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Microsoft Monitoring How Long You Use Windows 10 (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: The various privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 have received a lot of coverage in the media, but it seems that there are ever more secrets coming to light. The Threshold 2 Update did nothing to curtail privacy invasion, and the latest Windows 10 installation figures show that Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system. This might seem like a slightly strange statistic for Microsoft to keep track of, but the company knows how long, collectively, Windows 10 has been running on computers around the world. To have reached this figure (11 billion hours in December, apparently) Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times. Intrigued, we contacted Microsoft to find out what on earth is going on.
Monitoring how long people use Windows 10?? Is that the best you could do?
It takes snapshots of memory, which is a way of getting passwords for third party apps, and will also get bits of documents you're working on.
It watches the programs you run, and sends those details.
It sends your browser history to Microsoft.
It sends you disk encryption keys to Microsoft, this seems to have been an FBI request from 2012.
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2013/09/13/encryption-backdoor-by-fbi.aspx
It does this for everyone, not just Americans subject to FBIs new found law making capabilities.
For pen enabled devices it sends your handwriting.
It lies to you, you turn "off" these diagnositic surveillance feature and it just SLIGHTLY reduces the data its sending!
It's turn on full by default and automatically on at upgrades.
This is *before* we get into Cortana's data grab.
Games actually work surprisingly well on Linux by now. Either natively so or with wine or similar tools. It can of course be a bit more of a hassle to get them to run, admittedly.
The problem is rather in some more obscure programs that you can neither get natively on Linux nor run smoothly in wine. The more pricey and obscure a program gets, the lower the chance that you'll get a working version on Linux.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
>It would be the year of another desktop.
I think other issues are actually a bigger deal.
Interestingly enough, I set up my first Linux desktop last night in 10-ish years. I am very much an old school CLI Unix fellow, but since I'm going to be doing some stuff with the RPi 2B with my assembly students, I thought I'd give the GUI a try and see how much it'd changed in the meantime.
My first impression was that it was terribly ugly and slow. Slow I could deal with, since it's a $35 computer the size of a wallet, but it was still annoying watching it struggling to redraw a web page just because I scrolled down a bit and then scrolled back up. The default UI was bland and terrible. The default web browser ("Web", which is the worst name ever for a web browser, since it makes it impossible to look for solutions for it online, i.e. Epiphany) is slow and terrible. Oh, the ability to set your start page? Yeah, we removed that a while back. For a while we had the ability to set it via the CLI, but then, yeah, we removed that as well. We want everyone in your class to see what the last couple things you Google searched right there when you start it up. (Including, "How do I set the start page for Web?".) Double clicking in the top left corner of a window doesn't close the window, despite the window decorations by default otherwise being cloned exactly from Windows. Wi-Fi Supplicant is terrible (and help on the web on how to fix Wifi for the RPi can actually break it much worse), and I eventually switched to a wired connection to avoid its random crapouts. Changing the picture for the background in the appearance settings didn't change the actual background. Neither did right clicking an image from the web in Web (again, terrible name), and choosing "Set image as background". No audio settings (for setting the volume) obvious by default. Playing Youtube videos in Web is shit. The default clock in the bottom right of the screen has the rightmost number clipped in half.
Not to say this is the end of the story (I fixed all of the above, even the slowness), but these are reasonable, sane actions that developers should expect an end user to try, and when very simple things like setting desktop backgrounds and wifi settings don't work, or when you can't set your fucking start page in a web browser, it's enough to make the whole thing look like amateur night at the OS vendor faire.
To be fair, it IS a RPi, which is a very weak system, but it *is* the first Linux GUI that most people will see, and very probably the last as well for many of them, and a quad-core 900Mhz processor is many many times faster than the 68000 processor that ran the GUI for my first X11 system back in the day. So it shouldn't be that shitty.
And as it turns out, it doesn't really have to be. As I said above, I fiddled with everything (because that's what you do, natch), reset OpenBox, got a lot more settings appearing, got the desktop background change to work, fixed the window decorations so that they look nice and slick (and not something from the aforementioned 68k running X11), ditched Web, got Iceweasel, and the system not only didn't run slower, it actually ran noticeably smoother with the better window manager. I have it set so I can switch it from 1080p over HDMI to a touchscreen with a popup keyboard that makes for an only slightly awkward tablet computer. I installed tons of dev tools and while, again, it's not a CPU workhorse, it works just fine. I've got it set up as a class server for my assembly class, and it should work just fine for those purposes.
But would the average user go through all that? Would they be happy having to flash their SD card and start over to get another shot at Wifi working? Or would they ragequit out of frustration? In all frankness, the idiotic decisions and awkward user experiences is really no different than what it was like in 2005. Different set of frustrations, maybe, but the overall experience is still the same.
Anyhow, that's my review of the RPI Linux Desktop, reporting live from the year 2016.
That is irrelevant, though, since it is programmed in and there's nothing you can do about it. The court will not and cannot require the program be rewritten so it doesn't disobey the law, and the program will refuse to operate if it "thinks" that you have broken the agreement. If you clicked "No", refusing the EULA, it won't install, despite the FACT that it isn't required to be agreed to for you to have valid legal use of the product.
That's, right, even in the USA, there's no legal necessity for agreement to the EULA, since the copy made in installing IS NOT one controlled by copyright and not even one you make yourself, since it is copied by the program, which was written or given rights to make that copy by the copyright owner.
AND they will refuse to refund. So you have lost the money for the software. If the hardware is only going to be supported with the preinstalled OS, you have also lost the value of the warranty. And if the hardware is insisted as being part of the software/hardware bundle, refusing the EULA still doesn't constitute reason to refund the entire product, software and all, so you're down the entire product.
Not to mention the terms
a) aren't available until too late to say no without losing
b) can be changed at a whim, but you cannot refuse to accept (it will stop working) and if you do, you won't be allowed to get a refund
and, no, don't give me "You've had use of the software!", because they've had use of the money. Quid, quite literally, quo pro.
Since the EULA is PROGRAMMED IN, they don't HAVE to go and get the EULA contested in court. They win AUTOMATICALLY. And it's sure as shit not going to be made law that this private extra-legal non-judicial punishment "justice" system is itself illegal and must be removed. After all, you can in theory risk everything in a one-sided legal case in a court of law, right?
Only free countries.
Dystopian societies like the united States allows companies to enforce that kind of crap on it's citizens.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.