EFF Petitioned To Investigate Windows 10 Upgrades (change.org)

An anonymous reader writes: One of the most frustrating things about the ongoing stream of stories about Windows 10 upgrades is that there seems to be no way to hold Microsoft to account. Or perhaps there is: a petition asking the Electronic Frontier Foundation to investigate has now been posted on Change.org.
The petition argues "people are being tricked or forced into upgrading to Windows 10 from their current, preferred version of Windows," and describes Microsoft's actions as "ignorantly unethical at best and malicious at worst."

Comments

Lets be real now, what did MS do wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything and everything related to Windows 10 is stated plainly in the EULA.

First year law school stuff here folks. A EULA is a contract, and MS is just doing what they stated they have the right to do as per the agreement spelled out quite plainly before someone hits "accept".

Any investigations by the EFF's part or even lawsuits will be smacked into oblivion. In fact, the EULA forces all claims into arbitration anyway, so any judge who has gotten beyond first semester in law would find the EFF culpable for vexatious litigation, and find for MS.

Re:Lets be real now, what did MS do wrong?

[ledow]

You should have stayed on for the second year of law school. They would have told you that a contract cannot be automatically upgraded unless reasonable and the reasonable opportunity given to back out or otherwise not agree to the terms, that all contracts have to be reasonable anyway, that contracts are meetings of minds, and that unfair contracts will be interpreted in favour of the party that didn't draw them up (i.e. the user).

A EULA is also not specifically a contract, though it may form part of one, but a grant of licence to use a copyrighted work. If the terms to use that copyrighted work include, say, automatic control over your computer, upgrades, telemetry, etc. then it could easily be interpreted as overbearing for a copyright licence. It's also certainly not an automatically binding contract, and is override by basic statutory rights and contract law. Just because you agree to "give your firstborn" does not mean that's legal - even if you WANT to do that! And changing the goalposts later never goes down well in court.

And I agreed the Windows 7 EULA, not the Windows 10 one. What if I disagree with the Windows 10 one? Are they trying to trick me into agreeing by other methods (i.e. automatically upgrading me?), giving me no reasonable option, etc.? That's basically duress.

Personally, I think MS are on a hiding to nothing, and they'll "get away" with it for the most part. And then when Windows 10 becomes "pay only", and Windows 11 is treated the same way, they'll be a comeback that everyone else will have seen coming.

All its shown me is that MS hasn't changed one bit in its existence and all the posturing of recent years is just a trap to force you to upgrade. I certainly shan't be buying MS licences for my own use and, by extension, I avoid and recommend against their cloud services, office products, browsers, and even their consoles, phones, tablets and software services (though, let's be honest, you hardly need to avoid that shite).

Chromebooks are going down well with everyone asking me about "cheap laptops". Office compatibility for home use is barely an issue any more. Cloud services have plenty of alternatives. Most people have seen iPads and Macs and understand "they aren't Windows" and it doesn't stop people nowadays. I get just as many Apple Pages job applications as Microsoft Word (and when its for a techy position, I file those in the Deleted Items folder appropriately).

Here's hoping it's just a swansong for Microsoft, but if we can screw them to the floor with an EU parliament investigation or similar, maybe we can completely remove their influence more quickly.

Re:Here is how to hold Microsoft accountable

[houstonbofh]

- Back up your data files - Wipe that abusive shit operating system off your machine - Install Linux.

Don't look back.

I have had more clients ask about Linux in the past 3 months then in the past three years prior. With everything moving to the cloud, it is actually happening.

Re:Wrong priorities

[ljw1004]

I believe it doesn't send *memory dumps*. It sends crash dumps, also called "mini-dumps" within Visual Studio. They don't have the heap. They include registers. They include callstacks, but I think these only include address pointers not the stackframes themselves (not sure). They include a list of all loaded DLLs/EXEs in the process along with the address at which they're loaded.

(I work at Microsoft, and have had to investigate the occasional crash-dum- to fix whatever bug caused it, and the dumps didn't have any heap, so it's always taken a lot of guesswork and detective work to figure out what the bug was based only on the callstack).