, they must have, because I have seen more than one +5 pro-Microsoft postings on Slashdot. These comments were blatantly counter-intuitive with market-droid like "Only Microsoft can offer end-to-end integrated solutions for your enterprise." There isn't proof, but if it looks like a turd and smells like a turd...
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Um protesting someone's speech is also free speech. Why do you want to shut down the reaction? This would be the goal of someone who doesn't want their arguement to be challenged.
... that is unacceptable whether it comes from government, business, or an individual. It makes an utter mockery of our freedoms and undermines our freedom to speak in its most fundamental form.
...if you put it on the internet, expect it to be read and recorded. If you don't you are just dangerously naive.
Protesting is one thing.
Trying to shut people up through boycotts, threats against their employment, termination of their employment, threats against their lives, etc. is something else entirely, and while boycotts may be legal (and should be), they are antithetical to our most basic principles when organized to silence people, as they all too often are in the United States.
As for the other actions (threats against people's employment, property, persons, families, etc.)
Freedom and democracy require more than just the government to uphold them, they require the people to uphold them, whether they are acting as politicians, government employees, private businesses, or individuals. Freedom of Speech is about the freedom to speak, not the freedom to gratuitiously sanction and harm another for speaking an opinion you don't like.
No. You are dangerously complacant in a time when our freedoms and our most fundamental democratic institutions are being eroded faster than ever before in our history. It is precisely this asinine attitude that is at the heart of our loss of freedoms in general, and freedom of speech in particular. Indeed, you appear to have entirely missed the point and constructed a strawman in its place (HINT: I never said anything about not wanting something read, I spoke of expecting the right to speak, or write, and be heard, without having to fear for my livelihood, my job, my safety, or even my life, as others have had to do with, perhaps most appalling of all, the tacit approval of said threats from the man holding this nation's highest elected [prior to 1997] office).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
You should be. You guys can't even beat your in-state rivals.
Let me know how you like being raped by Roy Williams.
So, is your wife still planning to come over to my place tonight?
I'm guessing it wouldn't let him write anymore (ie: gave an error) after writing 4k of data to it.
Or, he could have been able to probe the circuit to tell that it had recorded the data, but ben unable to retrieve it through the data buss.
When people add the X-NoArchive header, they indicate they desire a certain level of privacy. Although the interview intimated that this was respected, Netscan detailed several people I know who use that header.
At the end of the day, you are right. But I don't think it is unreasonable to expect companies to respect somebody's wishes, and X-NoArchive couldn't be more clear.
I'll take a crack at explaining what all the uproar is about and why it goes under "YRO". Essentially, you have to use your imagination a little. Perhaps Microsoft is envisioning this as some sort of marketing tool they can sell to companies that want to find out what people think of their products, hence the reference to the bar code reader. I worked on a point-of-sales system, and the lead developer, who was more of a visionary/business analyst, was always coming up with interesting ideas such as this. So all well and good.
Not monitoring Usenet? That's incorrect as others have pointed out, but again a little imagination is required. It *could* be used to monitor usenet or Slashdot, whatever, maybe you're company e-mail. Hmmm....
Now let's take it a step further. Read anything about the TIA lately? Wouldn't "Total Information" include any posts you made to newsgroups? What if someone faked some incriminating posts and set your name as the poster? Hmm..
Imaginative folks like Philip K. Dick (Minority Report) wrote what they thought was pretty far fetched stuff, but, as a recent New Yorker article humorously (?) notes, the current administration seems to be using his work to guide their policy.
Albert Speer wrote of the incredible power of technology, and the dangers of it falling into the wrong hands. Consider 'AURA' part of that technology - kinda neat, fun for marketing, but also dangerous. Anyway, I'll post anonymously - you know - you never can tell can you? Sad that in our so-called democracy it has come to this - where you're not sure you're part of the communist bloc or not - but so be it...
First of all, if Microsoft's efforts concerned itself with the microsoft.public hierarchy, I'd say they're free to try and implement what they want while the rest of go about our business and ignore them along with all their top-posting-Outlook-Express-using-weenies. The problem is that Microsoft is tracking ALL newsgroups. This means that everyone posting text and binary messages to:
.sound hierarchy is watched by developers of high-end audio software; the alt.binaries.cbts group is actively watched by LearnKey; many pr0n groups are monitored by not only the FBI but also by local law enforcement (notwithstanding countless operators of pr0n sites); and the mp3 hierarchy does have a record of being scrutinized by you know who. So with Microsoft's investment of talent, resources and who knows what motives, is it that hard to see a "subscription" type service where anyone posting anything contained on someone's Hot List is going to get nailed. Getting nailed, BTW, is a eumphemism for any and all of the following:
... it's also become easier to find stuff on usenet. So no, the final of Outlook 2003 hasn't been released yet.
1. Warez, crack, and 0-day groups;
2. Music groups (mp3);
3. Porn groups; and
4. Multimedia groups (see #s 1, 2 and 3, above)
in addition to the traditional "discussion" groups. Their primary focus (the amount of information they choose to retrieve/store/analyze) may be variable, but the fact is that they have been and are maintaining a database for ALL usenet.
Secondly, I'll point out that while many groups are already actively monitored by a mix of different entities, Microsoft's involvement changes everything. The
a) losing one's posting privileges;
b) having one's news service account permanently cancelled;
c) losing your internet access;
d) finding yourself investigated by law enforcement;
e) being exposed to civil ligitation; and
f) being exposed personally.
And third, subjecting to scrutiny by any interested party what has traditionally been a comfortable and fairly anonymous back alley for everyone to openly (ok, mostly anonymously) enjoy has many inherent problems and dangers. And if behind it all is Microsoft (enter favourite conspiracy theory here), should you be worried? Most of us are worried enough by their overt actions. And is any of this any different from someone implementing a way to track peer to peer file sharing? Are the dangers any different?
So, next time you want to post information, comments, naked pictures of your ex-girlfriend, pr0n from a website you subscribe to, or some mp3's ripped from some CDs you own, know that enough information has been collected about you and your activities to allow someone to pursue an action against you. And if you slip under the radar with an assortment of changing nics, fake e-mail addys, accounts and proxy servers, remember that what information does exist is being stored for later analysis. No one bothered in the past because it was too much trouble. Now, it's become easy.
On a lighter note
Fuck Microsoft.
Fuck John Ashcroft.
Fuck the RIAA.
Fuck the MPAA.
Fuck George W. Bush.
Fuck the DMCA.
Say it; wear it; post it; it's your right.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
HAHAHAHAHA Take that Microsoft!
Argh! I was trying to reply to another comment and juggled my windows in a rather silly manner. So much for cross referencing threads (and letting Mozilla's tabbed browsing get the best of me). Substitute "I" for "he" above and it makes sense, or cut-and-paste it into this thread, where it belonged in the first place.
(except that in my original statement, I should have made it clearer I was talking about threats and actions taken against people, not counterarguments as such).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I reckon it's because the big words they use impress the big nobs.
Richard Feynman once told a story about a sociologist that was giving a lecture about a paper he wrote, but he couldn't understand a word of it. At first he thought it was becuase he wasn't qualified enough on the subject material, but then he said damn it I'm going to try to concentrate on just one sentence and see if I can understand what it means. So the sentence he picked was "The individual member of the social community often recieves his information via visual, symbolic channels". After a while he eventually figured it out. Do you know what it means?
"People read"!!!... of course if the sociologist just said everything straight everybody would just say "oh, but that's obvious" so hence the big words and convoluted sentences.
Microsoft has hated it forever. For much the same reasons movie makers and other large advertisers of shoddy junk hate information exchange. Large forums, such as TV/Radio, Slashdot, your local, state and federal governments can be astroturfed. Micorsoft's problem with smaller groups, like your local lug, is that they can't spam them all. They don't have the resources and never will to create trused users in all of those groups. So long as reliable search engines exist, we will all continue to enjoy honest information from impartial sources.
Marc Smith's efforts represent Microsoft's response to such groups. Efforts to "add core value" and rank newsgroups from a company that's proved it's willingness to lie to the public should not be trusted. Poor Marc has been at this for four years, but Microsoft's search engine, mail client and web browser all still blow. What I imagine M$ will do is start steering users of their OS to M$ friendly newsgroups. They will also try to destroy the structure of newsgroups themselves and limit who can run them and focus harrasment on groups unfavorable to them. They won't win but they will try. They have already forced most large ISPs to block ports on cable modems and DSL so that the average person has a hard time serving information. The push for control of information is ongoing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sanctions are speech. They are an action that promotes and expresses a viewpoint.
At the most fundamental and oversimplified level (ie my second example), I as a privately owned business, have the right to do business with whoever I choose. If your beliefs differ enough from my own that it makes me not want to associate with you, and thus not do business with you, then I am in no way obligated to do so. This is as much free speech as what you said to make me feel this way. It is also sanctions, though on a very small scale. Therefore, it can be extrapolated out to the level of me telling everyone I know what you said, and all of us deciding not to do business with you. Now we have large-scale sanctions, but still not government sanctions. This is more than acceptable, this is free speech. Could this threaten someone's livelihood? Of course. Is it against free speech? No, it is the economical application of free speech.
our most fundamental democratic institutions are being eroded faster than ever before in our history
My only question to this is to what institution are we are speaking now? If you made the speech at a podium it would surely be video or tape recorded. If you post it on the internet, it is logged. This is to be expected. How is this an attack on "the right to speak, or write, and be heard, without having to fear for my livelihood, my job, my safety, or even my life"?
To take your arguement into the realm of the silly (though to a place that it will surely have to apply against your will), how can you then hold anything W says against him? If you don't like what he says, and therefore vote against him, isn't that "the freedom to gratuitiously sanction and harm another for speaking an opinion you don't like." I mean, its just what he said. And you harmed him by voting against him. And you probably convinced lots of people to vote against him.
*cough*
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 politicians, lie about company afiliations at meetings of shcool teachers. All of this is outside their usual multi-billion dollar marketing blitz to buy your trust. Sorry, good products and software don't need that kind of promotion and stuff built to facilitate it is junk.
Given that kind of record, we can only expect bad things out of Microsoft's newsgroups efforts. I imagine they will steer their OS users without their knowledge or consent, make it even more difficult to get anything useful out of the internet with their sortware, and focus their trolling on forums and newsgroups that don't favor them.
Marc says he's been working on this for four years. I'd love to see what he has found and how he presents it to his boss. "Boss, we looked at newsgroups and what we found was widespread, virulent and well earned hatred of us. Ouside our astroturfers, no one has anything nice to say and the repitition of phrases is embarassingly noticable. We need more buzzwords."
Like I said, reading and study is fine. What Microsoft is liable to do with it is not, judging by the way they have abused their resources in the past.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My guess is that this an overestimate. I suspect that most lurkers might actually post one per year. It could probably be worked out. If you know the distribution of posts, say 5 million post once, 2 million post twice, ... then you have a guess at the distribution,
and that could give you a good estimate for total number. My guess
is a zipth law or poission type distribution.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
I thought this was funny, but of course we all know that Slash Mods can't take a joke unless is has to do with MS bashing, and the relationship between geeks, females, and sex...
It's more like Microsft is going to try to filter the usenet to say something good about them and harass those that don't like them. M$ is going to make the rules and give all the points. Anyone who trusts them to give them anything honest is going to be disapointed or blinded by that misplaced faith. What do you think a company that pays people to lie in newsgroups, write letters to politicians on their behalf from dead people, and says all sorts of vile things about free software is going to do with the information?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It is because the company is out of control of anyone except marketing. There are many good engineers in Microsoft and you may be one of them, but the quality of what goes into products is poorly architected and has too many major problems.
Actually, I want your management to be able to understand the great sticking points of their products. Perhaps services such as these will help. Perhaps rather than the API of the month club, they will follow through and get one of them to actually work as specified (publicly as opposed to the notes they send to those under special support).
I am well within my rights to send a data packet containing this information to Slashdot, and to most any other online forum, newsgroup, or mailing list, and so are you.
It can be taken down, it can be prevented from being posted or distributed at all, we can be asked to stop, but you and I are well within our rights to send such a packet of data.
It is neither obscene, nor inflammatory.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
So Slashdot better patent the idea first. Or in year Microsoft will, and sue us all for Patent infringement.
I bet they have enormous files on Ben Dover.
No, I can't tell you that, but since I went to CalTech too I poked your homepage to see if you were somone I knew from school, and I looked at your journal at speakeasy.com/~tzs. And I've got an answer to something else: the reason some people back in when they're parking perpendicular is that they have a better turning radius that way. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. e.g. I drive a `90 acura legend, and I can back into perpendicular spaces in one fluid movement that it would take me a 2 or 3 point turn to go into headfirst.
:-)
acutally, now that I think about it, it's not so much turning radius, but the space your car has to rotate through while it's making the turn. If you pull in head first, from the lane of traffic next to the parking space, the arc made by the car body overlaps the neighboring space at the midpoint of the turn. If you're backing in, the arc the car turns through is out in the middle of the street, and thus doesn't involve you hitting a parked car and feeling like a dumbass
It doesn't make a lot of difference when you can pull out wide, and then turn in, but if you're in the lane right next to the space, it's easier to back in- especially when there are already cars parked on either side. Try it sometime, you'll see what I mean.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Knitting and MS worship are the number one and two topics of discussion!
Either this guy has his head inserted dangerously far into his colon or we here at Slashdot are really, seriously out of touch with what's going on in the real world.You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
My only question to this is to what institution are we are speaking now? If you made the speech at a podium it would surely be video or tape recorded. If you post it on the internet, it is logged. This is to be expected.
As I said, the recording isn't the issue. The public record isn't the issue (although I suspect most people had no idea *how* public their musings and rants have become), Microsoft's Orwellian collection (and undoubtable soon to follow (mis)use) of the data isn't the issue. Were freedom of speech at all respected in our society this would be a minor issue with regard to privacy (if even that). But, because we live in a country where it has in recent decades become acceptable to fire someone for voicing an opinion one doesn't agree with (and yes, I do remember a time not so long ago when such an action by an employer was virtually taboo. Doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it was certainly not to be expected, and was firmly looked down upon by society and often by the courts), in which radical (and not so radical) groups routinely target people for economic and social sanction based upon their speech (another thing that would have been unthinkable just a couple of short decades ago), and in which the man holding our highest elected office condones the targetting of those who speak out against him, this really has become a problem. (As an aside, Bush's whole "freedom of speech has consiquences", comment was horrifically disingenuous. He is no different that Stalin would have been, had he said that exact same thing to the millions who died in his gulags. Indeed, by Bush's definition the Soviets had exactly as much freedom of speech as we do...which should tell you something right there.)
It is, however, not a problem with Microsoft's data collection practicies (although I do suspect we'll get to fully appreciate the Orwellian implications of that soon enough), it is a problem of the populace at large, in government, in private industry, and individually no longer even willing to maintain the pretence of upholding either the concept, or the intent, of our basic freedoms (in this case, that of speech), preferring instead to develope elaborate straw man arguments and justifications as to why they see no need to guarantee these rights any longer and, indeed, find it more convinient not to.
To take your arguement into the realm of the silly (though to a place that it will surely have to apply against your will), how can you then hold anything W says against him? If you don't like what he says, and therefore vote against him, isn't that "the freedom to gratuitiously sanction and harm another for speaking an opinion you don't like." I mean, its just what he said. And you harmed him by voting against him. And you probably convinced lots of people to vote against him.
Holding public office (elected or otherwise) is entirely different than living as a private citizen. So much so that our constitution, our laws, and our courts differentiate between the two in numerous ways (including the definition of a "reasonable expectation of privacy"). Equating my argument that a person being fired for voicing an opinion against Bush is in any way equivelent to that of pointing out an elected official's statements (or history) as reason to vote against him is yet another straw man argument, ignoring the underlying point, which I will reiterate for the dense among us:
Freedom of speech does not exist if you can lose your job, your freedom, or your life for expressing it. The fact is that the government is but one entity capable of denying a person their income, their freedom, or their life for expressing an unpopular opinion. The government is not the only one: an employer, a neighbor, or a lynchmob of angry (right or left-wing) zeolots is another. The constitution was clearly intended to protect our freedom of expression from both (a point reiterated by the 14th amendment), and yes, that does mean your freedom to fire an employee whose political opinion
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Marc Smith, the sociologist, who invented this tool has been at this for a while. He has done great work in mapping cyberspace. This project and tool was part of the doctoral dissertation he wrote about communities in cyberspace. Here is the book he co-edited on the topic
open what?
I would not be surprised, particularly now that Herr Himmler, er, I mean Ashcroft, is in office, to learn that the NSA has been tracking newsgroup postings all along, and compiling a list of who the Republicans like, and who they consider subversive (like Democrats, for example). So, anybody want to bet when Dubya will have the night of the long knives?
"It seems that once Microsoft starts tracking the behavior of individuals, you're asking for trouble. What about privacy?
........
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....
... their capital. And it sounds a like a lot more fun than coding security features. HOld on - I've got some more Sobig.F e-mails coming in.
Will there be people in 2100? Will they be real skinny? vote : the_real_38@yahoo.com
Yeah, sure, like I almost believe this article. Hoaxamtic. Look, here's the real scoop.
Phone rings:
Marc Smith: Hello
Voice: Hello, Mark!
Marc Smith: Oh, Hello, Mr. Gates. Nice to hear from you.
Gates: What have you been up to in the Sociology Department there?
Marc Smith: Oh, the usual, surfing for po.. uh, I mean, invading people's privacy. Yeah, that's it, we've been scouring Usenet looking for the "quality users" if you know what I mean.
Gates: Good work. Be sure to send me a list of who posts all the best... uh, you know, Usenet stuff. And make sure the press gets wind of it. It'll keeps the Linux weenies distracted whining about privacy.
Smith: Yes sir, Mr. Gates. Thank you for your inetrest in our "project".
yet another straw man argument, ignoring the underlying point, which I will reiterate for the dense among us:
Your resorting to personal attacks just goes to show how fringe and paranoid your position is. Maybe you missed the part wherein I personally pointed out how silly my example is. I will not join in this type of behavior because I don't have to.
become acceptable to fire someone for voicing an opinion one doesn't agree with...
As far as I can tell, this was always been allowed as part of freedom of association. One freedom does not cancel the other within private organizations. If I don't like you, I will fire you. If an individual wants to say whatever they want they can, but there is a risk that what they say may be perceived as my position and the position of the entity that I own if that person is my employee. I have to be able to terminate them for this. You think a retail clerk can say whatever they want to a customer? What if said clerk makes racist comments to a customer? Clearly this is protected speech, but it is also clearly bad for my business. I have the right, based on the employees speech alone, to fire them. Since you seem to be of the belief that this is not fair, I have to assume you live in California.
Freedom of speech does not exist if you can lose your job, your freedom, or your life for expressing it.
I will boil it down to the basic concept for you. The Constitution only defines the relationship between the government and the people. It does not attempt to define the relationship amongst the people. If the government is attempting to abridge your rights via any of your listed methods, this is illegal and unconstitutional. I can, today and tomorrow, say anything I want without fear of governmental reprisal. (I am curious to hear what specific incident makes you fear governmental reprisal.)
The fact is that the government is but one entity capable of denying a person their income, their freedom, or their life for expressing an unpopular opinion...economic threat through boycott (or dismissal from one's workplace) has replaced burning crosses and torches as the preferred method by which this is achieved
Hmm, great FUD. Doesn't change a thing. I have the right to spend my money wherever I want. Why does that scare you so much? I have the right to hire and fire whoever I want. Why does that scare you so much?
If I may:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
and:
Amendment XIV
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one
...that cmdrtaco@slashdot.org posted to alt.sex.unicorns 10 times last month.
And he gets scored +5 Interesting??
Lol
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
How many of ya'll actually read the artical?
I think it's kinda cool, honestly. Perhapse an option to opt-out would be prudent, but this is interesting technology. And real geek ought to be able to get off on this shit.
-Frapazoid
Usenet works fine for me. Microsoft has a history of fucking things up, just to suit their corporate agenda (embrace and expand). I can only imagine what'll they do to Usenet, but I'm certain it won't be good.
And will they honor X-No-Archive or not?
This has been mentioned before, 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. It might be a little too late to do anything to USENET now, either good or bad....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
So Microsoft is tracking usenet to examine the society of posters. I don't see the problem here. All the information is publicly availible, if a graduate student was doing this you'd have no problem. Microsoft can examine usenet society all they want.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I'm not going to feign the usual "oh it's microsoft and it must be bad". Actually the guy said some interesting things about how to go about sorting out informational posts in newsgroups using the sociology of the posters. It's an interesting approach and the information presented in the interview made me want to know more about it. ((and before you say anothing I'm a Java programmer so normally I'm very MS-suspicious)).
...
The Netscan tool looks interesting, if that sort of toolset was built into newsgroup programs or the Google newsgroups site it would be very nice. Now, if only MS had a decent newsgroup program in the first place
-A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's pissed-
"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."
... The MVP program will no longer be in operation effective 12/1/99.
Due to customer feedback and requests for more direct Microsoft involvement, we are changing our newsgroups strategy.
--Joseph Lindstrom, Director Business Development, October 22, 1999
similar to what others have pointed out, this isn't necesarily for nefarious purposes. It's rather similar to what search engines, well, at least Google, do to try and figure out what the most valuable websites. Google puts a strong weighting on incoming links from other reputable sources. Instead, for newsgroups, the only constants between posts are email addresses. Makes sense to me. I've often wished that Google Groups' results were as revolutionary as Google's were when it first arrived.
if a model emerges that lets us say that a thread has N likelyhood of being flamebait or guru exposition or whatever then ppl could use this metadata to find more signal in the noise.
Oh! Oh!
Someone rate this guy up! He's the little voice that provides the kneejerk reaction we all have missed in this article!
read the MS site; number of posts is stated as predictor of bad threads not good.
not sure why the interview came out differently but sometimes ppl are flustered in interview.
Mike --
First of all, I just want to say that you are right on the money in your post. However, I want to take what you said and expand on it a bit more.
Much of this thread has involved what is and what is not constitutional. Over the years, the Supreme Court has interpretted the First Amendment to give us another freedom that is just as important as Freedom of Speech: Freedom of Association, sometimes called the Right of Free Association.
Free Association gives people the right to associate with whomever they want for just about any reason they want. Its also been ruled that the inverse is true, a person or organization has the right to DISSOCIATE with anyone they want for whatever reason they want, without fear of government reprisal. This includes firing someone for saying something that the employer doesn't like.
The First Amendment actually would make it unconstitutional to create the society that FreeUser is advocating.
Of course, just like Free Speech has limitations (libel, clear and present danger, etc), Free Association has limitations as well, such as Illegal Discrimination in the workplace and "whistleblower" laws. However, by and large, the Right of Free Association runs counter to everything that FreeUser is advocating.
To respond to the grandparent (FreeUser) as well, I also don't remember the "almost taboo" nature of firing people for disagreeable speech a few decades back. In fact, I strongly remember the opposite. In the 1950's people got blacklisted for belonging to leftist organizations or anything that might resemble being a communist sympathizer. In the 1960's, having long hair alone was enough to not get a job. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, speaking out for or against the Vietnam War cost many people their jobs. And so on and so on. People getting fired for counter-culture speech has been part and parcel of American life for a very, VERY long time.
The
Goggle him for more info.
Ach! My eyes! The goggles, they do nothing!
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
I, too, use plussed addresses (available to anyone who uses sendmail as their MTA). Alas, a great many overzealous webmasters code overly-aggressive validation in online forms that excludes use of the plus.
I wonder if that's a/ legal and b/ qulaifies them as stalkers, especially as in some cases they'll be spying on minors!
The beauty of this is:
each individual has to choose between Free Speech or Privacy.
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 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.
Messages to/for me ( in me journal )
Apart from this monitoring, the guy talk about some nice ideas how to present threaded discussions. It would be interesting to apply these sorting techniques on mailing-lists.
Is there already an application, which does this? May it be a mail-client or a mailing-list daemon/archive. Perhaps this helps reading some of the bigger mailing lists
Perhaps we could choose
Given that those who post with real details risk much. Does that make them brave or stupid or naive? So the counteroptions should be
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Genius
Anonymous Sophisticate
What about the ones who post anonymously because they know they will get into huge trouble if the corporate leak is tracked back to them? Like the ones that provide information on security holes?
Anonymous Whistleblower?
For the Netspys:
Anonymous Timewaster
And the ubiquitous:
Anonymous SpamHater!
The interview sounds like MS would honor the X-No-Archive: yes header. However, there are people in newsgroups I read who have always set this header, and they're still in MSs system. Doesn't really seem to work.
However, the really good "answer people" usually don't have this set, so it may not change much for the quality of the system. Still annoying.
This acticle causes me no worry at all. Presumably if you post on a public forum it is because you have something to say. If you have something good to say people reply or mod you up. If you keep having good things to say and people keep replying or modding you up you get karma on the basis that the next thing you say is also likely to be good. As far as I can see this guy from microsoft is saying that some people always post good stuff and some people always post spam. Wouldn't it be cool to have a usenet viewer that could automatically work out what posts and threads were interesting either because there were lots of replies, or because a usenet guru posted some pearl of wisdom, and what posts were spam, flames or trolls and do you could ignore them. I didn't notice any proposal in the article that they wanted to link any posters username to a real identity, they just wanted to be able to say "that dude ThaReetLad always has great posts. Lets make everything he posts start at +5 Insightful" or whatever hidden equivalent they want to use.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
This has been up for a few months now.
God you people are selective in your memory and your choice of laws to enforce and ignore.
Much of this thread has involved what is and what is not constitutional. Over the years, the Supreme Court has interpretted the First Amendment to give us another freedom that is just as important as Freedom of Speech: Freedom of Association, sometimes called the Right of Free Association.
At a personal level they are equal (I offend you, you shun me). At a professional level the supreme court has ruled, numerous times, that "freedom of association" is quite limited. You do not have the right to 'disassociate' your business (i.e. refuse to do business, refuse to hire, etc.) from black people because you don't like the color of their skin. You do not have the right to 'disassociate' your business from jews/catholics/protestants/athiests becauuse you don't like them.
The supreme court has ruled uniquivocably that an individual's right not to be discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity, religion, etc. trumps any right you, in a business setting, have to freedom of association. And correctly so: freedom of association has limitations placed upon it just as freedom of speech does (libel, slander, screaming fire in a theater).
Freedom of speech must enjoy the same level of protection or it becomes meaningless. If a person can be fired for speaking their mind, they are not free to speak. I.e. "speak what I don't like and you starve/become homeless" isn't freedom of speech, any more than "speak what I don't like and I'll put you up for 20 years in my not-so-comfortable gulag" is.
Indeed, as we have seen in the past two years, the lack of this same level of protection has resulted in companies effectively becoming proxies for government silencing of opposing viewpoints. When Bush (or Clinton in years past) can turn to a company and say "Hey, one of your employees is spouting off" and thereby get that employee fired, that employee's freedom of speech is meaningless, indeed a mockery. There is little, if any, difference between censorship and sanction for speech conducted by a government directly, and conducted by a company at the behest of a government, or merely in support of that government. At the end of the day, in both cases, the individual is not free to speak out, and this is the antithes of what the founding fathers and the constitution intended.
Freedom of Expression must trump freedom of association with regards to conducting business, employment, etc. or freedom of expression simply doesn't exist in any practical sense. The Europeans for the most part know this, and have wisely encoded it into law. That is one of the primary reasons why you can have such lively debate in England and Germany, and diverse views can be represented so openly, while America remains a shining example of the sounds of silence (a few posterchildren and tokens aside).
Freedom of Association does not run counter to freedom of speech, or anything I am saying, or have said, when it is interpreted as originally intended: for individuals. When it is interpreted as carte blanche for corporations and business to have absolute disdain and disregard for individual constitutional rights, then it does. But, lest we forget, corporations were greatly mistrusted by the founding fathers: their charters were granted reluctantly and frequently withdrawm ("corporate death penalty") if the corporation were found to be acting against the public interest. Now we have the appalling fiction that corporations are "people" with all the same rights and priveleges, which has disempowered the individual almost completely.
Businesses do not have the same inalienable rights as human beings. Human beings may be free to associate as they will, but businesses are not. They are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, and so on, and they should not be permitted to discriminate on the basis of a citizen excersizing their constitutional rights.
Now, perhaps th
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
This MS site graphs some of the Usenet trends that are being monitored. You can bet there are plenty more that aren't shown. http://netscan.research.microsoft.com/
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If Microsoft spent as much time tracking bugs and security holes as they do users, they may have a product approaching linux on the stability scale.
Ah wait they cant do that can they.... they dont like revealing code so that the community can help them fix their bugz
Gates & Bullmer look inside and fix problems, not outside and cause more
Blame IBM if they had waited for CPM86 we would never jave these leaches at MS, they would still be working on basic
While this might work for large literary works, it most certainly won't work for ephemeral texts like on Usenet. The same person who wrote "K3wl, d00d" in 1992 might be publishing his disputas on genus and social behavior for peer review in 2003.
/., there's no time for this -- it happens there and then, and might be VERY different from what you would say in a different situation, or if having time to review and revise.
The apparent flaw is that what's published on Usenet doesn't take as much effort to publish, and can be thoughts of the moments, whether you're 12 years old or 60, sober or drunk, angry or sad. If you publish a book, you're not going to be an angry drunk kid, but will spend hard work time before publishing, ensuring that it does indeed follow your standards for writing.
When you fire off something on Usenet or
Regards,
--
*Art
Oh! Oh!
Someone rate this guy up! He's the little voice that provides the kneejerk reaction we all have missed in this article!
I've actually *got* a mod point left, and I was thinking about it, but I can't find the "+1 Troll" that this posting really deserves.
This page accidentally left blank
I was just forwarded this URL:
http://netscan.research.microsoft.com
Interesting what you can do from there...
God you people are selective in your memory and your choice of laws to enforce and ignore.
Pot, kettle, black. I cited numerous examples of instances of people being fired for expression in America through the decades. You just said it was unthinkable at your particular place of work during the late 1970's/early 80's. Which one is more credible?
At a professional level the supreme court has ruled, numerous times, that "freedom of association" is quite limited. (yadda yadda for three paragraphs)
Yes, thank you for making a point I already made. Did you even read what I posted?
When Bush (or Clinton in years past) can turn to a company and say "Hey, one of your employees is spouting off" and thereby get that employee fired, that employee's freedom of speech is meaningless, indeed a mockery.
Can you cite any specific examples of this? I haven't heard of any. If such a thing did happen, the ACLU would be all over it in a heartbeat. However, I haven't heard one bit about this kind of thing happening at all. Do you have a specific example or this is just paranoia?
In either case, we are still talking about a choice.
At the end of the day, this hypothetical company made a choice -- a legal choice by today's laws (and held up multiple times by the courts). Choices are a lot different than laws. The company can not be legally compelled to fire anyone on the basis of speech. THAT'S also a part of freedom of association. So if someone is fired from a private company, it was done because that company chose to -- not because the government compelled them to. The company can more than legally tell the government to jump in a lake.
What you are suggesting is the removal of choice and a reduction of freedoms. You are suggesting that a company can't fire an employee who badmouths a client in public, costing them the contract and millions of dollars (which might send the company bankrupt and put a LOT of people on the dole queue).
You probably think that this is some brave, new unproven legal ground you are advocating. Its not. Many, MANY cases have come before courts fighting this very issue from as far back as I can remember. Except in the cases of illegal discrimination, whistleblowing, and union busting -- the court, yes the same courts that you claim to cite with your beliefs, actually ruled in favor of the employer -- on first amendment grounds.
You really can't both advocate the first amendment and admonish it when it becomes inconvienent for you.
The bottom line is, in the United States you do not have the right to a job, no matter what you might think.
The
Oh yeah.. something I forgot to write before:
That is one of the primary reasons why you can have such lively debate in England and Germany, and diverse views can be represented so openly, while America remains a shining example of the sounds of silence (a few posterchildren and tokens aside).
I think you should think twice before holding GERMANY up as the shining example of free speech. I'm laughing just writing this.
Germany is quite famous for suppressing speech that it finds objectionable. Go ahead, stand on a Berlin street corner and pass out fliers advocating a Neo-Nazi movement or publicly celebrate the wonders that was Hitler. See what happens to you. Heh. They police the content of the Web very heavily too. Put something on a web page in Germany that counters the government and you are in a world of hurts. Germany has a lot of anti-free speech laws that are very tightly enforced. Quite a few people are currently in German prisons because of it too.
The UK, of course, is much better. However, they are still nothing compared to the free speech freedoms you enjoy in the US. A quickie example: Michael Moore's book "Stupid White Men" had part of its preface removed because it would have been illegal to publish that speech in the UK. Needless to say, he wasn't too pleased about that.
Before you compare the vast freedoms you enjoy in the US to those of Europe, you should really learn what you are talking about.
The
** This is Microsoft NetScam 1.4151 .. .. ..
> reputation "anonymous coward"
scanning Usenet
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found references @ www.slashdot.org:
Karma -100000 (asocial dumbfsck)
>
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.
Great, The software writers have a clue why I haven't upgraded to the new propritory versions. From what I have heard, they are working hard at the Open Software problem. Seems they haven't managed to come up with a solution yet. The BSA was great. It got lots of people to stop using pirated software. Unfortunately, many people still did not buy the high priced product but tried open source instead. All I can say is thanks! I've just left literature at a non-profit for Open Office 1.1. They were challanged with finding an office program for 5 new machines. I let them know the BSA risks of dropping their current copies on the new machines. That saved them a bundle. I can sleep better at night not worying about license challages. I love affordable legal alternatives.
Visit openoffice.org for a nice PDF brochure of their product and a free copy.
The truth shall set you free!