[PLUG] Why I will NOT use Windows XP (1)
guy1656
guy1656 at ados.com
Mon Jul 1 16:01:48 UTC 2002
http://theregister.co.uk/content/archive/24815.html
Win-XP Search Assistant silently downloads files
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 11/04/2002 at 20:47 GMT
Just over a week ago, while searching for a file on a Windows-XP machine, I
was surprised to see the Search Assistant attempting to activate my Internet
connection. It puzzled me because I wasn't searching the Internet, only my
local drive. I was busy with other things at the time, but I made a mental
note to look into it soon, which I promptly forgot to do.
This morning, Reg reader Jody Melbourne rattled my cage, fresh from having
made the same discovery. He'd noticed that the Assistant was establishing a
connection with a machine at Microsoft.
"I did not give Microsoft permission to know what files I am searching for on
my local hard-drive," Jody wrote.
Indeed, and neither had I. So I connected an XP box to my ISP, started a
packet sniffer, and launched the Search Assistant. Sure enough, it
immediately connected to http://sa.windows.com/ and fetched a number of
files. But it didn't attempt to send any data to the site, beyond comparing
my locally-stored versions of those files to the ones on the server.
But when I performed an Internet search, the Assistant sent my search terms
to the Microsoft site, and also dropped a session cookie on my machine.
Phoning home?
One of the files the Assistant fetches is the MS Search Companion privacy
statement. This is done for P3P compliance. According to the statement, MS
doesn't collect information about local searches. "No information is ever
collected by Search Companion when you search your local system, LAN, or
intranet for any reason."
I certainly didn't pick up anything to contradict that. But there is some
obvious collecting when SA is used to search the Internet.
"When you search the Internet using the Search Companion, the following
information is collected regarding your use of the service: your IP address,
the text of your Internet search query, grammatical information about the
query, the list of tasks which the Search Companion Web service recommends,
and any tasks you select from the recommendation list."
"Search Companion does not record your choice of Internet search engine, and
does not collect or request any personal or demographic information.
Information collected by the Search Companion cannot be used to identify you
individually, and is never used in conjunction with other data sources that
may contain personal data."
Hopefully there aren't too many loopholes in that, though I rather think the
user's IP can be considered personally identifying. However, MS tells us that
the policy statement is out of date. IPs were logged for testing purposes
during the XP beta period; but since the product launch, there has been no IP
logging.
In addition to the privacy statement, the remaining files fetched are XSL
(Extensible Stylesheet Language) stylesheets:
transform.xsl
balloon.xsl
prevectr.xsl
vector.xsl
boolean.xsl
pretrans.xsl
transform.xsl
Users curious to know exactly what they contain can quite easily locate them
on their local machine and have a peek. According to MS, they're simply used
to maintain up-to-date associations between file extensions and file types,
to make searching more productive.
I'm not acquainted with XSL, so I'm in no position to affirm that or to argue
with it, but I'd be pleased to hear from readers who can shed additional
light on the subject.
For now it appears that there's nothing here for users to worry about. But
there is a question about MS playing fast and loose with people's Internet
connections. Certainly, the minute one ventures onto the Web, one starts
bleeding information all over the place, fetching images and ads and taking
cookies from secondary and tertiary sources too numerous to mention.
But when we run an application for some local business like a file search, we
don't expect it to connect silently to the Net, even for a good reason. When
we discover something like this, it feels like someone else is in control of
our computer, and that is definitely not a good feeling.
If Trustworthy Computing is going to mean anything, it's going to have to
mean that actions like file downloads aren't going to happen without the
user's knowledge and consent. A simple popup asking if one wants the latest
XSL files with the options to decline, to be asked each time, or to grant
permission to go ahead without further consultation is all that would be
needed.
Related Story
Small MS DVD privacy invasion, not many dead
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24152.html
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