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De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

arstechnica.com

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Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#31

Post by just_boost_it »

exabrial wrote: post #28
just_boost_it wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a mac for the first time this year. Honestly, it feels like taking a shower after getting home from the beach on a sunny day when you've been wearing sunscreen. Everything just works with no extra garbage, no constant intrusive updates, no hassle. The only issue I had was the lack of alt-tab, and that was solved by an app called alt-tab.

brah... control-tab or even better: control-tilde

Neither does exactly what alt-tab does! Now command-tab does what I want.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#32

Post by NOWHERE_ »

lovepronmostly wrote: post #14
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether.

What is the limit here? If I own a store and you walk into my store am I required to forget that you came into my store? Monday: Bill: "Hey Jane (store owner), do you have any X45 hammers?" Jane: "Sorry Bill, I'm out but might have some tomorrow" Tuesday: Bill "Did hammer come in I mentioned yesterday?" Jane: "What hammer? Sorry I'm not allowed to remember anything about people in my shop because that would be spying…

First: just look into your session store, which lists all people which are in your store (hah!).

Second: You can have analytics AND be GDPR compliant without a cookie banner. There are even companies built around this: https://plausible.io/

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#33

Post by makingstuffs »

just_boost_it wrote: post #23
aetherspawn wrote: post #3

Suppose you are buying a new laptop ... does anyone else feel sad that their operating system has effectively turned into some weird social media marketing tracking data harvesting hybrid of a thing? But in the name of progress and security, you can't stay on Windows 10. So for me it's this weird middle ground right now .. waiting for either Windows to U-turn, die out, or for more work apps to port to OS X.

I got a mac for the first time this year. Honestly, it feels like taking a shower after getting home from the beach on a sunny day when you've been wearing sunscreen. Everything just works with no extra garbage, no constant intrusive updates, no hassle. The only issue I had was the lack of alt-tab, and that was solved by an app called alt-tab.

I know of this app which allows you to port that functionality: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/

Disclaimer: I have never used it, one of my colleagues mentioned it a while ago.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#34

Post by mutex_man »

aetherspawn wrote: post #3

Suppose you are buying a new laptop ... does anyone else feel sad that their operating system has effectively turned into some weird social media marketing tracking data harvesting hybrid of a thing? But in the name of progress and security, you can't stay on Windows 10. So for me it's this weird middle ground right now .. waiting for either Windows to U-turn, die out, or for more work apps to port to OS X.

My process for a new laptop for the last decade or so has just been to nuke Windows and immediately install Linux. The only machine I own that runs windows is my home gaming PC due to many online/competitive games not supporting proton or other tools.

Thankfully I work for a company who happily allows me to continue this practice with my work laptop. My last and current work laptops have run NixOS and it's been great.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#35

Post by mananaysiempre »

lovepronmostly wrote: post #14
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether.

What is the limit here? If I own a store and you walk into my store am I required to forget that you came into my store? Monday: Bill: "Hey Jane (store owner), do you have any X45 hammers?" Jane: "Sorry Bill, I'm out but might have some tomorrow" Tuesday: Bill "Did hammer come in I mentioned yesterday?" Jane: "What hammer? Sorry I'm not allowed to remember anything about people in my shop because that would be spying…

Not a lawyer. My impression is that you’re in any case allowed to record things in order to fulfil explicit requests (preferences, ongoing orders—like in your example), legal requirements (limited-time order history—ugh), or functional necessities (free trial used up), no explicit consent needed. Notably the bar is “required to work at all”, not “required to be profitable” or “required to use common out-of-the-box solutions”. Cloudflare or reCAPTCHA 3 would probably make interesting test cases here (my burning hate for them from the several years I needed to use a self-hosted always-on VPN aside).

The way to do this (both in ePrivacy and in GDPR, despite the different legal mechanisms they use) looks to be to write a phrase like “legitimate interest” into the main text, give illustrative examples of what that’s supposed to mean in the recitals before that, and let the courts figure out the details.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#36

Post by 0xDEADFED5 »

jchw wrote: post #22
tonymet wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a few minutes you can make Windows 11 look pretty close to Windows 7 (or 10) by disabling personalization, content , widgets, new tab content. In edge disable all of the new tools and bing integration. You’re right about the hassle of doing it manually, and I wish there were a global “Windows 2k mode” that ran the OS as lean as possible.

> In a few minutes That's a pretty big understatement to be honest. I don't use Windows anymore, but I still occasionally set up Windows for other people and there's so many annoyances that it's difficult to even enumerate all of them. Off the top of my head: - MSEdgeRedirect to stop Windows from opening Edge even when it's not your defualt browser. - Shutup10++ to quickly disable a bunch of crapware/unwanted feature…

My tool here [1] does some of the work, but it's certainly not complete.

[1] https://github.com/0xDEADFED5/ps_tiny11

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#37

Post by zamadatix »

6510 wrote: post #12
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether.

Fun thought experiment: How would you disable access to your website after someone refuses your cookies? iow, you should always click NO.

By requiring a valid cookie be present and used when trying to actually use the functionality of the site. The law does not allow this kind of behaviour for any cookies that require consent though, so that's why you can get away with hitting no.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#38

Post by jchw »

0xDEADFED5 wrote: post #36
jchw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a few minutes That's a pretty big understatement to be honest. I don't use Windows anymore, but I still occasionally set up Windows for other people and there's so many annoyances that it's difficult to even enumerate all of them. Off the top of my head: - MSEdgeRedirect to stop Windows from opening Edge even when it's not your defualt browser. - Shutup10++ to quickly disable a bunch of crapware/unwanted feature…

My tool here [1] does some of the work, but it's certainly not complete. [1] https://github.com/0xDEADFED5/ps_tiny11

I appreciate the link, I might try this sometime. For something like a test VM where I don't necessarily care if its able to survive a lot of updates or whatever, I kind of want something like this, and there are a lot of options...

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#39

Post by watermelon0 »

6510 wrote: post #12
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether.

Fun thought experiment: How would you disable access to your website after someone refuses your cookies? iow, you should always click NO.

1.) In general, it's illegal to disable access to the website, if user rejects tracking cookies.

2.) You are allowed to save 'consent=given/rejected' cookie depending on user choice.

Re: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon

#40

Post by RajT88 »

t-writescode wrote: post #11
dannyw wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay for Enterprise and a lot of it is pre disabled. Others can be configured via group policy.

How do you get access to enterprise? Last I looked, I believe you had to create a company-relationship with Microsoft to be allowed to do that and there was probably a lot more cruft to do. Edit: and a quick scan of the Microsoft website says that you need to "Contact Sales" still.

For much of my career, I got free Enterprise licenses through an MSDN subscription through work.

You can pay a similar amount to what your company pays for similar numbers of licenses across many OS's. Last I checked it was about ~500 USD a year. Sure, that's excessive for a single OS install, but if your company is footing the bill they usually don't care if you install on personal machines.

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