You can download your Google search history, but you should delete it instead

There's been a lot of talk lately about Google's ability to let users download their search histories. Deleting it is a better option.

There's been a lot of Internet buzz this week about the "news" that Google lets users download their search histories. Many Web commentators seem to find this capability fascinating, even though it's been in place at least since 2014 without anyone really noticing.

But here's my question: Aside from morbid curiosity, why would you really want to download it at all?

In fact, while your search history apparently has value for Google, which claims it helps the company deliver "more relevant results," "smarter predictions," and cross-device connections, it's hard to see what benefit seeing it has for the actual searcher. In fact, it seems more like a tool designed to help dig up search-history dirt on someone else!
042215 google search results download image 1

Given all that, why even collect it in the first place? Personally, I don't notice dramatically better results when searching on my devices vs. someone else's machines. Do you? Do you owe Google your search history in exchange for your Web searches? No, you don't.

I recommend turning on the option to delete your Web Search history, and setting Google not to record that history. Furthermore, if you run an IT department, I'd recommend that all your users do the same thing.

Even if you think all your searches are innocuous, that history file is still a security risk. There's simply not enough benefit to you or your company to bother keeping it.

If this mini Internet firestorm on this issue causes significant numbers of people to stop saving their search histories, then maybe it wasn't so pointless after all.

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Where Windows 10 stands right now

Windows 10 betas are coming fast and furious. Discover what Microsoft has released so far

With beta builds arriving at an ever-increasing pace, Windows 10 testing proceeds full speed ahead, with new features unveiled at every turn. If you don't have the time -- or the interest -- to keep up with the details, this report will keep you posted on how things stand. Like, right now. And we'll update it as Microsoft fleshes out more of Windows 10.

The Start menu
Unless you've been living on an alternate Windows desktop, you know that Win10 sports a new Start menu, with Windows 7-like menu entries on the left and Windows 8-style tiles on the right.

There are
a few customizing options -- for example, you can drag entries onto the pinned list in the top left, or drag items from the list on the left and turn them into tiles on the right. Tiles on the right can be resized to Small (see the three on the bottom right), Medium, Wide (two single-size slots, as with the Search and Weather tiles in the screen shot), and Large (Money). You can click and drag, group, and ungroup tiles on the right, and give groups custom names.

In build 10056, you can finally resize the Start menu. You can adjust it vertically in small increments, but trying to drag things the other way is limited to big swaths of tiles: Groups of tiles remain three wide, and you can only add or remove entire columns. You can drag tiles from the right side of the Start screen onto the desktop for easy access.

While it's possible to manually remove all the tiles on the right (right-click each, then choose Unpin from Start), the big area for tiles doesn't shrink beyond one column.

What's likely to appear
There's some transparency available on the Start menu, but we're waiting to see how much.

What we'd like to see
Power users would benefit greatly by seeing at least some of the extensive customization available in the Windows 7 Start menu make it through to the final version of Windows 10. Win10's Start menu doesn't have the moxie of Win7's because it has been rewritten in XAML, and the bells and whistles fell off in the process.

At a minimum, Win10's Start menu should have a hierarchy on the left, with customizable menus. The All Apps list should also be customizable with easily defined folders and entries. (If all else fails, bet on Stardock to come up with a Start menu replacement that's modifiable.)

Project Spartan
Long overdue -- and for many of us, a real surprise -- Project Spartan finally sheds the albatross that is Internet Explorer. Although it's still too early to tell for sure, initial reports have been almost uniformly positive. A stripped-down, consciously standards-compliant, screamingly fast-so-far shell of a browser, Project Spartan may see Microsoft taking back the mindshare it's been steadily losing on the browser front for the past decade or so.

Where Project Spartan stands
Although we don't even know the product's final name, Project Spartan has drawn
significant accolades. Spartan doesn't replace Internet Explorer -- to date, IE still lurks, but it's buried in the Start > All Apps > Windows Accessories menu's list. Project Spartan is, however, the default Web browser, with its own tile on the right side of the Start menu and its own icon on the taskbar. IE continues to use the old Trident rendering engine, while Spartan has the newer Edge.

Spartan is a Windows app (formerly universal app, formerly Metro app) that runs inside its own window on the desktop, like every other WinRT API-based Windows app. Thus, the chances of Spartan being ported to Windows 7 (which doesn't support WinRT) are zero.

Adobe Flash Player can be turned on and off with a simple switch in Settings. There's the Reading View as well, which helps on smaller screens. Click the OneNote icon in the upper right to make all the OneNote markup tools available. And you can now print as PDF.

Spartan supports Cortana for voice assistance and search capabilities, but the implementation to date doesn't do much -- for a glimpse of what may or may not be the future, use Spartan to go to cuoco-seattle.com.

What's likely to appear
Much more robust support for Cortana is a given: Limiting Cortana's intelligence (some of it gathered at the expense of your privacy) to specifically crafted Web pages will certainly change, as will the rest of Cortana (see next section).

It's also highly likely that the shipping version of Spartan will include support for extensions. Whether the support will be as robust as the extension support in Google Chrome remains to be seen. We also don't have any idea if the existence of extensions will spawn cottage industries that will rival the size of the Chrome or Firefox add-in communities, but we do know that Spartan extensions will (at least in theory) be much more secure and stable than the current plug-ins, toolbars, and other flotsam floating around IE.
What we'd like to see

Many of the features we've grown to expect from any browser -- private browsing, saved passwords, the ability to drag tabs, drag and drop files, a favorites or bookmarks manager (and importer), thumbnails when hovering on the taskbar for each open page, robust download handling with a for-real download manager. The list of "wanted" features is long and deep.

Cortana
While Apple partisans will give you a zillion reasons why Siri rules, and Googlies swear the superiority of Google Now, Cortana partisans think Microsoft rules the AI roost, of course. Unlike Siri and Now, though, Cortana has taken over the Windows search function, so it has a larger potential footprint than its AI cousins, which comes with a double edge.

Cortana occupies the Search box to the right of the Start button. It also appears when you click or tap on the Search tile, on the right side of the Start menu. Cortana will only work when connected to the Internet, and it's severely limited unless you use a Windows account. You can control some aspects of Cortana's inquisitiveness by clicking on the hamburger icon in the upper left corner.

Frequently overlooked in Cortana discussions: everything -- absolutely everything -- that you search for on your computer gets sent, through Cortana, to Microsoft's giant database in the sky. Cortana's Notebook, as your personal repository is called, can be switched off, and entries can be manually deleted, but Microsoft's banking on you leaving it on.

What's likely to appear
Cortana will improve as it gathers more information about you -- yes, by snooping on what you do. But it also improves as Microsoft hones its artificial intelligence moxie, on the back end.

Microsoft has announced that Cortana will be ported to both iOS and Android, although the extent of its integration/usefulness remains to be seen. No, you won't be able to use Google Search with Cortana.

What we'd like to see
Cortana is all well and good, but it doesn't give you any advanced search capabilities for your computer. Windows 7 and all earlier versions of Windows, going way back, had extensive searching capabilities. Those are all gone, at least at this point. It would be nice if we could search for, say, all Word documents written this year that contain the word "flugelhorn."

Will Windows 10 customers revolt when they realize that everything they search for on their PCs is sent to a Microsoft database? Microsoft could certainly soften the blow by making options for turning off the Cortana tracking much more visible.

Cortana could also pick up more computer-centric capability. For example, if you said, "Hey, Cortana, start a new document based on my letterhead," Cortana would obey and wait for you to dictate your letter. It'll happen, but probably not any time soon.

Continuum
Windows 10 includes a new feature called Continuum, which lets you switch between desktop mode -- the mode you're no doubt accustomed to using, where mice and keyboards rule -- and tablet mode, which mimics (but doesn't replicate) Windows 8's Metro side of the fence, the touch-based world.

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Where Continuum stands
There's software inside Windows 10 that, by default, prompts you every time it detects that a keyboard has been added or yanked from your computer. The prompt asks whether you want to switch to tablet mode or to desktop mode. That part works reasonably well. You can also switch to tablet mode manually (choose Start > Settings > System > Tablet Mode).

The part that's drawing a lot of criticism is tablet mode. The Windows 10 tablet mode is a real let-down for many people who use Windows 10 with their pinkies: It keeps the taskbar, launches apps full-screen but still retains the title bars seen on the desktop, doesn't make the tiles any bigger, the All Apps list remains small, and the full-size mode doesn't support many of the old Windows 8 swipe gestures. (There's no Charms bar, for example.)

Build 10056 adds the ability to turn off the app icons in the taskbar, but it doesn't turn off Home, Search, Task View, or the system tray -- so the taskbar's still there, taking up all that space.
What's likely to appear

At this point, with all the bad vibes created by the original Windows 8's Metro side, I don't see Microsoft spending much more effort on Windows 10's tablet mode. I know it isn't fair, but given a choice between setting a dev team on beefing up one of the core new features, versus gussying up tablet mode, I don't see where tablet mode has much chance.


What we'd like to see

Basically, all of the Windows 8 features, and some sort of accommodation for the Charms bar's functionality that doesn't rely on individual apps or tapping a tiny hamburger icon.
Virtual desktops and Task view

Windows has had virtual (or multiple) desktops since Windows XP, but before Windows 10 you had to install a third-party app -- or something like Sysinternals Desktop, from Microsoft -- to get them to work. Windows 10 implements virtual desktops so they're actually useful.
Where virtual desktops and task view stand

To start a new desktop, press Win+Ctrl+D, or bring up the Task view -- the environment where you can work directly with multiple desktops -- by clicking the Task view icon to the right of the Cortana Search bar, then dragging an app onto the + sign in the lower right corner. You can move windows among desktops by right-clicking and choosing Move To. Pressing Alt+Tab still rotates among all running windows. Clicking on an icon in the taskbar brings up the associated program, regardless of which desktop it's on.

What we'd like to see
The ability to drag and drop open windows among desktops would be very handy. Although there are subtle differences in the taskbar icons, depending on whether a running app appears on the currently active desktop or not, we'd like to see the much-discussed ability to limit taskbar icons to only apps running on the current desktop. There should also be some ability to name desktops and show the name of the currently active desktop somewhere -- perhaps in the system tray.

Windows Settings
Microsoft is stuck between several rocks and corresponding hard places. It has to make a Settings app that'll fly on smartphones but also remain adaptable to the copious settings on PCs. There are many settings/features -- Homegroups, for example -- that are both loved and loathed by legions of Windows 7 and 8 customers.

Although many of us prefer to run with local accounts, some of the features in Windows 10 won't work -- indeed, can't work -- without a Microsoft account.

Microsoft can't satisfy everybody. There's no easy way to change adapter settings, or to enable or disable the current network connection. That's just a small sampling.
Where Windows Settings stands

The schizophrenic Windows Settings/Control Panel situation isn't getting much better in recent builds.

Homegroups in Windows 10 are buried as deeply as they were in Windows 8, which means they're all but deprecated. I, personally, like Homegroups, so I find their departure deplorable. But it's easy to find people who vociferously disagree.

What's likely to appear
I don't see any indication that Microsoft will be able to port the zillions of Control Panel settings over to the Windows app side -- and precious little incentive for it to do so. I do, however, expect to see more settings dribble over from Control Panel to Windows Settings, perhaps with greater emphasis on migrating entire categories of settings.

There's been so much complaining about the inability to easily change adapter settings and enable/disable the current network that I expect we'll soon see a feature that duplicates what we had with the Network icon in Win7's system tray.
Other Windows apps

OneDrive in Windows 10 doesn't work anything like it did in Windows 8, primarily because Microsoft is doing away with "smart file" behavior -- where thumbnails of files are stored on your machine, and only pulled down from OneDrive as needed. I have a
much more detailed explanation in my review of build 9879.

Mail and Calendar made their debut, in very preliminary form, in leaked build 10051. People is still largely an unknown, although there are rumors that Windows 10 Phone will have a People Sense app. Music and Video have replaced the Windows 8.1 Xbox Music and Xbox Video. The new Photos app is a dud. The Weather app (still called "MSN Weather") shows more

Where Windows apps stand
Mary Branscombe posted a widely acclaimed suggestion that Microsoft at least improve OneDrive a little bit in Windows 10. Microsoft has responded saying, basically, it ain't gonna happen.

Mail and Calendar are nascent, at best, but undoubtedly due for much more affection in the future.

Music and Video received a full makeover, but there's little if any improvement to their core features.

The new Windows Photo app looks a lot nicer than the Windows 8.1 version, but it has fewer features.
What's likely to appear

The OneDrive change has been beaten to a pulp. Microsoft isn't going to change.
Mail and Calendar will undoubtedly get beefed up (at least we should get the minuscule feature set in the Windows 8.1 Metro Mail app). Look for a branding change, somehow incorporating the term "Outlook" -- which seems to be Microsoft-speak for "mail client" on all platforms.

For the rest, it's likely that we won't see significant improvements until after Windows RTMs. Microsoft tore off many Windows Live applications -- pulled them from Windows, you may recall -- as it approached deadlines on Windows Vista. Similar unbundling occurred with Windows 7 and 8. Although it's still hard to draw the line between what's in Windows and what's an app (Exhibit No. 1: Project Spartan), Microsoft's under the gun to get Windows out the door, and if the apps lag a few months, so be it.

One big untouched area at the moment involves updating. We don't know anything about how Windows 10 will get updated. Right now, testers can't block individual patches, can't hide an update, and can't control automatic installation of updates. No doubt that will change by the RTM version given to PC makers, but it's a real can of worms.

Microsoft has announced Windows Hello biometric authentication, but we haven't seen it in action yet.

There are hooks inside Windows 10 right now to install updates through a P2P system, something like a torrent approach within trusted networks. That means you'll need to download patches only once, and they'll propagate through a network. Tom Warren at The Verge has some details, but the final result is anybody's guess.

There's a lot of conjecture about how Microsoft might feed advertising into Windows 10. WinRT API pro WalkingCat has uncovered some details about Windows Spotlight, which point to some sort of new advertising mechanism.

We also don't know anything about Win10 SKUs and prices. Those are topics that generally come to the fore around the time Windows is ready to ship.

Stay tuned. We'll be updating this article as the Windows 10 builds roll out.

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Update: Microsoft quietly seeds consumer PCs with Windows 10 upgrade 'nag' campaign

Automatic update delivered to most Windows 7 and 8.1 consumer devices illustrates aggressive marketing intent
Microsoft has seeded most consumer Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 PCs with an automatic update that will pitch the free Windows 10 upgrade to customers.

According to Myce.com, a March 27 non-security update aimed at Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows 8.1 Update -- the latter, the April 2014 refresh -- lays the foundation for a Windows 10 marketing and upgrade campaign. The update, identified by Microsoft as KB3035583, has been offered as "Recommended," meaning that it will be automatically downloaded and installed on PCs where Windows Update has been left with its default settings intact.

Microsoft was typically terse in the accompanying documentation for KB3035583, saying only that it introduced "additional capabilities for Windows Update notifications when new updates are available to the user."

Myce.com, however, rooted through the folder that the update added to Windows' SYSTEM32 folder and found files that spelled out a multi-step process that will alert users at several milestones that Microsoft triggers.

Computerworld confirmed that the update deposited the folder and associated files onto a Windows 7 SP1 system.

One of the files Myce.com called out, "config.xml," hinted at how the Redmond, Wash. company will offer Windows 10's free upgrade.

The first phrase, marked as "None," disables all features of the update. But the second, tagged as "AnticipationUX," switches on a tray icon -- one of the ways Windows provides notifications to users -- and what was listed as "Advertisement." Myce.com interpreted the latter as some kind of display pitching the upcoming Windows 10, perhaps a stand-alone banner in Windows 7 and a special tile on the Windows 8.1 Start screen.

A third phrase, "Reservation," turns on what the .xml code identified as "ReservationPage," likely another banner or tile that lets the user "reserve" a copy of the upgrade as part of Microsoft's marketing push.

Later steps labeled "RTM" and "GA" referred to Microsoft-speak for important development milestones, including Release to Manufacturing (RTM) and General Availability (GA). The former pegs code ready to ship to computer and device makers, while the latter signals a finished product suitable for distribution to users.

The upgrade won't be triggered until GA, according to the .xml file's contents.

Presumably, the messages shown in the tray icon -- and when displayed, the ad banner or tile -- will change at each phase, with the contents drawn from a URL specified by Microsoft in the .xml file.

Not surprisingly, the Enterprise editions of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 -- those are sold only to large customers with volume licensing agreements -- will not display the Windows 10 upgrade pitches. That's consistent with what Microsoft has said previously, that the Windows Enterprise SKUs will not be eligible for the free upgrade. By refusing to show the alerts and ads to Windows Enterprise users, Microsoft avoids ticking off IT administrators, who will, by all accounts, stick with Windows 7 for the next several years before migrating to Windows 10 as the former nears its January 2020 retirement.

Although Microsoft has often prepped existing versions of Windows for upcoming updates with behind-the-scenes code, the extent of the messaging generated by the .xml file issued on March 27 would be a change from past practices. That fits with Microsoft's professed goal of getting as many as possible onto Windows 10, a position best illustrated by the unprecedented free upgrade.

Users will face a long line of nagging messages that will be impossible to ignore. Add to that the fact Microsoft set KB3035583 as Recommended -- by default Windows Update treats those the same as critical security fixes tagged "Important" -- and it's clear Microsoft will be aggressive in pushing Windows 10.

Those who don't want to see the Windows 10 marketing push on their machines can uninstall KB3035583 from the Windows Update panel. But because the .xml file was pegged as "version 1.0," there's a good chance more such updates will follow.

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What can you do when the insider threat is IT itself?

IT pros are not always the good guys, and when they go bad, the damage is immense.

IT is charged with keeping threats at bay, from both traditional external hackers and, increasingly, company insiders. One insider that is too often overlooked is IT itself. Look around your IT department - can you trust every single person there?

It turns out that a notable portion of insider breaches come from technical staff: 6% from developers and another 6% from admins, according to the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. The report shows that many of these breaches come from privilege abuse, although there are still plenty of other techniques IT staffers use. Great importance should be given to the moral character of your IT admins, after all, they do hold a lot of power at their fingertips, especially when a sizeable chunk of the business goes through IT systems.

In a recent Infoworld column, Roger A. Grimes offered a few war stories and some bits of advice on how to hire truly trustworthy IT pros and spot the bad seeds.

"When someone you admired, trusted, and invested yourself in ends up embezzling from the company, illegally accessing private emails, or using customer credit card data to buy computer equipment for their home, your incorrectly placed trust in that person will haunt you," Grimes wrote. One person he hired had not disclosed that he had a criminal record, and only after a background check had he learned. By then, the person had already been employed.:

"The one employee I kept on after they committed this transgression ended up stealing thousands of dollars in computer equipment from the company," he wrote. "I found out when he asked me to drop by his house to help diagnose possible malware on his home computer. When I entered his abode, I saw that he had a multi-thousand-dollar computer rack, computers, and networking equipment identical to what we had at work. When he realized I recognized the equipment, his expression was clear. It had been a mistake to invite me to his house, at least without first hiding the stolen equipment."

Grimes suggests that background checks are very important when hiring IT staff, and he warns against hire candidates who have been found to have lied, or those who always have something bad to say about their previous employers. Grimes also recommends keeping an eye out for current employees who know too much about things they probably shouldn't.

Some years back, I covered this topic in a 2006 cover story for Redmond magazine: IT Gone Bad. The stories came straight from IT pros themselves and gave a good overview of what goes on behind the curtain of admin privileges.

"We have a network guy who monitors everyone's Internet usage. Most employees don't know this because our boss tells everyone that there's no one monitoring the Internet and that he doesn't want to know anyway, but this network guy always seems to know what everyone is surfing for. He even talks about it with other employees," said an IT pro interviewed for the article.

In another case, a school district IT director and a co-worker conspired to defraud the system.
"They had a computer consulting business they ran on the side and would leave the district several times a day to work on client computers without taking vacation time," an IT source revealed. "They discovered the program eBlaster, which records everything you do on the computer and attaches key logs, screenshots, Internet usage and a lot of other info in an email and sends it to a specified address for review. This was initially used to monitor users suspected of spending too much time surfing the Internet or inappropriate email. It was put on the CFO, COO, and superintendent's computer. It's also suspected that it was put on a few of the school board members' computers."

This was done in order to advance their career by either blackmail or through special knowledge they gained from all the information they harvested.

With so many businesses relying on tech as a means of communication, the computer network can be a treasure trove of sensitive data, easily accessible by IT admins. Trust is of utmost importance, but what else can you do, and how does Verizon suggest you block breaches, including those from the inside?

"The first step in protecting your data is in knowing where it is and who has access to it," the report reads. "From this, build controls to protect it and detect misuse. It won't prevent determined insiders (because they have access to it already), but there are many other benefits that warrant doing it."

That's good advice, and I take it to mean that even IT should fall under strict data access privilege policies, and all network activity, including that from IT, should be tracked for security threats.

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