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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.
... it begins.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is the price of "free" MS upgrades.
Are you still being paid enough to shill for Windows 10, even in the face of something like this? Honestly, how much more of this do you think people are going to put up with before they say 'enough is enough'? Doesn't matter if you can turn them off or not -- they shouldn't be there in the first place! There's no excuse for this, none whatsoever.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It doesn't. You're being monetized.
They tried to get into the ad game by muscling in on Google with Bing... and lolfailed hard.
Molesting Windows users is all they have left in the game. Well, Windows and Xbox users.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The annoying part isn't that Microsoft would try to advertise on your own lock screen. No, the moment we heard that Windows 10 was announced as a free upgrade, we all knew they'd eventually stoop to this level. The annoying part is how they refer to it in their settings.
"Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more"!? Go piss up a rope, you insincere, weasel-mouthed, marketing stooges. You've already hidden the option to turn the ads off behind a labyrinth of menus, you could at least give us the courtesy of not bullshitting us any further than that.
Who the fuck stares at their screen AFTER THEY ARE DONE USING IT?
They do the same thing on my Kindle. It shows ads after I am done using it.
I couldn't give a shit if they put "You are a giant tool." on the screen after I am done using it.
Well I guess I won't have any ads on my lock screen until the next update restores Windows Spotlight as default...
@cyberrecce
Hee, advertisement companies. Still wondering why people hate advertisements so much? Because these days it's really being overdone!! Flashy, beeping and screaming shit at places where you don't want them. Advertisements in the lockscreen of my own fucking PC is not only crossing the line, it's first spitting and taking a big dump on it before crossing it. It might even be going back, jumping on your own shit to make it extra messy and crossing it again!
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
Same reason "God" needs a spaceship.
Table-ized A.I.
How much would it cost to get a Linux ad placed there?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Enjoy your advanced gpu and play some computer games. :)
After that turn Microsoft off and return to any other real OS. No need to go deep into settings on a real OS to get basic users rights back.
Its always your computer
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
to get into the MS ad network and display gape porn on their network...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
3 BSODs within 2 days of taking it out of the box. Tablet mode is unusable, They sell it on the strength of using existing Windows apps, like firefox but clicking on the text boxes inside firefox (or older windows apps that don't use the stock windows edit boxes) don't bring up the on-screen keyboard. Power saving modes like you find on android or iOS devices are an after thought. Microsoft still treats this thing as a PC so coming out of sleep mode is not fast.
Basically it's an overpriced but nice ultrabook.
So I reached the level of acceptance as it, still, barely, serves the purpose I bought it for.
Last night I wanted to order a pizza - something stupidly easy to do on android or my iPhone with an app - So I went to the microsoft store and searched for a papa johns app for a lark.
No apps found.
No apps found?! WTF?!
Fine, how about Dominos.
Here's one... for India. That's nice except I live in the United States.
OMG...Here I am trying to at least "live" in the Microsoft eco-system and it's like a bunch of Paklids running the joint - "We have Microsoft App Store! We are Smart!"
And now... NOW they're forcing ads onto the lock screen?!
Microsoft is dead. I've got everyone in my friends and family holding onto Windows 7 (and have disabled windows update) and while I'm forced on my surface to use Windows 10 - Well, this is where I leave you.
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.
Can't we sue them for loss of traffic, electricity used, and using your device as an ad board?
Up to this point I wasn't really put off by Microsoft's spying - and I know I was very much in the minority there (but I'm not a Windows user so I guess that was purely a hypothetical opinion anyway).
I was under the assumption it was there for usage statistics to make a better product. I've work on a paid iPhone app where we recorded anonymous usage statistics so we can see how people are interacting with the product and it was super useful for making a better product - note that users were informed of this tracking and had to opt in.
With advertising, Microsoft poison that argument, now they spy on you for the same reason as every other company.
It's turtles all the way down.
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
If you want to make sure you're not hit with these ads, follow these steps to disable Windows Spotlight: buy a Mac (or install Linux!)
FTFY.
Yaz
Windows is the only consumer operating system which is not free as in beer. Upgrades to OSX, iOS and Android are always available for free. Android is also free to OEMs. This disadvantage can not be competitive long term. Since Microsoft doesn't sell much hardware, they have to make money on advertisement, cloud services or Windows store commissions.
Kindles have always had two prices. The lower price with ads is the advertised price. You can pay a higher price for the one without ads on the lock screen.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Another reason to move to either Linux or Mac O/S. Games are the only reason to stay with Microsoft unfortunately
Best thing is they're probably gonna be served directly from Microsoft servers, making it impossible to block through host blacklisting without losing anything actually useful, like security patches. But oh, well, the setting does exist. The wider problem here is the amount of people who they will reach out of the fact they simply aren't savvy enough to disable them, much like most Google opt outs. Either that or the setting itself filled with WARNING screens saying how much they lose disabling it, pretty much mitigating the soul count turning that crap off out of fear. It's mesmerizing the lenght companies will go instilling the notion that ads are good for all of us. Get a fukin clue
Ubuntu is way ahead of the curve.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
When will Apple catch up?
Point taken, but then substitute Debian or OpenBSD or ...
Stephan
Now we just sit back and wait for infected ad servers to deliver 0-day malware....
If I put this story in a bottle (along with enough context to make it meaningful), and put the bottle into a time machine, and set my former self as the recipient, I'd have to dial all the way back to cow-pasture Iowa 80386 (circa 1986) before my former self would do much more than go "oh my god, that's awful, but not actually all that hard to envision—if mass society remains dumber than trees for another three entire decades".
Then my former self would think, "wow, the generation gap is truly smaller than it first appears" and then "shit, I was kind of hoping the enter key would be gone by then" and soon I'd be in my cups and on my way to rent a copy of WarGames so as to even more earnestly root on the WOPR.
Well, then it is again time to do a long-term evaluation ..cough...cough... of Windows 2012, just like back in the days of XP and 2003. 2003 was better in every regard over XP, especially when running Autocad and 3DS Max even with Geforce 2 cards softmoded to Quadro and overclocked Duron @+30% clock. This served me well for ages, and the whole reinstallation of the OS and the apps every 30 or 60 days was not even a bad idea when you had your disk partitioned in the right way.
I'll contact Microsoft right now and see what the process is of downgrading this license to Windows 7. After today I don't think anyone will buy this product.
Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated. We will add your license keys to our own, and your PC will adapt to service us. Windows 10, lead project manager
How much would it cost to get a Linux ad placed there?
You could ask amazon? they use Linux to run their kindles which have ads. You could buy a Linux ad from amazon.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
With this, interest in Linux and *BSDs just got a little bit stronger. More users means more potential developers and advocates.
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.
You know those telemetry updates you can't turn off? It'll be reporting back to Microsoft exactly what your lock screen setting is.
In a week or two, a group of MBA fuckwits will be poring over a report entitled, "Percentage of users to disable Spotlight in period 2/24 to 3/9" and reaching conclusions from it.
If it's low, expect this shit to ramp up in intensity. If not, expect a pukeworthy "We've listened to our valued customers decided the time in not right to bring exciting and engaging content tailored to your interests"
How's it feel to be monetized until the pips squeak, calculated with exquisite perfection?
Microsoft doesn't refer to this as molesting. They prefer "customer experience."
Unsolicited Finger In the Anus. Popularized on the website Fark.com and is a cliche among TotalFarkers. Originated from a news story about a young man who poked his friends in the backdoor with his finger on a high school football bus trip. In the story, the judge is quoted as saying "an unsolicited finger in the anus, while crude, is not criminal".
This is one of the really great things about Windows, how it introduces features to people that they really want and need. Having Windows constantly context aware insert product placements directly into peoples lives will really help them be aware of the things they need to spend money on.
Ads are great and anyone who doesn't like this won't know what they are missing. I want to thank Microsoft for introducing this feature to computers. Anyone who doesn't like these features in windows is probably just really stupid.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Those of us who have had a couple of rounds on the tech sphere already know this fact --- you just have to be a jerk to survive the Microsoft corporate culture
In fact, the more jerk one happened to be the hire the Microsoft corporate ladder that individual gonna attained
When you see something like this, you know that the Product development group has taken a back seat to the commercial / sales groups at a company.
No self-respecting product designer / owner at a company would allow such a fundamental, first impression of the product to be tainted by advertising as they designed the thing. What product manager would say, during the design process, "wouldn't it be great if we could show ads all over the home screen of people's phones!"
No. Only after the filter had been applied by the marketing / sales department and commercial officers to say, "well, we need to raise more revenue to make our shitty product line seem good" would the product team reluctantly agree to allow ads to make their way into this.
All respect lost.
I won't upgrade then - seems to click this little popup on the lower right corner boasting millions of idiots are using it off, is the lower pain....
This is no longer true. It is possible to download open source iOS apps, and build and install them into your iOS device. That whole $$$ required to get a developer certificate quietly went away a while back.
To be sure, you do need an apple account to get the now free device cert, and so this doesn't quite qualify as 'opening up their devices', but at least it no longer costs cash. That said, there are few iOS open source apps, since the vast majority of people don't seem to mind paying a bit of money for an app. They also don't mind that they're being 'tracked', whatever that might mean in the context of installing applications. If I visit a website, I am constantly bombarded by ads from that site until I go and delete the tracking cookies. If I install an iOS app, this doesn't happen (of course). So while they know I've installed an app - a good thing, by the way, since the purchase can be restored if you lose the device, and even installed on what appears to be an unlimited number of additional iOS devices - they don't appear to do anything with that information.
For OSX of course, there has never been any restriction beyond having to turn off gatekeeper. The dialog that pops up and complains that you're trying to run unsigned software even directs you to the appropriate place in the system settings.
What Amazon,Google OS version is out for me to get for my PC please?
Jack of all trades,master of none
I wish MS had been more upfront about the fact that Windows 10 is advertising/personal data collection-supported software. Between the automatically installed Candy Crush Saga, the Get Office and Get Skype ads which reinsert themselves with every Windows update, and of course the keylogger, Microsoft should be paying the end users substantial sums of money to run Windows 10.
Sent from my iPhone
I could hardly imagine a business system where full screen commercials keep popping up.
No business that I have worked for would put up with that.
I would love to see Anonymous, Lizard Squad or whoever are the latest "hacktivists" poison the Ad servers to push out ads for Apple, Ubuntu, heck even Haiku or ReactOS. I think it would be somewhat poetic!
Precisely. And I actually worked there at the time. Made me physically ill.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I feel bad people have to deal with this nonsense. I am very happy to have moved on to OS X.
Windows 10 = adware = malware... Now we are starting to see why MS was trying to force windows 10 upgrades on us.
Time to start complaining to local regulators, at least in those countries with consumer protection laws.
The above product advertisement from an AC is actually on topic and the sort of thing that could be used in this situation so should not have been modded down.
Even if APK's solution would be appropriate and on-topic, he has lost any goodwill from this community by his incessant spamming.
Not surprisingly /.ers are irate, but it won't matter a jot to MS.
Leaving the corporate world aside, most domestic Windows users aren't those in the know. They're families, students and old ladies who don't know how to turn off updates, don't know how to turn of ads, but more importantly, have been conditioned into thinking that Windows is the only option if you want a home computer.
Back in the 1970s/80s, people in the UK actually bought Austin Allegros, which were an unmitigated fiasco of a car, but your average car buyer never really went through the process of thinking maybe there was something better out there.
What do you need a lock screen for? All it's there for is to make you hit a key to make it go away. Utterly useless. So get rid of it! Regedit, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows, create a Personalization key if there isn't one, make a DWORD (32-bit) Value of NoLockScreen and set it to 1. Reboot and it's gone.
Unlike Microsoft, Canonical actually listened to its users. Unity 8 will have the Amazon thing as opt-in instead of opt-out.
Besides which, there are other Linux options out there besides Ubuntu, and there are other desktop options besides Unity.
Opt-out is the standard excuse of spammers, scammers, and assorted miscreants.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Is it April 1st yet?
I'm not having an operating system that inserts advertising into my most private device in my home.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
If the spying wasn't bad enough,now ads ON YOUR HOME COMPUTER? NO MORE,Micro$oft -get off my machine
Geek Hillbilly
Javashit-rendered website, DON'T CLICK
The better multi-function printers and copiers support a few different options for transferring scans, such as sending to email or FTP or a Samba share. Again, if you buy cheap crap, then you get what you paid for.
And then sometimes you have bad surprises.
We've bought a network connected Cannon i-SENSYS mf8550Cdw Laserprinter/Scanner multifunction. (with support for Google Print and Air Print)
In my opinion Cannon is supposed to be a more or less reliable brandname.
Big surprise:
the thing doesn't speak Postscript.
It only speaks UFR (an obscure proprietary format of Cannon) for which the drivers are a bit PITA to get to compile (cannon provides a mixed binary and source-code components)
and PCL - for which luckily there's a driver, requiring only to manually craft a PPD (sorry, no links yet).
Note that, Mac OS X is similarily left in the dust (the official Canon driver fails to install, I can't get pxlcolor to work), luckily at leat AirPrint seems to work (and let the printer's firmware rasterize the PDF documents).
Google Print still doesn't function - the steps described in the manual just fail.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I would be lying if I didn't say that it gets annoying to learn on this site about all the crappy shit MS has been pulling with Windows 10 since it's release. If my laptop hadn't fried over a month ago I don't think I would have to worry about this as much but since I needed a replacement device asap and most of us still have that one program that only runs on windows (for now, anyways), I had to bite the bullet. Thankfully there are some dedicated to finding this crap and letting the rest of us know.
Yet another reason to switch to Linux...
Everyone is complaining about the ads themselves. What about the bandwidth thievery happening? All you whippersnappers on FIOS may not mind a little stolen bandwidth, but for all of us who are rural dwellers and have to rely on satellite, I say FUCK YOU WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER, MICROSOFT! My satellite provider only gives me 10 gigs/month before I get throttled. I don't want even more advertising hogging my limited bandwidth!
This is what we get for needing to have fancy clocks, slide shows, weather updates, and all other kinds of garbage cluttering up our PC experience. To me this is kind of like the sound scheme, just another thing to turn off. Who the heck even wants to hear beep-boop every time they click on anything? And who the heck even wants tips, photos, or anything else on the lock screen? The same sort of idiot who walks on my lawn I assume.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
What bothers me is Windows 10 computers for kids. Micro$oft will be showing ads to them as well? I think in Quebec, that my friend Micro$oft, is a bad move as advertising directly to minors is prohibited. I think I'll just sit back and watch this one explode on Micro$oft in a most spectacular way.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
If I had mod points, APK, I'd toss you a +1 this time - unfortunately, it is trivial for MS to get around your Hosts (as well as all adblocks) as they can hardcode IPs at a more base level. Only proper way to do this is at the router level now*.
* Ok, maybe always, but before now** it still worked the other way.
**now ==current version of Windows, my Win7 still behaving itself (though I have a very modified hostfile and adblocks).
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
APK will NEVER get a +1 from me, no spammer should ever be rewarded even if they're correct.
http://marsandmore.com - Posters of space, spacecraft, and astronomy.
I view the merits of the posts individually. In theory, receiving +1's when appropriate could encourage good behaviour. In practice ... maybe not, but even chronic trolls like Sexconker say something good every now and then & I don't think it's fair to judge the message by the messenger (and he has been down-modded to -1 - I'm not saying he deserves a +5, but a +1 would not be inappropriate).
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Cool guys don't spend all day spamming and trolling.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Several years ago, I wrote a haiku:
Thunderstorms outside
Microsoft software inside
It's safer out there
Now that I've started using Windows 10, please substitute "Hurricane" for "Thunderstorms".
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Hmm maybe you didnt tell the last sideloaded application that i recieved for some of my users. The thing had some sort of code in it that expired and had to be re-sideloaded every year or something like that. Im not a developer but the error that came up was something along the lines of "Untrusted Enterprise Developer..." and the application soon stopped running at all with NO error message (thanks for the troubleshooting help there apple!).
Whereas a trivially rooted android device is beyond trivial to sideload things 100% effectively for all time.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
I do have a Kindle. As a matter of fact, I have one of the ad supported ones... but I knew that when I bought it. It was advertised up front. Unlike *free* Windows 10 which I don't recall ever advertising that it has ads. That's the problem... and Microsoft knows it. Why do you think they waited to turn this feature on? I bet a ton of people wouldn't have done the *free* upgrade if they knew they were going to ads right off the bat. Imagine the ads there from day one... how do you think that would look? Crappy, of course. :P
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.start64.com/index.p...
Gets data for blocking ads, trackers + known bad sites via 10 reputable security community sites.
* Better on power/cpu/ram+ other IO resource use vs. local DNS servers & certainly less security issues vs. DNS servers + routers for years now too - Blocks all ads + known bad sites, all the time (not like "AlmostALLAdsBlocked" bribed by google to let ads through)
APK
P.S.=> Does more for speed (hardcoded favorites + adblocking), security (adblocking + blocking known bad sites/servers & dns issues avoiding DNS), reliability (vs. downed or dns poisoned dns), & anonymity (avoids dns request logs) vs. ANY other SINGLE "so-called -solution'" out there, bar-none using what you already natively have. Unlike Adblock\UBlock\Ghostery it's also not detectable & blockable by ClarityRay/BlockIQ + it uses FAR LESS RESOURCES yet does far more (especially vs. DNS security issues)
... apk
I believe this is a prank called "goosing". Here's an example where Robert De Niro gooses Zac Efron on the set of Bad Grandpa.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Maybe they'll activate your camera to see your reactions to ads next as is being done with some billboards.