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Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
101–110 of 113 posts
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may be interested in this older documentary: https://youtu.be/DfsK6DuNhnc?t=2208 about the psychology of conspiracy theorists. The psychologists claim that they can predict who will believe in conspiracy theories, and they use as a dividing test the following question to separate conspiracy theorists from healthy trustful people: "The government is using mobile phone technology to track people all the time. Yes/N…
It's a pretty sad world when the conspiracy "nutjobs" turn out to be right..
Don't worry there's still plenty of wrong out there to be ( www.abovetopsecret.com )
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#103Personally after KB3035583 that I had hidden before, was re-enabled and installed automatically, I started feeling bothered by that fact. That was the final push that led me to nuking my Windows 7 partition and jumping to Xubuntu GNU/Linux.
Happened to me too yesterday on fresh windows 7 SP1 x64 install.
Why let the user hide it if you're going to unhide it again later ?
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#104Is this story true? If so, can anyone find a more substantive source for it? In the meantime, we added a question mark to the title.
Assuming the story is truly fake or just impossible to verify, as the OP, I apologize for posting it. I saw it linked and thought it was interesting enough to post, but it should have occurred to me it may not be accurate.
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't see this being anything other than a good thing for (the vast majority of) these users and for developers. For developers? I think they are quite capable of deciding for themselves. For users? Here I can see where you're coming from, but let's think this through: - Some users know how stuff works. They'll upgrade when they want to, no need to force them. - Some users have no clue about how stuff works, but…
> For developers? I think they are quite capable of deciding for themselves. Sorry, to be clear on this I mean devs building the stuff users use, as in no more need to support older, less standards-compliant, less fully-featured browsers. It saves an incredible amount of effort, time, money and stress. I'm not even saying Edge is good, I'm just saying it's evergreen and regardless of its current state you'd hope it w…
> I'm emphatically talking about the last [category], which is absolutely massive. I used to work at a company where a significant proportion of our userbase was composed of this type of person. Lots of money is wasted on this problem, which is so easy to fix.
I see what you mean but still, an opt-out button would pretty much solve everything. Forcing everyone is just a bad move I think.
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#106Is this story true? If so, can anyone find a more substantive source for it? In the meantime, we added a question mark to the title.
Assuming the story is truly fake or just impossible to verify, as the OP, I apologize for posting it. I saw it linked and thought it was interesting enough to post, but it should have occurred to me it may not be accurate.
Not to worry. It's often hard to tell. One of the things this community is good at is figuring out the likely (in)accuracy of a story together.
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I installed windows 10 last week I had the .. pleasure... to look at the various privacy options. During the installation, Windows uses weasel words to present the user with privacy settings hiding the option to change them at all. Take a look: https://jonathan.porta.codes/images/posts/2015/07/window-10-... In "express settings": * Send contact, calendar and input data to Microsoft * Send typing and inking data…
I posted this in a different thread yesterday but am reposting here for the folks that do move to Win10. -- PSA: For people with Windows 10 installed, I've found the following tool quite useful in shutting down the large amount of information collected. http://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
Thank you. That looks great.
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#108I've gone to great lengths to avoid Windows 10 and its back-ported features but installing patches marked "Security update" now tries to download and install Window 10. Enough!
My story:
A few months ago, I trusted MS to provide necessary updates to my system. This means when they said something was an improvement, I accepted this and installed the update. For my trust I got the Get Windows 10! Ad-Ware installed. "'Reserve' your copy today" it said. Sounds good, I can reserve the free upgrade but wait to install it until the dust settles and I can make a reasonable decision about those apps that won't work any more. I "reserved" my copy.
What this really meant is that I had scheduled the upgrade. Windows Update had now become Microsoft's beachhead for capturing my PC. The release date came and Windows update was going to go ahead and install Windows 10. No prompt. No choice to leave it on my hard drive and install later. It was doing it... right then and there.
I rolled the system back to a restore point and hid the upgrade. No matter. Win Update had its heart set on getting Win 10 installed. Those new security patches... Nope, Win 10. That update to the keyboard drivers... Nope, Win 10. So I rolled up my sleeves and began hours of research and diving into forums and the registry and reboots and...
I uninstalled the updates for the GWX application. Removed its registry keys, cleared its directories, uninstalled the preparatory updates related to it. I marked them all as hidden. Success; Windows Update was doing normal updates again.
Then Microsoft back-ported the "user telemetry" system from Windows 10 to Win 7 and pushed it as a pair of updates. "Eases the upgrade experience" their KB article said, but I knew enough now not to trust that. I had to find alternative reviews of every KB. Now every update MS pushed was suspicious. The software that was supposed to keep my machine secure and running properly, was now the software attempting to erode my control over my hardware. Even though I had hidden the updates for the GWX app and the user telemetry "enhancements" Microsoft put them back in the update queue by reissuing them. Hide says I.
Now, with the latest round of updates, I carefully select only those marked as "Security updates", having read the KBs and confirmed them with non-Microsoft sources.
Update
Downloading Windows 10
I hate what Microsoft is doing here.
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you still want to delay updating if Microsoft stopped all security updates for the previous version of Windows after releasing the new one? I think only supporting one version at a time has a lot of benefits like being able to focus on development and security for just one version. And I think we might all be better off collectively if everyone just upgraded straight away.
Most people only want the security updates. You can tout the new features of Windows 10 all you like, but most people don't actually need them and the short-term value of the new features is less than the retraining cost of learning how to use them. Incurring that up-front retraining cost on a frequent basis causes you to never come out ahead. This is why everyone kept using Windows XP until it was completely unsuppo…
If anything what people want are less frequent releases with longer support periods.
I wish the big name software vendors would understand this, but the hype train has a lot of momentum right now and it seems like everyone is trying to jump on board.
The reality is that stability and reliability in your software bring huge benefits. Big changes can bring big benefits too, but usually any improvements are more modest. And the kicker is that even quite small changes can make something work worse from the user's personal, subjective point of view, and this is actively bad.
My standard policy on our Win7 machines at work has been security updates only for quite a while now. I don't see anything pushing us to install Win10 on any of those machines right now. In fact this whole farcical exercise has been a great demonstration of why we shouldn't: the more Microsoft try to abuse the update process in older versions of Windows, the clearer it becomes that a version of Windows where updates are mandatory shouldn't be trusted.
Re: Microsoft Removes the Option to Opt Out of Windows 10 Free Upgrade?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The total of fines Microsoft has already faced from the European Commission is €2bn. It's mostly for forgetting to give the browser choice in Vista, if I remember well, after doing it properly in XP, and for not publishing the documentation of an API. On the other hand, given automatic upgrades are now a habit, and given Microsoft's monopoly is on a very narrower market (so, not sure it's a monopoly), I'm not sure th…
Most users will (rightly so) view this as an OS upgrade, not as an update. You already gave MS permission to provide you with security updates. You did not give MS permission to upgrade your OS. I feel the difference is of importance as updates are often necessary, while upgrades are not. This update installs the Get Windows 10 app, which helps users understand their Windows 10 upgrade options and device readiness. h…
One type of update is fixing a defect in the original product -- closing a security vulnerability that should never have been there, fixing some function that didn't work as advertised because of a bug, that kind of thing.
Another type of update changes to the product in ways that are not necessary for the original product to be used as intended. They may be desirable for the customer and/or the developer, and there's nothing wrong with that. However, from the point of view of things like consumer protection law that says you should get what you paid for and it should work as advertised, these two cases look qualitatively different to me.