Alexander’s Blog

The lead program manager for WinFS, Quentin Clark, has announced that his product is no more — at least in its current form. Just one week after a slew of WinFS sessions at TechEd, Microsoft has decided not to continue development on the new file system, canceling the expected Beta 2 release. Although the status of WinFS has already changed a number of times, it seems Microsoft has finally given up on once-lofty plans to completely re-architect the way Windows stores files.

The technology, which is based upon Microsoft’s SQL Server platform, was originally slated to ship in Windows Vista, but the feature was cut in 2004. The changed prompted many industry watchers to speculate that WinFS was dead, a victim of delays plaguing the new operating system.

But Microsoft very publicly brought WinFS back to life last August, releasing Beta 1 ahead of PDC 2005 and announcing plans to launch the file system technology as a separate download after the debut of Windows Vista. WinFS was integrated into the WinFX Runtime Components and back-ported to Windows XP. Read more…

Microsoft designed Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) to prevent software piracy. WGA consists of two components: Validation and Notification. The validation part ensures that you are using a legal copy of Windows, while the notification part is responsible for displaying alerts on pirated copies of Windows. In addition, it also “phones home” to Microsoft with certain information.

Recently, several security experts complained about this “phoning home” feature and some like Brian Livingston publicly referred to WGA as Microsoft spyware. First Microsoft denied that WGA is spyware but when things got pretty hot, Microsoft decided to back down a bit.

One of the complaints about WGA was that it sends system-validation information to Microsoft every time you rebooted your PC, even if your Windows version was legitimate and Microsoft has verified it. The second complaint was that Microsoft issued WGA to customers as a high priority update through Automatic Updates and Windows Update, while WGA is still in beta. This really got the customers upset. While Microsoft continuously stresses the importance of using beta products only on test computers in lab, people complained that it turned the entire world into one large test lab. Needless to say, neither the privacy rights advocates nor security experts were very amused.

You have to credit Microsoft because it decided to cool things down a bit by announcing that it will check for validation only the first time and not at every reboot and it also decided to stop “phoning home” with system-validation information.

This is not the first attempt from Microsoft for having Microsoft products secretly “phone home.” If you recall, Microsoft used the “phone home” feature in Windows XP. You can read my article Tired of Windows XP Phoning Home? on this topic. After numerous complaints, Microsoft announced at that time that they won’t be secretly “phoning home” in future.

Harvard University has been left in the lurch by Larry Ellison, chairman of software group Oracle, who has failed to make good on a $115 million donation 10 months after academics believed they could count on the money.

The Ellison Institute for World Health, which was gearing up to employ a staff of 130 by the summer of 2007, has been put on hold. Twenty research fellows and five top academics had been all but appointed, while three senior managerial staff who had been hired, have now been dismissed.

The planned Ellison Institute, which was to study and disseminate ways to assess health policies around the world, would have marked a big increase in philanthropic support by Ellison, estimated by Forbes to be the world’s 15th richest man with $16 billion in net assets.

It would also have marked Ellison’s second foray into global health, an area of increasing interest to wealthy businessmen led by Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, who last week said he would step down in 2008 to devote himself principally to philanthropy.

Prof. Christopher Murray, head of Harvard’s Global Health Initiative, who was set to run the new institute, confirmed on Tuesday that he was still awaiting $115 million first promised by Ellison in March 2005 and set to be paid last September. He said: “I remain hopeful that Ellison will follow through on his commitments.”

A spokesman for Ellison at Oracle refused to comment Tuesday. Read more…

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard to build the world’s largest software company and become the world’s richest person, said Thursday he is stepping aside over the next two years to work full time at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The world’s largest charity, the Seattle foundation has a $29.1 billion endowment focused on fighting disease and improving education around the world. Gates said he came to the decision Tuesday after ensuring that a strong transition plan was in place and that the company “would not miss a beat.”

He began by consulting with his wife, Melinda, the foundation’s co-chairwoman. He then brought in Ballmer, and later other close advisers, including his father, William Gates Sr., and billionaire investor and famed Gates bridge partner Warren Buffett.

“There’s a few key people who always help me with key decisions,” Gates said.

Under the transition plan detailed Thursday, Gates will assume the role of senior technical adviser at the company in July 2008, but he intends to continue his chairmanship of Microsoft’s board for the foreseeable future.

Under the transition plan detailed Thursday, Gates will assume the role of senior technical adviser at the company in July 2008, but he intends to continue his chairmanship of Microsoft’s board for the foreseeable future.

Ballmer said, “Bill teased me earlier. He said, ‘Anytime the president of China calls, feel free to give me a call and we’ll have him over for dinner.’ ”

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According to Microsoft “Broadly speaking, spyware is deceptive software that is installed on a user’s computer without the user’s consent and has some malicious purpose.”

Brian Livingston of WindowsSecrets.com disagrees with Microsoft definition. He states that “This is patently absurd. Many spyware programs, such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications, are knowingly installed with the user’s consent. The user downloads the software to get music, a screen saver, or whatever other benefit is promised. What makes a program spyware, among other things, is that it operates in ways that aren’t clearly disclosed before installation and it reports data back to a central server. Furthermore, this activity needn’t be malicious. Many spyware programs do nothing more than serving up targeted advertising or tracking anonymous marketing behavior. If a user wants such tracking functions, they might be fine. But if the user wasn’t clearly made aware of this, whether or not such software has a malicious purpose, it’s still spyware.”

The majority of security experts will agree with Brian Livingston’s argument that spyware does not have to be installed without the user’s consent and spyware does not have to have a malicious purpose. Here are some of the definitions of “spyware” that you’ll find on the Web.

Webopedia.com: Any software that covertly gathers user information through the user’s Internet connection without his or her knowledge, usually for advertising purposes.
Wikipedia.org: In simpler terms, spyware is a type of program that watches after what users do with their computer and then send this information to a hacker over the Internet.
CNET: One generally agreed upon definition of spyware states that it is software that tracks personal information about you and transmits that information to third parties.
Dictionary.com: Any software that covertly gathers information about a user while he/she navigates the Internet and transmits the information to an individual or company that uses it for marketing or other purposes.

Finally, The Anti-Spyware Coalition (ASC), headed by the Center for Democracy & Technology with support from industry giants America Online Inc., EarthLink Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Yahoo Inc. among others, has released a document designed to establish definitions that will bring clarity to anti-spyware vendors. The ASC is a group dedicated to building a consensus about definitions and best practices in the debate surrounding spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies.

ASC has two definitions of spyware. According to ASC, in its narrow sense, spyware is a term for Tracking Software deployed without adequate notice, consent, or control for the user. In its broader sense, Spyware is used as a synonym for what the ASC calls “Spyware and Other Potentially Unwanted Technologies.” In technical settings, ASC uses the term spyware only in its narrower sense and always marks it as such [spyware(narrow)]. However, the term spyware, when used generally in an ASC document always refers to the broader colloquial usage. This is how ASC defines spyware in the more common “broader sense.”

Spyware and other potentially unwanted technologies are described as those that “impair users’ control over: material changes that affect their user experience, privacy, or system security; use of their system resources, including what programs are installed on their computers; or collection, use, and distribution of their personal or otherwise sensitive information.”

All this debate about spyware definition leads to the privacy issues that most people are concerned about. I’ve written a couple of articles on privacy issues that you might be interested in.