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Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

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Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#41
post #35
post #13

Basically M$ adoption of this strategy is the death knell for any semblance of privacy on the PC. It's amazing how far we have come to accepting such draconian measures in order to further marketing. There is still time people, come on over to Linux, the privacy here is still fine and will continue to be fine. And if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux and all the col…

"port their software to Linux". The main issue there is that there is not one single linux, the market is very fragmented. Getting the binary format right (which is the same across distros) is the trivial part, just set the proper compiler backend. The hard part would be getting all dependencies and especially IO sorted out. The wide range of display managers, audio drivers that needs to be supported to simply "port…

Yes if you actually write software for desktop Linux you know that it's not that much of a problem to actually do it if you want to. There is enough free software available, you know often written by individuals without multi-million dollar budgets, that I have not had need for using a Windows machine other than to compile software for Windows machines. If multi-million dollar companies actually wanted to support Linux they could do it without breaking a sweat. The only reason they don't is because Windows user base is so large and Linux's is so small that the benefit does not justify the cost.

All you have to do is add a significant user base, say 5-10% of the market and it will be competitive with Mac and I am sure there will be lots more commercial software for it.

I would also like to mention that my sister is a total computer dummy. Her computer always gets infected with malware and lots of it. But I installed Linux on it because I did not have a Windows install disk. And she loves it because it doesn't get malware anymore. And she loves the fact that she can install free software using Ubuntu's software center. That's a true story.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#42
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that, unlike Windows, you can turn it off.

Except for telemetry (and that you can turn off in the Enterprise edition as well) you can turn off all these features.

You can't know if they are truly disabled, unlike ubuntu which is nowhere near what windows 10 does.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#43
post #35
post #13

Basically M$ adoption of this strategy is the death knell for any semblance of privacy on the PC. It's amazing how far we have come to accepting such draconian measures in order to further marketing. There is still time people, come on over to Linux, the privacy here is still fine and will continue to be fine. And if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux and all the col…

"port their software to Linux". The main issue there is that there is not one single linux, the market is very fragmented. Getting the binary format right (which is the same across distros) is the trivial part, just set the proper compiler backend. The hard part would be getting all dependencies and especially IO sorted out. The wide range of display managers, audio drivers that needs to be supported to simply "port…

This can be solved by containers.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#45
post #13

Basically M$ adoption of this strategy is the death knell for any semblance of privacy on the PC. It's amazing how far we have come to accepting such draconian measures in order to further marketing. There is still time people, come on over to Linux, the privacy here is still fine and will continue to be fine. And if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux and all the col…

$? (and no, I dont mean the shell's exit code) The 90s called and would like to have their hatred back. As for privacy issues in your recommendation -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28user_interface%29#Pri...

The privacy issues from Ubuntu are nowhere near what windows 10 does.

> None of Ubuntu's official derivatives (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.) include the feature or any variation of it.

Ubuntu it's not the only distro out there, you also got Linux Mint and ElementaryOS for beginners.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#46
post #43
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"port their software to Linux". The main issue there is that there is not one single linux, the market is very fragmented. Getting the binary format right (which is the same across distros) is the trivial part, just set the proper compiler backend. The hard part would be getting all dependencies and especially IO sorted out. The wide range of display managers, audio drivers that needs to be supported to simply "port…

This can be solved by containers.

It doesn't need to be solved by containers. I can easily import KDE packages onto my lubuntu distribution and everything just simply works.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#47
post #9

But there is less concrete evidence to support the pirates’ most worrying claims. less , or just none (e.g. the claim about data being sent from local disk)? In any case this is turning to be far from ideal for MS and makes me wonder if they really didn't see this coming when defaulting to not-so-private defaults: I already know people asking 'I heard this new Windows sends all your data to Microsoft, is that true?'…

It doesn't matter much what the current implementation does, when Microsoft has asserted (and demonstrated in practice) that they can send arbitrary updates at any time (and without explanation).

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#48

Does anyone know how the trackers themselves can detect Win10 users, is the Win10 TCP/IP stack sufficiently different to previous versions of Windows that you can fingerprint it?

Presumably just the useragent and the javascript navigator.appVersion.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an easy way to do that: when the browser makes a request to some web site, the server serving it will detect the browser's user agent (which the browser sends with the request to the server) and will check the operating system specified. If it's Windows 10 - don't fulfill the request. Here's a random example of user agent detection http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6163350/server-side-brows...

They are talking about trackers, not anything web based. So unless a client announces the underlying operating system there shouldnt be any way to implement such a block.

They are talking about private trackers. All of these trackers have their own website and that is the only way to get access to the lists of torrents.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that the average user necessarily knows this, but in principle can't the user agent string sent by the browser be spoofed?

Sure, but its not about user agents.

How else would you detect the operating system of the client making the request?
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