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Windows 10 Now Showing Full Screen Ads On Lock Screen (consumerist.com)
Striek writes: Several media outlets are reporting that Windows 10 has now started showing full screen ads on users' lock screens. They can be turned off, but how many people will actually bother with this? "Tips site How-To Geek discovered that Windows Spotlight, which normally rotates between a selection of photographs, was being used to display an ad for Square Enix's Rise of the Tomb Raider. Understandably, most people probably don't want to be hit in the face with a full-screen ad for a video game before they even unlock their computer. If you want to make sure you're not hit with these ads, follow these steps to disable Windows Spotlight:
Open the Start Menu and search for "Lock Screen Settings."; Under "Background," select either Picture or Slideshow, instead of Windows Spotlight.; Scroll down to "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen" and this toggle." Apparently the "and more" is where Microsoft hid the advertisements.
Why doesn't MS offer a "normal" edition and a "spam and snoop" edition ("Windows 10 SSE" *). The normal version would cost more. At least you'd know what you are getting and can avoid junk by paying more.
* Or Godwin it: "SS"
Table-ized A.I.
That would be epic! I'm willing to throw some dollars at a "mission" like that. Unfortunately, I don't have any contacts there any more. (Years ago, for about a dozen years, I was an MS MVP.) I'd throw a few bucks to help make that happen so long as it's ethical and legal. Depending on how well they sanitize inputs, maybe you can get goatse there - but I'm not gonna help pay for that. I will, on the other hand, download the ISO and run it from a VM and take screen shots of it.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
About half of my family is running Linux instead of Windows. We're geekier than the average, but I can tell you that non-geeks in my family have no problem at all running a Linux desktop. (And I've installed Windows and Linux, and overall it's easier to do a Linux install.)
It has never been easier to junk Windows and switch to Linux. Many people just use email, a web browser, and Facebook; those all Just Work on Linux. Video, sound, it's all fine.
And desktop is getting less important all the time; people are using mobile devices more and more. And Microsoft missed the boat on mobile.
So even as the "network" that makes Windows important is crumbling ("network" as in "network effect"), even as Microsoft's actual power to push people is waning, they keep finding new ways to punish people who stick with them. Hey, nobody will mind if we monitor them a bunch, right? Make it almost impossible to figure out whether it's enabled or not. (If it's even possible to disable it... maybe it isn't!) And start pushing ads, because nobody hates having full-screen ads in their faces.
Is Microsoft actually trying to achieve Windows 8 levels of hatred for Windows 10? Does Linus Torvalds have sleeper agents inside Microsoft trying to make Windows crumble from inside?
Keep this up, MIcrosoft, and we may yet see the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
P.S. I haven't bothered to keep up with all the settings one must change to disable all the bad behaviors in Windows 10. I just checked to see if there's a tool for it... there's a bunch and it's not obvious which one(s) to use. Is there a clear favorite tool to fix the Windows 10 settings?
http://www.ghacks.net/2015/08/14/comparison-of-windows-10-privacy-tools/
Hmm... maybe this one: Spybot Anti-Beacon
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Till the first bit of malvertising that uses this as it's infection vector? Is someone taking bets?
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Welcome to the past. They tried this shit with Active Desktop "channels" in a Windows 95 add-on and part of the core install of Windows 98
Wow, Active Desktop. Enabled by default in ...windows 98? 98SE? And the most common error in the OS, even more common than... well, all the other errors, was a long pause where the system wouldn't respond, followed by the Active Desktop Recovery screen. The first thing I did when working on any PC was turn that crap off. (The second was to disable browse master. Or maybe that was Win95...)
That takes me back. Or is it forward?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The sad thing is that people don't need to be paid to shill.
When I discuss what Win10 is doing with ordinary non-geeks, the reactions usually vary from, "It's not a big deal", to "Oh, I doubt they're doing that". Almost everybody agrees that the control panel options to disable the spyware actually do work, so there's no reason to worry. There doesn't really need to be an excuse for what MS is doing, because even when people are informed about what's happening, they still don't see why there's anything wrong and see us nerdy weirdos as paranoid. Interestingly enough, every day I keep finding more and more people that support Windows10 and actually like it. Hey, it's free, so why not?
I don't like Linux and have always had trouble when experimenting with various distros over the last 12-or-so years. Nonetheless, I am very thankful that it exists and will be switching my workstation to it shortly. My game machine runs Win 7, though, and I honestly have no idea what to do when that OS no longer runs the newest games.