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Even In Remotest Africa, Windows 10 Nagware Ruins Your Day (theregister.co.uk)
Iain Thomson, writing for The Register: When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades. The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link. And it's not just bandwidth bills they have to worry about. "If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft's hands," said one member of the team.This is not a one-off case. We're reading about similar incidents everyday. Automatic updates, accidental automatic update, and the humongous data that these updates eat are ruining user experience for many. These are real issues. It's been roughly a year since Windows 10 has been officially available to consumers, and Microsoft is yet to address the issue.
We keep hearing about this... it's clear that Microsoft doesn't care. I don't understand why people are so shocked by that concept.
--Hired Net Grunt
and a patient is dead as a result, then this issue will get noticed. Not until then.
Set the connection as a metered connection. Windows Update will not pull updates over the connection.
The pushy upgrade was a stupid idea for more than one reason, and this was well known before Microsoft did it. There's the old saw "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Some hardware would quit working. The upgrades were most cavalierly programmed to happen without regard to the customer's needs, able to take a computer out of service for hours, and that could be just when the owner had scheduled some important work. And of course for those with limited, expensive bandwidth, it's damned rude of Microsoft to pig out on such a precious resource without asking. That's stooping to the level of online advertisers, who deserve to be blocked because they just can't lay off the obnoxious loud, flashing animated video advertising that eats gobs of bandwidth and CPU time. Not that Microsoft was ever much above that level.
Speaking from my experience as a system administrator, doing a major upgrade on production systems for the heck of it was a major no-no. We only upgraded if we had to, for some crucial new functionality, and we'd spend at least a week preparing for it with tests on identical equipment if available, dry runs, and the like. We'd document how long it was going to take, and if too long we might set up a temporary system. We were not going to risk taking down the website of our company. Uptime is critically important. Stunts like this pushy, opt out upgrade assure that Windows will stay permanently banned from the server room.
That Microsoft apparently can't grasp any of this or just doesn't care shows, again, how stupid their leadership is. Meh, they've been unbelievably stupid for 15 years now. Getting in bed with the MAFIAA of all people, and deferring to those idiots on technical matters around DRM, wow, just wow. MS doesn't deserve to be regarded as a tech company, not while they're willing to defer to tech morons on the areas they're supposed to be the experts on.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
There is no issue.
There is nothing to address.
Windows 10 upgrade is doing what Microsoft wants it to do: maximizing the number of machines running Windows 10.
Think about it this way.
If you pay a vendor for something, then--at some level--that vendor will serve you.
If you do not pay a vendor for their product, then that vendor does not serve you. They may serve some other revenue stream, like advertising, or some kind of big-data analytics that they hope to sell, but they definitely do not serve you. If you are not paying for the product, then you are collateral damage, or prey, or fodder: something to be harvested and packaged for resale.
Somewhere in Microsoft is a VP who is in charge of the Windows 10 upgrade.
This VP has been told that his bonus, or stock options, or possibly his job is dependent on getting X million Windows 10 installs, or X million installs per month, or something. He doesn't care how many people are inconvenienced, or lose data, or have their machines bricked. He doesn't care how much bad PR Microsoft gets, or how much bad trade press, or how many outraged Slashdot comments there are. All he cares about is making his number. And this is going to continue until the CEO goes to this VP and changes his performance objectives.
Deal with it.
(Linux works for me. YMMV.)