full-disclosure - More Evil from MS (fwd)

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From: lorenzo at muug.it (lorenzo)
Subject: More Evil from MS (fwd)

On Fri, 2002-08-02 at 11:30, Alif The Terrible wrote:
> 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,
> 
> "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:

on the website it also says

---
Windows Update Privacy Statement
Windows Update is committed to protecting your privacy. To provide you
with the appropriate list of updates, Windows Update must collect a
certain amount of configuration information from your computer. This
information includes:
[...]
---

"committed to protecting your privacy"...

ok I don't want to lauch false-alarms, or to be just plain "anti-m$".
but I wonder 

> * Operating-system version number and Product Identification number

PIN of the OS? why is it needed for updates? maybe they "could" use it
to collect statistics about how many unique windows are updating
compared to the number of windows that are sold..

> * Version numbers of other software

other software? can I give them my gcc vesion? :)

> * Plug and Play ID numbers of hardware devices

I'm ignorant about that... perhaps they have updates for every possible
different configuration..?

> 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.

note also that you cannot display that page with a non-microsoft os.
which doesn't make sense at all - such page can interest people using
unices, too..

oh well. funny.

-- 

lorenzo
lorenzo@...g.it
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