Re: Is this true?

[Randy Thornton <thor@sprynet.com>]

  There is some confusion in this thread on these issues.
  
  Let's organize:
  
  1) RegWiz
  
  Andrew Schulman's article was about the Win95 registration wizard, 
  when used to dialup and register a new copy of Win95; it was NOT about
  MSN or MSIE. 
  
  The article speaks for itself: RegWiz searches for a predefined 
  list of software listed in the registry and sends that list to MS
  when you register Win95 using the dialup registration.
  
  
  2) MSN
  
  [snip]
  >> FYI, did you know that if you are running W95 and you use it to dial-up
  >>the Microsoft Network, that the first thing it does is to transmit to
  >>Microsoft a complete listing of ALL files on your system.
  >> If you want to test this, dial them up. But first run a TSR program
  >>that will record in a Log-file all disk access. After contacting MSN,
  >>check the Log-file and you'll see that your FAT was transmitted to MSN.
  
  Is there any evidence for this ? Do you have the log files
  and such a TSR ? This statement could be easily proved or disproved. 
  A log file would of course show that the FAT was accessed during 
  any file access. There would need to be evidence of transmission.
  
  3) MSIE
  
  >>I always suspected that was the purpose of those nasty, and according to MS
  >>tech support, undeletable Mm2048.dat and Mm256.dat files, always working
  >>the the background with Explorer list file manager, [ all redundant 12
  copies!]  that IE and some sites download to your hard drive...
  
  These files are not redundant and not all the same. 
  
  If you look at them, you will see the ones in the cookie directory are a 
  cache of cookies. 
  
  The ones in the history directory are the history list of sites you have
  visited: the same thing as Netscape's netscape.hst file. 
  
  The ones in the temporary internet files/cache# directories seem to
  consist (at least) of HTTP header files that have been cached. You
  should get one of these entries for every HTTP connection you open
  (one for each html file and each graphic file). That's why they
  are so big.
  
  I am not sure why cookies and headers are cached and indexed on the hard 
  drive, but the probably for performance reasons, similar to using
  file cache for extra ram. 
  
  Could this information be read by some process or program without your
  knowledge ? 
  Yes, if the process has access to a known file on your hard drive. This is
  why the
  security bugs in browsers that can read known filenames is a big deal:
  everyone
  knows where these files are. (And ActiveX ....)
  
  Marketers would die and go to heaven if they could surrepticiously collect
  history files ! 
  (I'm surprised they aren't openly offering to buy them - yet <g>.)
  
  4) Searching
  
  >>  though I did hear that your search requests go to MS
  >> mainframes before they hit the search engines, Infoseek, Yahoo, etc.
  
  That's a new one. This could be proved or disproved by capturing
  the TCP/IP packets and seeing if they sent stuff to the "wrong" ip
  address first, then the correct one.
  
  
  --
  
  I believe that Andrew Schulman was scheduled to speak at the conference
  today on 
  the topic of the alleged integration of MSIE with the OS. He may very well
  have
  some interesting things to say on the above. I'm sure if turned his
  attention to
  it for a day or two, these rumors would be settled one way or the other.
  
  --
  
  More interesting Andrew Schulman discoveries:
  
  People pretended to be using ActiveX:
  http://webreview.com/97/05/23/feature/index.html, 
  when they really are not, and what net technology do companies REALLY want:
  http://webreview.com/97/06/06/imho/index.html
  
  His personal home page:
  http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/
  
  
  --
  
  
  
  --
  Randolph W. Thornton
  President, The LAN Guide Company
  www.languide.com