Crash Reports

Seen those “Send Error Report” dialogs that pops up when an application crashes on your computer? Like Lidia Jean Kott, have you wondered if there is any point in sending the report?

“Could there be someone, somewhere, blurry-eyed, scrolling through thousands of crashes a day?”

Guess what, there are people doing exactly that. At least at Microsoft! That’s what Kott found out by talking to Kirk Glerum, the “father of Windows Error Reporting”. When the feature was introduced with Windows XP in 2001, the term Big Data had not yet entered everyone’s lingo. As Eric LeVine, the former Group Program Manager for Windows Error Reporting, put it:

“In that time, [Windows Error Reporting] was totally novel and audacious.”

Were such reports helpful?

“LeVine says that in its first three years the feature wiped out ninety-five percent of crashes in Office Products.”

So what information do such reports send out from your computer?

“After a program crashes, the operating system gathers information such as the name of the application that crashed as well the names of all the other applications that we’re running at the time. The operating system might also swoop up some personal information, like the name of the document you were working on.”

That last line does sound a bit worrisome, doesn’t it? The German paper, Der Spiegel, claims that the infamous NSA, the US intelligence agency that snoops on pretty much any and all communications (even outside the US), does consider such reports helpful. But why? The NSA isn’t going to fix those crashes, so why would they care about such reports? Der Spiegel says that the NSA wants to mine such reports of your system for clues on how to hack into people’s computers!

Glerum, however, pooh-pooh’s the idea:

“Glerum holds that error reports are too lightweight to contain any information that would be of any practical use to hackers or spies.”

Some Microsoft folks don’t like the error report window that pops up:

“On a Windows computer the same apologetic popup appears, even if the program that crashed wasn’t made by Microsoft, making the company look responsible for flaws that aren’t their fault.”

It’s amusing that Microsoft actually came up with an idea to improve their products. And they’re not responsible for all crashes we see on Windows. Who’d have thought?!