Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
Microsoft receives no love from me for the privacy invasion that is windows 10. But are you seriously nitpicking your surface because you wanted a pizza application from the app store and there wasn't one? I guarantee you that it took you more time to search the appstore than to simply open papajohns.com and log in with your account from any of the multiple browsers that work on the device?
Oh, and multiple blue screens in two days? Let me go ahead and call Bull. Shit. Either you have bad hardware out of the box, or you installed something you shouldn't have. This is not 2001 and windows XP. BSODs are bad hardware, or bad driver.
Now we just sit back and wait for infected ad servers to deliver 0-day malware....
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.
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.
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.
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.
And no it wasn't bullshit but thanks for your concern.
Then you have dodgy hardware, or you are doing something you aren't admitting. One or the other. The devices simply do not BSOD 3 times a week out of the box, not even running pale moon, unless it is defective.
Send it in for warranty.
Pizza apps are a staple of any app ecosystem
Staple or not they are irrelevant nonsense. The Windows app store does have lots of BIG gaping holes... many banks don't have a windows phone app. Many peripherals don't either... from Lego Mindstorms to Harmony Remotes, to communications stuff like RingCentral.
But Pizza? Give me a break. You can still order a pizza on your surface via the website. That's a minor inconvenience at best. Me, I find it MUCH faster to just phone it in.
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.
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.
Are we going to be giving Microsoft 2 years to change their minds? :)
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
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
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