On Jan 13, 2008 9:35 PM, Xiaofan Chen wrote: > On Jan 13, 2008 8:11 PM, Dr Skip wrote: > > No doubt MS has so many things trying to phone home (and which of them is truly > > blocked by the MS firewall and which have hard coded exemptions?) that it would > > embarrass them if it alerted the user, especially Media Center stuff and its > > services... > > > > Trust nothing, approve only what you need... ;-) > > I do not really care so such about the "Phone Home" thingy since I highly > doubt it is really the case. It is not that I trust Microsoft so much but I > think it is not worth their efforts to do that. What I mean is that even they do "phone home" but I doubt that they are really make use of the data to be against you. > On the other hand, Google may > be of more concerns since they are reading my Gmail (with targeted ads > on the side). Again the easy of use with Gmail outweights the privacy concerns. I do understand that there are great concerns of the "Phone Home" features built-in Vista (and XP SP2 or other Microsoft software). The following is about Vista. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Forget-about-the-WGA-20-Windows-Vista-Features-and-Services-Harvest-User-Data-for-Microsoft-58752.shtml For XP, do not install XP SP3 (when it comes out) if you believe the following. http://blog.syracuse.com/technofile/2008/01/microsofts_phonehome_philosoph.html And many more from Google for "microsoft vista phone home". One of the link is from none other than FSF: http://badvista.fsf.org/ The problem is that you can not do too much about it if you have to use Windows. If you are really concerned, better format Vista and use Linux instead. And do not use those online service like Gmail, MySpace, Facebook, etc. They all collected personal data quite aggressively. And do not even use Internet since most likely the traffic will go though the internet backbones where some US law enforcement agencies install monitoring device. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/21/att_nsa/ In the end, we have to trust something in order to use the Internet. Anyway, it seems we'd better use Linux instead of Windows at home. ;-) Xiaofan -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist