The Black Underbelly of Windows 8.1 'Blue'

snydeq writes "Changes in Microsoft's forthcoming upgrade to Windows 8 reveal the dark underbelly of Microsoft's evolving agenda, one that finds pieces of Windows 8 inexplicably disappearing and a new feature that allows Microsoft to track your local searches cropping up, InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports. 'As Windows 8.1 Milestone Preview testers push and prod their way into the dark corners of Windows 8.1 "Blue," they're finding a bunch of things that go bump in the night. From new and likely unwelcome features, to nudges into the Microsoft data tracking sphere, to entire lopped-off pieces of Windows 8, it looks like Microsoft is changing Windows to further its own agenda.'" A lot of the stuff the article gripes about are what Google has been doing for ages with Android: requiring a Microsoft account, funneling users to their services first, tracking your system usage, etc.

Comments

Expect more of this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has every incentive to do this, and no disincentive.

Seriously, how many people are going to switch to Linux over this? Nobody.

Get used to it.

Re:Expect more of this.

[Fluffeh]

Seriously, how many people are going to switch to Linux over this? Nobody.

Actually, I think that this is finally starting to change. Ever-so-goddam-slowly, but in recent times, I have moved two non tech savvy friends over to Linux partly because it was free, partly because it did everything they wanted. Okay, these folks didn't go out, do the research themselves, pick their 'nix flavour and get into a terminal window - but after seeing how easy most things are, I have managed to encourage two more users to switch. A few and a good few months into their little linux saga respectively, neither would consider switching back. Disclaimer: one of these machines is merely a media server and transcoder (Ubuntu, MediaTomb and MakeMKV) but even that is a good win in my books.

I think the biggest issue with these changes for Microsoft will be when businesses, typically their biggest proponents are going to start frowning about these changes. I dare say that for every company that switches off Windows, half their employees will change OS at home. Perhaps not straight away, but in time.

Re:Expect more of this.

[Opportunist]

Bluntly, the average Linux distri is, from a surface point of view, more Windows than Windows 8.

Re:Expect more of this.

[Entropius]

I find KDE to be wonderful (and, in fact, used it as a replacement for the Win8 that my new laptop came with). It's pretty easy to use, pretty flexible if you care, and in general just gets the hell out of the way. It doesn't try to be everything -- it's a window manager, and a thing that provides basic services like network management. (The exception is the annoying "notifications" mechanism...)

Re:Expect more of this.

[rockout]

Depends what you mean by many. OS X's market-share has been rising for almost a decade, slowly but steadily. Has Linux's?

Re:Expect more of this.

[0123456]

Getting lots of conflicting advice and no actual solution.

The solution is easy. If you want something that works almost like Windows XP or Windows 7, download Mint MATE edition and install it.

And since Mint is supposedly now the most popular Linux distro, they should be getting that advice from most people they ask.

Re:Expect more of this.

[UltraZelda64]

No... most people run Windows because they don't know any better, and they don't want to know any better. When is the last time you saw someone who knew that there were alternatives? When is the last time you saw someone who, after learning about alternatives, was willing (ie. not afraid) to try something new? How many people even cared, ignorantly just saying "well I'm used to Windows" after having everything you said go out the other ear? The answers are probably "never" and "next no one" in any case.

Re:Expect more of this.

[devent]

I find the notifications in KDE the best of the whole desktop (maybe a little bit exaggerated).
It stays out of my way and only shows up if something noteworthy have happened. But if I need the information about the current process I have a very informative window.

I very much like how KDE have integrated the notifications in one widget, for copy, download, system updates, errors, etc. Windows for example have not manage to do that at all.

Re:Expect more of this.

[MachineShedFred]

Not yet.

I know of at least 5 Fortune-100 companies that are either in early-life support, or full rollout of Mac OS X as an IT-supported option. They wouldn't be doing that if there wasn't a reason - either user choice in order to make employees happier, a TCO argument that pencils out, or something that works better and more efficiently.

Are they replacing all their Windows boxes? No. But if large insurance companies are supporting them somewhere besides the marketing department, then something in the IT zeitgeist has changed.

Re:Not surprising is it?

[msauve]

MS is the new IBM.
Apple is the new MS.
Google is the new Apple.
IBM is the new Google.

What goes around, comes around. Except for Dell and HP(/Compaq/DEC). They're just dead. (Agilent is the new HP)

"google does it too"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya, but at least you aren't paying extra for the privilege of being tracked like you do with a microsoft product. Its a trade off for 'free' services in google-land.. In the microsoft world you pay thru the nose AND get tracked.

Google is more upfront about it too.

( that said, neither is right.. but one is less bad about it )

Windows 8.1 also broke the Windows RT jailbreak

[Myria]

In addition to a lot of other misfeatures like shoving Microsoft Accounts down your throat, Microsoft actually went out of their way with Windows RT 8.1 to lock out the jailbreak that allows you to run non-Metro applications on Windows RT 8.0. Windows RT is basically just Windows 8 ported to ARM, desktop and all, but Microsoft made Windows RT unable to run any non-Microsoft program in the desktop -- all third-party applications *must* be Metro applications on the Windows Store. I really think that Windows RT is Microsoft's testbed for what they envision as the future of all of Windows, both desktop and tablet.

The jailbreak made Windows RT able to run unsigned applications on the desktop. Some open-source applications have now been ported to the jailbroken Windows RT environment. That's pretty much all the jailbreak allowed you to do -- run some desktop-mode open-source programs on Windows RT. The jailbreak doesn't seem to facilitate Windows Store application piracy at all -- at least, I haven't heard of such hacks.

And yet, Microsoft went well out of their way to block it. They revoked the certificate used to sign all RT 8.0 applications. They changed the debugger policy on RT to not allow WriteProcessMemory. They rewrote considerable portions of the Windows RT-specific lockdown DLL, wldp.dll. They marked csrss.exe as a DRM-related "protected process", even though it has nothing to do with DRM. This latter change applies to x86 as well, even though the change was clearly designed to target the method by which the Windows RT 8.0 jailbreak worked.

I'm working on a new jailbreak for RT 8.1. I already have code executing in kernel mode in RT 8.1, so it's just a matter of putting everything together. I'm going to wait until the 8.1 final release before releasing the jailbreak, though, to make things more complicated for Microsoft to fix.

Re:Apple

[MrL0G1C]

people already have gmail accounts and Google makes it painless

Gmail in browser on android: unusable, mobile version: all features stripped out, desktop version: doesn't work because the stupid compose email box insists on moving itself off-screen.

Android email app and gmail app: both suck bad, lacking in features and never f**king remember or offer email addresses which I have emailed 10 times already.

Gmail on android It is not 'painless' to use it is an awful nightmare to make emails with (Galaxy Note 2).