Longhorn gets a black box

[newstech]

Microsoft's answer to system crashes

submitted by Matthew

NEWS

Microsoft used the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) to announce plans to include the equivalent of a black box data recorder in the next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn.

The new system will incorporate Watson, the existing error reporting functionality found in Windows XP, but will increase the amount of information gathered. When a crash occurs the system will record information including what applications were open, what those application types are, and the user information each application currently had in it. For example, the system would record that you had Microsoft Word open and the contents of the document you were working on. The same will be true for e-mail applications and the contents of any e-mail you are writing when the crash occurs.

Microsoft has tried to head off privacy concerns by stating that the consumer version of the system will allow the user to decide what information is sent. A list of everything the user was doing will be brought up, and the user can choose what is and isn't sent to MS. I.T. managers will be given access to the information, and can also decide what information is collected from users' machines.

Microsoft also said it plans to respond to error reports in a more meaningful way. Currently Windows users can get feedback, but it is usually very non-specific. Microsoft's aim with the new system is to respond with detailed information as to what caused the crash and how to fix it.

Read more at http://www.Silicon.com


MATTHEW'S OPINION
This won't signify any real change for home users other than they'll get to see what information is being sent to Microsoft in more detail before it is sent. The more technically savvy among us might even be able to review that information ourselves and figure out what went wrong. This all depends on how readable that information is, however, as references to registers and application names won't be enough.

I don't think privacy is an issue here, as this is just taking the error reporting Windows already uses to the next level. Information on the contents of a Word document, for example, will just be the number of pages, what images were being used and their formats, any included spreadsheets, HTML, etc. There should be no specific information other than the type of data being used sent as part of an error report; anything other than that would be unacceptable, and Microsoft should never have a reason to need the actual text we have written in a document, nor be able to view the images we were using.

Business users may see this extra functionality as an opportunity to check up on their employees. If the system is set up to report on everything that was happening on the machine then it may spot a number of applications running that should not have been, e.g., instant messengers, media players, etc. Hopefully this won't be the case, but the system does offer that level of information gathering.

The downside of this, though, is that you have to wait for a crash to view the data, making it an unreliable tool for that purpose.

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2005M ... 030218.htm

[infinitevalence]

I am flat out uninterested in haveing ths on my system. Most of the time i know what goes wrong, if i really wanted to debug i could. But the last thing i want is MS haveing access to all my private information.