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

extremetech.com

251–260 of 451 posts

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

#252
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we don't want another "XP situation" with Windows 7 If Microsoft had really wanted to avoid that, they'd have made Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user. Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants, and treat the installbase as a testbed for forced updates that could easily (and have) render machines ino…

> Instead they jammed it chock-full of spyware and malware-tier garbage that nobody wants Can people stop spreading this meme? Worst case, anonymized telemetry is hardly spyware. > Windows 10 actually attractive to the end user It is, regular people around me love it. > and the tech people that would recommend it to the end user. I (and many) do, if only because it is immensely better than sticking to Win7 whose non-…

> Can people stop spreading this meme?

How about stopping the meme that everyone should accept spyware?

> anonymized telemetry is hardly spyware

Without the explicit informed consent - which means opt-IN and an accurate and full manifest of what is included - then "telemetry" is spyware, by definition.

As for making the data "anonymous", have you seen the specifics of how that works? When Google claimed they made the IP addresses in GA anonymous they only masked the lowest 8-bits. Uniqueness (and the ASN) was completely recoverable.

The only way to make "telemetry" anonymous is to cook it so much that it isn't useful anymore. If you doubt this, you don't understand how easily modern methods can find correlations between data sets. But that's only about the data inside the packet. Just logging arrival times of packets that have any kind of common identifier can build a detailed picture of someone's pattern-of-life. Just because think it's ok to spy on users doesn't mean you get to make that decision for everybody else.

> regular people around me love it.

So what? It's a fallacy to extrapolate that opinion onto other people.

> support ends next year

Which means support is still available.

> Oh nasty corps.

Willfully misrepresenting the people that criticize Microsoft (et al) is never a good way to argue.

> Probably end user should stick to pen+paper.

Insults like this are why you got downvoted.

> reasonable talk instead of yelling at each other?

see: stones, glass houses

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

#253
post #130
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have they refused to be up front about any of this? As far as I'm aware, they have detailed all of those things except how exactly they anonymize the data, which I haven't seen anyone specifically ask them about.

Where does Microsoft explain what they are sending to domains like ad.doubleclick.net?

Exactly where you would expect to find it: the data use and access section of the technet article on the feature, and in the Windows privacy statement.

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

#254

Am I the only one who leaves the Windows Update service entry disabled under the "services" settings? Seriously, it's that simple. I check once a week, tops.

>Am I the only one who leaves the Windows Update service entry disabled under the "services" settings?

I really hope you are.

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

#255
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrolling direction? Though I'm sure you can change that in the parameters somewhere.

Of course you can. You can also, I think, reverse trackpad scrolling on Windows. However, I dislike the fact that on MacOs they call the setting "natural scrolling" and that they enable it by default for any trackpad you hook up. Moreover, since the "Magic Mouse" is basically a mouse with a trackpad for a scrolling wheeel, they also enable reverse scrolling by default for any mouse.

It's unnatural for anyone that grew up with mice and trackpads.

It's 100% natural for phones. Most people don't realize "natural scrolling" on OSX is phone scrolling.

Makes sense when you realize they ripped the magic trackpad code out of iOS's touch screen event handler.

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

#256

Am I the only one who leaves the Windows Update service entry disabled under the "services" settings? Seriously, it's that simple. I check once a week, tops.

I wouldn't say disabling all security updates is a good solution.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way to turn it off. It says it's turned off, and it's still sending shit to Redmond. That's unacceptable and deceptive. I do not use software that lies to me, period, paragraph.

You can turn it off via group policy if you have windows enterprise. If you just want to complain that the cheaper version doesn't have the feature you want, and you don't want to pay the higher price for the version that does have it, that's your right, but I don't have much sympathy for that.

It's also worth noting that it doesn't seem to be possible to buy Enterprise as a regular user, so it's not even a matter of me not wanting to spend the money as it's a matter of the company not giving me the option.

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

#258
post #67
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Windows 7 is supposed to keep getting security updates until 2020. Computer illiterate users are the last group you should upgrade to a new system in an automated manner, because they are the most helpless if drivers/applications break from it.

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

It fails. My father was forced to buy a new scanner (Canon I believe, one with an inlay for scanning photo-negatives) and a new soundcard (Xonar DX) because of lack of support. The soundcard itself still worked though, but none of the supporting tools (equalizer, multichannel processor, softvol control).

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

#259
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, there is never a good time to restart. That is simply an artifact of the sad historical circumstances that led to the current state of operating systems. I don’t particularly enjoy waking up to all my programs are closed because Windows decided that tonight was the night that it restarted. It’s slightly better on MacOS, where programs using MacOS-specific APIs can restore their state on startup, but th…

For the record, Linux does not do this, and it is an operating system.

On the other hand, many/most distributions have major releases every 6-12 months, and the upgrade process is a lot more hit and miss. I have Debian and (unexpectedly enough...) Fedora services that I've managed to drag along two and, respectively, three major releases. On the other hand, I can't remember ever managing to get a clean upgrade on Ubuntu after 8.04 or so. My latest attempt has been miserable, I spent half a day nursing my Ubuntu station at work back to health.

Besides, it's a trend that I expect to see reversed soon enough, given the direction in which Linux desktop is heading nowadays.

Edit: empirically, what has greatly simplified my life in this matter is being old-fashioned about partitioning. I keep /home and /opt separate, so upgrading typically consists of saving a list of packages, wiping everything but /home and /opt, doing a fresh install and reinstalling the packages. Depending on what I'm installing (OpenBSD on my laptop, Debian on my desktop) it takes about five minutes of accepting defaults and waiting for progress bars to fill, then another ten minutes until the packages installs (most of those ten minutes is spent on LaTeX, to be honest).

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

#260

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…

Support it if you want, but you seriously think it's OK for the PC to restart in the middle of a call? What if the user is doing something mission critical; it's acceptable to just wait an hour (or more likely several) to get back to work because "MS knows best"?? There is nothing to stop it from just doing it all over again either. I will never use Windows again because of this behavior.

I've had various problems with running a long job, and then Windows popping up and saying it's going to restart shortly to install updates. Or I want to open my laptop to check something, and it demands the power plugged in so it can spend 10-20 minutes installing updates. I've worried about it doing this nonsense when I'm using it to do a presentation or something.
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