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Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

irishexaminer.com

321–330 of 358 posts

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#321
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…

> 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 collapse of privacy will be a bad dream. I use Ubuntu almost daily as a desktop for programming. While it's way better than linux desktops 5 or 10 years ago, it's still a far cry from even Windows even…

The Spotify client on linux is a beta application made by some developers for themselves because they wanted it. Spotify released it because they are a fairly decent company and why not? Many of us use it but we should not regard it as a mainstream offering. (In spite of this I find Spotify on Linux to work better than Spotify on Mac.)

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why it connects to a-0001.a-msedge.net when I type into start menu, with web search and cortana turned off?

You have to block outbound communication for "Search" in the Windows firewall. Regardless of whatever privacy settings you may have set.

Yes, I know.

I was trying to point out, that even when you disable everything using the provided controls, the OS still doesn't respect your choice.

Be careful regarding the searchui.exe firewall rule. It names specific assembly version - one silent update (is there any other in win10?) and your rule is invalid, instead a new rule that is enabled is suddenly in effect.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#323
post #179

> The controversy began because of a line in Microsoft’s service agreement. This allows Microsoft to issue updates that will stop users “playing counterfeit games,” according to TorrentFreak. Game companies have been issuing updates that stop users "playing counterfeit games" ever since it was possible to do so. Microsoft is a game company, or one of the divisions are. It's interesting that they would stop there, rat…

The justification is that they didn't know about it before.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue isn't whether the functionality is currently built-in (it'd be trivial to add later). The issue is that Microsoft states its intent to do so (relevant section underlined): >we may access, disclose and preserve your personal information, including your private content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or ______files in private folders______), when we have a good faith belief t…

> The issue is that Microsoft states its intent to do so (relevant section underlined): The quoted section is from the privacy header which also applies to Onedrive, which is essentially Microsoft's version of Dropbox. They're not stating their intent to collect files in private folders on your computer aside from bits that have always been collected, like whatever parts of a crash dump Error Reporting sends on.

The doc is at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement . It says:

>It applies to Bing, Cortana, MSN, Office, OneDrive, Outlook.com, Skype, ___Windows___, Xbox and other Microsoft services that display this statement.

It appears that you're making an assumption that they only intend this to apply to OneDrive, but they explicitly state it applies to Windows too. My Linux installation definitely didn't come with such boilerplate.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#325
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft was an early adopter of PRISM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg > same thing to Google So what? The claim was about not using Microsoft's products.

OP's point is that the whole Snowden thing was about datacenters, which happened to all biggest players so not using Windows is not going to mitigate that fact.

Even if that were true (as another commenter pointed out, Snowden's leaks are about far more than just datacenter snooping), that still puts Windows users at a lot of risk; when basically your whole computer is being continuously synchronized with Microsoft's servers, your whole computer is now vulnerable to such datacenter attacks.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#326
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole PRISM thingy was the reason why I tried Linux. I didn't continue using it because I was scared for my privacy. I continued using it because it was awesome and satisfied every single one of my needs.

PRISM had nothing to do with any specific operating system. Be it Linux, OS X, Windows or anything else. It was the theft of unencrypted data on dedicated fiber lines between data centers. It actually didn't impact Windows, it impacted Hotmail, OneDrive, and other Microsoft "Cloud" services. Ditto with Google, Apple, et al.

Again, Microsoft was mentioned, so I tried something not made by any company that was mentioned. Is that so hard to figure out?

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"good enough for a good chunk of people" completely describes Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender, all of which are absolutely powerful and capable of (and actually used for) the highest level professional results. That there are features and quality from the well-funded proprietary tools that are lacking in the free/open ones is undeniable. But the examples you chose are ones where if we had to use the free/open ones, we wo…

> "good enough for a good chunk of people" completely describes Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender I said that keeping in mind professional use. There are some people who can effectly replace Office with LibreOffice at work and the number is significant. However, when you try to do the same with a designer then Gimp, Inkscape and Blender falls behind, so yeah... A dev could do a minor manipulation on an image using Gimp, bu…

Yeah, but "print-ready posters" ain't the only professional use for raster graphics software anymore. GIMP (in my experience, at least) works quite well for digital work; it's only print work that it's significantly lacking (particularly due to the lack of proper CMYK support).

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point. "Proprietary system" here means Windows. All these applications could run under Linux just fine if the vendors cared.

Any good examples of closed source applications being financially successful on Linux? How do the opportunities on Linux compare with investing in applications for other platforms? It's not so much about "caring" as about the ability to pay programmers to create profitable software.

Linux + proprietary 3D graphics software is very popular in large shops (ILM, Pixar, DreamWorks, etc.). 3D graphics, CAD, etc. in general tends to have much stronger roots in the Unix world (by way of IRIX, with GNU/Linux being the most common migration path) than Windows.

Basically, for the big names in computer-animated movies, the Year of the Linux Desktop has already happened.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#329
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hatred for Microsoft? I have none. I do hate the fact that we have an absolutely free operating system that works just fine but thanks to Bill Gates 90s shenanigans and aggressive and illegal market and business tactics we're stuck with a proprietary system that is totally unnecessary and as it continues that system becomes more and more invasive. And that system is a black box that you can't trust. Google started en…

> we're stuck with a proprietary system that is totally unnecessary I think you are being a bit biased on this one. There are a lot of applications that the "free" alternative is just not good enough in comparison with the propetary one. Just to name a few: Gimp and Photoshop Inkscape and Illustrator Maya/3DStudio and Blender I would even add Office and LibreOffice but the later is actually good enough for a good chu…

FWIW, I prefer GIMP at work when Photoshop is also already available to us. I still stick to GIMP because of its ease in scripting and automating my work via PyGimp. I'm aware Photoshop can script via AppleScript, VBScript, and JavaScript, but Python just makes more sense to me.

And not on the automation side, I have also created professional quality icons on GIMP used on our web application.

Re: Windows 10 users are being banned from torrent sites

#330
post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good examples of closed source applications being financially successful on Linux? How do the opportunities on Linux compare with investing in applications for other platforms? It's not so much about "caring" as about the ability to pay programmers to create profitable software.

Matlab does quite well?

Runs on Windows and Mac OS X as well, so it's a good cross-platform example. But there's no way to tell how much money it makes from each OS....
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