Win'95 handing our directories over to MS?????

[Richard Dimock <red -at- ELSEGUNDOCA -dot- ATTGIS -dot- COM>]

A DAMN SERIOUS SUBJECT!

Chet raised the Q,
Arlen discounted it
Karen verified it.

This "Feature" is real enough. We had this circulate around our
offices a couple of weeks ago, and it stirred up quite a controversy.

One of our engineers put a packet sniffer on the line, and observed
the directory structure going up to Microsoft, as well as some
disk data.

As Karen says, it is an option. One that SOUNDS innocent enough.
But there are a couple of points that people here raised among
themselves.

1.      Piracy, Direction 1, you from MS

Your pirate MS copies will be exposed once your directory content
is included with their sales database. One can assume that litigation
would follow.

The directory contents could also be sold in database form to other
software makers, for piracy detection or ANY other purpose.


2.      Piracy, Direction 2, MS from you

The disk area Karen mentions could well have programmer's own projects
that could be inspected and stolen by MS. This may not be a problem
for TWs, unless the captured text was proprietary OR CLASSIFIED.
Some disk content was observed by the packet sniffer.


The choice is up to you. Be aware of possible consequences before you
enable the option.


Personally, I avoid such attempts by commercial interests to "help me."
Privacy is a terrible thing to waste.


Dick Dimock             Artfully Senior Information Developer  @
AT&T Global Information Solutions   @
El Segundo, CA          Where the deadlines stack up out to December.
                        Excellent axe-man repellant.