In some mail from Colin Stefani, sie said: > > Be sure to read the new EULA/privacy statement for Windows update, it has an > interesting portion about how Windows Update and Automatic Update (which > gets installed with SP3) can, by agreeing to this license, send the > following pieces of info to Microsoft, this was posted on the MS focus list > by Javier Sanchez: > > "With the latest version of Windows Update (essentially a mandatory download > and now part of SP3) you consent to sending the following information to > Microsoft: > > * Operating-system version number and Product Identification number > * Internet Explorer version number > * Version numbers of other software > * Plug and Play ID numbers of hardware devices > > This is stated in the "Windows Update Privacy Statement" which you can read > at <http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/about.asp?> You can also > follow the "About Windows Update" link off the WindowsUpdate page. Don't > bother trying to right-click, they've made sure to disable that." [...] I don't know about others but that is completely unacceptable to me from a business perspective. If I was in Government I would be signalling to staff that W2KSP2 was "the last service pack" to install and that it was time to look for alternatives. Being forced to give away this sort of information to anyone for the purpose of acquiring bug fixes is just plain unacceptable. I think Governments are slowly waking up to Microsoft, or at least the European ones seem to be with open statements being made about how they are working open source products into their strategies. From a technical standpoint, open source platforms are now, with the advent of OpenOffice/StarOffice able to offer a decent alternative. The challenge is to make the people who make decisions understand this and since we're not typically the crowd who are out playing 18 holes of golf with CEO's, etc, it isn't quite that easy. Darren
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Aug 01 2002 - 20:15:56 PDT