Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade • Hacker News Board

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#31

Post by apostacy » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:54 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #22

soggypretzels wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose they mean taking Apple's "We know what is good for you better than you do" approach. While Apple currently does not force OS upgrades, they do make a lot of decisions for their users without giving their users an opt-out or a way to roll back. This idea top-down, walled garden is pretty central to contemporary Apple.

Like what? Give examples. Apple makes design choices that are very opinionated on how you should use software and internals are hard to see, but they don't make decisions for you.

Example: Apple held my iPad 2 hostage until I stopped using iOS 8. I forgot my unlock pin (because I lent my iPad to someone else) and there is no way to factory reset it without also updating the OS.

So now Flux no longer works, and there is no way to adjust the gamma on this device, which means I no longer like reading on it before bed. And there are plenty of other regressions in iOS 9 as well. And they forced me to update my desktop just to interact with it.

SO, Apple very much forced me to update, if I wanted to keep using my device. There is no reason that updating iOS should be required to factory reset it.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#32

Post by soggypretzels » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:54 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #22

soggypretzels wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose they mean taking Apple's "We know what is good for you better than you do" approach. While Apple currently does not force OS upgrades, they do make a lot of decisions for their users without giving their users an opt-out or a way to roll back. This idea top-down, walled garden is pretty central to contemporary Apple.

Like what? Give examples. Apple makes design choices that are very opinionated on how you should use software and internals are hard to see, but they don't make decisions for you.

Isn't that making a decision for you? "users will only ever need to install software from our central app store" is deciding for the user that they don't need to be able to run whatever software they want on their device. It's fine if, as a user, you decide you don't need that capability, but you are still having that decided for you.

Disclaimer: I don't know the current status of 3rd party app on iOS but my point still stands.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#33

Post by Filligree » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

I had about three GB free on my root partition.

Windows 10 was automatically installed. Well, partially. You can probably guess what happened; if this had happened to anyone else in the family, their computer would have been effectively bricked.

I used to spend most of my time in Linux anyway, but now I'm justifiably scared of booting Windows.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#34

Post by wlesieutre » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

reaperhulk wrote: post #23

wlesieutre wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a problem with this when the recent iOS 9.2 update was bricking iPad Pros. My iPad had downloaded the update but (having seen early reports of problems) I hadn't let it install. So naturally, it started incessantly popping up reminders asking to install it, and if you hit "Later" it tells you to enter your passcode and automatically installs it later . There's a small bit of text below the PIN pad that you have…

You can stop a previously downloaded update from actually being installed by deleting the downloaded data in the settings, but that's definitely not easily discoverable behavior.

Hm, I'd looked through Settings for a way to cancel but couldn't find it. Now that you mention deleting the data, I'm guessing this is under General > Storage & iCloud Usage > Manage Storage rather than somewhere related to updates?

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#35

Post by robin_reala » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:56 PM UTC

no_flags wrote: post #17

Karunamon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced, no. Incessantly bothered, yes. iOS in specific starts popping up modal dialogs once it sees a new update.

That's true, but still less annoying than when I walked up to my PC to find a brand new OS I didn't ask for. I really wish there was a viable alternative to windows for gaming because I don't want to reward unethical behavior.

Consoles. They still automatically update, but they don’t break any of your other applications when they do.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#36

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:56 PM UTC

Guest98123 wrote: post #19

A few days ago I was visiting family, and my Mom was online Skyping relatives on her Windows 7 PC. She comes running into the other room and says her PC just restarted while she was talking, and now it says something about configuring Windows 10, even though she was always careful to opt-out of the constant requests to upgrade. So, we had to wait for it to install the OS, then decline the terms of service, then wait…

You're missing the point. Your computer is there to update itself. Your use is purely secondary. ;)

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#37

Post by pkaye » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:57 PM UTC

dmfdmf wrote: post #16

I'm not a fan of class action law suits but if there ever was a case it should be applied this is it.

With a class action lawsuit, the lawyers will get millions while the rest of us will get a coupon for a free upgrade to windows as settlement.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#38

Post by drakonandor » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:57 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #2

I am frankly surprised that she's the first one who's tried taking Microsoft to court. I kind of anticipated that there would be a class action lawsuit after Microsoft made Windows 10 a "recommended" update--meaning anyone who had their Win 7 or 8 machines set to install recommended updated automatically would get updated without being made aware of it.

No matter what they do, the users would complain. By leaving the settings on recommended, the user said she wants free IT support from Microsoft. Microsoft, like any other IT dept. would, made the decision to upgrade to an OS which will work better for everyone.

Sadly, a small amount of users don't understand why they can't keep using the same $200 Dell from 1999 forever - just like many users can't understand why Microsoft can't and shouldn't support obsolete operating systems forever.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#39

Post by jc4p » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #27

theandrewbailey wrote: post #3

The idea of "let's put a popup on everyone's computer telling them they can download the next version of Windows for free" simply reeks of malware shit. Even worse is when they decided to force it on everyone else who doesn't automatically click "OK" on every dialog box they see.

I kinda understand the mindset. In IT, we learn that pretty much everyone will be clueless on how to do something unless you make it nearly impossible for them to not. So when Microsoft's top support question was "how to I upgrade to Windows 10", it doesn't seem out of far field for them to think "how do we make it nearly impossible for them to fail". There's no doubt Microsoft screwed this up for a number of reasons…

I agree with you on the IT mindset, but there's a huge difference between getting users in a small company to run updates or whatever the IT need there is vs overriding settings on something someone actually owns.

My company's IT has accidentally done things like this before and even when it's on a corporate machine a popup coming up and saying "gonna restart in 5 to do updates" SUCKS while you're working.

Re: Woman wins $10k judgment against Microsoft for forced Windows 10 upgrade

#40

Post by ak217 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

dgritsko wrote: post #20

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #10

There are many helpful things about Windows 10 - security, update, performance. Then there's the new screwed-up interface. If they'd staged these two, or offered them separately, there'd be less resistance.

What do you mean by "screwed-up interface"? After using 10 (upgraded from 7) for the last few months, I can only say that the interface is better. Any changes that I've noticed have been improvements, so I'm genuinely curious as to what you're referring to.

In my experience, Windows 10 is a poor upgrade from Windows 7 on laptops and desktops. The interface is a buggy, half-hearted attempt to roll back the trainwreck that is Windows 8 to something resembling 7, except 7 still works better since it doesn't have to deal with all the Metro (tablet/touch interface) bits.

For now I'm keeping Windows 7 with manual updates - while loathing the fact that I have to use Windows at all - and I suspect there are a lot of people like me.