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Microsoft's Telemetry Additions To Windows 7 and 8 Raise Privacy Concerns
WheezyJoe writes: ghacks and Ars Technica are providing more detail about Windows 10's telemetry and "privacy invasion" features being backported to Windows 7 and 8. The articles list and explain some of the involved updates by number (e.g., KB3068708, KB3022345, KB3075249, and KB3080149). The Ars article says the Windows firewall can block the traffic just fine, and the service sending the telemetry can be disabled. "Additionally, most or all of the traffic appears to be contingent on participating in the CEIP in the first place. If the CEIP is disabled, it appears that little or no traffic gets sent. This may not always have been the case, however; the notes that accompany the 3080149 update say that the amount of network activity when not part of CEIP has been reduced." The ghacks article explains other ways block the unwanted traffic and uninstall the updates.
"Raises privacy concerns" is elliptical speech: it's made to be deliberately obscure. (It uses "causes concern" to convey the central point without giving any information about what the point is.)
It's also passive voice, in that there's no person performing the action, the action is simply "caused" by something. (For comparison, consider "we wrote reports" versus "reports were written".) Hence, there's no person or group responsible, it's simply an aspect of situation.
And finally, the phrase uses framing to soften the effect. Your personal information isn't being harvested, the system simply "raises some concerns".
Taken as a whole the headline tries to get the reader emotionally involved by stating something we should be concerned about, without saying in concrete terms *that* there is anything to be concerned about, and that it's *other people* who are concerned.
Meh. This didn't work on me, I'm not actually concerned, I'm going to ignore it.
(Propaganda success!)
https://github.com/WindowsLies...
Someone is on the case!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
And it's a failure b/c they ignore what people really wanted: the Start Menu.
Instead we got the Start List: 100+ icons to scroll through.
Only Santa's list is longer.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I really want to like Windows 10. It seems to have a lot of nice features, was a smooth upgrade from 7, and probably the single most painless OS upgrade I've had on any MS platform (I had to correct a single driver, for a minor issue, and that was it).
But I'm really, really sick of just how blatantly Microsoft is trying to jam every single stupid thing into this, and tie it back to their cloud based bit. And I might even be okay with some of that, because I'm well aware that I wind up giving a lot to Google when I'm using stuff on Android. I might even use some of it, if they weren't going far beyond even what Google does.
The final straw was when they wanted to essentially remove my local account on the machine and replace it with me using a Microsoft account for my local login. No, sorry, but Redmond can go get fucked if they want that. It's one thing to have stuff in a cloud based application that has its own password, but it's another thing for that cloud based password to be my entire system. Perhaps I'm being overly negative, but it's just too much, that they want all this personal data, and they want to tie it all not just to what I do in application land with Outlook/Bing/Edge/Cortana/Skype whatever, but down to the OS level? No. And if it gets worse, I may just have to bite the bullet and do my PC gaming on Linux, and give up on doing anything bleeding edge.
The funny part is that there was a man who saw all this coming back in the early 90s who nobody listened to. His name is Richard Stallman.
Stallman warned everyone that proprietary software turns on the user in the end. People are complaining that Windows now sucks, and they have all these expensive (closed source too) tools they depend on for their livelihood that can't run on any platform besides Windows. Well, I guess they're getting what's coming to them. Stallman tried to warn them, but they didn't listen because they wanted stuff to "just work". Well, Stallman's inconvenient truth can no longer be ignored.
So have fun Windows users. I hope that your short term gains were worth not solving the problem in an open, portable, way.
Would the editors consider adding a section for analysis of Windows updates so we can read then decide if we want them instead of having to go on click marathons through the desktop client? Even some sort of Patch Tuesday digest just indicating which of the updates are actual security patches would do it.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel