Microsoft To Add A Black Box To Windows

An anonymous reader writes "According to ZDNet, Microsoft plans to add the software equivalent of a 'black box' flight recorder to Windows. According to the article, 'The tool will build on the existing Watson error-reporting tool in Windows but will provide Microsoft with much deeper information, including what programs were running at the time of the error and even the contents of documents that were being created.'" Commentary available via C|Net as well.

Comments

try again...

[circusboy]

it was from "cool hand luke"

the prison guard talking to/about paul newman

http://imdb.com/title/tt0061512/quotes

Re:Privacy Alert! Maybe not.

[DrEldarion]

the choice of whether to send the data, and how much information to share, will be up to the individual

Looks like Microsoft is fine, then.

Re:Not on my system you don't

[Phisbut]

Talk about an invasion of your privacy and a HUGE hole to reveal corporate IP.

And it wouldn't even surprise me that, hidden somewhere in there, there's a license agreement that mentions that you give all the rights to the content you send to Microsoft somehow, or give them an unlimited royalty-free license... just like you do everytime you attach a file on Hotmail.

From the Hotmail Service Agreement :

by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting your Submission you are granting Microsoft, its affiliated companies and necessary sublicensees permission to use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses including, without limitation, the rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Submission; and to publish your name in connection with your Submission.

Re:What's In Your Box?

[homer_ca]

System control panel, Advanced tab, Error Reporting button
and/or
Administrative Tools, Services, stop and disable Error Reporting service

Re:What's In Your Box?

[Guy LeDouche]

WinKey+Break > Advanced > Error Reporting Click the "Disable error reporting" radio item.

Re:Not on my system you don't

[gmplague]

Have you heard about WMI? Installed and running by default since Win2k. You'd be amazed how much info you can get about a running system from a vbscript. Entire registry, map out the entire file system, info on every piece of hardware installed on a system, performance information (tcp packets sent/receieved, etc.), information about every component of every installed application. Not to mention that with the right privs you can execute any code you want. All this of course requires you to be an administrator on said machine, but if you combine it with the latest 0-day RPC exploit, then you've got a serious privacy concern.

Oh, and said virus could also easily access any unencrypted file on your system, and dumping your pagefile or info currently in memory would be pretty trivial.

Point: if you're worried about this enabling a virus to invade your privacy, then I'm sorry to burst your bubble but a virus can invade your privacy pretty easily already.

Re:What's In Your Box?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I sure like M0n0wall
Easy to install and configure.

Pretty well documented, too.

I repalced Astaro with m0n0wall, and have most of the features I used - minus some of the application proxies.
I have a tor installation on the box - easy to set-up with privoxy, after i added Perl to the m0n0 mix (big as the rest of the distribution!)

There are some add-ons, too.

Re:Shouldn't that be illegal?

[guardian alpha]

RTFA. The information will not be sent in the background, and will be treated almost identical to how it is now:

"This application crashed. Would you like to send the error and additional information to the developers?"

[yes] [no]

And as the article states, the user will have the choice to completely turn off this feature; Windows XP and 2k also have the option to turn off this error reporting.

Re:Privacy on the job

[nmb3000]

how exactly did they contact you?

doesnt the crash dump tool say "no personal data transmitted"?

The way it works is after submitting a problem, if there's recognizable issues it asks if you want to use OCA and if you choose Yes, it opens a web page in IE and tells you what happened. You can link OCA activity to your Passport to help keep track of it and a record of your problems.

Doesn't always work, but it's nice when it does.

Blackbox = UNIX core dump

[ebresie]

So basically what they are saying, is they are going to have a core-dump like functionality as is found in UNIX, right?