[IP] Petabytes of Personal Data in Microsoft's Hands?
Begin forwarded message:
From: Rod Van Meter <rdv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: October 11, 2006 8:59:31 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Petabytes of Personal Data in Microsoft's Hands?
Reply-To: rdv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi Dave,
For IP, if you wish...
A couple of days ago, the New York Times had an article about
Microsoft's beta program for Vista. It said they have 5.5 petabytes
of crash dumps of the Vista release candidate, collected presumably
from all around the world from members of their beta test program. If
each crash dump is a gigabyte, that's 5.5 million individual crash
dumps.
My first reaction, as an engineer, was to be impressed and a little
envious. Even as we near a terabyte per spindle, building a
multi-petabyte archive, collected over the Internet in half a year or
so, and processing it is quite an accomplishment. It's an incredible
engineering resource, and it must be fascinating to write tools that
accelerate debugging by leaping from dump to dump, looking for data
that will confirm or disprove a hypothesis about a particular
problem. Certainly a problem related to a specific hardware
configuration must stick out like a sore thumb.
My second thought, as a smug Linux user, was that it would take a
<i>really</i> long time to get 5.5 million crashes, even if everybody
in the world switched tomorrow.
Then this evening it occurred to me that Microsoft now has the memory
contents of millions of people's PCs. I wonder what's in there? Bank
account info? IM from a congressman? Crypto keys? It seems likely
that Intel and Oracle have extensive beta test programs; perhaps part
or all of a chip design or database product strategy?
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist, or even loathe Bill Gates,
to think that any one organization collecting the memory contents of
millions of computers is a questionable idea. It has to be a tempting
target for hackers, ambitious Justice Department folks, or even
curious Microsoft employees.
I'm sure there are people on IP who are members of the beta program.
Were you made aware that your memory contents would be sent to
Microsoft in the event of a crash, and were you warned not to use it
for sensitive work? Does anybody know the technical details of what
is and is not included in a crash dump? (e.g., is the screen memory
dumped?) Was there and agreement you had to assent to? I wonder if
this violates any EU privacy laws...
NYT article at
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/technology/09vista.html?
_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1160570218-j
luC4PtjX6CNjhDUDj+OJg
and this note on my blog at
http://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2006/10/petabytes-of-personal-
data.html
--Rod
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