Bill Gates Knows What You Did Last Summer

theodp writes "Give Bill Gates your 'pictures, videos, documents, e-mail, instant messages, addresses, calendar dates/scheduling information (e.g., birthdays, anniversaries, appointments), voice mail, phone logs, RSS feeds, subscriptions, bookmarks, mail lists, project management features, computing device data, tasks and location data,' and he'll improve your 'quality of life.' That's the promise behind a patent issued Thursday to Bill Gates and his 20 co-inventors for 'Personal Data Mining', which Microsoft notes 'can include a monetization component' that 'could initiate an auction to sell information to the highest bidder.'"

Comments

Privacy

[Hatta]

Is not privacy essential to a high quality of life?

Re:Privacy

[PotatoFarmer]

The fact that someone would do all those things is in itself more data about that person's habits. The real trick is to selectively limit your audit trail so that you still appear in the middle of the distribution curve. Like schooling fish and flocking birds, the best form of anonymity is to surround yourself with a few million things just like yourself.

Sadly, the end result of this sort of behavior is that Netflix recommends I watch Transformers 2. A high price to pay, but such are the wages of freedom.

Isn't that called Google?

[nweaver]

Isn't that already called Google, where you give them your email, your pictures, your videos, your calendar, all your documents, all your web searches, and about half of your total web surfing (*cough* analytics *cough* doubleclick *cough)?

Hmm

[goldaryn]

Gates can have all that stuff, but there's no way I'm giving him my chair

Re:And you were worried about Google?

[MozeeToby]

It looks like you're getting married, would you like to...
() Perform background check on your fiance
() Take out a loan to pay for the reception
() Invite Clippy... Please? I'm so lonely...

One note about data mining...

[NecroPuppy]

You get such interesting stuff when it's way off.

I recently picked up, at a going out of business sale, a piece of jewelry that was normally $1200 for less than $200.

Since then, I've gotten several high end credit card offers, none of which I would normally qualify for.

So mess with the system.

Use your grocery store card... but only when buying beef jerkey and toilet paper.
Get your name on a couple strange mailing lists.
etc.

If the data becomes so worthless that they can't actually use it, they'll stop. But only if enough of us go through with this.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Re:Office.microsoft.com hates alternative browsers

[b4dc0d3r]

(apologies for the formatting, I just created this 20 minutes ago for my own purposes). Bottom line: the entire intention of this Office.Microsoft.com "feature" is misguidedly implemented, showing a complete lack of testing using the common 'alternative' platform.

Visiting Office.Microsoft.com with FireFox and NoScript gives the following message:

<noscript>
<table border=0 height=95%>
<tr><td valign=middle>
<div><center><b>One Moment Please...</b></center></div><br>
<div>To help optimize how your Web pages are displayed, we are checking to see if a 2007 Microsoft Office program is installed.</div><br>
<div>If this page does not automatically redirect, you have scripts disabled. <a href='/_services/errors/error.aspx?id=5'>See more information on scripts.</a></div><br>
<div><a href='http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?assetid=FX010562591033'>Follow this link if the page is not redirected.</a></div>
</td></tr>
</table>
</noscript>

Enabling scripts, loading the page, then disabling scripts, results in the message at the top of the page, along with the requested page content (which doesn't appear prior to loading scripts):

Warning: This site requires the use of scripts, which your browser does not currently allow. See how to enable scripts.

That seems to be a disconnect. The second message shows that the site can be used with scripts disabled. The only reason I see the "One Moment Please..." message is the lack of cookies. In theory, the browser would check which versions are installed, and then show customized content for your version. IE browser allows ActiveX controls which could access the local filesystem, which can report that information.

VBScript function ofctestax() creates objects using the following CLSID values and then calls GetOfficeX() and/or GetOfficeLcid() functions to see what's installed:

• 4453D895-F2A1-4A38-A285-1EF9BD3F6D5D
• 6632AA50-49DC-475B-B911-A02B84C7C794
• C9712B19-838B-45A5-ABF2-9A315DDDED50

It then calls the function ofcpost() which sets cookies describing which versions are installed. ofctestax() is called inline from a script at the bottom of the page.
How does this work in FireFox?

if (typeof(window.external)=='undefined') {
if (navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-msoffice12'] != null && !IsOpera())
document.write("<embed id='ofcnp' type='application/x-msoffice12' f='ofcpost' width='0' height='0'>");
else if (navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-msoffice'] != null && !IsOpera())
document.write("<embed id='ofcnp' type='application/x-msoffice' f='ofcpost' width='0' height='0'>");
else
ofcpost('N','0','N','0');
} else {
if (typeof(ofctestax)!='undefined')
ofctestax();
else
ofcpost('N','0','N','0');
}

ofctestax is a VBScript function, so in IE and any browsers supporting VBScript, it will run. In other browsers, it will not be recognized, and thus be undefined. ofcpost() function is called with default values, setting cookies to uninformative values.

With no cookies, this happens, because ofcpost() calls post() function:

<script language='JavaScript'><!--
function post()
{