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[pisskop]

I turned off all my ugrades.

And Ive been happier ever since.


One day, the linuxes will be mines, and I can cleanse myself of the urge to by fadish games and can say Im am teh smarties

[Sergarr]

I turned off all my ugrades.

And Ive been happier ever since.


One day, the linuxes will be mines, and I can cleanse myself of the urge to by fadish games and can say Im am teh smarties

I never turned on the upgrading in the first place, since I've owned a computer, which was more than 10 years ago. Granted, I think that at first it was because phone-modem Internet is very badly suited for downloading big files, but I don't feel that I've missed out on anything, seeing the way that Microsoft pushes forward Windows 10 (sadly, successfully, for a lot of people).

I know that people usually predict that you would catch a lot of viruses if you don't upgrade, but honestly, I don't remember having any serious problems with these myself (i.e. not counting computer-illiterate people around me doing dumb things on the Internet).

[scriver]

Jerusalem no

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

America - The Meme World

[Aklyon]

Microsoft is ramping up their Windows 10 conversion efforts. Now they are trying to get me to agree to an automatically schedule upgrade. The ok button is big and obvious but the "do not schedule" option is a tiny little itty-bitty hyperlink-esque option in a bottom corner of the prompt window.

If my computer one day just magically upgrades to windows 10 then I'm switching to linux out of spite.

Sonlirain's way works, theres also this if you want to double check.

[Avis-Mergulus]

I turned off all my ugrades.

And Ive been happier ever since.


One day, the linuxes will be mines, and I can cleanse myself of the urge to by fadish games and can say Im am teh smarties

As a person whose is teh linuxes, I can say that a surprising amount of shit will run on it even without wine, and the number is growing.

[Spehss _]

It's been interesting to see MS's narrative on Win10 Upgrades change over time:

• First, it was a limited time offer. "Don't miss out! Upgrade for Free for a Limited Time!"
• Then, it was bargaining. "Why not upgrade for free still? Here's all these reasons! Also we're discontinuing support of the old OS a few years early whoops."
• Now, it's turned to aggression. "Hey guess what, I'm just going to upgrade you unless you tell me explicitly not to. Oh, and I'm gonna make it hard to say that too."

I thought it was suspicious it was free in the first place. Now, I understand MS has a fair bit to gain, given that they're collecting and selling information the way social media does, but across the entire the OS itself. The info it collects is apparently worth more per person than the entire development of the OS, the advertising campaigns, and the PR hit they've taken for all the coercion to upgrade.

I know that I don't run a large multinational business, but maybe you guys could make a good product that doesn't make people feel vulnerable and exploited, and is an improvement over the last generation. Maybe then people would seek out the upgrade on their own, and would even be willing to pay for it!

What the heeeeeeeeelllllllll kind of information could they be selling that's worth so much? As if I wasn't already convinced to move to Linux eventually. Now I'm, uh, more convinced. Doubly convinced.

What a scummy sounding business plan.

[Lord Shonus]

Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 so hard because they don't want to put up with another decade of being blamed for security problems that are caused by stubborn refusal to upgrade.

The whole "they're selling your data and spying on you" is an unproven conspiracy theory.

[Bauglir]

There is absolutely no way it's worth that much per person. Presumably they expect it to be worth that much in aggregate, but it's worth noting that besides the obvious "We're gonna sell your shit to advertisers" motive, they expect a return in intuitively-designed software interfaces outcompeting other vendors who don't have access to that data, plus reduced tech support costs as they're able to shift resources according to which problems are the most common and severe, plus the ability to manage desktops remotely to reduce the ability of user ineptitude to fuck things up catastrophically, plus whatever other value they can extract that's not even occurring to me right now. Remember, for most of the world, ease of use is king - privacy, security, and whatever else you might care about doesn't even come close.

EDIT: Ninja'd

[Solifuge]

It's been interesting to see MS's narrative on Win10 Upgrades change over time:

• First, it was a limited time offer. "Don't miss out! Upgrade for Free for a Limited Time!"
• Then, it was bargaining. "Why not upgrade for free still? Here's all these reasons! Also we're discontinuing support of the old OS a few years early whoops."
• Now, it's turned to aggression. "Hey guess what, I'm just going to upgrade you unless you tell me explicitly not to. Oh, and I'm gonna make it hard to say that too."

I thought it was suspicious it was free in the first place. Now, I understand MS has a fair bit to gain, given that they're collecting and selling information the way social media does, but across the entire the OS itself. The info it collects is apparently worth more per person than the entire development of the OS, the advertising campaigns, and the PR hit they've taken for all the coercion to upgrade.

I know that I don't run a large multinational business, but maybe you guys could make a good product that doesn't make people feel vulnerable and exploited, and is an improvement over the last generation. Maybe then people would seek out the upgrade on their own, and would even be willing to pay for it!

What the heeeeeeeeelllllllll kind of information could they be selling that's worth so much? As if I wasn't already convinced to move to Linux eventually. Now I'm, uh, more convinced. Doubly convinced.

What a scummy sounding business plan.

Ah, that's not what I meant; I could have worded it better, but ya know, mildly disgusted.

Given that they're willing to distribute the OS to new users for free, indefinitely, and through strong coercion, we can conclude that the estimated value of the collected data per user over the lifetime of the OS will offset the cost of production, as distributed among the expected user count (assuming the majority of existing users can be convinced to switch over). Likely with a significant (impossible to determine) profit margin that can sustain the business (given how much of their value is based around OS sales).

EDIT: I should probably add, I get that Big Data has a lot of great benefits, like improvements to technology, usability, and figuring out what people use the device for (for future optimizations, etc.) Even if a lot of it goes to research used to shape advertisements, or whatever else, it's not fundamentally some big bad evil thing. It's all in how much you trust the one collecting said data's intentions. It's just kinda invasive, and I find the coercion tactics pretty annoying and gross. Not what I signed up for when I last upgraded my Windows... and the early end to old OS support just pisses me off even more.

[Baffler]

It's been interesting to see MS's narrative on Win10 Upgrades change over time:

• First, it was a limited time offer. "Don't miss out! Upgrade for Free for a Limited Time!"
• Then, it was bargaining. "Why not upgrade for free still? Here's all these reasons! Also we're discontinuing support of the old OS a few years early whoops."
• Now, it's turned to aggression. "Hey guess what, I'm just going to upgrade you unless you tell me explicitly not to. Oh, and I'm gonna make it hard to say that too."

I thought it was suspicious it was free in the first place. Now, I understand MS has a fair bit to gain, given that they're collecting and selling information the way social media does, but across the entire the OS itself. The info it collects is apparently worth more per person than the entire development of the OS, the advertising campaigns, and the PR hit they've taken for all the coercion to upgrade.

I know that I don't run a large multinational business, but maybe you guys could make a good product that doesn't make people feel vulnerable and exploited, and is an improvement over the last generation. Maybe then people would seek out the upgrade on their own, and would even be willing to pay for it!

What the heeeeeeeeelllllllll kind of information could they be selling that's worth so much? As if I wasn't already convinced to move to Linux eventually. Now I'm, uh, more convinced. Doubly convinced.

What a scummy sounding business plan.

I know Linux has a reputation for being actively antagonistic to its user unless they're an IT professional, but how much of that is just memes? If a viable alternative to Windows exists (other than Apple) I'd be happy to jump on it, but an IT professional I am not.

[itisnotlogical]

Linux is perfectly usable if you've been using Linux for decades. That's what everybody on Linux forums says anyway. Either you know everything about Linux, your distro and your hardware, and you presumably custom-built a machine to avoid many of the fuckups that can catch an unsuspecting newbie by surprise. Because if you've been using Linux for decades then you'd already know about all that shit.

Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 so hard because they don't want to put up with another decade of being blamed for security problems that are caused by stubborn refusal to upgrade.

The whole "they're selling your data and spying on you" is an unproven conspiracy theory.

But Microsoft is an evil Illuminati-esque organization, if they're not the Illuminati themselves. Clearly the answer is to use Linux and settle for the fact that nothing works, except one guy on the Ubuntu forums with his extremely specific purpose-built setup has no problems so he doesn't know what's causing your issue.

[Tawa]

Linux is actually a bunch of different OSes operating off the same base and general philosophy. There's a lot of distros that are more or less Windows with the serial numbers (and you know possible data mining) filed off.

Don't start on Gentoo or something like that though.

-snip-

You don't need to be so passive-aggressive about it :I

[Bauglir]

Ubuntu doesn't even require you to know how to use the command line, so it's what I'd recommend. I'm sure there are many other distros that are the same. Fixing Linux is a slight pain in the ass if you've never used a command line or anything like that, but the basics are straightforward to pick up, and as long as you don't do anything weird and nothing goes wrong in a particularly weird way, that should be enough. Half the time when things are at their worst, you'll just be copying arcane commands off of a shady Russian web forum, anyway - and getting there's a matter of Google.

EDIT: In case I jumped too far ahead, a distribution, or "distro", is a particular type of Linux. The thing that's actually Linux is just a small thing at the core of the OS, and distros are built around it to the tastes of the developers. Ubuntu is a very popular distro, with tons of information available online for getting it up and running if something goes wrong with the user-friendly installation process.

[Aklyon]

Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 so hard because they don't want to put up with another decade of being blamed for security problems that are caused by stubborn refusal to upgrade.

It doesn't help that Windows 10 is subjectively worse in interface design to 7, or that they'll be able to force people to upgrade to windows 11 through unpreventable windows updates even if its worse.

[Solifuge]

The whole "they're selling your data and spying on you" is an unproven conspiracy theory.

Apart from the fact that Win10's terms of service circa August 1 have you agree to said data collection:

Some observed behaviors:

• Clicking on a link from an application (in this case, a download link from within Fiddler) submits the URL you are visiting to urs.microsoft.com.
• Opening applications-- even with SmartScreen disabled-- opens sessions to apprep.smartscreen.microsoft.com and, among other things, submits the hash of the application. EDIT: Apparently you must also disable smartscreen in edge. Even so, it will initiate a connection to w.apprep.smartscreen.microsoft.com
• Typing anything into the search bar will, regardless of settings, initiate an HTTPS session to www.bing.com. It will transmit a cookie, though so far I have not seen anything in there that looks like keystroke monitoring, as the only thing that appears to change between attempts is an HV section of the cookie. It appears to be downloading javascript, and submitting identifying data (screen resolution, install date, SID). The URL it uses is https://www.bing.com/manifest/threshold.appcache
• Opening the settings app and going into account options sometimes opens a session to public-family.api.account.microsoft.com:443. I suppose this would be expected.

It's old now, but anyone with Windows 10 and the technical knowhow could investigate and substantiate/debunk these claims, or investigate other various behaviors that indicate quiet data collection.

TL;DR: It looks like MS at least caches the URLs you click, a shorthand bit of data that IDs applications you run, and bounces local (on-your-harddrive) and online search terms to Bing's database. And this is with maximum possible opt-outs and privacy settings.