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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...
"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...
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.
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.
You use the Remove Hidden Data add-in to get rid of all that Office stuff. Strongly recommended before submitting a resume...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
That feature is seriously screwed up. Microsoft are *still* trying to sell people on the idea that its ok to share around the editable document, when in reality its hardly ever ok. All it takes is for one person to forget to remove hidden data and you're on the news.
Look at the list of Office products it integrates with - there's one missing. Outlook. Why isn't outlook set up to prompt you to ask if it should strip the documents before sending? Why is there no feature on exchange to block emails leaving the domain with unstripped attachments? Why doesn't iis block access to unstripped files? Now those would make it a feature worth having.
Stepping back from MS for a moment, the same problem actually exists in many other file types - even html (meta tags and comments). Its why the microformats movement thinks metadata should be presentable and parsable rather than hidden in 'document properties'. Their solution isn't complete though - we need to separate the notions of 'Save As' and 'Publish'. One way to achieve this in a corporate/government environment would be for servers to require digital signatures on outgoing documents - this would introduce publication into a document lifecycle for the purpose of integrity, at which point we can hook in 'strip doc' wizards to minimize risk.
Just thinking out loud.
"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?"