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Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

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Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#121

Post by happycube »

lostgame wrote: post #22
jeroenhd wrote: post #16

The website is down, but yeah, offering customised ISO files with Windows and some tools is clearly a breach of license. You can't just take a paid OS distribution, add some config and plonk it onto github. There's been people patching and customising Windows for many years, but most of the time that was done in the form of gaining an official ISO, patching it with a program on your computer and then using that to in…

I’m not sure, but is Windows 10 not slightly different from previous releases insofar as you can directly download the ISO for Windows 10? Unless you had an MSDN subscription it was a little more difficult to grab an ISO back in the day. Of course, it’s still illegal to modify and upload the modified version...but you’d think the patcher would be an even more obvious route than normal these days if it’s so easy to do…

Windows 10 is de facto shareware at this point. If you don't provide an activation code it simply puts a nag text on the bottom right. ;)

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#122

Post by millzlane »

nickjj wrote: post #21

I would consider things like automatically searching Bing for typing anything into the Windows search bar a pretty annoying feature. Especially when 99% of the reason to use such a search is to find a local program or Windows setting to open. Problem is with the 20.04 edition of Windows, there's no user friendly way to do turn that feature off. Putting all of the privacy settings to the most restrictive values doesn'…

I use this for redirecting my searches https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxtana-pro-r...

FTA "Force Windows 10 and Cortana to use Firefox and your favorite search engine instead of Bing! This is the official port of Chrometana Pro for Firefox."

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#123

Post by occamrazor »

winkeltripel wrote: post #34
tomxor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[edit] Not so blatent abuse, apparently the repo included windows iso derivatives... > Business Software Association acting on behalf of Microsoft. Oh wait a sec... Another BS third party Github DMCA complaint? This sounds very similar to the "REACT" Github DMCA complaint last month also covered by TF [0]. Where someone was (not) using Casio's software on an ARM SBC inside a plastic Casio case. "REACT" [1], "BSA" [2]…

"BSA, is a trade group established by Microsoft" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_(The_Software_Alliance)

So essentially Microsoft is suing Microsoft on behalf of Microsoft?

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#124

Post by effingwewt »

user5994461 wrote: post #61
qilo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, now Microsoft allows everyone to download ISO. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10I...

The ISO is provided so you can download to your Windows 7 PC and upgrade in place to Windows 10. I did it on my old laptop, works well. Microsoft really wants Windows 7 to go away and they actually give the tools to do so. I think it's great!

Respectfully disagree.

This is a story of a personal laptop of mine. Upgrading from Win 7 to win 8 with paid upgrade sometime after win 8 was 'stable'

The upgrade tool works fine until it doesn't.

When it chooses not to work, it will have you DL the upgrade files, as well as updates to OS, this can take forever and is a major point of failure for techs. (random hangs, reboots, loops, you name it)

But the really evil bullshit actually happens on successful upgrade. Oh that tool that said your laptop could 'upgrade fine' now can't, so sick of the BS revert to old installation.

Jk to find its no longer a valid bootable os now. had to repair win 7 installation to make bootable and was asked for product key... what? entered mine, sticker still gleaming on my laptop... Microsoft says invalid key! No worries, must be an accident, call MS CS. Am told that upon upgrading even though incomplete, I had willingly surrendered my old product key and it could never be used again. Ok... ask MS CS rep to please issue a new one? He says happily, but they no longer sell keys for windows 7, I could either buy an enterprise edition from them for if I remember correctly $7-800. In shock I looked it up and found at bestbuy for i think was 120...was advised to purchase from bestbuy as MS couldn't offer me the same( incidentally not long after this was when they extended the EOL timeline for win7).

Screw all that noise, I just ran a SLIC and never thought about it again, laptop's still chugging along today.

So personal anecdotes whatever, but I have worked on far more than my share of PCs, and upgrading became so convoluted early on it was invariably 100x faster and easier to backup and clean install. Even when everything 'just works' when upgrading, sometimes it doesn't. You will have errors everywhere, random hangs reboots etc.

It's infuriating and it has persisted as an issue from Win XP to 10.

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#125

Post by redis_mlc »

jeroenhd wrote: post #63
lostgame wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure, but is Windows 10 not slightly different from previous releases insofar as you can directly download the ISO for Windows 10? Unless you had an MSDN subscription it was a little more difficult to grab an ISO back in the day. Of course, it’s still illegal to modify and upload the modified version...but you’d think the patcher would be an even more obvious route than normal these days if it’s so easy to do…

Copyright law does not grant you tge right to spread something you downloaded even if it was free. The original rights holder may decide who can and cannot host what part of their product for what reason. Free software usually permits you to redistribute the software you download, but there's no such freedom in closed source software. This is part of the "free as in speech" qualifier of open source software. Microsof…

> Copyright law does not grant you the right to spread something you downloaded even if it was free.

Software source code is copyrightable (to a large extent, for the past 30 years) in the US, but a program exe might not be as there's no artistic expression at all in the bit pattern alone.

So an exe might just fall under license terms.

Source: I have successfully filed software copyrights and trademarks.

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#127

Post by Elinvynia »

selectodude wrote: post #114
nvarsj wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has excellent open source support. They embraced the Linux community a few years ago, and we now have a high quality AMD driver mainlined in the Linux kernel. Games run very well on AMD/Linux, including Steam/Proton. It's NVIDIA that is completely Linux/OSS hostile, and still follows the broken proprietary driver approach they have been doing for years. On top of that they actively ignore the agreed community sta…

Nvidia has always had super high quality Linux drivers. It’s their lack of desire to open source pieces of them to make them work better with desktop Linux that is the issue. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of Nvidia GPUs used on Linux don’t have a screen connected to them, so supporting wayland isn’t really a priority.

It's really hard to consider these drivers "high quality" if they don't even work with Wayland properly.

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#129

Post by BLKNSLVR »

beervirus wrote: post #126

This is dumb clickbait. They weren’t distributing some script to tweak a Windows installation. They offered a download of the whole Windows package, with their tweaks added. Of COURSE they got a takedown notice.

I disagree that it's clickbait. The wording of the BSA, clearly specified in the article, makes it interesting and worthy of highlight.

Article TL;DR:

"the complaint goes on to highlight several features of Ninjutsu OS that are claimed to be infringing. As advertised and specifically highlighted by BSA/Microsoft they are:

– Customize Windows 10 with powerful tweak and optimize.

– Protect your privacy by tweak and customize Windows 10.

– Disable many of the annoying features built into Windows.

– Unwanted Windows components removal.

– Remove/Disable many Windows programs and services."

Re: Removing “Annoying” Windows 10 Features Is a DMCA Violation, Microsoft Says

#130

Post by ghostpepper »

nailer wrote: post #116
smolder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad move for MS. It's user hostile enough to have telemetry and ads in the OS in the first place. If they fight against people's efforts to make it usable again, they lose market share, developers/power users lose interest in the platform, less software gets bought from and made for their store, and so on. I think what they really need is a pro version of Windows that attracts pro users by removing the bull…

The hack is probably removing even the 'Security' low-level telemetry. Which yes, would hurt users. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-w... Edit: if you don't feel like reading the link, the 'security' level is the minimum required for updates. No updates means no security updates. Which means exploitable boxes. Which would return us to the grand old days of exploited Windows XP botnets.

Is there any technical reason why telemetry would be required to make updates work?
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