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Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

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Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#61

Post by to3m »

Macha wrote: post #33
Paul_S wrote: post #8

Reminds me of when canononical did something similar with ubuntu and extended searching your applications to searching merchandise on amazon and other stores. It's really funny when you open the start menu equivalent at work to launch the terminal* and as you type "t" you get to see items you can buy - one of them being "The Simpsons". Genius. * before you complain I use the start menu to launch the terminal: I never…

This behaviour bit me in the ass in work today. Had a new Mac, just installed Polycom (our video conferencing program), typed Polyc out of habit in spotlight to launch it, ended up on the wikipedia page for polycystic ovarian syndrome...

I rarely use the Spotlight or Start Menu keyboard searching because of stuff like this. If it doesn't reliably produce the right result each time if you only type a small amount of the name - which it doesn't - what's the point?

(Call me crazy, but because of this I've come to not mind the basic Windows 8 start screen. It's not as good as the classic start menu, but compared to the Windows 7 one you can at least arrange it for quick access to a larger number of programs.)

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#62

Post by rbanffy »

mucker wrote: post #51
Paul_S wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could use free software.

How, pray tell, does free change the problem except in fantasies? There is plenty of "free" software that contains the same problem.

At least, with those, you can audit the code and have someone fix it. No such luck with proprietary software.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#63

Post by bitmapbrother »

I installed Windows 10 yesterday and used it for a couple of hours before coming to the conclusion that I made an error in downgrading from Windows 7. Windows 10 feels more like their phone OS disguised as a desktop OS. Perhaps the most jarring part was how ugly legacy (Windows 7) apps looked in Windows 10. They didn't even bother trying to make these apps look nice. Also, their services are plastered all over the place and there's little you can do to turn these off. And then there's the numerous privacy invasive "features" proactively turned on for you when you install it.

Luckily, you have 30 days to change your mind and return to Windows 7. I did it within hours. I never liked Windows 8 and I think I dislike Windows 10 ever more. No wonder they're giving it away because had they tried to sell it then it would have probably met the same fate as Windows 8.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#64

Post by manicdee »

blinkingled wrote: post #48
matthewmacleod wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thoroughly doubt that Apple's endgame here is to make their users the product – given that the operating system is only available to people who have paid them money in the first place. A much more pragmatic conclusion is that they think this feature is something that users want. And in Apple's case, as well as others, it probably is.

You paid for the hardware and the OS that shipped with it. Developing a new OS version costs Apple non trivial amounts of money - development, deployment, testing, bandwidth, support etc. and they used to charge for them up until just a few years ago. Something's got to fund it - things like pushing more of Apple's online services, gathering user data etc provide some ROI to Apple.

Are you intentionally ignoring the fact that Apple rakes in 95% of profits in the mobile sector?

Each thousand dollar phone is making many times its manufacturing costs in profits. I expect that there is a large enough margin on phones sold to fully fund R&D not just for iPhones and iOS but the Apple Car, its OS and battery technology, and whatever other projects are in the works.

Apple makes their money selling premium ITC. They don't need to sell your personal details.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#65

Post by mackal »

mucker wrote: post #51
Paul_S wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could use free software.

How, pray tell, does free change the problem except in fantasies? There is plenty of "free" software that contains the same problem.

Free as in freedom, not beer. You can look at the code of the free software, therefore tell if it's phoning home or not. More importantly, changing it.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#66

Post by devindotcom »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #63

I installed Windows 10 yesterday and used it for a couple of hours before coming to the conclusion that I made an error in downgrading from Windows 7. Windows 10 feels more like their phone OS disguised as a desktop OS. Perhaps the most jarring part was how ugly legacy (Windows 7) apps looked in Windows 10. They didn't even bother trying to make these apps look nice. Also, their services are plastered all over the pl…

I wonder - does that get you in the door to do the free upgrade more than a year from now? I wouldn't mind upgrading once 10 has had a little time to age properly.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#67

Post by rbanffy »

justThis1Post wrote: post #52
Paul_S wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could use free software.

Not a guarantee of privacy or anonymity. See: SourceForge. Generally a step in the right direction though.

Many software projects I use are hosted on SourceForge. While SF has been using some nasty techniques with binary installers, the source code is, as far as I know, untouched.

And, as soon as it's touched, the project maintainers can shut down the SourceForge repos and move on to someplace else.

It's not a guarantee of security, privacy or anonymity, but open source is still your best chance to get any (or all) of the three.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#68

Post by thejosh »

Paul_S wrote: post #8

Reminds me of when canononical did something similar with ubuntu and extended searching your applications to searching merchandise on amazon and other stores. It's really funny when you open the start menu equivalent at work to launch the terminal* and as you type "t" you get to see items you can buy - one of them being "The Simpsons". Genius. * before you complain I use the start menu to launch the terminal: I never…

Which you could turn off without any problems. The issue with Windows 10 that is still being reported is that it searches when you turn that feature off.

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#69

Post by MichaelGG »

unluckier wrote: post #47
chatmasta wrote: post #34

This also happens on iOS with spotlight. As far as I can tell there's no way to turn it off. Source: MITM your iOS traffic. Sidenote -- a possibly unforeseen side effect of end to end encryption everywhere is that it makes it far more difficult to man in the middle your traffic and hold companies accountable for their privacy policies.

It's pretty simple if the OS you're using allows you to install a trusted root CA certificate.

Except apps like this should probably not be using the OS CA store, and instead just pin their own CA cert. Doesn't seem to be the case here but in general I think pinning is getting more adoption, isn't it?

Re: Windows 10 phones home when you search your start menu, even with Bing disabled

#70

Post by rbanffy »

dc_gregory wrote: post #39
bsilvereagle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are literally thousaunds of bytes exchanged For people on capped connections, this is a nightmare. 4kB/search, for using your computer normally! Even though 100 searches/day is only 12MB of data/month, the fact that Microsoft thinks it's okay for the OS to slurp data like this boggles my mind.

It seems a bit unlikely that users doing 100 searches a day would also be the same set of users who worry about 12MB of data usage in a month. For example, even in the Australian market (very low competition environment), 12MB of data via 4G is trivial.

It's not Microsoft's data traffic to grab. The user is paying for it and Microsoft should treat their users with respect. Not making users pay for data that benefits Microsoft would be a start.
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