Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 280 posts

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#101

Post by arter4 »

It's about the kind of power they have. Microsoft cannot get GPS data from your smartphone (no one uses Windows phones anymore), Google can. Microsoft cannot get the searches you made from your smartphone (see above), Google can because, regardless of whether you're an Android or iOS user, you most likely use Google as a search engine.

Nowadays, people spend a lot more time on smartphones than they do on their personal computers. So, Google is far more powerful than Microsoft and arguably even Apple.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#102

Post by imgabe »

jareklupinski wrote: post #39
throw__away7391 wrote: post #5

I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever s…

> pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads because it doesn't do away with _all_ the ads: every video still has the video maker themselves talking about their 'sponsor' for at least a minute, reminding us to 'like and subscribe' for at least ten seconds, and a patreon scroll of users that have paid extra for another three minutes

It costs money to run YouTube and it costs creators money to make content. Some of them are trying to make a living doing it. If you don't want to pay and you don't want to see ads, how do you expect the service to function?

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#103

Post by cyberlurker »

derefr wrote: post #77
CoastalCoder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turn off telemetry I may be working from old information, but doesn't Windows 10 still have unstoppable, and unauditable, telemetry?

> Unstoppable Use a PiHole?

Btw, I do this and sometimes stuff stops working suddenly when you block random telemetry. This applies to MS and Apple products.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#104

Post by ranting-moth »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #5

I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever s…

I think the constant obnoxious YT Premium ads are a big reason for the animosity. That and that it doesn't feel like an option. They really increased the amount of ads so it fells like an extortion - pay or suffer.

Most YT ads are abhorrent and incredibly repetitive. Awful music and a piercing voice. I very quickly develop loathing for the brand I see on YT ads.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#105

Post by BlargMcLarg »

sowbug wrote: post #41
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube It's still a Google product that does Google things. If you hate Google things, making an exception for YouTube is saying your standards have a price tag attached.

Polarization plays better than nuance.

What nuance would you want? YouTube is the most similar to Google Search of all Google products in regards to 'doing things people hate about Google', beyond maybe Android. The product has been trend-chasing for years trying to do what Twitch, Instagram and Tiktok did all to sell more ads and data to in turn become more profitable, because we all know a few clear tech guides without ads are not turning YouTube anywhere as profitable as another 30 second short or 10-minute pog-face clickbait for kids who somehow have access to their parents' credit card or primed to become the perfect future consumers.

It's been a very, very long time since YouTube has been very profitable for individuals who aren't playing Google's game or started before that time. Practically any new channel is clout-chasing, appealing to kids or unsatisfied adults in some form, with few able to replicate a momentary success if not following these tactics. Enshittification of the platform has been going on for at least a decade now and Google isn't showing any signs of stopping. A few people making themselves believe "oh well it isn't so bad because tech guides" may as well say "Google Search isn't so bad because I can specify the website and aggressively avoid ads".

But YouTube is the good guy because it.. centralizes content creators and soft-locks them into Google's desired format, be it now or in the future? What, do people think if WEI succeeds, YouTube won't be a future candidate for whatever funny business Google decides on next?

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#106

Post by zztop44 »

rectang wrote: post #98
bastardoperator wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh, I think this is also a bad take. Turn off telemetry, delete ChatGPT conversations, and I like having an LLM for GitHub versus Give us all your personal data and we're sharing it with ad partners, your personal data is our number one product and secondary products are only made to support the first endeavor.

> I like having an LLM for GitHub That LLM was trained on FOSS software that others like myself wrote and did not consent to have used in such a manner. Even if you're also a FOSS contributor and you're fine with it, I'm not. So you like it, but you're not the party whose consent matters. You're the customer consuming the laundered goods from the fence.

If you release source code under a FOSS license doesn’t that specifically mean that you explicitly consent to it being used in ways you might not be fine with?

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#107

Post by _silicon »

semitones wrote: post #80
huhtenberg wrote: post #36

The best part is that Microsoft and Google are working together towards the end goal of locking users out of their own machines. Microsoft is really pushing for its trusted OS platform, with a completely locked down kernel, that will grant them full control over what can and cannot be done on the computer. Google is pushing for the same, but in the browser space. Except their Web Integrity effort has no chance of suc…

Do you have any sources or evidence to support this claim?

TPM, Widevine, Web Environment integrity, NGSCB; codenamed Palladium, SafetyNet…

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#108

Post by jezzamon »

bbkane wrote: post #22
throw__away7391 wrote: post #5

I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever s…

I'd like to take this paid option, but for some reason the official YouTube app on my Google Pixel is broken - the screen overlay never goes away, I can't see comments on videos, and trying to go to a channel takes me to "An error occurred RETRY" screen. Unfortunately, I don't think Google does any kind of support for their YouTube app on their phones. Casual googling brought me to some forum posts that didn't seem h…

If your phone is otherwise normal, clearing the app's cache and data is usually a good way to get things working again for cases like "this app obviously must not be doing this on other people's phones"

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#109

Post by adventured »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #75
slavapestov wrote: post #3

Times are changin’. All you young whippersnappers wouldn’t believe that back in my day, Microsoft was evil, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Google was the scrappy upstart who prided themselves on not serving ads and irrelevant fluff on the search results page.

If you go back enough, Microsoft was the scrappy upstart, sort of. They were this small software company loved by most, the creators of Windows and Excel and all that. The amount of fuckery going on the background never saw the light of day back then. People seemed to be happy with them bundling more and more crap in their products, a move that killed most of their competition. They haven’t given up on that, to the p…

> Microsoft has and will always try to control the entirety of the stack

> from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration

Apple has the world's most valuable integrated stack. At scale nobody integrates more tightly or better than Apple, and nobody makes more money from that tight integration. It's the foundation of their entire business and has been for a long time.

That's a pretty bizarre premise to suggest Apple is lacking in the integrated approach. That's exactly what they do, very aggressively. Imagine Microsoft building their own processors and then Windows only running on those. You have the integrated salivation inverted, it's the other way around - Microsoft execs can only dream of the business gain they could have if they actually had Apple's level of ownership (over its ecosystem) but over everything Windows touches.

Microsoft doesn't even have a play in mobile OS / mobile app stores. Whereas Apple is one of the duopolists in that critical segment.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#110

Post by robertlagrant »

candiddevmike wrote: post #8

This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.

What do you mean, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type?
Post reply on HN