Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Woof.
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.
--
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
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
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.
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.
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. ;-)
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!!!!
No.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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 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
Unless we're schitzophrenic.
I are, are you?
- 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
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$.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Why do interviews from Microsoft employees come across so strangely? Like CorporateSpeak or something.
It's like there's a list of terms they must use a lot, like: enhance, investment, and strangely for a person who says they don't like the word, community.
Then there's this one:
This is potent. We accept that and hope we can offer people good prophylactics against loss of privacy.
Did they mean to refer to potency and prophylactics one behind the other? Seems like a Freudian slit. Loss of potency? Personally I wouldn't want to by prophylactics from a company whose name I've heard translates too literally in some languages as "small and soft".
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
What's so alarming about this?
It's no different than any social study on the general public. It's done in academia all the time.
If someone thinks their Usenet posts are so damn sensitive or private they don't want people to look at or study them later, don't post to Usenet or use an anonymizing service.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
This is old news. With .Net, Windows Update and Lord Knows what else, it should be no suprise to anyone that Redmond is poring over any and all soft-content being created using any of their apps.
Not only is it a near limitless cache of information, there is near limitless ways to use it. They can market new crap, er, products to us; determine how to repackage and (attempt to) re-sell information to anyone who may buy.
You post info to misc.transport.road, for example, on the lastest news regarding the Maumee River crossing project (the massive I-280 bridges in Toledo, Ohio), you'll get spammed, er notified about Micro$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
Tracking users who provide value?
You mean like keeping track of poster through karma ratings?
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]
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?
The scariest thing is..
People can see me when I go outside!
The girl at the deli even recognizes me and knows that I want a steak and cheese for lunch!
When will it end?
I think we all need to run around in opaque hamster balls, and each of us develop a unique language that only that individual understands.
Bork blalableep mooga mooga
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
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.
While it's true that such simple messages and "Fr1st p0st" equivalents can't be mapped, they can easily be filtered out as noise, since there's no content anyway.
However, if you're posting reviews to Amazon or ePinions your text is likely to have analyzable content.
I know someone who has done this type of analysis and discovered people who reply to their own posts in dicussion boards under different IDs to make it look like they had some kind of consensus. When confronted with the analysis, they admitted the ruse.
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.
"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).
Perhaps you should reread the article. The analysis that it discusses doesn't simply say "Post Frequently == Spammer". Rather, it correlates that with the ratio of new threads vs responses, variety of threads, etc.
If a user ID posts lots, and all of those posts are a new thread (instead of a response to an existing one), and if those new threads don't generate repsonses themselves, then those are characteristics that point to spamming.
However, if a user ID posts lots, and many of those posts are in response to other posts (i.e. answering questions), and many of those posts are in turn responded to (i.e. acknowledging useful information, or asking for more details), then those are characteristics that point to a guru who is a good source of information on the topic.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
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"
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
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.
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!
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.
You just pulled that out of your ass, and you know it. There are so many gigantic misunderstandings underlying that statement that I can't even begin to attack it, so suffice it to say, a simple Bayesian analysis more than likely cannot identify people based solely on what they write.
Ok, I'll give you a hint. Suppose we apply this method to Slashdot. There are about 650000 Slashdot readers. You are talking about calculating the class-conditional probability for every user on Slashdot. The differences in class-conditional probability (per user) are going to unbelievably small -- so small that any results you achieve are going to be statistically meaningless.
Bayesian techniques work okay for classifying when you've only got two or three buckets. But when you try to apply it to say, thirty buckets (much less 650000!!) it breaks down really quickly.
Also, remember that the true name for the technique is "Naive Bayesian inference." In this case (heh, in most cases) the term "naive" doesn't mean "clever and infallible."
Yes, I do research on text analysis algorithms with applications to anti-spam filters, so I do have some clue what I'm talking about.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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!"
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.
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
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
HEY, WAIT A MINUTE!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
...and mod him up too. We all agree on this one.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Here ya go
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?
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?
Neither are bad in my opinion. With the MS "tracking" users on Usenet-- they're just usenet postings, it's not like they're tracking down people's phone numbers and addresses. Microsoft and anybody else can read them or save them. Everyone "tracks" users in their minds, remembering who's knowledgeable and who's a flamer. This MS Sociologist seems to be doing this for research purposes though. It's no worse than keeping tack of consumer car purchases of certain colors to decide on what color to make your own product. It's not really spying.
Nonsense. Your freedom of speech does not guarantee anything in the private sector. I.e. it does not guarantee your employment contract, your image, your customers, others' opinions about you, or others' actions taken based on opinions expressed from your free speech. In other words, you may well express bad opinions about your employer, but your employer does not have to keep employing you as their salesperson, or spokesperson. Your may badmouth your customers, but they don't have to keep paying for your product or service. What you said is very wrong on so many levels, most of all that your free speech right would trump others' free speech and other rights as well.
It is obvious if you read the U.S. Constitution (the document you are referring to) that it refers to Government's actions to censor free speech, not your private life.
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.
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.
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?
"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....
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!
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.
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 )
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