When Windows can mean life or death | Bangkok Post: tech

COMPUTER Currents

Windows 7 has been slowly settling into public use but is it an OS you will want to use for critical situations? A close friend of mine works in the IT service and response industry in France and related the following situation.

Win 7 updates are by default stealth updates, i.e. they download and apply themselves without asking, sometimes rebooting the PC. In some cases even when you say no the PC will reboot itself and even XP users will have experienced the slowing down of their computers when an update wants to be installed or rebooted to take effect.

In this case a doctor was using his home PC to remote-connect to his clinic at 4:15am to discuss a roadside accident scan with a surgeon. He selected "no" to the reboot message that popped up and Win 7 promptly rebooted, corrupting his medical software, and causing him to lose 15 critical minutes. The doctor now wants a non-Windows box to conduct future critical business.

This is, of course, a single example, but typically where there is one, there are many, and in this case the OS pretends to know more than the user and took control of the reboot even when told not to.

I have experienced similar situations with earlier versions of the OS so I was not surprised to hear about this. After many OS versions and similar situations in their application suite, Microsoft has failed to learn that their idea of what is the right action may not be shared by the users of their software. In most cases it is merely annoying, but in some cases it can be life-threatening.

Search engines collect a lot of data as you use them. They start by resolving your IP address to a location e.g. a city or even a suburb. Anyone who has studied any marketing knows that the more information you collect, the better you can target products and advertising.

Search engines make money from advertising revenue and if they can provide targeted advertising to their customers they can ask for more money for each ad. Armed with regional data and your browsing habits then can both filter the results of your search and change the banner ads you see.

Let's say you want to replace the exhaust system in your car or buy a new TV. You do a search for TV stores and exhaust service locations in Bangkok. In the first case you may return results for Central and The Mall because they may have paid to have their results show first. Since you happen to live in, say, Sukumvit Soi 41, you also see The Emporium in the top three of your list. The latter would be the result of geographical information that the search engine has stored for you.

This information is not only available while you are online but kept for months or longer, depending on which search engines you use and what you believe about their data-retention claims. This includes search results, sites you browsed, buying habits, financial institutions you frequent, news articles you read, and depending on your provider, what your e-mails say.

If you typically use Google and Firefox, there is a plug-in from GoogleSharing, (http://www.googlesharing.net) that you can use with Firefox to anonymise your searches and websites visited. It only works with Google and it works by mixing the search request from multiple users into the same data stream to homogenise the data that Google can collect.

Geographical information is lost, as well as specific requests from individual users. The creator is a hacker known as Moxie Marlinspike. In the case of Google, this also included Google Map usage and Google Analytics, which tracks websites you did not get to via Google, and even Gmail.

The service works by using a proxy address to direct your Google traffic to first. Identifying info is removed and a random user is selected as your proxy. All other traffic is not passed through the proxy, so there is no loss of response time for all your other browsing. The service was set up one day after Microsoft announced that their Bing engine would cut storage of user data to just six months. Google holds info for nine months, but only parts of the data. Cookie data, for example, is not touched. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, if you would prefer that your data not be tacked. then "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place".

There are other services that will handle the anonymising for you, e.g. Tor, but they can be quite slow. The source code for GoogleSharing was also made available so that alternate services for, say, Bing and Yahoo could be built by others.

Industry news

The iPad hit the streets with the usual Apple fanfare. I am sure you have read what a wonderful device it is. What you may not know is that Apple is in a dispute with Fujitsu over the name and at least one other company is having something to say about them using an existing product name. Fujitsu has been selling an iPad since 2002 and Mag-Tek has also registered the name for a PIN entry system.

I never thought that I be writing this but to me it looks like Apple has out- Sonyed Sony and out-MS'd Microsoft with the iPad. For a start the new device is supposed to be used for web surfing. According to Adobe, Apple is not supporting Flash on the iPad. This means that any of those sites you browse that require Flash to work are out of reach. This limits both content publishers and consumers. The new device also will apparently only play DRM-activated files, so unless your audio or video has been DRM'd, you may be out of luck.

Once again it appears that Apple has produced a device for the Apple lovers and not the broader community. You are locked into Apple-only products and Apple-only supported formats and files. I would not have an issue with, say, all Flash updates being downloaded from Apple sites, but to ban it altogether smacks of, dare I say it, elitism.

On the subject of touch screens, Cypress Semiconductor already has 14- and 17-inch multi touchscreens, so larger tablet-like devices are perhaps not that far away. The screens are already Win 7-certified, so watch that space.

To finish up, let's talk about Windows 8. According to an ex-Redmond employee, the predicted release date will be Jul 2011, maybe with the next Windows Server and Office in 2012.

If that sounds a little fast to you based on previous examples, you'd be right. What you need to remember is that Google may have their Chrome OS arriving sometime this year and Microsoft will want something to answer it with. They are willing to say that Win 7 is their fastest-selling OS ever, but for Win 8 the release date is "to be determined".