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Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#171

Post by yuhong »

caskance wrote: post #141
AlexandrB wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who cares to look it up knows. Last I looked Microsoft's privacy policy was vague enough that it could include almost anything and everything on a PC as well as whatever Windows can infer about your local network. > Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collec…

I'm talking about MSDN, not their privacy policy.

TechNet not MSDN.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#172

Post by mikestew »

ajross wrote: post #160
KirinDave wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are substitutes, but they are of such poor quality and such user unfriendliness that they're inaccessible to all but the most technically inclined, patient and sympathetic users. That's sort of the story of desktop Linux, to be honest. And Ubuntu was keytracking in searches, collects data on its users usage, and does centralized update authority as well. It's marginally better for a substantially inferior exper…

Again, I fail to understand why we're off on this "linux sucks" tangent in a discussion about privacy. You too sound like you're just making a value judgement (though you use some more colorful language) that software quality trumps privacy. Well... fine. Just say that and be done.

People aren't going to "say that" just because you demand it. So you're saying that, yes, using a text editor to edit JPEG files is a pain, error-prone, and horribly time consuming, but privacy. Fine, just say that and quit cajoling people into falling into your argumentative traps.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#173

Post by yuhong »

vetinari wrote: post #61
skrebbel wrote: post #41

I fully agree with the complaints, but I never understood why this outrage doesn't happen about e.g. Gmail (or all of ChromeOS for that matter). Lots of people virtually live in Google Apps, which certainly does a lot more tracking than Windows 10 does. The argument that "it's OK because it's on the web" just doesn't cut it anymore guys. An application is an application. We should just be as angry about browsers that…

When you started using Gmail or ChromeOS, you started with understanding, that you are using a browser and everything happens pretty much on Google servers. When you started using Windows, it was pretty much offline affair. Many people were connected to internet only occasionally, if at all. So basically, Gmail/ChromeOS was adding something to your options - you have a new service, you can decide whether you can star…

Yea, they didn't call it "Windows as a service" for nothing.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#174

Post by krick »

rms_returns wrote: post #88
agentultra wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being…

> Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enoug…

> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.

Woah, really? There are plenty.

Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately.

AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one).

Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are the reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn't possess. That's why free stuff available sucks or even doesn't exist.

Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.

OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.

To put it shorter: pretty much any software which isn't trivial to write or requires domain knowledge. The only decent examples of these in the FOSS world I can remember are Blender and Krita.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#175

Post by forgotAgain »

DanBC wrote: post #14

When your start menu (or whatever the hell it's called now) serves you ads you know you can give up on that OS and that the vendor does not care about the user.

Well one can hope that they evaluate the pictures your looking at in the photo app and use that to insure the ads shown in the start menu provide value and joy to the user.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#177

Post by alkonaut »

witty_username wrote: post #90
codingdave wrote: post #78

This is the one that worries me -- "More than four billion hours spent playing PC games" Tracking usage in Microsoft's own software is one thing. But for the OS to understand which 3rd party apps are games, and track hours spent on them has some deeper implications.

They probably mean Windows Store apps in the game category.

That has to be a tiny fraction of the total hours, making it a pretty bad metric...

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#178

Post by blub »

Sanddancer wrote: post #167
rms_returns wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enoug…

I tried using a fully Open Source desktop from 1998 to 2007. I finally gave up, because things were "better" but still far worse than windows. It's only gotten worse since then. One of the biggest examples I can see right now is the support compiler chains give in terms of the development process. Visual Studio makes simple what open tools like emacs make near impossible. Remote debugging on windows is a matter of do…

Remote debugging is actually quite simple when using QtCreator, gdb and gdbserver. MISRA-C is not just "more rigurous" checking, it significantly restricts the way C is written. It is also a commercial standard that must be bought by implementers.

IMO Windows is a primitive development platform out of the box, one needs to install many tools, a lot of them commercial to replicate what's available on Linux. I've done my share of development on both and strongly prefer investing more effort and time into open source tools instead of some proprietary solution that I have to pay for and which I am not guaranteed to be able to use in future projects.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#179

Post by mhuffman »

EdSharkey wrote: post #151

Windows 7 is the last version of Windows I'll run, Microsoft! The moment Ballmer switched from "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!" to "Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers!", I knew it was time to start migrating myself to Linux and Mac.

When I saw that Microsoft started putting ads in the start menu, I began to seriously wonder if there isn't some sort of "Trading Places" type bet going on over there to see who can run the OS into the ground first!

The messed up thing, is that they are getting such good press on their open-source initiatives and research projects, but really seem to be screwing themselves on the OS.

Then again, maybe they know something I don't know, and we will see some resurgence of Windows somehow.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#180

Post by caskance »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #165
caskance wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm objecting to the claim that users are "powerless to stop this [data collection] even if they knew what was happening, and they don't." To the contrary, it's very clear what is being collected and how to turn it off. As well as what you can't disable in cheaper versions, and which versions you need to buy in order to get that option. Obviously consumers would like Microsoft to sell them a product with more feature…

Not having your privacy violated is not a feature, it's a form of extortion. Being violated is not the default state, they specifically added code to the product I pay for to do so. I should be able to disable or remove it. That's the core of Stallman's point. He's an extremist, but there's merit. If it's my software, I need to be able to turn parts of it off.

If you're going to bring up Stallman, it's very disingenuous to talk like Windows was ever at any point "your software" by his or the FSF's criteria.
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