Slashdot Mirror
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.
They want to see how long before the new purchaser clicks on "I agree" (Did this guy even bother to read the EULA) then wipe that drive to install something else to make himself more productive.
Unfortunately, he prefers Windows 7. Brings new meaning to the phrase"Win-Win. NOT!"
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Microsoft is also monitoring how long people are using the operating system.
Wow. That sounds like a pretty certain statement of fact...
Microsoft must have been logging individuals' usage times
That sounds less certain.
Maybe they simply know when people installed Windows 10 and what the average computer use per day is (from their own studies), and, actually, "11 billion hours" is not meant to be taken as particularly accurate.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Sadly, if you use hardware or software that requires Windows and the internet, you're hosed at this point. WinXP is no longer really internet safe and most of the privacy screwing aspects of Windows 10 have been back-ported to Windows 7/8 through updates.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
How many of those hours were just because someone didn't shut down when they were done? And why is this even being monitored?
Why? Probably for the same reason they implemented a key logger. You are constantly monitored on W10, and hours of use it probably the most benign of the bunch. Because Microsoft fans will put up with anything Microsoft does. - Microsoft pees on your leg and tells you its raining.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You know the funny part?.. I've installed the latest ISO of the November update, using an OEM Windows 7 Pro product key I had laying around on a spare laptop drive in one of my laptops. I went thru turning off all the cutesy-toosie privacy destroying toggle switches during the install instead of going with the "recommeneded"
defaults, including all of the additional steps done in gpedit.msc, went with a local account vs an MS account. From a lot of articles I've read, that *allegedly* disables nearly all of the more egregious crap.. Note I said "alledgedly"... After loading a copy of rpcapd on my Tomato router and firing up Wireshark and pointing it at the rpcapd instance on the router, I still see this fuckin' Microsoft abortion yammering away at a good number of the listed (in many articles) MS endpoints. In other words, It appears to me, that MS is gonna vacumn up your data come hell or high-water, even if you believe you've "castrated" the fucker.. I guess the only way to prevent this pile of shit from phoning home is to block *.microsoft.com in your hardware firewall... You *do* have one, don't you??? Sooooooooo fuckin' glad I moved all my systems to Linux about 5 years ago.... The *only* reason I was trying out Win10 was the fact that I *know* I'm gonna be pestered by friends/family to support this pile of shit, so I figured I'd play with it a while....... (shudders)...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
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.
I think it's pretty well publicized that Windows 10 chatters with Microsoft servers quite a bit. It's now even coming to light that new PCs with Win 10 preloaded on them are shipped with the disk encryption feature enabled already, and a copy of the master key for the encryption housed on Microsoft's servers. (If you want to use encryption but not have MS hold on to a master key for it, you have to turn it back off, wait a while for it to complete, and do it all over again, choosing the correct options to keep a key yourself but not to upload one to them.)
The thing is, the average/typical user doesn't CARE that any of this is taking place. The fact that MS holds a key for the encryption means when Joe Sixpack user screws up and locks himself out of his own drive, he can actually get MS support people to unlock it for him. That's more useful in his "real world" scenario than the concern that MS could pass his master key along to the NSA or FBI, who might in turn look at his hard drive full of poorly written Word documents, his country music collection and his stupid drunk party photos, plus his Windows wallpaper backgrounds of his favorite porn stars.
The relative minority who actually concern ourselves with online privacy rights are obviously not a crowd Microsoft really targets or cares much about. If it's that big a deal, you probably need to use something like Linux.
>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.
They backported all that crap to 7 you know.
http://www.extremetech.com/com...
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
a bit more of a hassle
You've just lost 50+% of your target audience.
For the vast majority of users, games come in three forms:
- Click to buy (steam, console downloads.)
- Insert a disc (consoles again.)
- Log onto a website (flash games and their ilk.)
(This applies to non-games as well for the most part, though productivity and business software gets a bit more leeway as they're frequently "must haves" rather than "waste a couple hours.")
People don't want to work to be entertained. They just want to play the damned game, watch the damned show, etc. And most people don't find fiddling with Wine settings and other "technical" things to be excessively entertaining.
About as long as we pretend like all other OSes dont gather data on how their software is used
Gentoo does no such thing. Really.
In some countries the EULA would be thrown out and burned if ever tried in court.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I wouldn't say the Raspbian on RPi is representative of 'desktop Linux'.
New things are always on the horizon
Like many people, I block them on the router level.
If I missed some of them, please tell me.
choice.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com.nstac.net
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net
df.telemetry.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
redir.metaservices.microsoft.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
services.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
settings-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
sqm.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
ssw.live.com
statsfe1.ws.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
telemetry.appex.bing.net
telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.urs.microsoft.com
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
vortex.data.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.ne
Indeed. The role of games in cementing MS's domination on the desktop is often overlooked. But it's games that keep the general public running Windows on their home PC (whether for themselves or for family members). And it's the fact that pretty much everybody uses Windows at home that means that businesses and Governments know that they can save a lot of time and money on staff training by using Windows, as everybody will just know how to use it.
The irony is that MS just spent more than a decade trying to downplay PC/Windows gaming, by throwing out a competitor to it in the shape of the Xbox line. What's interesting is that since Phil Spencer took over MS's gaming operations, he's swung the focus heavily back onto PC gaming (implying, I think, that he "gets it"). We hear a lot less about "Xbox exclusives" these days and a lot more about "Xbox/Win10 exclusives").
And no, Linux gaming is not even vaguely close to being an acceptable replacement for Windows gaming at the moment. A good chunk of PC gamers use the platform because it allows them to run the latest titles with better performance and visual fidelity than the consoles. Telling them to use an OS where they'll be mostly limited to older games and crappy driver support isn't going to cut it.
Valve have been trying hard to push it, as they know that in the long-term, having their platform be dependent upon a competitor's OS isn't a good business strategy. They got a nasty shock from Win8's app store, until it turned out to be shite. But the jury is very much still out on whether Valve are going to make serious headway with SteamOS. They've got a lot of work to do to convince publishers and hardware manufacturers.
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.
Slackware and Debian as well don't spy on me either.... in fact I am certain that BSD does not as well.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.