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With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

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Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#291

Post by graycat »

sjellis wrote: post #227
graycat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is probably a registry value you can change to do so though. Thanks, but with "probably" I sense that I'm about to get into what I call "mud wrestling" or hours or days of just throwing wild guesses against a wall to see if any appear to stick. I've only got 365 days a year, and I've given away far too many of them to such mud wrestling. GOD knows I do NOT want to do more of that. For physical things, say, an…

Speaking as a veteran Microsoft administrator, in total seriousness: buy a Mac. If you have a corporate network complete with good administrators, Windows can be made to work well enough. If you are a lone professional, Macs are secure, low-maintenance and have an OS designed by people that care about your privacy. Windows is probably not worth your time or energy right now unless there a specific piece of Windows-on…

Thanks.

Okay, and when my Web site software, with several special back end servers, is all working well, what platform do I use to keep, say, an 8 core AMD processor at 4.0 GHz busy?

On Windows, I'm aiming at Windows Server (WS). My initial usage of WS will be just dirt simple. As I get revenue, for more I will pick up a phone, call an expert, maybe you, pay for an hour to walk me through the most recent issue, take notes, and then move on until the next issue.

For Windows, I have used the .NET Framework, Visual Basic .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, a little of platform invoke to call some C code, etc. and, of course, Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) to sit between my Web pages and the users. I wish the .NET documentation had better technical writing, but otherwise I'm from happy enough to thrilled with .NET. If I am to use .NET heavily, then I sense that to minimize mud wrestling with weak documentation and too many bugs (e.g., from trying to get .NET to run well on iOS or Linux) I should stay on Windows.

Maybe implicit in your suggestion is that I would deploy for production on some Linux system? Okay, which one? And how many loose ends, third party, open source, do it yourself issues would I encounter?

Roughly I get the impression that for high end production use of Linux, I would be nearly rolling my own operating system -- this could be wrong. I'm eager to have good information on any operating system I use, but really I want to draw a line at the operating system, compilers, etc. and not cross that line.

At this point, I about have to go ahead with Windows. Maybe I'll get some books Windows Server 101 for Dummies or some such.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#292

Post by makecheck »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #262
fdgdasfadsf wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are subpar (and osx or whatever Apple call their offering is no better). I've been stuck in an update hell with windows where security updates simply would not install the only solution I could find was a full re-install. I've been in a similar situation with Ubuntu and was able to fix it - but only because I understood it - otherwise I would have had to do a re-install. The key with Ubuntu updates is to stick t…

OS X 10.11 broke USB support on Macs. USB used to just work. Now it stops working after you connect ten or so devices - which is not a common thing, but not unusual in music studios. And external USB hubs only work if they have a specific generic name in the firmware ID. Apparently if you hack your own kexts you can get it working again, kind of. >At this point I'm disappointed by every system I use. This. The Win 10…

At least, as of a few years ago, Apple figured out that incremental updates are not such a bad thing. There is only so much “damage” they can do with an update; and although they do screw up stuff, you can at least figure out what happened.

Where do you start though when W10 changes the entire damned UI, replaces a bunch of apps, moves stuff around, creates two versions of some control panels, etc.? That is just a special level of “don’t give a crap” that is embarrassing for any company making billions of dollars.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#293

Post by dTal »

cwyers wrote: post #140
jrapdx3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite sure what recklessness you are referring to. If necessary, the exception is only for the one directory the EXE is in. IIRC the program isn't really installed, it just needs to run once to make changes in firewall rules, etc., that prevent MS telemetry. AFAIK it doesn't increase external access to the computer being configured. After making modifications, the exclusion can be deleted if desired. If you have…

No, uh, look, running an EXE one finds hosted on GitHub, deliberately disabling the virus-checking on that EXE file and running the EXE is the reckless behavior. Even assuming that the person who made the EXE didn't mean so maliciously, any kind of a MitM attack or other way of sureptuously putting a payload in that EXE is an attack vector.

Why is it particularly worse than downloading a binary hosted anywhere else, upstream binaries being the standard way of obtaining software on Windows?

As for the virus checker, their program's raison d'etre is making registry changes. It's not difficult to imagine that being flagged by Windows Defender is unavoidable.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#294

Post by graycat »

CJefferson wrote: post #257
graycat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is probably a registry value you can change to do so though. Thanks, but with "probably" I sense that I'm about to get into what I call "mud wrestling" or hours or days of just throwing wild guesses against a wall to see if any appear to stick. I've only got 365 days a year, and I've given away far too many of them to such mud wrestling. GOD knows I do NOT want to do more of that. For physical things, say, an…

Why don't you want security updates? Personally, on all OSes I use I just want security updates to happen. My time is too valuable for me to go reading about every minor security update, when I will just install it anyway.

My main interest is my startup. So, what I really care about is my development system and, then, my production system. Since the development seems nearly done and is in alpha test, soon I will be highly interested in my production system.

One of my concerns is a standard, old one: On a system used for development or production, don't change any of the tools until are ready to accept the extra work of fixing any new problems the changes cause.

So, just delay changes to fit my work schedule. E.g., I don't want some change, intended to be good, break something in my tools or my production software. Such things have been known to happen; I haven't seen such in Windows, but at one point I was around some high end production systems where one hour of outage in a year meant that the CIO lost his bonus and two hours, his job. No joke. Walk around the raised floor? Not a chance! They were uptight. A change or update? Fine: Run it on the side for no less than six months. Well, the fundamentals of that situation have not changed.

Really, soon into production, I will want a test system on the side, put any changes on that system first, run it with the best test workload I can, and after some weeks usually implement the changes on the production systems.

On Windows, I've gotten good at using the old NTBACKUP to backup a copy of a boot partition and, later restore it. I have several such backups for my current, main boot partition.

When I get closer to production, if some automatic updates were applied to a production boot partition, I might save the partition but I definitely would restore back to the version before the updates.

My main interest is not as a consumer user but as a developer of a startup that could become serious, maybe an average of an hour a week of 75% of the people with access to the Internet -- IMHO my software has by a wide margin the best solution for a problem serious for nearly every user of the Internet. That's my main interest.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#296

Post by cwyers »

dTal wrote: post #293
cwyers wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, uh, look, running an EXE one finds hosted on GitHub, deliberately disabling the virus-checking on that EXE file and running the EXE is the reckless behavior. Even assuming that the person who made the EXE didn't mean so maliciously, any kind of a MitM attack or other way of sureptuously putting a payload in that EXE is an attack vector.

Why is it particularly worse than downloading a binary hosted anywhere else, upstream binaries being the standard way of obtaining software on Windows? As for the virus checker, their program's raison d'etre is making registry changes. It's not difficult to imagine that being flagged by Windows Defender is unavoidable.

I think the recent situation with SourceForge, where binaries were changed to add a malware-ridden installer[1] shows why GitHub is potentially worse than trusting some other provider. I think it's a low likelihood that something like that happens with GitHub ever, much less soon, and SourceForge has reversed that action already. But it is one reason to potentially trust binaries from a third party like that less.

But that's not really the thrust of the point. It's software from an unknown provenance, and yes, that's pretty standard for Windows but it's not great and it's getting worse all the time. Virus scanners are not a great solution, but not having them are worse. Without any kind of a checksum on that page, it's impossible to verify that the binary you have is the one that you should have. (Not that it's guaranteed that you can do so if there is a checksum.) So you're already in a bad situation, and you're turning off one of the few safeguards you have.

As for registry changes getting flagged by Defender... programs that change the registry aren't rare.[2] They do not universally share this problem. I imagine it's probably a false positive and I don't know how it could be avoided, but the proposed remedy is reckless.

1) http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/source...

2) http://windowsreport.com/windows-10-registry-cleaners/

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#297

Post by brokenmachine »

tracker1 wrote: post #129
wangchow wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past year I've noticed a lot of things mysteriously getting installed, things moving around, etc. I don't mind automatic updates so long as there's a separation from the new features and bug fixes. There should be a base core of apps that are necessary and a set of opt-in add-on features. It's time to move to Linux on laptop/desktop/tablet I think. While I love my surface pro 3 and the Windows 10 experience…

On the flip side, I run Ubuntu on my htpc, and have for several years now... there have been a couple times where the updates broke audio, and the fix took on average 2 days, though I can imagine some people having worse experiences... Getting an MCE remote (arguably the most common PC remote type) working with Kodi (formerly xbmc and very popular full screen media player) took some cumbersome steps. On average one a…

I have had the same experience, especially with broken mythtv updates (specifically the mythtv web interface), and also sound.

Plus for some reason every time I update I have to manually edit the grub file to boot the correct kernel and run the nvidia installer. I think it's because I'm still on an older version of grub or something.

I'm still much happier running ubuntu on my server/htpc than Windows. I'd be ecstatic to use ubuntu exclusively if I didn't need to run Ableton Live on Windows, which I can't run in a Windows VM.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#298

Post by MR4D »

0xmohit wrote: post #2

Some highlights: Microsoft installed an app in users’ system trays advertising the free upgrade to Windows 10. Not satisfied, the company eventually made Windows 10 a recommended update so users receiving critical security updates were now also downloading an entirely new operating system onto their machines without their knowledge. This is essentially equivalent to saying: You've been running whatever version of Win…

Interesting thought...

If Microsoft forces a new version on your computer, and you refuse the EULA, what happens?

Second thought - if you can't undo the install upon refusing the EULA, has Microsoft committed a crime of computer vandalism by (in effect) bricking your computer?

Something tells me that some smart lawyers are going to blast some holes in this. Especially from a trade secret perspective where some smart hacker gets his computer bricked (just go with me for a second :) ) and then has to reverse engineer something to access his data, but because he didn't accept the EULA, and MSFT took over his computer without explicit permission, he can't be sued for violating the EULA.

Now obviously IANAL, but you can see where this could go.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#299

Post by brokenmachine »

Osiris wrote: post #226
tracker1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, I run Ubuntu on my htpc, and have for several years now... there have been a couple times where the updates broke audio, and the fix took on average 2 days, though I can imagine some people having worse experiences... Getting an MCE remote (arguably the most common PC remote type) working with Kodi (formerly xbmc and very popular full screen media player) took some cumbersome steps. On average one a…

I was running Ubuntu 14.04 on a small PC with XBMC and proprietary Nvidia drivers. The standard `apt-get update` would never rebuild the nvidia drivers so inevitably on reboot, X couldn't start and I had to figure out why, then rebuild the nvidia drivers manually, and try again. I'm much more scared of Ubuntu aptitude updates than I am of Microsoft updates.

I've had the exact same problem every time with Nvidia drivers when updating ubuntu.

Despite this, it's not too hard to fix, and I'm much more scared of forced Microsoft OS updates though.

Win7 will be my last Microsoft OS. The way they've been trying to trick people into updating is disgusting.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#300

Post by Neeek »

rdiddly wrote: post #278
graycat wrote: post #90

Gb abbreviates gigabit or gigabyte? What does GB abbreviate? ===================== In update: PLEASE stop down voting me for my simple, nice, courteous reminder to the person who wrote the post I replied to. I was NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT ignorant of the meanings of Gb versus GB and was NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT asking for a tutorial on the difference. I am not an ignorant newby on HN knowing too little to be posting here. Just w…

A downvote or even a hundred downvotes on HN is hardly worth getting upset over. Remember how there's this whole world out there with women in it and sunsets and grass and beer and stuff?

Mmmm, beer.
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