emanuele@kb2ear.ampr.org> (04/27/91)
I just downloaded this from a local bbs and thought it might be interesting.
### BEGIN BBS FILE ###
218/250: Fraudigy
Name: George J Marengo #199 @6974
From: The Gangs of Vista (Southern California) 619-758-5920
The L. A. County District Attorney is formally investigating
PRODIGY for deceptive trade practices. I have spoken with the
investigator assigned (who called me just this morning, February 22,
1991).
We are free to announce the fact of the investigation. Anyone can
file a complaint. From anywhere.
The address is:
District Attorney's Office
Department of Consumer Protection
Attn: RICH GOLDSTEIN, Investigator
Hall of Records Room 540
320 West Temple Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Rich doesn't want phone calls, he wants simple written statements and
copies (no originals) of any relevant documents attached. He will
call the individuals as needed, he doesn't want his phone ringing off
the hook, but you may call him if it is urgent at 1-213-974-3981.
PLEASE READ THIS SECTION EXTRA CAREFULLY. YOU NEED NOT BE IN
CALIFORNIA TO FILE!!
If any of us "locals" want to discuss this, call me at the
Office Numbers: (818) 989-2434; (213) 874-4044. Remember, the next
time you pay your property taxes, this is what you are supposed to be
getting ... service. Flat rate? [laugh] BTW, THE COUNTY IS
REPRESENTING THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. This ISN'T limited to L. A.
County and complaints are welcome from ANYWHERE in the Country or the
world. The idea is investigation of specific Code Sections and if a
Nationwide Pattern is shown, all the better.
LARRY ROSENBERG, ATTY
Prodigy: More of a Prodigy Than We Think?
By: Linda Houser Rohbough
The stigma that haunts child prodigies is that they are difficult
to get along with, mischievous and occasionally, just flat dangerous,
using innocence to trick us. I wonder if that label fits Prodigy,
Sears and IBM's telecommunications network?
Those of you who read my December article know that I was tipped
off at COMDEX to look at a Prodigy file, created when Prodigy is
loaded STAGE.DAT. I was told I would find in that file personal
information form my hard disk unrelated to Prodigy. As you know, I
did find copies of the source code to our product FastTrack, in
STAGE.DAT. The fact that they were there at all gave me the same
feeling of violation as the last time my home was broken into by
burglars.
I invited you to look at your own STAGE.DAT file, if you're a
Prodigy user, and see if you found anything suspect. Since then I have
had numerous calls with reports of similar finds, everything from
private patient medical information to classified government
information.
The danger is Prodigy is uploading STAGE.DAT and taking a look at
your private business. Why? My guess is marketing research, which is
expensive through legitimate channels, and unwelcomed by you and I.
The question now is: Is it on purpose, or a mistake? One caller
theorizes that it is a bug. He looked at STAGE.DAT with a piece of
software he wrote to look at the physical location of data on the hard
disk, and found that his STAGE.DAT file allocated 950,272 bytes of
disk space for storage.
Prodigy stored information about the sections viewed frequently
and the data needed to draw those screens in STAGE.DAT. Service would
be faster with information stored on the PC rather then the same
information being downloaded from Prodigy each time.
That's a viable theory because ASCII evidence of those screens
shots can be found in STAGE.DAT, along with AUTOEXEC.BAT and path
information. I am led to belive that the path and system configuration
(in RAM) are diddled with and then restored to previous settings upon
exit. So the theory goes, in allocating that disk space, Prodigy
accidently includes data left after an erasure (As you know, DOS does
not wipe clean the space that deleted files took on the hard disk, but
merely marked the space as vacant in the File Allocation Table.)
There are a couple of problems with this theory. One is that it
assumes that the space was all allocated at once, meaning all 950,272
bytes were absorbed at one time. That simply isn't true. My
STAGE.DAT was 250,000+ bytes after the first time I used Prodigy. The
second assumption is that Prodigy didn't want the personal
information; it was getting it accidently in uploading and downloading
to and from STAGE.DAT. The E-mail controversy with Prodigy throws
doubt upon that. The E-mail controversy started because people were
finding mail they sent with comments about Prodigy or the E-mail,
especially negative ones, didn't ever arrive. Now Prodigy is saying
they don't actually read the mail, they just have the computer scan it
for key terms, and delete those messages because they are responsible
for what happens on Prodigy.
I received a call from someone from another user group who read
our newsletter and is very involved in telecommunications. He
installed and ran Prodigy on a freshly formatted 3.5 inch 1.44 meg
disk. Sure enough, upon checking STAGE.DAT he discovered personal data
from his hard disk that could not have been left there after an
erasure. He had a very difficult time trying to get someone at Prodigy
to talk to about this.
--------------
Excerpt of email on the above subject:
THERE'S A FILE ON THIS BOARD CALLED 'FRAUDIGY.ZIP' THAT I SUGGEST ALL
WHO USE THE PRODIGY SERVICE TAKE ***VERY*** SERIOUSLY. THE FILE
DESCRIBES HOW THE PRODIGY SERVICE SEEMS TO SCAN YOUR HARD DRIVE FOR
PERSONAL INFORMATION, DUMPS IT INTO A FILE IN THE PRODIGY
SUB-DIRECTORY CALLED 'STAGE.DAT' AND WHILE YOU'RE WAITING AND WAITING
FOR THAT NEXT MENU COME UP, THEY'RE UPLOADING YOUR STUFF AND LOOKING
AT IT.
TODAY I WAS IN BABBAGES'S, ECHELON TALKING TO TIM WHEN A
GENTLEMAN WALKED IN, HEARD OUR DISCUSSION, AND PIPED IN THAT HE WAS A
COLUMNIST ON PRODIGY. HE SAID THAT THE INFO FOUND IN 'FRAUDIGY.ZIP'
WAS INDEED TRUE AND THAT IF YOU READ YOUR ON-LINE AGREEMENT CLOSELY,
IT SAYS THAT YOU SIGN ALL RIGHTS TO YOUR COMPUTER AND ITS CONTENTS TO
PRODIGY, IBM & SEARS WHEN YOU AGREE TO THE SERVICE.
I TRIED THE TESTS SUGGESTED IN 'FRAUDIGY.ZIP' WITH A VIRGIN
'PRODIGY' KIT. I DID TWO INSTALLATIONS, ONE TO MY OFT USED HARD DRIVE
PARTITION, AND ONE ONTO A 1.2MB FLOPPY. ON THE FLOPPY VERSION, UPON
INSTALLATION (WITHOUT LOGGING ON), I FOUND THAT THE FILE 'STAGE.DAT'
CONTAINED A LISTING OF EVERY .BAT AND SETUP FILE CONTAINED IN MY 'C:'
DRIVE BOOT DIRECTORY. USING THE HARD DRIVE DIRECTORY OF PRODIGY THAT
WAS SET UP, I PROCEDED TO LOG ON. I LOGGED ON, CONSENTED TO THE
AGREEMENT, AND LOGGED OFF. REMEMBER, THIS WAS A VIRGIN SETUP KIT.
AFTER LOGGING OFF I LOOKED AT 'STAGE.DAT' AND 'CACHE.DAT' FOUND
IN THE PRODIGY SUBDIRECTORY. IN THOSE FILES, I FOUND POINTERS TO
PERSONAL NOTES THAT WERE BURIED THREE SUB-DIRECTORIES DOWN ON MY
DRIVE, AND AT THE END OF 'STAGE.DAT' WAS AN EXACT IMAGE COPY OF MY
PC-DESKTOP APPOINTMENTS CALENDER.
CHECK IT OUT FOR YOURSELF.
### END OF BBS FILE ###
I had my lawyer check his STAGE.DAT file and he found none other than
CONFIDENTIAL CLIENT INFO in it.
Needless to say he is no longer a Prodigy user.
Mark A. Emanuele V.P. Engineering Overleaf, Inc.
218 Summit Ave Fords, NJ 08863 (908) 738-8486
emanuele@overlf.UUCP
[Moderator's Note: Thanks very much for sending along this fascinating
report for the readers of TELECOM Digest. I've always said, and still
believe that the proprietors of any online computer service have the
right to run it any way they want -- even into the ground! -- and
that users are free to stay or leave as they see fit. But it is really
disturbing to think that Prodigy has the nerve to ripoff private stuff
belonging to users, at least without telling them. But as I think
about it, *who* would sign up with that service if they had bothered
to read the service contract carefully and had the points in this
article explained in detail? PAT]Leryo Malbito <leryo@gnu.ai.mit.edu> (04/29/91)
Upon showing V11 issue 311 (the one with Mark's comments) to a tax professional friend, he discovered not only confidential tax info on most of his clients, but logs of Telix sessions which he didn't remember taking, in addition to the entire Telix dialing directory, including passwords, macros, etc. An interesting side note is that Telix is on his D: drive, while stage.dat et al are on his C: drive. He is still searching through his immense (950K) STAGE.DAT file, shouting expletives.
tnixon@uunet.uu.net> (04/30/91)
In article <telecom11.311.1@eecs.nwu.edu>, overlf!emanuele@kb2ear.
ampr.org (Mark A. Emanuele) posted a BBS file containing hysterical
raving about Prodigy supposedly snooping through user's disks,
uploading and processing confidential information.
This is nonsense. The STAGE.DAT file is allocated in large chunks
according to the level of usage of the service and the number of
different areas you visit. The Prodigy software requests the space
from DOS, which allocates it from areas of the disk which previously
contained other files. DOS does not erase the old information -- and
neither does the Prodigy software. But the Prodigy software does not
READ sectors to which it has not first WRITTEN. Any non-Prodigy
information in the STAGE.DAT file is left over from deleted files, in
sectors to which the Prodigy software has not yet written. Remember
that even formatting a disk does not remove old information!
I was involved in early beta testing of Prodigy, was a charter member,
and have watched HOURS of Prodigy traffic on data line monitors. I
have NEVER seen any information transmitted that was not typed by the
user, or originated within the software. I've never seen ANYTHING
that even remotely gave me the impression that information from
previously-delete files was being transmitted.
The idea that Prodigy is slow because they're using bandwidth to
upload confidential information for analysis is just wrong. Watch your
modem lights! Only tiny little bursts of transmission are sent. MOST
of the time, the line is completely idle in both directions. The
simple fact is that Prodigy is slow because the software is SLOW (it
was written in anticipation of us all having very fast CPUs, video
cards, and modems before too much longer), not because of some
sinister conspiracy to invade our private files. Who could honestly
believe that two companies who are big fat targets for lawsuits would
do something so supremely stupid and easily detectable?
No, the biggest mistake Prodigy made was in not wiping clean
newly-allocated disk space in order to remove any questions in this
regard -- and I suspect that the next Prodigy software update will do
just that, considering the amount of noise that has been generated
over this non-issue. We should all be concerned about privacy, but
this is grossly misplaced paranoia.
Toby Nixon, Principal Engineer | Voice +1-404-840-9200 Telex 151243420
Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc. | Fax +1-404-447-0178 CIS 70271,404
P.O. Box 105203 | UUCP uunet!hayes!tnixon AT&T !tnixon
Atlanta, Georgia 30348 USA | Internet hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net
[Moderator's Note: Thanks for an excellent rebuttal, but not everyone
sees it quite the same as yourself. See the next message for another
thought on this topic. And is there a logical reason for the traipzing
back and forth between the C and D drives, as per the next item? PAT]ric@ifs.umich.edu, ic@ifs.umich.edu (04/30/91)
Just to add my data point: I have searched my STAGE.DAT file several times hoping (:-) to find private data to no avail. The only items I've found in the file are cache'd Prodigy screen dumps and error messages. Perhaps significantly, I use a Macintosh version of the software. Really folks, this sounds much more like typical DOS filesystem bugs than a conspiracy directed by Sears and IBM to gather confidential info from hundreds of thousands of users. But it's a great urban rumor. ric
"Louis J. Judice 30-Apr-1991 1328" <judice@sulaco.enet.dec.com> (04/30/91)
Really, now... I've seen paranoia in this discussion before, but this really takes the cake. I must say that I just cancelled my prodigy account, but only because it I was only logging into it once a month. Why? Well, first of all, except for the online Sam Goody "song directory" there was nothing left of interest to me. Oh, and the fact that Prodigy is slow enough to put bricks to sleep. But come ON NOW! If you look at pre-allocated data files created on any simplistic operating system without DELETE/ERASE capability you'll find all kinds of data trash left behind by previous programs or users. I remember on RSTS/E in college, allocating HUGE files, dumping them and then pouring through it, looking for interesting junk left behind by OTHER USERS. If anyone REALLY thinks that Prodigy, IBM and Sears are going off and uploading your confidential files to have a look, well, I suggest you power off your computers, unplug your phones, cancel your drivers license and move to the mountains where the CIA, NSA, Trilateral Commission, KGB and Iraqi secret police can't find you! Sorry to be so blunt, but someone has to point out the paranoia aspect of all this! ljj
tnixon@uunet.uu.net> (04/30/91)
In article <telecom11.316.2@eecs.nwu.edu>, leryo@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Leryo Malbito) writes: > Upon showing V11 issue 311 (the one with Mark's comments) to a tax > professional friend, he discovered not only confidential tax info on > most of his clients, but logs of Telix sessions which he didn't > remember taking, in addition to the entire Telix dialing directory, > including passwords, macros, etc. An interesting side note is that > Telix is on his D: drive, while stage.dat et al are on his C: drive. > He is still searching through his immense (950K) STAGE.DAT file, > shouting expletives. Since Patrick asked me to respond to this, I'll at least ask this: has he ALWAYS had Telix on his "D" drive? Or, perhaps, did he move it to "D" in order to make room to put Prodigy on his "C" drive? Are these physically separate drives, or just partitions? And how would Prodigy get logs of Telix sessions? You can't have two programs receiving serial data at the same time. I think the operative phrase here is "he didn't _remember_"; let's not attribute to major corporate conspiracy what is best explained as memory lapse. I think that if ANY of us searched through the "free space" (not currently allocated to a file) on our disks, we'd ALL be surprised. This is only turned into "shouting expletives" when one has been convinced by conspiracy-theorists that one is being spied upon. But it just ain't so. I don't mean AT ALL to come across here as defending Prodigy in any way. _I'd_ like to know why they go out and grab so damn much disk space if they're not going to use it right away! Regardless, there are so many REAL violations of our privacy going on, I think it's a shame that so much energy is being expended on this case. By the way, you would do your lawyer friend a great favor by advising him to NOT store his passwords on his hard disk. Aside from the fact that anyone with physical access to his computer (including burglars) can easily get them, he must now realize that deleting those files means that information can be inadvertently released to others. It's quite simple -- all a program has to do is write a partial sector, and that password data could be left there. It's then possible for XMODEM to send that data to others, and you'd never even know it. Even copying the file will preserve the "garbage" at the end. I've heard stories of "heads rolling" at software publishers when programmers used supposedly "empty" disks to produce the master disks that were bulk-duplicated, boxed, and sold. The problem was, of course, that the disk wasn't clean, but that the old files had simply been "deleted" (and not erased) -- so anybody that did a little "garbage collecting" (it's fun; try it some time) got a good bit of the source code of the product!! It's great fun on a multi-user computer to open a new file for random access, and do a write to an arbitrarily high record number -- the system allocates all of the unused space in between to you, but doesn't erase it, so you can merrily read through everything that the other users of the system supposedly "deleted". If you're on a multiuser system, always use an "erase" program that actually overwrites your files rather than just deleting them, or everything you delete will be available to other users of the system. Toby Nixon, Principal Engineer | Voice +1-404-840-9200 Telex 151243420 Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc. | Fax +1-404-447-0178 CIS 70271,404 P.O. Box 105203 | UUCP uunet!hayes!tnixon AT&T !tnixon Atlanta, Georgia 30348 USA | Internet hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net
Syd Weinstein <syd@dsi.com> (05/01/91)
Toby Nixon <hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net> writes: > It's great fun on a multi-user > computer to open a new file for random access, and do a write to an > arbitrarily high record number -- the system allocates all of the > unused space in between to you, but doesn't erase it, so you can > merrily read through everything that the other users of the system > supposedly "deleted". If you're on a multiuser system, always use an > "erase" program that actually overwrites your files rather than just > deleting them, or everything you delete will be available to other > users of the system. I know its off the topic, but ... if you are on a multi-user system and this technique works for you ... switch. That is terrible security and the vendor deserves not to be in business (don't name names, I know several which work this way). Since most of our multi-user readers are on UNIX, this trick will not work on UNIX systems. Two reasons: First, UNIX does not allocate the intervening space in the file. It just allocates the blocks you write to. The OS returns 0's for all other blocks read that are not yet allocated. Second, UNIX does not write partial sectors, nor depend on the contents of the file to mark end of file. However, root using the raw partition can always farm the free space looking for interesting info, but then it can also look at all the files and look for interesting info too. Sydney S. Weinstein, CDP, CCP Elm Coordinator Datacomp Systems, Inc. Voice: (215) 947-9900 syd@DSI.COM or dsinc!syd FAX: (215) 938-0235
Simplicitas gratia simplicitatis <binder@decvax.dec.com> (05/01/91)
Toby Nixon <hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net> writes: > ... even formatting a disk does not remove old information! I beg to differ. Vehemently so. I used to design controllers for both floppy and hard disks - I did it for about 14 years, using SSI and MSI chips and, later, LSI controller chips. The formatting operation must by its very nature destroy the old data. Formatting is a write operation that is done without reading to verify position. It writes both the sector preambles and the data fields instead of only the data fields. LSI chips have a register into which the controlling hardware loads the data pattern to be written into every byte position in the data fields. Not wiping out old data in a formatting operation would mean that the data fields weren't being written - this makes no sense because the propose of a formatting operation is to put readable information on a previously unused disk. The previous claim, that data is in the freshly-allocated sectors by virtue of their having been marked in the FAT as available, is true. You say Prodigy doesn't upload this stale data. If I were paranoid, I'd respond that of course you would say that -- after all, as a beta tester you're probably going to be on Prodigy's side in any such argument. After reading both sides of this discussion, I'm not at all comfortable with the idea that I would have to use Prodigy's software --- most other BBSs let you use any old telecomms package. Maybe it's just as well that Prodigy doesn't sell a package for the Apple II. Dick Binder (Simplicitas gratia simplicitatis) Digital Equipment Corporation DEC Easynet: DECVAX::BINDER 110 Spit Brook Road, ZKO3-3/Y32 uucp: ...!decvax.dec.com!binder Nashua, NH 03062 Internet: binder@decvax.dec.com
news@ucsd.edu> (05/02/91)
In article <telecom11.316.1@eecs.nwu.edu> hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net (Toby Nixon) writes: > In article <telecom11.311.1@eecs.nwu.edu>, overlf!emanuele@kb2ear. > ampr.org (Mark A. Emanuele) posted a BBS file containing hysterical > raving about Prodigy supposedly snooping through user's disks, > uploading and processing confidential information. Let me say first that I don't think they're doing it, however, I can see why someone might think so. Also, I don't believe the article said that they _were_ uploading, just that they could. > [how STAGE.DAT is created] > The idea that Prodigy is slow because they're using bandwidth to > upload confidential information for analysis is just wrong. Watch your > modem lights! Only tiny little bursts of transmission are sent. MOST > of the time, the line is completely idle in both directions. The I hate to tell you this, but I do watch the modem lights, and there are many times that the computer should not need to send data to Prodigy when it is most definitely doing so. Usually when it is sending the info about a new screen for STAGE.DAT, it seems to spend a _lot_ of time talking back to Prodigy. It's probably just ACKs and other chatter, but it certainly appears suspicious, and that's the problem. I, too, wondered why the hell it was sending all that stuff back and exactly what it was sending. > simple fact is that Prodigy is slow because the software is SLOW (it > was written in anticipation of us all having very fast CPUs, video > cards, and modems before too much longer), not because of some > sinister conspiracy to invade our private files. Who could honestly > believe that two companies who are big fat targets for lawsuits would > do something so supremely stupid and easily detectable? > No, the biggest mistake Prodigy made was in not wiping clean > newly-allocated disk space in order to remove any questions in this > regard -- and I suspect that the next Prodigy software update will do The biggest mistake Prodigy made was to completely alienate its customers with arrogance and incredible high-handedness, to not train its customer service people better (so they know what the hell is going on instead of just denying everything), and in handling the E-mail affair so badly (okay, three mistakes). GEnie and CompuServe both have software that perform the same function as the Prodigy software and take over your machine in the same way, but you don't hear people worried about that. Why? Because people trust GEnie and CompuServe and they don't trust Prodigy. Train of thought: "Hmm, what's all this stuff doing in my STAGE.DAT? You don't think Prodigy could be harvesting my hard drive, do you? Why would a big company with the backing of IBM and Sears risk alienating their customers like that? On the other hand, they've never seemed to give a damn before about alienating their customers, and then there's that E-mail stuff. You know, I bet those b*stards would have the chutzpah to do it." Not that I think they are, but it is easy to see how someone could think so. Prodigy has a _serious_ image problem. I don't think anyone could log onto a "normal" local bulletin board, ask about Prodigy, and continue to use it once he/she reads the replies. Someone asked what they could possibly do with the data that's sent (assuming it was, of course). 1 MB per user is a lot to store. However, I could do a _lot_ with one item from every user's hard disk: their directory tree. Small, doesn't take much time to send, and tells you a lot about the person, much more so if you send it every now and then and compare it to the latest copy. The STAGE.DAT is sort of a red herring. If they wanted to send stuff from your hard drive, they wouldn't need to put it in STAGE.DAT first. Standard disclaimer applies, you legalistic hacks. | Ron Dippold
Gordon Burditt <gordon@sneaky.lonestar.org> (05/02/91)
> [Moderator's Note: Thanks very much for sending along this fascinating > report for the readers of TELECOM Digest. I've always said, and still > believe that the proprietors of any online computer service have the > right to run it any way they want -- even into the ground! -- and Prodigy doesn't have the right to rip off copies of my company's software from its customers. Regardless of what's in the service contract, people can't sign away rights they don't have in the first place, and third-party commercial software doesn't generally come with redistribution rights. If Prodigy is uploading the contents of hard disks, how can they avoid doing this? Proprietary software need not consist entirely of .COM and .EXE files, or any other formula based on file names to avoid. > that users are free to stay or leave as they see fit. But it is really > disturbing to think that Prodigy has the nerve to ripoff private stuff > belonging to users, at least without telling them. But as I think > about it, *who* would sign up with that service if they had bothered > to read the service contract carefully and had the points in this > article explained in detail? PAT] I suspect that MOST contracts are written in a way that no sane person would sign up for it if they assumed that the other party (who wrote the contract) would take full advantage of the terms to their disadvantage. For example, PSI offered an e-mail service where you were allowed to send mail TO psi and FROM psi. Nobody else! (That they didn't mean it that way is besides the point). Telephone companies can change your phone number at any time. Would you subscribe if you knew they're going to do it every half hour? Would you buy expensive electronic equipment from someone who was going to sell lists of names, addresses, and what was purchased to organized crime? I was inclined to believe the uninitialized-disk-space theory. The test with a fresh-formatted floppy (assuming that this means what everyone but MS-DOS thinks it does - a destructive format that erases data) seems to disprove that. I wonder, however, about uninitialized memory. A lot of things showing up in clean-wipe tests seem to be data likely to be accessed during boot. Could someone prepare a bulk-erased and then formatted floppy, delete all TSRs from memory, run a program to clear user-available memory (without booting), then install Prodigy on the floppy? I'd expect to find directory contents (including the hard disk) of directories in the path, read while scanning for commands. I would like to see evidence that this data actually appears on the line. Since it's compressed, how about demonstrating sufficient volume of transmission back to Prodigy? Of course, it's possible they are hiding a few bytes in each packet ACK. It is, of course, possible to conduct "marketing research" on the contents of customers' disks without any huge STAGE.DAT file with "incriminating evidence" in it, just given a proprietary program to access the service. Every five minutes, the service could send a query "does this user have <file x>", and all the program has to do is look around and send back one bit with an answer. This, they match against the registered owner list. So what if they don't have a trademark on the file names for Lotus 1-2-3? It could also upload files deemed interesting while the user is reading the interesting advertisments :-). Gordon L. Burditt sneaky.lonestar.org!gordon
Arup Mukherjee <arup@grad1.cis.upenn.edu> (05/02/91)
In article <telecom11.311.1@eecs.nwu.edu> overlf!emanuele@kb2ear. ampr.org (Mark A. Emanuele) writes: X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 311, Message 1 of 4 > doubt upon that. The E-mail controversy started because people were > finding mail they sent with comments about Prodigy or the E-mail, > especially negative ones, didn't ever arrive. Now Prodigy is saying > they don't actually read the mail, they just have the computer scan it > for key terms, and delete those messages because they are responsible > for what happens on Prodigy. They said WHAT? Did Prodigy "officially" admit this somewhere? I had a feeling that this might be happening, but I thought I was just getting paranoid! I remember that on one of the Prodigy boards someone posted a message saying that they had written to the FCC about the matter, and received a reply to the effect that Prodigy would be violating FCC rules if it were restricting private mail betweem two adults. Prodigy responded that they only did such things to bulletins, and private e-mail was never interefered with. Does anyone know of an admission to the contrary?
tel@cdsdb1.att.com (05/02/91)
The following is quited directly from Prodigy Today (5/2/91). It was
posted in the Service Info Section:
[Begin Quote]
Members have asked recently about the privacy of the information that
they store on their coumputers as it relates to their use of the
PRODIGY service.
The privacy of your personal information is of primary importance to
us. We know that our members consider this kind of information
proprietary; so do we.
[ The following was underlined ] The PRODIGY service does not read,
collect, or transmit to the Prodigy Services Company any information
or data that is not directly connected with your use of the service.
[ End of underline ]
Recently there was an unsubstantiated and false newspaper report
suggesting that members' personal information -- unrelated to their
use of the PRODIGY service -- is being transmitted to our computers
from our members' computers. This is simply not true. It never has
been.
Member privacy has always been a top priority for Prodigy. In fact,
we were active participants, with the ACLU, in the drafting and
passage of the Electronic Communication Act of 1986.
Ted Papes
President, Prodigy Services Company
[End Quote]
----------
Disclaimer: I am just a user of Prodigy who happened to see this posted
and sent it on for your information.
Tom Lowedeanp@sequent.com (05/02/91)
I ran a protocol analyzer during my session with Prodigy yesterday -- about an hour's worth -- and saw no personal data being transmitted from my PC. If anyone's interested I can post a few hundred bytes of the trace.
herrickd@uunet.uu.net> (05/03/91)
In article <telecom11.316.2@eecs.nwu.edu>, leryo@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Leryo Malbito) writes: > Upon showing V11 issue 311 (the one with Mark's comments) to a tax > professional friend, he discovered not only confidential tax info on > most of his clients, but logs of Telix sessions which he didn't > remember taking, in addition to the entire Telix dialing directory, > including passwords, macros, etc. An interesting side note is that > Telix is on his D: drive, while stage.dat et al are on his C: drive. > He is still searching through his immense (950K) STAGE.DAT file, > shouting expletives. Look in the file config.sys in the root directory of the boot disk for a line that says "buffers=40" or some other number. DOS sets aside this number of buffers. When your program writes one byte to a file it goes into the appropriate location in one of those buffers and then the whole buffer is written to disk. Carrying along whatever data was last moved through that buffer. The typical number of buffers will hold a lot of data from whatever you were doing before starting Prodigy to copy into stage.dat. This is the most likely mechanism for data kept only on D: to appear in stage.dat on C:. dan herrick herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com
"Seng-Poh Lee, Speedy" <splee@gnu.ai.mit.edu> (05/04/91)
For the last few days, the Prodigy highlights screen has a message proclaiming that the users information is safe and that Prodigy does not upload data from the users computer. This is from the President of Prodigy, so they are taking this seriously. They also have a further description of how users info got into STAGE.DAT, and it follows the deleted sectors theory. I think after Prodigy messed up the e-mail issue, they are responding faster to this issue. However, although they emphatically claim that they do not get hold of any data NOT RELATED to the running of the Prodigy, this still leaves some avenues open. For example, they could claim that they need your path information to run Prodigy. This path information, however also happens to give them an idea of what type of programs you run on your machine. This would fall right in line with their marketing research. In any event, if Prodigy wanted to get info from your system, they don't have to store it in STAGE.DAT. The Prodigy software is written in such a way that new modules can be downloaded to your PC and then executed. This COULD include a program to scan your disk, and upload stuff without a trace of residual data. While I don't think the current STAGE.DAT issue is related to any uploading, I do think that Prodigy has the means to do a lot more if they wanted to. For example, lets say they investigate a complaint of abusive mail from a user (They reserve the right to read private mail under these circumstances). They could also download a module to that users PC to scan other files for abusive text, as part of building a case against that user. Is that justified? I have a funny feeling that this is not the end of it. Big brother is here and he runs your BBS! Seng-Poh Lee splee@gnu.ai.mit.edu
Mike Andrews <mikea@chinet.chi.il.us> (05/06/91)
The excrement has hit the fan. This Prodigy legend was reported on CNN today. A representitive of Prodigy denied emphatically that they were collecting *any* information on their subscribers. The CNN reporter ended the report with Prodigy's statement that they were fixing this problem in their software, adding sarcastically, "a problem that they deny they have..." As was mentioned on PBS's "Nova" a few weeks ago, Prodigy DOES collect information on its members. It tracks the demographics of the user and where they go in the service to find the customer's interests so that the ads that appear are tailored to those interests. There was no mention of whether Prodigy sells that information to others.
Harold Barker <barker@wri.com> (05/07/91)
In article <telecom11.329.3@eecs.nwu.edu> deanp@sequent.com writes: > I ran a protocol analyzer during my session with Prodigy yesterday -- > about an hour's worth -- and saw no personal data being transmitted > from my PC. If anyone's interested I can post a few hundred bytes of > the trace. If Prodigy has an once of common sence they will have turned off this feature (if it ever existed) as soon as this little discussion started. [Moderator's Note: At least I have an ounce of common sense! :) With your message, we have to close this thread as some people tell me they are starting to get bored to tears. I am too. Thanks. PAT]
tnixon@uunet.uu.net> (05/07/91)
In article <telecom11.329.7@eecs.nwu.edu>, binder@decvax.dec.com (Simplicitas gratia simplicitatis) writes: > The formatting operation must by its very nature destroy the old data. > Formatting is a write operation that is done without reading to verify > position. It writes both the sector preambles and the data fields > instead of only the data fields. ... This is true, of course, for the initial low-level format of a disk. But a subsequent FORMAT command does nothing but rewrite the FAT and directories to show that the file spaces is all available. This is why a "deformat" program (e.g., Mace) that keeps a copy of the FAT and directories in inner cylinders can recover an accidentally-formatted hard disk by simply copying the saved information back to the outer cylinders. Nothing will recover from a low-level format, of course (although NSA and CIA supposedly have ways to even read this data by examining the residual magnetism in the media between tracks -- but I doubt it). Toby Nixon, Principal Engineer | Voice +1-404-840-9200 Telex 151243420 Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc. | Fax +1-404-447-0178 CIS 70271,404 P.O. Box 105203 | UUCP uunet!hayes!tnixon AT&T !tnixon Atlanta, Georgia 30348 USA | Internet hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net
jw7348@uunet.uu.net> (05/09/91)
In article <telecom11.329.7@eecs.nwu.edu> binder@decvax.dec.com (Simplicitas gratia simplicitatis) writes: > Toby Nixon <hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net> writes: >> ... even formatting a disk does not remove old information! > I beg to differ. Vehemently so. I used to design controllers for > both floppy and hard disks - I did it for about 14 years, using SSI > The formatting operation must by its very nature destroy the old data. > Formatting is a write operation that is done without reading to verify Well, your both right. Formatting, at the controller level does destroy everything on the disk (at least as far as mere mortals are concerned. The NSA claims that its just a minor incovenience). However, DOS only does a low-level format on flexible disks. Hard disk "formatting" consists of a read test of every sector and a rewrite of the FAT (ever wonder how Norton and other utilities can advertise disk recovery, after a format?) No actual media format or writeover is done. Therefore, information on a hard disk is still available to determined disk hackers, after a format. It takes special disk utilities to do "low-level" formats on a hard disk (the BIOS knows how, but DOS doesn't). Some hard disks, notably those from Plus Development Corp, give you a warning message and halt the machine if you try to do a "low-level" format. Thus, Toby's right, DOS doesn't always clean up a disk with a format. But Dick's write [sic] too. The controller makes toast of your data.