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

#411

Post by dang » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 7:11 AM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #406

dang wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accusations of astroturfing and shillage are not allowed on HN without evidence. And please don't post comments complaining about downvotes ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11989084 and marked it off-topic.

Not arguing with your decision, but seriously: you don't find the moderation patterns in these threads just a little suspicious? You'll note I didn't accuse anyone specific of shilling.

I'm grateful that you didn't accuse anyone specific (that would be worse), but it still degrades the discussion to make this charge without evidence.

> you don't find the moderation patterns in these threads just a little suspicious?

I don't know exactly what moderation patterns you mean, but for the most part what we see is pretty easily explained. Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253.

We're dead serious when we do find evidence: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR...

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

#412

Post by sametmax » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 7:30 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #391

sametmax wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not compare an a paid OS I run a business on which upgrade one entire version, force rebooting, freezing my machine and introducing incompatibilities and spywares with an free opensource browser that I can merely swap with any competitor at a click of a button in my start menu. I don't run my main source of income on Firefox or Android. I didn't pay a licence for a browser or a phone OS. I can't find a quick alter…

Hey whoa, calm down there. What's really funny is you're getting upset but then ignore all the people who do make their main source of income in Firefox or Chrome, and need the stability in their browsers to support a specific feature. Remember IE6 and how many applications were coded exactly to that browser? And then people bitched that Microsoft didn't automatically update that browser, even though doing so would h…

First, you haven't paid for that software. Secondly, this software is an execution environment on an another machine, so you don't have control over it's update cycle, even if it wasn't auto update. Finally, version updates in browser can not be compared in any way to an OS version update, they are usually quite minor. Besides, when they do break something, you got thousand of publication telling you it's comming and what's it gona do to your code.

There is no such thing here. You are on your machine, minding your own business on something you have paid, expecting support for it. You are harassed with an upgrade you don't need and you refuse. Then you are updated against your will, sometime it reboot in a moment you need it and lock your machine for some time. And then if you do accept the upgrade (out of "I don't have time for this s*"), you don't know what's going to break. Your scanner ? Your drawing tablet ? Personnaly, my login broke, it's in a state of a perpetual guest session.

Now compare that to Ubuntu, luckily on my second partition. It's supported for 5 years despite the fact I didn't pay for it, and doesn't force me to upgrade. Oh, and it's not full of spywares.

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

#413

Post by gpvos » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 7:32 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #290

PeterisP wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about 100% everything instead of "basically anything", without serious "if's" like "as long as drivers are compatible" ? If a machine is running, say, windows xp, and it does in a manner that satisfies the owner's need, then it should be able to keep running forever in the same manner, provided that hardware lasts and/or is replaced with adequate spares, not necessarily anything newer. It's ok if that computer be…

Because Microsoft didn't write the drivers for 100% of hardware... and tbh, if a company wants they can pay Microsoft to write those initial drivers, and provided the hardware for testing, iirc, they tend to maintain those drivers between versions. There are plenty of drivers that are written by MS, it's pretty common with Printers iirc, and works pretty damned well. Because foo pro-audio, or bar cnc-board didn't wan…

Nevertheless, because the chance of something like that happening is clearly higher than 0.0000000001%, Microsoft should simply never do such a drastic upgrade automatically. (So, even within Windows 10, they should not automate all upgrades, because occasionally they will have to include bigger changes.)

Also, users will not understand this, and will, rightly, blame Microsoft.

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

#414

Post by Decade » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 9:23 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #188

Decade wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never seen this. Partly it may be A/B testing and I was never in the B group, but I think people are closing dialog boxes without thinking enough about how they’re closing them, and accidentally agreeing to upgrade.

No matter the dialog box, closing it should always mean "do nothing and go back to where I was before", not "do your sneaky crap later when I'm asleep or busy". Anything else is a malignant antipattern.

No, I said, “how” they’re closing it. If you click the OK button, the dialog box should close but you would expect something to happen. The issue is that people are unhealthily conditioned into clicking Cancel, and Flash and Java never get updated, and everything is terrible. So, Microsoft designed a dialog that is less likely to get Canceled.

Now there are reports that Windows 10 is installing when you click the X in the title bar. I have not seen this happen. Maybe this does happen, but on the other hand, I always see people closing dialog boxes without fully reading and comprehending what they say. With the scheduled install option, your unwitting “choice” could even have been days ago.

I think the situation is sort of bad, but the situation started sort of bad. "No software project is ever done, so you are always really buying a subscription, and the sooner you realize it, the sooner you can act like it." - Neal Ford. More to the point, Windows was never yours. It was always Microsoft’s. As long as you are using something that is not yours, it’s advantageous to use the latest, best-maintained version that you are able to use.

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

#415

Post by Decade » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 9:30 AM UTC

blakeyrat wrote: post #366

jameskegel wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if you think about it, it has the exact same problem: until you reboot, your Linux box is still running the known-buggy code. This has not been true for some time, and not in any mainstream distributions currently that come to mind.

How do they solve the problem without requiring, at minimum, closing all of the user's applications and restarting them, then closing all system services and restarting them? (At which point, you've basically done a de-facto OS restart.)

On Windows, once in a while there is a Patch Tuesday when the only update is Internet Explorer, a program that I neither wanted, nor installed, nor opened since I got tired of it years ago. Clearly, I need to reboot my computer for this.

On Ubuntu, certain packages are labeled as needing a reboot, and when you update them the control menu thing with a gear in the upper-right corner turns red, and the Update utility says you should reboot. Then you know you should, but it doesn’t force you to.

EDIT: There’s also Ksplice, which was going be a standard until Oracle bought it, and Red Hat kpatch. Those allow you to update a kernel without rebooting. Most other programs still require restarting, but Linux benefits from a saner architecture, where the web browser isn’t an “integral part of the operating system,” and the font renderer for the GUI and for printing is not part of the kernel. You need to reboot less.

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

#416

Post by Chris2048 » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 9:52 AM UTC

NamTaf wrote: post #393

marssaxman wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a reasonable point of view, but it's not Microsoft's job to make it happen. I could see a reasonable case for the idea that people should be held liable for hosting malware on their computers, and that failing to patch security holes could have some kind of secondary liability consequences. If that were the law, it might well make sense for Microsoft to offer upgrade contracts as a form of insurance. Ref…

Except MS is the one who cops the blame, the negative PR and the reputation of being insecure when malware runs rife across old Windows systems that weren't patched for years. There's literally no way they can win this. If they force updates they're evil for rebooting PCs. If they don't, users don't update because it's always inconvenient and then they blame MS on malware.

> Except MS is the one who cops the blame

When?

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

#417

Post by arximboldi » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 10:32 AM UTC

arximboldi wrote: post #165

linkregister wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 did…

> Whether the OS is proprietary isn't the important facet of this issue. The OS being proprietary is an important issue. With libre software, lightweight forks that still work in old hardware can be maintained. Also, the software stack can be customized. Note that it's not security patches what makes software slow, but the zillions of layers of indexers, UI frameworks written in three layers of dynamic languages, etc…

My friend sent me the link to the slow computing/technology sobereignty project:

http://tianguis.cordoba.cc/que-hacemos/soberania-tecnologica...

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

#418

Post by urbanKeywi » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 10:32 AM UTC

BTW, personally I don't like any kind of updates. But I couldn't help updating them, cause always there were irritating alerts.

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

#419

Post by newjersey » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 11:00 AM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #410

newjersey wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think automated updates are fine but require user's intervention to restart. Don't restart automatically on their behalf.

They are not fine. For example, Outlook (on my work PC) tends to become non-functional when an update is pending.

That's just P* poor quality and lack of care at Microsoft. When I think of automatic updates, I am thinking about automatic security updates on Ubuntu server. I'm sure canonical will screw things up at some point as well though.

I guess it is easy and tempting to say "just turn it off and on again" on consumer electronics and end user computers. :/

Why would an application become non-functional when an update is pending? Perhaps a critical security vulnerability?

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

#420

Post by 794CD01 » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 12:20 PM UTC

FussyZeus wrote: post #356

794CD01 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to pay for Windows just like any other software the creators don't want to give away for free.

This point fails thrice: - I am paying for Windows already, that we've established does spy on me - The Enterprise edition is not available to be purchased by a regular consumer anywhere I can locate - The Enterprise edition doesn't allow the disabling of ALL reporting to Redmond, only most, and only via group policy which is hardly accessible to the layman.

Your first point still makes no sense to me. You are paying for something that doesn't have a feature you like. A more expensive version does have the feature. What are you proposing instead? That you get a product with more features for the same price? Of course every buyer wants that for every product. And every seller wants the opposite.

Your second point is equally mystifying, since you've created an arbitrary definition of a "regular consumer" as someone who doesn't want to contact the sales office of the company you want to buy a product from.

Your third point is factually wrong and/or is based on a ridiculous definition of reporting. See sibling comments.