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

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

#141

Post by ben_jones »

I was watching a stream of an online gaming tournament (Overwatch) with ~20k viewers. Right before a match one of the competitors machines decided to force a Windows 10 upgrade and they had to reschedule another two teams to play while he waited for everything to finish. It's to the point where Windows OS upgrades are no longer synonymous with new features or better performance, they are 100% associated with annoying and forced upgrade notifications.

IMO it invalidates all the awesome OSS work and public outreach Microsoft has been doing. If you gut punch me with your left hand I don't care if you're holding out flowers with your right.

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

#142

Post by imglorp »

Spooky23 wrote: post #36
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. ;)

You are now the product. Your use of the computer is enticement to provide more actionable data.

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

#143

Post by linkregister »

arximboldi wrote: post #134
Someone1234 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic both ways on this one. I think Microsoft went "too far" but I also agree that we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7. Effectively having 20%+ of the market on a super old OS holding back the industry and less secure. Microsoft claim they're planning to avoid this in the future by no longer releasing named new OS's, and instead just update Windows 10 for "free" forever. Basically the same…

"Holding back the industry" No! I think we, the software industry, are very irresponsible when it comes to __planned obsolescence__ [1]. Computers from 10 years ago are very capable of doing most things common users want to do nowadays. However, many modern operating systems and applications make these computers unusable. We are forcing users to upgrade software, and because of all the layers of cruft accumulated in…

Whether the OS is proprietary isn't the important facet of this issue. The case for encouraging users to move off of Windows XP is the same as the case for encouraging users to move off of older GNU/Linux distributions: security updates.

Even in a slow computing initiative, outside invention will continue. Take ASLR, DEP, and other memory corruption mitigations. The architects of the legacy, fixed-address systems didn't expect the large amount of vulnerability due to buffer overflows in programs that handle external input. The authors of these programs failed to write tests that exercised some edge cases of malformed input. While long/malformed input unit tests might seem germane today, they weren't then.

Custom software initiatives make sense for people who have a high aptitude and the time to undertake them. This use case doesn't fit the vast majority of people who use computers.

While Microsoft certainly deserved the $10k judgement against them, software authors have the duty to help mitigate past imperfections, errors, and lack of foresight in their software. Authors of free and proprietary software share this responsibility.

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

#144

Post by rubidium »

gnoway wrote: post #121
sirsuki wrote: post #116

Windows forced upgrade can be avoided with Never10: https://www.grc.com/never10.htm Easily Control Automatic and Unwanted Windows 7 & 8.1 Upgrading to Windows 10

I think you can also just uninstall KB3035583 and then 'hide' it from windows update.

Not quite. I tried that (at least, one of the KB#'s early on) and it kept trying with new updates... so that probably wont solve it for anyone.

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

#145

Post by creshal »

snuxoll wrote: post #132
Bartweiss wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great for systems which are simply too old to handle the upgrade, but Windows has an ugly history of releasing upgrades which are uncaught breaking changes for some machines. I think release-day Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 all broke wifi connectivity for a large swath of users. At least one Windows 7 patch bricked a large number of Asus motherboards, and the Windows 10 upgrade did the same to a smaller number of…

I didn't say it was perfect, but I would be surprised if it didn't block more potential issues than it missed.

Is a 51% success rate really good enough to justify unleashing the OS upgrade right now? Why not make the upgrade opt-in, continue improving the migration wizard over the next years, and start the upgrade campaign in two or three years when it becomes both stable and more pressing to migrate people over?

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

#146

Post by ionised »

djsumdog wrote: post #118
bluecalm wrote: post #41

Their practices for downloading updates in Windows 10 itself are not much better. I tried following all the instructions to disable automatic updates on my Windows 10 pro laptop and still they got me with 20 minutes update at the time I needed my computer urgently. Windows behaves like malware these days and it's very sad to see.

Why are you disabling updates in Windows 10? I meant you're already on it. Updates are the most valuable security defense (next to never using anti-virus as it's a massive attack vector).

Because Windows updates break things sometimes. In fact they do so fairly frequently.

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

#147

Post by jasonkostempski »

overgard wrote: post #86

This is probably a dangerous position as a software developer, but I think we should stop calling these things upgrades . What's being shipped are changes . Whether they're improvements or not is completely subjective. It seems like splitting hairs, but terminology matters. It sounds harmless when you say "Microsoft reserves the right to update your machine" but things are clearer when you say "Microsoft reserves the…

"Upgrade" seems to get used when there's a major version change and "Update" when there are minor changes. Since Windows 10 is supposedly the last version of Windows, it should be nothing but "Updates" from here on out.

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

#148

Post by acqq »

dragonwriter wrote: post #119
snuxoll wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade. My friend was trying to upgrade to Windows 10 last week but it kept denying him saying his "display is not compatible". I logged into his machine and saw he had an old GoToMyPC monitor driver installed that was causing him grief, uninstalled it and away the upgrade went. It's not perfect by any means, and "compatibility" ch…

> This is why the Windows 10 installer does a compatibility check before performing the upgrade. Which would be nice, if it worked 100%. But it doesn't, so that's a problem for non-technical users. In fact, the Win10 upgrade on my Win 8.1 laptop "helpfully" rolled-back the touchpad driver from the latest driver designed for Win 8.1 -- which works fine with Win 10 -- to the original Win 8 driver, which doesn't functio…

Exactly, I have two notebooks on which Windows 10 Update claimed "everything's OK" and one is completely unusable under Windows 10 because the WiFi card driver is unsupported by Intel and crashes the whole system, and another is unusable because the touchpad doesn't work anymore.

On the former, even rolling back to Windows 7 turned bad, as all tasks (created by Microsoft, not by me) became somehow invalid.

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

#149

Post by Shorel »

Someone1234 wrote: post #54
themartorana wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about this. I'm with you 100% on having the explicit opportunity to opt out of updates like this. That said, a large swath of Windows users are not nearly as technically literate as you and your mother are, and automatically helping people forward (if for nothing else, security fixes and ongoing support) is a Good Thing in my book (so long as it's free, and it is). There is no doubt there are co…

I'm sympathetic both ways on this one. I think Microsoft went "too far" but I also agree that we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7. Effectively having 20%+ of the market on a super old OS holding back the industry and less secure. Microsoft claim they're planning to avoid this in the future by no longer releasing named new OS's, and instead just update Windows 10 for "free" forever. Basically the same…

They could keep patching XP to avoid the security issues.

This is more about taking control away from users than anything else.

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

#150

Post by ionised »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30
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.

Maybe the interface is a generational thing. I don't appreciate the phone-centric features (swipe, page-by-page, large boxy graphics everywhere) on a desktop. Tiles are obnoxious. The new browser is obnoxious (struggle to set and then maintain home page/blank page settings through updates). The goofy wizards with no obvious buttons.

Agreed.

I prefer minimalist detailed list interfaces that maximise the use of space.

This push towards giant tiles and block colours with massive images is frustrating. It's almost like diluting information is the goal here.

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