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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

#361

Post by jakebasile »

supernovae wrote: post #305
CommanderData wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing more negative news about Win 10 on HN interests me. HN, what I regard, a big developer news site - I wonder if Microsoft cares. I am sure and probably stating the obvious here. Developers are a group Microsoft does care about - devs eventually drives some of the cogs in their grand scheme. Making noise here will get their attention, more than making noise on some consumer forum.

Most of it seems completely misguided if you ask me. I'm no fan of all the tracking stuff, but lets be real. Everyone in here with an iPhone or an Android phone has the same experience yet i don't see them complaining that their iphone/android device updates itself, has tracking info and locks them into stores and such. It only seems unfair when MS does it. I remember the day when people used to be enthusiastic about…

> i don't see them complaining that their iphone/android device updates itself

You can choose not to update in both of these cases.

> people used to be enthusiastic about their computer ...

I'm not upset at those features being available. I am upset about them being added without any input from me and without a chance to stop them from being installed. I have no use for most of what you mention, I don't want them installed, and if they are installed without my consent I want to be able to remove them. I own my computer, not Microsoft.

> the nagging of onedrive can be uninstalled by not using the desktop app

You have to regedit to remove OneDrive from Explorer.

> if they honestly don't like it, they don't have to buy it.

Many people didn't buy it and were upgraded unknowingly. I did buy it, but that doesn't mean I cannot be upset at the current situation.

> for the life of me can't find a reason not to upgrade if the upgrade was offered

That's your choice, and many others. Neither you nor Microsoft should override those choices. If someone does choose to upgrade to 10 that also doesn't mean they must further consent to every other new decision Microsoft makes for Windows.

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

#362

Post by r00fus »

rasz_pl wrote: post #331
r00fus wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jury is still out: http://superuser.com/questions/1038050/does-oo-shutup-10-eff...

Jury is not out, shutup10 turns off "official' telemetry services. Problem is MS build in telemetry into everything now, explorer, cortana, edge, crypto service or dnscache, _everything_ calls home regularly ~once per hour during ordinary use. Only way to 99.9% block telemetry is to switch blocking all outgoing by default in firewall and whitelist what you use. This still leaves DNS exfiltration route :(

Did you read the comments where, if you do block the standard ports, the telemetry system in Win10 goes all subversive botnet-like and starts connecting on random ports to random hosts in order to get out of the firewall?

Frightening.

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

#363

Post by Grishnakh »

creshal wrote: post #360
Grishnakh wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see MS force a showdown over this: since the EU is dumb enough to run all their computers on Windows, MS could force them to make an exception for them, or else . What's the EU going to do when all their government computers suddenly shut down? Toss Satya in jail? He's in the US. You don't make yourself completely and utterly dependent on someone and then tell them how to behave.

> I'd love to see MS force a showdown over this Slow down with your corporate boner. In the past, Microsoft has caved in to every single government demand yet. IE-free Windows, encryption-free Windows NT, … you name it, Microsoft did it and wagged their tail happily.

That's too bad; hopefully under Satya's leadership they'll stop this pathetic capitulation, and show the EU government who's really boss. It would be a great lesson on the dangers of outsourcing your critical infrastructure to a foreign corporation.

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

#364

Post by graycat »

Silhouette wrote: post #346
graycat wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As no-one else seems to have replied to the parent as I write this, let me just reassure you that if you do ever want to look into using a Linux platform for the server side of your system, it's not so big and scary. There are lots of Linux distributions. For general purpose server work, something big and well-supported like Debian would be a sensible starting point. You can install a relatively bare bones system to…

Nice. Thanks. I needed that. I was hoping for something like that.

Okay, if my startup becomes a big thing, then maybe I'll have the servers all on some version of Linux. For the conversion, if I could consider doing it now, then it would be easy enough for a team of a dozen if my company gets to 100+ people.

As it is, except for nonsense interruptions not due to Windows or Microsoft but would be much the same for Linux, I am a few weeks of good work from going live. I shouldn't jump ship now.

But, your post is a keeper. Thanks.

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

#365

Post by graycat »

wonkaWonka wrote: post #144
graycat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "AD environment"? Sounds like maybe what I want. I want no updates or changes of any kind without my knowledge. Indeed, before any change, I want to backup the relevant boot partition so that I can restore it if any changes are harmful or doubtful. For Cortana, when I looked at it, everything it has I have a lot better with just my favorite programmable text editor and a few simple macros. Uh, to reply, I hav…

If you weren't familiar enough with Microsoft's products to immediately recognize that the acronym "AD" within the context of Microsoft anything, means Active Directory, then you are thousands of dollars, and possibly multiple years away from moving in that direction.

I know a lot of the fundamental concepts in computing, many from when they were nearly new. I knew nearly all the concepts long before Windows, 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, XP, 2000, or NT. I didn't learn the concepts in the context of Microsoft or Windows. So, I learned the concepts before I ever saw any Microsoft acronyms.

E.g., I first learned about Kerberos from one of the first papers about it, an article in Scientific American. I learned about RSA and public keys, of course, usable with Kerberos, near the beginning. I still have the source code for an early version of Kerberos. And I learned about and used authentication, capabilities, and access control lists back not too far from their origins in Multics. Sure, later IBM called some of that Resource Access Control Facility (RACF) -- saw some of that, too.

So, at one point Microsoft in Windows Server wanted some authentication, capabilities, with encryption, etc. so borrowed Kerberos and got Active Directory. Fine. So far I've never seen even a single word of Microsoft's Active Directory documentation but likely already understand nearly all the main purposes and core ideas. For working with the actual code, I suspect that I can get the dozen or so operations I need with examples and documentation and, then, be okay on Active Directory.

Uh, in a very significant sense, Microsoft and Windows are an example of the old biology ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, each organism as it develops from fertilization goes through stages that closely repeat how the species evolved. Well, as Windows grew from Windows 95 to Windows 10, it stayed close to the development of the core ideas in computing, e.g., multiple virtual memory, demand paged, protected, with gate segments, etc., embedded operating systems with an hierarchical file system. They stayed close to the ideas in the Mach kernel. And they are staying close to the ideas in virtual machine. Some of the hardware ideas include instruction caches, data caches, multi-way set associative caches, cache invalidates, page-segment tables, address translation look aside buffers, micro-code, instruction pipelines, speculative execution, out of order execution, parallel execution, etc. I understood all of those well long before I ever touched a PC.

I have a friend with a background a little less than mine who got good with Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange, running an e-mail server, etc. all fairly quickly. So can I.

There is an issue: I'm trying to be successful with my startup. For that, I need to learn some about computing. Okay. But I'm not trying to be a broadly competent computer professional. The difference is, I just want to know enough for my startup and am not trying to know enough for everything everyone else might encounter. So, a good computer professional can be eager to learn everything in sight (early in my career, I did a lot of that). But as a startup entrepreneur, I want to minimize how much I learn. Significant difference.

Besides, I try to avoid acronyms.

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

#366

Post by r00fus »

PatentTroll wrote: post #340
r00fus wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you stop playing games (it happens eventually for many of us), your need to have Windows around will drop considerably. Are there any killer apps other than games to have Windows around @home?

Office. For any "real" word processing in the "real" world, there are no open source equivalents.

I have Office on my Mac.

Plus I really don't use Word/Outlook for home stuff, though sometimes LibreOffice doesn't cut it for spreadsheet stuff.

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

#367

Post by Senji »

sjellis wrote: post #214
plantocorp wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Microsoft employee, this W10 force upgrade things is the single thing that pisses me off the most by far... It goes against everything that we are trying to promote/change. Sometimes I'm really wondering if we work for the same company (I'm not in the Windows division). I feel like all the effort we put in investing in open source, being more open, and just generally a more empathic company is totally destroyed…

I've been in this business a long time, and sadly the whole episode is entirely in line with the general level of competence and empathy that I've come to expect from the Windows division. SQL Server is really good, hugely impressed by .NET Core, but I can say nothing good about Windows today, and haven't been able to for an age. Disclosure: I was one of the people that signed the petition to ask the EFF to get invol…

Windows updates have been so bad about bricking randomly your machines that I've been using slipstreamed installs and completely disabling updates at all.

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

#368

Post by Senji »

r00fus wrote: post #242
ben_jones wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the game Overwatch doesn't have an OSX port so I have windows 10 setup as a dual-boot option. It seems that Microsoft has correctly deduced that users don't really give a fuck. They'll throw a hissy fit, they'll make all sorts of blog posts, but at the end of the day the majority are still staring at a windows 10 installation screen and dealing with it.

Once you stop playing games (it happens eventually for many of us), your need to have Windows around will drop considerably. Are there any killer apps other than games to have Windows around @home?

Excel

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

#369

Post by Senji »

MR4D wrote: post #298
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…

>what happens?

It reverts as if noting happened.

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

#370

Post by Senji »

rasz_pl wrote: post #331
r00fus wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jury is still out: http://superuser.com/questions/1038050/does-oo-shutup-10-eff...

Jury is not out, shutup10 turns off "official' telemetry services. Problem is MS build in telemetry into everything now, explorer, cortana, edge, crypto service or dnscache, _everything_ calls home regularly ~once per hour during ordinary use. Only way to 99.9% block telemetry is to switch blocking all outgoing by default in firewall and whitelist what you use. This still leaves DNS exfiltration route :(

Not if you run your own DNS server.
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