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Microsoft Adds Risky System-Wide Undelete to Vista
douder writes "Windows Vista will have a new 'previous versions' feature when it ships next year. According to Ars Technica, the
feature is built off of the volume shadow copy technology from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Now turned on by default, the service stores the modified versions of a user's documents, even after they are deleted. They also report that you can browse folders from within Explorer to see snapshots of what they contained over time. It can be disabled, but this seems like a privacy concern." From the article: "Some users will find the feature objectionable because it could give the bossman a new way to check up on employees, or perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person. Previous versions of Windows were still susceptible to undelete utilities, of course, but this new functionality makes browsing quite, quite simple. On the other hand, it should be noted that 'Previous Versions' does not store its data in the files themselves. That is, unlike Microsoft Office's 'track changes,' files protected with 'Previous Versions' will not carry their documentary history with them."
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
"could give the bossman a new way to check up on employees"
Um, your work computer is the property of your employer. If you want to do something that would get you in trouble with your boss - put it on your own computer. Plus all this does is back up files that you have made, how is this a privacy concern? Even if this was happening and you never knew it and uploading all your files to a central server, it's still an option of your employer, and not an invasion of privacy, it's crappy, but the option of your boss and his/her company. Just like the fact that they can read your business email. No different, and to me even less intrusive than that since you can't control incoming mail.
Amazing that a Good Thing gets turned into a big-brother or privacy issue just because it's Microsoft. Shadow copy has saved my ass twice in the past year and the more it's available, the better. If employees are worried about the boss checking up on them, then maybe they should just do their job.
Keep in mind that the goal and justification of a desktop is productivity, not some vaguely defined "monitoring" issue.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
If I get my hands on a beta of vista I can undelete things that I won't create for years?
As with System Restore, Windows Firewall, Remote Assistance, etc... just disable, delete and install better applications to provide the same functionality. MS should just focus on security, stability, and releasing the damn thing.
http://religiousfreaks.com//I for one welcome the Previous Versions of our new Overlords.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't get the privacy concern. If someone gains physical access to your machine, then the contents are vulnerable unless you take active steps to prevent it. People have known forever that stuff may not be lost forever just because it's deleted. This feature doesn't change that.
The issue is that this makes it "easier" but I can't help but see that as a neat feature.
The really silly part is this:
If that's what keeps you up at night, then you better give up on all technology, not just this.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ever hear someone think they deleted or crashed the internet? I have.
God spoke to me.
With Windows Vista, the operating system will make "shadow" (that is, backup) copies of files and folders for users who have "System Protection" enabled (the default setting).
In Windows Vista, each partition that is protected by "System Restore" requires at least 300MB of space, and may use up to 15 percent of the available space on a partition to store previous versions of files. In the event that more space is required, the service will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.
always mosh clockwise
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-112322121 7782777472
If you have windows 2003 r2 or sharepoint, you already have this feature. I enabled it on our network and people like it. there is a previous versions tab when right clicking a file in xp and selecting properties and then "previous versions". You tell windows 2003 r2 how much space you want to allocation for previous versions and then how often you want it to index versions of changed documents. It has saved me a lot of trouble restoring from backup when someone saves a change they didnt mean to make.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
In a normal office environment, assuming you can keep the porn and mp3's under control, people don't create enough bits in the course of a day to be an issue. Remember that this is the age of 300Gig harddrives for $100.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Vista comes with the Previous Version Explorer extension installed by default, and System Restore now watches the whole disk.
Ok. So what? This feature has been around for awhile, and if you have privacy issues, well just disable system restore (or whatever the equivalent option will be in Vista).
Never mind that as you make new versions of a file, the old ones are still hanging around in your drives' free space for a long time (about the same amount of time the previous-versions feature would keep them). So basically you're making the distinction between being able to access the deleted files explictly, vs. having to use a drive recovery tool.
If you're security concious, you disable the old restore points, fill the drive with a big file full of random data, then delete it. This isn't going to change...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The security risks could be eliminated by encrypted the user's home directory, a la Mac OS X.
It's a fantastic feature. I remember Novell Netware had this and we used it a lot to roll back changes to code. It was better than version control when only one person was working on the project.
I wonder if OS X 10.5 was going to have such a feature and it leaked out. This is actually a quasi-innovative idea from Microsoft. Maybe they stole it from Apple via corporate spying.
Ok, you do realize Windows has had encryption for like 10 years now, right? Or are Mac Zealots just naturally unaware of anything without an Apple logo on it?
You also realize this has been in WinXP and Windows 2003 Server for quite some time, so I doubt they stole the idea from OSX 10.5. (geesh)
As for the Versioning in Vista, the new thing is that it is turned on by default and works on local volumes, where WinXP required the data to be on a Windows 2003 Server.
Also, there aren't security risks, and this article is nothing but FUD. Windows Server has had this ability for 'versioning' files since 2003, and BUSINESSES have already been using it.
It also is a great tool, especially when you accidentally nuke a file, or change and save a file you didn't mean to, etc. Versioning archives are more handy than a 'problem'. (Truly)
If you are an employee, don't be doing crap at work, they own the computers, download your goat porn at home and don't be writing your resume while at work.
Also, as an employee if you are half way bright, you can purge the 'versioned' copies, unless the company doesn't allow you to with group policies. And again, it is their computer, so they can do what they freaking want if you work there.
There is a great extension for firefox called Nuke Anything which allows you to remove sections from pages.
My missus had a great time deleting all the geeky stuff from slashdot.
You should have seen her face drop though when I told her she had actually removed it from the internet.
liqbase
Yes, other people have thought of it before, but kudos to Microsoft for implementing it. Disks are cheap, whereas the documents I create are not. Anything which helps protect those documents from mistakes is going to be a good thing.
Just out of curiousity, the ability to effectively undelete things ought to rely on the filesystem. In the old days of MS dos, the first chars of the filename were simply changed to a reserved character, which was actually faster than going through and deleting the whole file. When the file system wanted to create a new file, it might use the nodes marked with the "it's ok to delete me flag". That's why MS Dos 6.22 and its brethren required you to type in the first char of the filename when you undeleted a file. So actually no, there's actually no overhead in creating a comprehensive file undelete system. Any 3rd party which implemented the same thing, might cause it to be slower.
If they could be fast in MS DOS 6.22, I don't see why XP would make the feature inherently slower.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
This sounds similar to the file versioning on VMS which I have never heard anyone complain about (other than being wicked annoying). If anything, I would think that people (and by people I mean the techno commoners) would like this feature. I think most people still believe that when you delete a file that it is really gone. Maybe this feature will show people that without wiping the free space on your hard drive things that you thought were gone are still around. I can't see how anyone could think of this as a privacy concern except maybe law enfourcement who end up finding that people are better at permanently deleting files.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I wonder, could an existing open filesystem be modified so that a file marked with some attribute will store its contents as a log, rather than as a working copy, able to be rolled back and forward (probably by some utility) until squashed, yet have the current copy be worked with transparently, without making (invasive) changes to the VFS? Does something like this already exist? Maybe something using FUSE?
We toyed for a while with implementing something like this in our scientific data management application and decided in the end that it just wasn't possible because the (instrument vendor provided) applications would have to be modified to deliver information about when to create a "version" of a file. Instead, we require users to provide us with this information manually.
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
Microsoft got this one much more directly. Windows NT started out as basically the next version of VMS, designed and written almost entirely by former DECies (one rumor has it that the "NT" came from taking VMS and adding one to each letter to get WNT...) VMS has had a feature like this for years. It predates not only OS/X, but the Macintosh in general. I can remember using in about 1981 or so -- I don't remember for sure, but VMS 3 is what sticks in my mind -- and I don't think it was new then (it seemed pretty cool to me after dealing with Control Data mainframes, but the people who'd been using VMS longer didn't seem to think of it as new or exciting).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
a built-in versioning system. Want to roll back to a previous version? Bam, done. Want to fork? Just make a copy of the "old version" and move on.
I'd like directory-by-directory control over this, some way of controlling when the old versions "go away" (I don't want mass-id3'ing of my MP3 collection to clobber my old documents, for example), as well as efficient move operations. But, as many are saying, this sounds like basically a good thing.
It's a feature, and a pretty cool one. I wouldn't mind this in Linux. This is not a bad thing.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I have a little and simple rsync-backup script that does basically the same: runs every day, uses locate to search for .rsync-backup files and then stores the directories containing these files. Simple. Elegant. Transparent. Efficient. No need to mess around with system-internals.
I used an OS back in the 70s, Twenex from Digital Equipment Corp, that had file versioning. Every time you wrote out a file it kept the previous N versions, typically 5. It wasn't oriented towards deletion so much as recovering old versions after you screwed one up. It was a pretty nice feature, although it tended to fill up disk space which was in short supply in those days.
Today, I thought undeleting was what the trash can was for. With today's big disks you shouldn't have to Empty Trash very often.
XPs: System Restore
Windows 2003: Volume Shadow Copy / Previous Versions
It's a system service that puts a shim between userspace and your physical disks (like LVM on linux). It can take file-system wide snapshots at configurable intervals. Those different names are just different levels of user-space interaction with the same underlying stuff.
VSS can notify programs that a snapshot is about to be taken. If they are VSS aware they will flush their open files to make sure the snapshot is "consistent". Otherwise the snapshot could be made of files that are corrupt (in the middle of being changed by an application). Most applications by 3rd parties are unfortunately not VSS-aware. Office 2003+ and MS SQL Server 2005 are, however, which is nice.
The snapshot is made at the block level, having no real knowledge of "files" per-se. It records changed blocks between snapshots so you can construct a historical version of a whole disk. It's not like rsync or anything.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It doesn't actually delete your data, just flag the space as free. The problem is that undeletion in that matter is unrelaible at best. A fiel is at any time subject to partial or complete overwrite, even if there's ample free space on the drive. When it's flagged as free the OS sees it as free period. There's no prioritisng the free space to not overwrite newley delete files (DOS was the same way).
This gives you more reliability. The files are stored and aren't messed with until the space is needed. So if you delete something and still have 500GB free, it'll keep the file since you can afford the space and it'll be marked as allocated and thus not overwritten. Also, it looks like it does version tracking too. If you overrote a file on a FAT or NTFS volume, it writes it to the same space it occupies before, makes sense to do it that way. However that means if you mess up and make a change you didn't want to, there's no undo. You replaced the bytes, it's too late. This will go and keep a copy prior to the change you can roll back to.
Basically it's similar to how NetApp units work. It provides storage that's reliable even against user faults. Things like RAID are great, but they protect only against hardware falure. You can still fuck your data up. There's a market, and MS seems to think the home desktop includes it, for systems that are resiliant against that. You decided to delete 5 paragraphs of that paper and save it, and then deleted it form the disk but now want it? Ok no problem, not only do we have the deleted version, we have the pre modificaiton version.
We use a NetApp FAS 270 at work for home directories for this reason. We aren't really concerned about disk reliability, though it's excellent for that too, and we go to tape nightly. We want to be able to save people from themselves. When they screw something up, we want to be able to get a non-screwed up copy.
MS wants to bring that to home computers. Will it be worth the performance impact? Guess that's too be seen. However it's certianly a good idea in general. What most users really need and want, even if they don't know it, is protection from their own mistakes.
Truely, MS is damned if they do, damned if they don't.
How many times has your mother/father/other family member called you over because they deleted "that one file" they never backed up (it's usually never just "that one file", but that's the typical excuse)? So you head over and, sure enough, the thing is gone. The only recourse is to buy some overpriced Norton Utilities or whatnot (that will probably slow down the system to crawl) and cross fingers.
So, Microsoft enables a feature that's been built-in to the OS for a while and the reaction is instantly negative? Never mind that, daily, petabytes upon petabytes are backed up using VSS around the world, as almost all decent backup software uses it on Windows. Never mind that, if "privacy concerns" get in the way, you can always remove versions in VSS or disable it entirely.
Seems much ado about nothing, personally. Don't like it? Turn it off.
And if you're in a company, well, you don't get a choice. I'm not really sure I understand the "bossman" comments -- in most big companies, the "bossman" has been backing up every file you create, every site you visit, etc. for decades. Granted, 99.99% of it will never be looked at, but in these post-SOX days, you're pretty much mandated to catch that 0.01%. And if you don't like it, well, I guess you can always start a company with your own rules.
Personally, I think this thing is going to be a tremendous blessing. When a relative calls me still using Windows (I've been trying to push them all to Mac), and says "My god, I deleted this crumb cake recipe! I'm doomed!" I'll be able to get it back after a couple clicks. Sounds great to me.
They had done a quoted search for the title of a particular book. Unfortunately, several porn sites included that title in the meta tags for their home page.
So when they did the search, and it popped up the porn sites, they were quite offended and were absolutely sure that "Google is broken" and that I could "fix it."
I explained the situation to them (but there was a language barrier, not to mention a lack of the capability to understand much) and then reported it to my supervisor. When he encountered the person later (as they took an opportunity to attempt to complain about it), he explained to them the situation again, and said that if they didn't understand the simple concepts or could develop basic computer and internet skills and understanding, he had no position that they could fill.
I talk about stuff.
The VMS filesystem (Files 11) was an evolution of earlier DEC filesystems and had versioning buit in from the start. There's also a more user-oriented versioning filesystem which has been in development for Linux for the past few years.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/versionfs/
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
This versioning in NT is based on a generic disk-snapshot system (similar to Linux's LVM, FreeBSD's gvinum stuff, Solaris DiskSuite, NetApp, etc. etc.)
The VMS versioning was done in the file system itself. This system (and many related systems) are done at a layer underneath the filesystem, and are often filesystem agnostic.
People like to say that Windows NT borrows a lot from VMS. That's like saying Linux borrows a lot from Multics. There isn't really _anything_ in common, but they are in the same spirit.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Yes, an additional feature that COULD be used by some evil genius who has your computer anyway to see some of the files you deleted is a good reason not to upgrade. I agree!
Sure, some people don't buy into this, they say things like "but it can easily be disabled, and your casual computer users would only benefit from this kind of feature". These people are obviously missing the large scale point. Microsoft has been making windows for a long time, and every time they do it, they add more features. If we keep buying new versions of windows, inevitably they will continue to add features untill all they can add is BAD, DANGEROUS, EXPLOITABLE SECURITY HOLES!
If you buy Vista, within years they will have features that send your porn to your parents. Send your AIM conversations to your boss. They will probably have a start option "Open Computer To Random Hacker".
Microsoft is obviously adding this feature because all of their engineers are evil. They have been for years! You and I will not stand for this. I am sending my 50 page word document, which proves my case to congress... it is right in this folder... hm.... where the fuck did I put it?! FUCK! I deleted it!!! If only I could recover my deleted file, I COULD END VISTA AND ITS PLAGUE OF EVIL FEATURES FOR GOOD!!!
You take it, I don't want it...
I'm sorry. You're allowed 5 punctuation errors and capitalization mistakes per post submitted to this website.
You are quite over that limited, and your spelling is atrocious. Please, leave and don't come back. Thanks.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I see your point.
:-D ) It's to cover corner cases and disastrous events outside the data management model. It's less invasive than a recovery from backup too.
However I will submit the following counterpoints:
* It works across the entire file system, which creates questions about its efficiency:
A disk-wide snapshotting system will be less resource intensive that a system that has to make multiple, discrete metadata updates per write transaction. Since system restore is enabled by default on XP and I haven't heard much complaint about it performance-wise, I think this is a non-issue. (An exception might be systems that have very slow disks and limited RAM, like a palmtop).
* Its 'all or nothing' implementation does create significant liability in places like law offices, as other have already noted;
Enabling this system doesn't make you or your data more or less at risk. The reality is that old copies of files will stick around on disk for about as long as the Restore feature will keep old versioned copies. The difference between enabling and disabling the feature is whether you want to be able to _definitively_ access an old file or attempt a recovery with a tool booted from CD-ROM, which has to operate with less definitive metadata, and may only be able to give you a corrupted or incomplete copy.
Keep in mind that if you are concerned about hackers accessing your deleted files and you don't feel the need to use this service for recovery, the hacker will probably be able to resurrect enough of the files anyway for it to be moot.
That is, if you get penetrated by a hacker, the issue is moot. You are already in trouble. The real issue is whether you would like a safety net for legitimate recovery. Since the additional resources consumed are neglible, I would posit it would be foolish not to take advantage of it.
Furthermore, when deleting files, if you don't want anyone to get at them ever, then whether you use this system or not is irrelevant. Once you delete a file, you need to use a secure undelete facility to make sure all non-allocated space on your system is overwritten. Even with this undelete feature operational, such a tool will invalidate and overwrite ALL the restore points as well as free space. (That is because the facility gives up restore points when disk space gets tight, and the tool operates by attempting to fill up the entire disk with random data, thus it will demand-release all undeleted files, which will then be overwritten).
I would recommend you DISABLE the versioning feature before wiping a machine, to ensure all undeleted files are irrecoverable.
* It encourages laxness in data management; yet
* It doesn't seem to be rich enough to support proper change management processes.
That's not what this tool is for. You still need to have change management processes in place. The tool is for recovering files you didn't know were important! (Otherwise, why would a user delete it? If it were important he or she would have checked it into the Subversion repository, right?
But it would be foolish to rely on this facility alone. Just as it is foolish to rely on RAID alone for data security on the server side.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
In other news, Kenneth Lay's heart attack confirmed by new autopsy, found to be caused by shock from leaked secret Microsoft "undelete-feature" memo.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
A better question would be why we need the following files at all anymore:
autoexec.bat
config.sys
msdos.sys
io.sys
ntdetect.com
Those five files exist to make sure that this NTFS disk, if copied to a FAT partition, isn't attempted to be booted by anything other than Windows NT. But never mind that they are tiny files which are stored inline in the MFT, and marked H/S so you can't even see them normally.
They implement a sort of null windows 98 boot telling you that you need to boot from a NT bootloader... which is *fanfare* NTLDR!
ntldr and boot.ini are what make a drive bootable. They need to be in the drive root.
Now Recycler and System Volume Information are ALSO both hidden and system so you don't normally see them. There are one of these per drive (they have nothing to do with a specific windows installation but store your Recycled Files and Restore Points for a drive respectively).
So everything is marked hidden. After install, all you see are:
Documents and Settings
Program Files
Windows
I was just trying to be complete and figured the parent poster probably was annoyed after disabling "hide operating system protected files" and looking in his C:\...
And what does it matter where they are? Because if the sector location on disk mattered, it certainly wouldn't make any difference if you located it inside Windows, because you'd have no way to migrate the windows folder itself anyway.
In fact you can move around those folders (and you can use more than one) if you are smart about things.
Typically I install a small system in C: using the original paths. I install all the SPs I can find, and update all my drivers.
Then I change the UserProfiles folder to point to a RAID-0 volume so that all local/remote users profiles get created on the faster volume on first login. Thus some profiles are located on C: (DefaultUser, Adminsitrator) and everyone else's are in C:\UserData or D: or whatever.
You can also choose to install Programs in _any_ folder you want at install time. C:\Program Files is just a default, and one that Windows uses internally to house things like Internet Explorer. Programs in the registry can store whatever path they want.
So make yourself an E:\programs network folder after boot and put all install all your software there.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Being a sysadmin, I deal with end-users. About 6 months ago I got an email that said "Bob, I forgot to save an unedited copy of this form and overwrote the file with my data. Is there a way to retrieve the old file?" ... It happens and this previous version feature could be a great tool for us sysadmins if it's deployed correctly.
OTOH, I can definately understand the privacy issues -- especially if the user doesnt realize this is going on. A home user types their credit card data into a word document to save it temporarily and then deletes it when they are done with it and they think its gone, but its not.
What I dont understand is why Windows doesnt ask some of these questions on install (or on windows setup when you buy a name-brand computer and plug it in for the first time). It would seem that asking whether the user wants windows to do this for them would be a great compromise.
Oh my gods... somewhere an angel just shot an English teacher in the face.
For the benefit of future article submissions, I've predicted a few headlines from the coming future and offer the required Slashdot twist:
Windows 2010 Ships with IPv6 as Default
- becomes -
Windows 2010 Foresakes Legacy IPs
Microsoft Office 2009 Ships with Photoshop Competitor
- becomes -
Microsoft Cheats Adobe Out of Millions, Again
Microsoft Ergonomic Mouse Helps Corrects Carpal Syndrome
- becomes -
Microsoft Mouse Locks Out Porn
Asheron's Call VII Goes Alpha
- becomes -
700 Bugs Detected in Asheron's Call VII
Please add your own.
-David
You found the hidden spelling mistake!
You can stay.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
MS's job isn't to make you, the geek happy. MS's job is to make as many people as they can as happy as possible. So let's say they develop a new awesome feature that they think nromal users will really like. However, they know normal users aren't smart enough to turn it on by themselves (this is easy to prove). They have two choices:
1) Disable it by default. This makes a few geeks who know about it and want it happy, more geeks who know aobut it but don'want it indifferent, and doesn't help normal users at all. It's almost worth just leaving out.
2) Enable it by default. This makes some geeks who don't want it a bit annoyed, but makes everyone else happy.
Gee, hard choice. Look, if you want an OS that does nothing by default, get a different OS. Run OpenBSD or something. You won't spend any less time configuring it than you will configuring Windows, you'll just spend that time turning things on rather than off.
Really I fail to see the problem. If you only do it occasionally, it's just a few more minutes of system configuration. I do a hell of a lot of customization to personal systems, it doens't bother me the time I spend turning the things I don't want off. If you do it a lot, develop a system to automate it. There's plenty of ways including customized Windows installs. Don't whine because you haven't done the research to automate tasks for you.
Because MS is an everyman based OS, they need to have the useful stuff turned on by default because normal users won't do it. It's like automatic updates. I don't like them to install on my personal system automatically because I many have something going. So I set it to wait till I give the ok. However it needs to be on by default for normal users. Why? Well otherwise they won't update it. Just today I had to update an XP system that was pre SP2 still. Why? No auto updates. Users didn't know they needed anything, just thought it should take care of itself.
Same shit here. If you don't need file version tracking because you make your own backups, you are smart enough to know how ot turn it off. If you don't know how to turn it off, it's probably a feature you should leave on.
This was an awesome feature in VMS,
and a privacy concern in Vista.
Those of us who have used versioning in filesystems or elsewhere think this is a pretty nice feature, even if we prefer other OS'es. So I would say not nearly so many people are against Microsoft on this one (or at least agree with the summary).
Now if you really wanted to see a storm of negativity from Slashdot imagine what would happy if Sony announced this feature on the PS3!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I remember VAX/VMS having version control. Filenames were in the form of FILENAME.EXT;nn where nn was a number from 1 to 99 {initially; later versions upped it to 32767} and you could {theoretically at least, though nobody ever did in practice; everyone just ran with the default settings} set on a file-by-file or directory-by-directory basis how many versions to retain. You could PURGE out old versions {essential when we had a disk quota of 5MB, even with a default version_limit of 3} and reset the counter back to 1.
This definitely has got the potential to bite some unsuspecting person in the arse. But so have most things.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"Some users will find the feature objectionable because it could give the bossman a new way to check up on employees, or perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person"
Hum! i think a company that OWNS the computer and PAYS their employee to WORK has a god damn right to make sure people aren't wasting their time having their entire photo album on their computer or music or other personal material whatsoever and that goes for network shares too.
If a company can filter e-mails of their employees i think they can also filter the content of what they are copying unto their machines.
Keep your stuff at home if you dont want prying eyes invading your computer at work.
or perhaps it could be exploited in some nefarious way by some nefarious person.
... ... ... ... everything.
...
This is exactly why we NEED to outlaw
Someone might use it for
[mermaid man]
*EVIL*!!!!
[/mermaid man]
"System-wide undelete", also known as filesystem snapshotting, has been available for years in various incarnations, both native to Linux (and other operating systems) and as part of NAS storage devices.
Why the hell is it suddenly bad when Microsoft does it? (Hint: it isn't.) What the hell are you doing on your PC at work that could get you fired if your boss found out?
FUD indeed.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You're right-- this problem exists in other formats. Like, say, Photoshop.
I have a friend who decided to make a major career change from being a network administrator for a university to... a porn photographer. At the time, I was the resident Photoshop whiz around, so he asked me if I would help him make his business cards. I said I would, but I never got around to it, so he sat down and tried to figure the program out himself. After adding various nude models to his card to come up with a template for a silhouette (want to be tasteful here, right?), he submitted the card to the offset printer.
Unfortunately for him, the printer was not amused. Apparently, due to his unfamiliarity with Photoshop, he left all of those nude photos in there-- in hidden layers. When the printer output the file, out came these prinouts covered in naked women. The printer refused to print the cards, and he eventually had to find another printer. Oops.
Combining this with Speech Recognition:
user:"Undelete this file"
vista:"unknown command undulate, no wi in fi"
user:"restore old version"
vista:"Going to MS online store. No new olsen twins tracks"
user:"fucking dammit, give me the file from yesterday"
vista:"This system has parental controls enabled. Please contact your parents"
user:"@#ç$!&%".....
Seriously, though, this is a nice feature, but I can see it chomping through users' 250GB disks like a hummer goes through gas.
Microsoft has taken so much out of Vista basically making it XP with a new interface. So far, it is hardly worth the update. No sense paying Microsoft all that money for a copy of a DRM infested product. If you think spying is bad now it is only going to get worse under Vista.
But all in all, it is a pretty attractive interface. The beta is extremely buggy. Virtually all features have serious problems. Accessing a SATA drive from allegedly support drivers/chipsets can still take you 30 seconds or longer to open a directory you were previously in but move away from and want to move back into. The network 100mb transfer rate is extremely slow. The same machine with XP works flawlessly at a nice speed. Wireless is essentially non-functional on most of my machines. The Aero interface is only working a the highest end 128mb cards when it should easily work on any card with 128mb of video ram. That 128mb requirement is more than some games for a simple interface.
But, aside from all that Vista has been trashed so badly with components being removed that Microsoft has felt that they need to insert features to make it seem so less bare-bones.
Even so, that feature is poorly implemented and weak and will fill people's drives with unwanted overhead and make a storage facility for spyware/adware/malware to hide--just like system restore.
It is essentially a non-feature for an OS lacking any real feature updates.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.