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Microsoft's Asimov System To Monitor Users' Machines In Real Time
SmartAboutThings writes Microsoft will monitor users in the new Windows 9 Operating System in order to determine how the new OS is used, thus decide what tweaks and changes are need to be made. During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor. The new system is codenamed 'Asimov' and will provide a near real-time view of what is happening on users' machines. Rest assured, the data is going to be obscured and aggregated, but intelligible enough to allow Microsoft to get detailed insights into user interactions with the OS. Mary Jo Foley says that the system was originally built by the Xbox Team and now is being used by the Windows team. Users who will download the technical preview of Windows 9, which is said to get unveiled today, will become 'power users' who will utilize the platform in unique scenarios. This will help Microsoft identify any odd bugs ahead of the final release.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
Prior to Windows 8, what exactly where people using to start applications if they were not using the start menu?
Or did they just notice the start menu was being used less often because people were keeping applications open?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Windows 7 is the end for me, thanks. I pretty much felt that way anyway, but now I really double-extra plus feel that way. Thanks for helping make that decision simple, Redmond.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Rest assured, the NSA will be getting the unobfuscated stuff and sending the obfuscated data back to MS.
More like the Orwell system, or perhaps the Huxley system...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
in the same paragraph. That'll be five laps. Backwards.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It's hard to tell by the article, is this system for the tech preview only, or also for the consumer release versions?
How does one obscure data to the point where you can't identify the user, but still have meaningful data? Haven't we heard this all before?
Nah, this is just a customer opt in to to 100 percent surveillance.
"Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor."
New Asimov has already confirmed that Windows 8 users don't use the Start menu hardly at all.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So microsoft will monitor windows 9 to see how people are using it? So email, watching cat clips on youtube, porn, games, occasionally looking stuff up on google, and writing a document. Why would microsoft need to monitor the OS to see that?
Clippy: *tap* *tap* *tap* I see you are looking up porn. Would you like some help with that.
...monitoring will cease after Microsoft has gathered enough information to make Win 9 as user-friendly as possible.
ROFL...kicking my feet in the air and gasping for breath
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
So, smart people will disable the monitoring, leaving Microsoft to only get usage data from the stupid people. I see this going really well.
Facebook, Solitaire, Candy Crush, Angry Birds, not Internet Explorer, cracked copies of Office.
Even after axing 4000 employees and preeching a new leaf culture, Microsoft is still so divorced from its customer base that it requires an intrusive surveillance program to figure out how to deliver a functional product.
Here are some hints for free: listen to your customers and stop treating them like unwashed hobos. shutter your dismal app store, stop making the OS contingent upon capacitive touch screen, release one, one version of the OS instead of a whole shit sandwich of different versions the average user cares nothing about. bring back the start button. Quit trying to make me use your internet browser, its a wretched piece of garbage. Stop with the search engine, its alexa rank is ten fold lower than yahoo and its results are worse than awful.
Good people go to bed earlier.
From the article:
(Emphasis mine.)
Maybe I'm just out of it since I've never played Halo, but how is "Asmiov" a "Halo-influenced codename"? Doesn't this reference Isaac Asimov, the extremely prolific writer and one of the major pillars of classic science fiction? I'm assuming that something within Halo is named Asimov, after Isaac. Do we credit references to the latest to use the reference instead of the original source?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped
Maybe that's because they got rid of it and put that bullshit metro in its place... Of course nobody wants to use it.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Windows XP: Windows Genuine Activation
Windows 7: Internet Explorer SmartScreen sends your URLs to Microsoft
Windows 8: You log in with your "Microsoft account" to your own computer
Windows 9: Accurate information is sent about how you use your computer
Lots of other companies manage to produce a great UI without telemetry. It's pretty sad that a company of Microsoft's depth needs telemetry data to break the management deadlocks that are contributing to the 'designed by committee' feeling of Windows 8. Talent and balls seem to be absent in these decisions.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
They're starting over from the drawing board to see how humans use computers? Are you fucking kidding me? Just design it so it doesn't suck. They could replace their AI system with 1 individual person who isn't an idiot. Ask any single computer user that works in IT if they should have removed the start menu and replaced it with a touch-friendly interface with no options. Ask anyone if they should have gotten rid of the red X to close that existed in Windows 3.1 through 7. Ask anyone if they even want to touch their PC (and don't ask stupid people). I could sit down and design an OS interface myself that would crush Windows 8 and I'm not a team of experts. They don't even need one!
Do please enlighten us. I'm sure no-one else here has any understanding of software development, statistical analysis and data mining, or the related privacy issues, so we'll all be glad to learn from you.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor.
No, Microsoft, wrong conclusion. See, your data told you the $deity's own truth, that start menu usage has dropped. Most people pretty much use desktop shortcuts 90% of the time, so your stupid fisher-price jolly candylike tiles may look like crap but don't seriously impact that specific usage pattern. More accurate data collection won't change that.
What your data didn't tell you? That remaining 10% of the time doesn't just mean people "forgot" they had a shortcut and decided to use the start menu for the fun of it. Using the start menu drastically beats having to hunt down actual executables somewhere on the HDD, particularly for administrative-type tasks that might go six folders deep into the Windows directory, and have insanely long command-line arguments as a bonus (ie, a lot of the control panel apps).
Data doesn't equal knowledge. The stats can tell you "how often", but not "why".
Most frequently used does not always mean the thing you should optimize the design for.
Windows is a dead man walking. At some point someone will come out with a fully functional Wine environment and people will be able to run all their trusty/crusty old x86 apps on *Nix. At that point Windows is dead.
The company is being run by dickhead after dickhead, alienating it's core users and changing stuff "just because we can".
Nobody gives a fig about the O/S as long as they can run the programs they want to run.
*Nix mostly fails as a desktop O/S because of the sheer volume of legacy stuff that is tied in to the Windows API.
Let's wait what the Asimov family has to say about that stunt.
Some warm, balmy, financial rain coming.
What's so heinous about the North American Marlon Brando Look Alikes, or the Kind Kentucky Kids?
They appointed Cloud Guy to run the show, at a time when Cloud was a buzzword. No big surprise there from a trendy board/investor point of view, but to anyone with technical chops that move went against basically every major strength Microsoft had left and played straight to their weaknesses.
Based on historical trends, I suspect MS get 2-3 disasters with Nadella at the top before he gets forced out. The difference this time is that now Microsoft itself can probably only survive 2-3 more disasters on the Vista/Win8 scale before it ceases to be a major player in the industry at all.
The worrying thing is that there is no clear successor, with neither Linux nor OS X having the application base to be comprehensive competitors to desktop Windows yet, while the average web app is still a child's toy in comparison to serious software (and often a child's toy with serious security and privacy concerns). It is possible that the 2010s will be remembered as the decade when progress in software development reversed and the industry became dominated by cheap, "good enough" software that left professional/power users out in the cold, though I have some hope that OS X and the relatively polished, diverse and sometimes disruptive applications running on it will take over before all is lost.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
.
Microsoft will be the sole collector and interpreter of the data.
Microsoft will release information about the data collected only when such information justifies what Microsoft had wanted to do anyway.
duh
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Of course we have common programs on the task bar or desktop. The start menu is there for an easy, fast way to access everything else. I might only use the start menu a few times a day for those obscure programs, but it is still the 'best' way we have of accessing them. 'Invisible' menus and full screen tile displays that obscure ones work are not the way to go as the current situation should suggest to them.
It just seems that they're trying to justify their position with this, they should be giving the customer what they want. And yes, for all you marketers; in this case the customers know what they want as evidence by this.
Microsoft found that the J, K, W, X and Y keys were rarely utilised by Italian users and so has replaced those characters in the Italian version of the operating system with Unicode characters representing hand gestures. The Italian keyboards are also more compact. "It really wasn't worth supporting them when they are only used 0.1% of the time", said a Microsoft spokesperson.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
In Windows 10, the Seldon monitor. I, for one, will welcome our new psychohistorical robot overlords.
Invenio via vel creo
How are you having problems with Beta? I saw it once (by choice), dismissed it, and I've not seen it since.
Hey, Microsoft... if you really want to know what people like and dislike about your system, how about you try and LISTEN to what they say? Have someone lurking here on Slashdot, in no time he could see hundreds of comments bashing in detail the countless flaws on your shitty interface designs. Shit, have some of your designers actually having a fucking clue about usability, that'd help too.
Circumcision is child abuse.
So, are they going to remove this once they've finalized the release?
Or is Microsoft more or less giving themselves the right to do real time monitoring of every Windows machine on the planet?
Because that would make them even bigger assholes than I've come to expect, and quite possibly would break the law in a bunch of places.
Sounds like a terrible idea to me, maybe if they focused on more QA before they released it, they wouldn't need to do this.
A real-time "call home to Microsoft" feature needs to be killed.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
They should have called it the Orwell system.
The problem was that most moderately tech savvy people decline to share telemetry data. So the data they were using to make decisions was already heavily skewed toward the barely computer literate crowd.
This is a classic problem with data analysis. You have to be sure you have a truly representative sample. It's astonishing that they made this simple mistake and made such a huge change without doing more analysis.
Rest assured, the NSA will be getting the unobfuscated stuff and sending the obfuscated data back to MS.
No, this is much worse than that. The collection of data will lead to Microsoft "helping" you use the system...
and that will be a justification for their ultimate goal...
BRINGING CLIPPY BACK TO LIFE!!!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
To make things cheaper and better for customers instead of buying a perpetual windows version license, You pay a monthly Fee to access the operation system! with discounts for 3mounths and 1 year packages! After all isn't that how all major software packages are going?
HOw about that... you make the start button a PITA to get to and it's use drops. wow. These folks are S M A R T.
I guess the entire OS is now spyware eh? Wow, this company really wants to commit suicide.
Disclosure:
I work extensively with Microsoft customer usage data (although on Visual Studio, not Windows)
Odds are, unless you've been very intentional about ticking the checkboxes the right way, Microsoft is already collecting usage data from you -- for a variety of products. Never without your consent, of course.
The issues around anonymizing your data and removing PII are taken very seriously. It's damn frustrating, because I often look over the data for user 234209342349 and think, "I wish I could email this guy and ask why the hell he is doing that". But there is no way for me to recover PII for VS client customers.
For the Visual Studio products, a typical approach is that data that might have a PII impact is one-way hashed on your local machine, so that PII never goes over the wire and never gets to Microsoft to begin with.
You can use tools like filemon to see where VS dumps the usage data files it generates. I don't remember if these look like binary mess on disk or not, but they get written to disk, and then you can see them go over the wire some time later. You could of course use a packet sniffer to see the on-the-wire format, and if it differs from what is stored on disk.
The data we scrub in VS covers the obvious things -- account names or email addresses -- but also some more subtle things -- like file paths (because these could contain your username, or a company name, or anything else), and even thing like VS Project Type names (because Company Foo can create their own Project Type, and might put their company name in the Project Type Name)
So anyway, there's actually not much of a story here. I can't comment on the truth or accuracy of what MJF is saying. However, what she is saying is that, in effect, the latency between usage data being locally captured/calculated, and that data being sent to Microsoft (assuming the user has allowed usage data to be sent), is now much lower than it was in the past.
For VS, at least, I know what data we have available to us. I opt-in to all of the MS data collection stuff, because I see no evidence of it being used inappropriately, and, because I know that we use it to try and understand what users are doing and why they are doing it.
Opting into the data collection stuff effectively gives you "a vote" in how we do things in future releases.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You've got to be kidding.
Someone, if not Microsoft, had better come up with an option to kill this on all Windows computers, phones, tablets, etc. I started to write this and put "kik.." in place of kill. Ya, kick this can down the road.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
The trick of course is knowing whether there's a secondary channel that they use to send the PII and associated hash that they wouldn't generally provide to anyone except say the NSA.
Of course a packet sniffer would find that out easily enough, and I'm guessing that someone would have already done so and let the world know if that was the case (and thus its probably not,) but simply being anonymized in the data you have doesn't directly imply that there isn't additional data somewhere capable of de-anonymizing it.
Sure, it's fine to be skeptical, but it's easy to verify (or not). You don't think Windows has a big enough market that people won't analyze every bit of traffic that comes out of the next OS?
Plenty of programs have had that customer experience improvement program opt-in for a while. I haven't seen anything that suggests that you really can't opt out of it, that data is sent anyway. I'm sure that if somebody found evidence of that, we'd hear about it instantly.
Sure, it may be required as part of installing the technical previews (but even that's not clear). How it works in the release, who knows. I agree that the best move would be not to have it at all in the RC or RTM builds, but that's not impossible or even unlikely.
If it was alpha or conceptual, that's fine. Beta means that they are testing out a product, and the final product is probably going to be fairly similar.
Is Microsoft 3 Laws Safe? Federal Courts have said, "no."
OCP CPU-001 only has limited space for it's directive database. You clutter it up with too many rules and it bogs down and requires a hard reset. Hence we now limit it to only the three most critical rules.
There is no rule six.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You pay to have MS grant you permission to use it the way they want you to.
I don't have a strong opinion on the management and practicalities of Linux itself; clearly Linux is already stable enough to run useful software on it, because servers all over the world are doing it today. But any operating system, no matter how good, has little value unless there is software to run on it. Right now, you simply can't buy a lot of serious professional software to run on Linux, and the open source equivalents to things like Excel and Photoshop don't cut it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yess-s-s, of course you would ... *MU-HU-HA-HA-HA*
How often do I go into the fuse box that controls my home's electrical circuit breakers? Not often. But that isn't a reason to bury the damn thing under 20 feet of concrete either.
Frequency of use does not equate to obsolesce. I probably access the start menu about once a day to perhaps three times a week. I keep really common stuff on my desktop or in a folder on my desktop.
However, there are a lot of things that are best found by looking at the start menu.
MS really should just give users options. Ask them on install or on the first running of an account... "do you want it to work this way or this way?"... and that way the users can decide.
Might this confuse the hapless? They're going to be confused regardless. That is unavoidable. However, to anyone that can follow along and has a clue... you'll be providing the service they need.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
> provide a near real-time view of what is happening on users' machines. Rest assured, the data is going to be obscured and aggregated, but intelligible enough to allow Microsoft to get detailed insights into user interactions with the OS.
FINALLY! I've been waiting for near real-time monitoring by Mycosoft for *years* now. It's at last going to be real.. I CAN"T WAIT! Inject Windows10 into my arm NOW PLEASE!!!
Rest assured, the NSA will be getting the unobfuscated stuff and sending the obfuscated data back to MS.
No, this is much worse than that. The collection of data will lead to Microsoft "helping" you use the system...
and that will be a justification for their ultimate goal...
BRINGING CLIPPY BACK TO LIFE!!!
Zombieland Rule #2 - Double Tap
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Sorry is that meant to be an apostrophe or a comma?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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