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A Naysayer's Take On Windows 10: Potential Privacy Mess, and Worse
Lauren Weinstein writes: I had originally been considering accepting Microsoft's offer of a free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. After all, reports have suggested that it's a much more usable system than Windows 8/8.1 — but of course in keeping with the 'every other MS release of Windows is a dog' history, that's a pretty low bar. However, it appears that MS has significantly botched their deployment of Windows 10. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised, even though hope springs eternal. Since there are so many issues involved, and MS is very aggressively pushing this upgrade, I'm going to run through key points here quickly, and reference other sites' pages that can give you more information right now. But here's my executive summary: You may want to think twice, or three times, or many more times, about whether or not you wish to accept the Windows 10 free upgrade on your existing Windows 7 or 8/8.1 system.
Now that we're into the first week of widespread availability for the new version, if you're a Windows user and upgrader, has your experience been good, horrible, or someplace between?
It'll give loads of people a way to try to get out of copyright infringement lawsuits... "Windows 10" shared my Wifi password"
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
I've been running Windows 10 on a couple of systems that are six years old. Boot and shutdown times markedly better than Windows 7.
As I understand it, that's because Window 8 and above don't actually shut down, they do some weird partial hibernate thing.
Besides, my Windows 7 box boots in under ten seconds anyway. Most of that is in the BIOS.
That is all they had to do, make security updates required, the others user selectable. Could make them level 1=security, 2=bugfixes, 3=features, 4=drivers, etc. They could look at the Linux Mint updater for ideas.
Sooo easy even a megalomanic CEO could understand.
I have been running Windows 10 on my desktop for the last couple of months and it has been an interesting experience.
I am a WoW player and will sometimes jump into Dragon Age. I also played the SWBF Alpha which ran just fine. My system is an 8 core AMD CPU with a Radeon HD 7900 on an Asus ROG motherboard. There have been definite issues with system stability related to graphics drivers even though the performance has not been noticeably slower.
I was running Windows 7 before and attempted to do an in-place upgrade initially but it failed despite trying many different things. I ended up installing clean from an ISO and have been on the fast ring ever since.
I have enjoyed seeing the evolution of the desktop and the changes to the UI over the last couple of months and I am really happy with the smooth transition from insider to "RTM" bits.
I like Edge even though I will stick with Firefox until there are some key extensions available for it.
I kind of liked the "modern" version of Skype that they then took away.
I am not really sure that I like Cortana integration.... I just am not really sure how to utilize it fully.
I do REALLY like the MSA authentication and Azure cloud services integration though... It is really neat to have seamless integration between my Nokia windows phone and my desktop without having to install any 3rd party stuff.
I used to be like most /.ers and hate MS and Windows, but over the years I have changed my tune. I spent many years running a Gentoo desktop and working through all kinds of problems, but I have sort of come full circle now. My first OS was DOS 6 + Win 3.1... I bought Windows 95 on 20+ floppies then 98 then moved on to Slackware 3 and stayed in the Linux world for several years before returning to Windows 7 on my desktop.
This is the first time I have ever been a beta user of Windows and I have to say it was a fun experience.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
The UI in 10 does look nice
That just goes to show that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As far as I can tell, EVERYTHING has become a monochrome "white-on-dark" or "black-on-white" mid-90's style WordArt icon, to the point where you can't tell some of them apart. They look butt ugly. Why UX people these days think that removing colour from the icons/glyphs, an important visual clue as to the icon's meaning, is beyond me. I'll keep my colourful Windiows 7, thanks. It doesn't run on a mobile phone, but I don't need or want it to.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I own my own domain and I give each service I sign up for a unique contact email alias, which forwards to my real email address (currently I have just shy of 500 aliases). I have never received spam at google@mydomain.com. In fact the vast majority of my email aliases receive no spam, indicating the vast majority of online companies are in fact keeping your private info private (at least not without anonymizing it). Contrary to what seems to be the general belief here.
The two major exceptions have been microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com. Those two companies clearly sold my email address to marketers and spammers.
your constitutional right to a trial. They make you agree to binding arbitration instead. (Section 10 of the EULA).
That one really burns me. It's pretty unAmerican to say "Give up a constitutional right or you can't use our product." (Was that there before?)
How can this be legal? There's got to be a way around that. I have no intentions of ever suing Microsoft, but this rubs me the wrong way. What's next, you have to give up your right to freedom of speech?
The two major exceptions have been microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com. Those two companies clearly sold my email address to marketers and spammers.
Can you be sure? Every now and then, I'll open up the floodgates and alias all of @domain to an account just to see what comes in. At one point I noticed a ton of spam to netflix@, and got pissed until I remembered that the email on my Netflix account isn't netflix@. That's never been a legit alias, so it's probably a dictionary style attack. Spammers are blasting shit out to netflix@<everywhere> much like the ssh bots try logging in as alice, bob, and a few thousand other users that have never existed on most systems.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!