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Woman Wins $10,000 Lawsuit Against Microsoft Over Windows 10 Upgrades (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares this story from the Seattle Times:
A few days after Microsoft released Windows 10 to the public last year, Teri Goldstein's computer started trying to download and install the new operating system. The update, which she says she didn't authorize, failed. Instead, the computer she uses to run her Sausalito, California, travel-agency business slowed to a crawl. It would crash, she says, and be unusable for days at a time. "I had never heard of Windows 10," Goldstein said. "Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to update."
When outreach to Microsoft's customer support didn't fix the issue, Goldstein took the software giant to court, seeking compensation for lost wages and the cost of a new computer. She won. Last month, Microsoft dropped an appeal and Goldstein collected a $10,000 judgment from the company.
Microsoft denies any wrongdoing, and says they only halted their appeal to avoid the cost of further litigation.
When outreach to Microsoft's customer support didn't fix the issue, Goldstein took the software giant to court, seeking compensation for lost wages and the cost of a new computer. She won. Last month, Microsoft dropped an appeal and Goldstein collected a $10,000 judgment from the company.
Microsoft denies any wrongdoing, and says they only halted their appeal to avoid the cost of further litigation.
I wasted about 20 hrs trying to prevent that crap from destroying my business. At $200/hr, can I sue?
Of course you can. In the US, you can sue anyone for any reason. If you can't find a lawyer to take up your case, you can always go pro se and represent yourself.
Whether you'll prevail and get any sort of a settlement is an entirely different question.
Except Windows 10 is not a security update: the computer in question had Windows 7, which is still in extended support and will still get "proper" security updates until 2020.
My immediate assumption was that they were worried that a court judgment against them would open them to many similar claims
Read it again. She won the court case. MS appealed, and then dropped the appeal.
The thing is the EULA you accepted for Windows 8/7/95 etc does not apply to Windows 10. If they shove Windows 10 down your throat it really doesn't matter what the Windows 10 EULA is when you click decline and it fucks up your computer when "uninstalling".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
you still think its a campus...
It's a freaking space relay when finished it will fire a beam of energy into space to carry Jobs essence back to his homeworld.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
(it's simple to turn most of that crap off)
Pray, tell, how do you turn all of it off?
Short of buying a Windows Server to run as a domain controller, and only use Windows Enterprise Edition for the desktops and laptops, and constantly research, write and push your own group policy objects to whack the latest mole, I don't think you can.
Turning most of the spyware off is like removing most of the human droppings from your soup.
The "cost of further litigation" includes what would happen if they appealed and the appeals court found in the plaintiff's favor. Then the generic argument becomes fairly bullet-proof - anyone going to court with that argument is going to win.
It would unleash thousands of cookie-cutter pro-se and cheap-lawyer lawsuits, which they seriously don't want.
They don't have to worry about me, though. I've been MickeySoft free for almost 20 years. I have nobody to sue.
--
BMO
Microsoft made nearly $100,000,000,000 last year. It's the equivalent of someone who makes $50,000 a year spending 50 cents.
There's no point in tying up legal resources over such a small amount when you've secured a cheap settlement and no acknowledgement of any wrongdoing.
It's not just the spyware either, it's the updates. You can't control updates like you can on 8.1 and below. They auto-install and push really hard to reboot your machine afterwards. You can't block them in advance.
Even if Windows 10 did work on my hardware, the update rollercoaster with no way off doesn't sound like much fun.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
just take it to your chosen techie
This doesn't happen anywhere close to 100% of the time. As often as not, they will buy another computer - especially if it's an early Windows 7 PC (which is where the upgrade fails most often). That's why I say is near enough to bricked for consumers.
Actually, that's not entirely true....
For example, if you get a speeding ticket in New Orleans, it is ALWAYS advantageous to show up to set a court date, and not pay automatically even IF you are guilty as hell.
What you do is set your date, then show up at date, and before the trial, the traffic DA will bring all the folks back and offer you a "plea deal", in which the charge will be dropped down to a non-moving violation charge, which will keep it off your insurance driving record, and you just pay a fine.
They are only interested in the revenue, but it is nice to not get your insurance involved.
Check with your city as that I'm sure things vary widely, but I am of the understanding that this is more common than not....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
entirely possible (and easy) to disable all of the metrics and info that the software wants to send about you
I'm impressed. I tried to do this, but Windows 10 continued sending thousands of encrypted packets per day to different Microsoft servers. I have no idea what's in those packets. You apparently were able to decrypt them, inspect their contents, and determine they were benign. Would you mind sharing your analysis?
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
And your answer is relevant how? MS has no God-given right to their users' telemetry data. They may politely ask their customers to volunteer such information (as they did with that Office improvement dialogue thingy, as far as I remember). But the way they are clawing for it shows they do not understand who they are and what they produce. There are many environments where it is undesirable or even illegal to simply throw around data so detailed as what I have seen in Windows telemetry to a third party over the internet.
And do not forget that those issues that need fixing are not God-given, either. They are defects. Some in Microsoft's products, some in someone else's products. It is not the customers' job to help fix them. If anything, the whole tech industry should be infinitely grateful for the incredible leniency it receives regarding product faults. Imagine the smoldering ruins in Redmond and Cupertino (and some other places) if Microsoft and Apple had to operate under the same regulatory regime as GM and Volkswagen. I know, we as consumers get to play with shiny toys that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive and incredibly boring. Still I think especially Microsoft urgently needs to be reminded that they do not rule over a lawless wasteland but operate under the same laws as everyone else.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Same applies to Windows 7. This isn't limited to Windows 10.
No, in Windows 7, you can turn off automatic updates, and uninstall the telemetry patches.
In Windows 10, you cannot turn off automatic updates, nor disable much of the telemetry that comes with the base OS, and not as patches.
Turning most of the spyware off is like removing most of the human droppings from your soup.
I upgraded my bootcamp partition on my personal Macbook Pro to Windows 10 from Windows 7 Pro. It was pretty trivial to disable everything.
How about a little experiment. Boot into Windows 10 and install Wireshark. Start a capture and walk away from the computer for an hour. Come back and stop the capture and see what all transpired on the network while you weren't even touching the computer. For grins, start a new capture and spend a few minutes interacting with the computer, but not doing anything internet related. Don't use a web browser or your email program, just run Notepad to create and save a testing text file, run the calculator, maybe browse through your filesystem. Now look at the network traffic that was captured during those few minutes.
Are you still sure you disabled everything?
You accept the EULA when it first boots up into the new OS. If you decline it reverts you back. The problem is the massive waste of time this is, plus reverting to the original OS is not foolproof and screws up now and then. Sort of like being signed up to a book of the month club without your permissions; it's a pain in the ass to mail back all those unwanted books.