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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.'"
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."
...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.
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.
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.
"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?"
Easily, if all you want is to figure out things like "How long does it take a user to find the application they want in the Start Menu" then all you're doing is timing from the moment they click start, to the time they click a start menu option. You don't need to know who the user is, or even what IP the data was submitted from and when you have a lot of this data it's trivial to tell if the mean time users take to find an application has increased or decreased after you made a change in an update, or after they changed a configuration setting.
If all you're doing is getting metrics on millions of users as to how they use things like this then it's trivial to keep it anonymised and non-identifying. I don't care how long it takes John Smith from Outer Mongolia specifically to find Microsoft Word in his Start Menu - I don't need to take information about who he is, where he lives or any such thing, I just want to know how long on average it takes a sample of users to do so for example.
Though of course, this isn't to say that I trust Microsoft to do just this, I don't for one moment imagine they'll be able to resist the urge to keep the data anonymous and/or only collect data that is non-identifying, but that doesn't change the fact that it's trivial to come up with useful metrics they may choose to gather without it being identifiable - what they're claiming is certainly possible, realistic, and even helpful to them (and arguably users too if they get a better product out of it) but whether they'll stick to what they're claiming or not? that's what's troubling here.
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.
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 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 -----------------------------------
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
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.
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.
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.