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Microsoft Faces Two New Lawsuits Over Aggressive Windows 10 Upgrade Tactics
Microsoft is facing two more lawsuits over its Windows 10 upgrade tactics. The first lawsuit comes from U.S. District Court in Florida, where the company has been accused of violating "laws governing unsolicited electronic advertisements" The suit, PCWorld reports, says Microsoft's tactics are against the FTC's rules on deceptive and unfair practices. The second lawsuit was filed last month in Haifa, Israel alleging that Microsoft installed Windows 10 on users' computer without their consent. It's similar to another recent lawsuit that was filed against Microsoft in which the Redmond company had to pay a sum of $10,000. The company, however, believes that these new lawsuits won't succeed. In a statement to The Seattle Times, the company said:We believe the plaintiffs' claims are without merit and we are confident we'll be successful in court.
Fuck MS. Mod +5 Insightful because you know it's true and no more needs to be said on the matter.
"We believe the plaintiffs' claims are without merit and we are confident we'll be successful in court."
Primarily due to the courts computers running Windows...
Couldn't happen to a more appropriate company... FUCK MICROSOFT!
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
They would be so perfect for Microsoft's situation. Perhaps a baghdad balmer?
I mean, what's MS going to say? 'We believe this case has a lot of merit and we're probably going to lose'?
It is all user error! We compiled it and it run just fine on our end.
-Microsoft
There's gotta be a lot of others impacted. A Yuuuuge class-action lawsuit may be in order. A law firm could advertise, asking about those affected, and collect the claims together.
Table-ized A.I.
I know this 800lb gorilla could care less and will probably just come back to squat on our heads and fart in our faces again, but dammit do something against this M$ BS.
On Monday I had to repair yet another Win7 computer, where Win10 installation had started without user consent and had broken the system. In practice the Win10 installer had created a new user (without real name, just a random UUID) and removed the ownership and write permissions from the computer owner users home directory tree. Unsurprisingly all the applications, including Windows explorer failed to function properly. It seems that current applications just ignore any file IO errors without any indication or hint to user what operation did not work.
I foresee this to be just the beginning. As long as people can continue to stick with Windows 7, there won't be *that* much of an uproar, but once support expires and companies are faced with being forced to upgrade to Enterprise edition cause Microsoft has mutilated the consumer editions so badly, there will be a reckoning.
It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. In this case forgiveness will likely be some bad press and inconsequential fines. However the door is open, the maidenhead breached.
Silence is a state of mime.
Management at Microsoft seems wildly incompetent. It wasn't only Slashdot comment posters who called former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Monkey Boy.
Quote from an article in Forbes Magazine about Steve Ballmer: "Without a doubt, Mr. Ballmer is the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today."
Microsoft just pulled off a miracle.
Only three lawsuits out of 100's of millions of downloads.
Obviously, if the most litigious society of all time accepts this new practice, it is going to become the norm.
This is not because of Microsoft's legal muscle.
It has nothing to do with Windows 10 quality.
It is pure consumer ignorance, apathy and resignation.
Welcome to the future.
Synergy!
This is pointless. Microsoft already owns enough lawmakers and judges so that they can do whatever they want. As to any class action joke, Microsoft would end up giving the legal firm a token few million dollars and the members of the class would end up with coupons for "free" upgrades to Windows 10.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I think one person was awarded some money for this same or similar behavior by Microsoft. I just can't believe how much crap Microsoft pulled to cram Windows 10 onto your device. Even though it was absolutely free, but of course nothing is really free, right? I think it's clear Microsoft doesn't have a hope in hell of selling Windows 10 upgrades. If it went to this much trouble to push a free copy. I cannot imagine willing customers buying and installing Windows 10. Maybe Enterprise will have to pony up but certainly not consumers. I know I wouldn't pay $5 for the upgrade, which I must have reinstalled a dozen times already on my new Dell laptop because of "issues".
are worthy of a class action lawsuit if some attorneys can dig up enough disgruntled windows users that had win10 upgrades cause them enough problems
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
People has been sheepish on this topic up to now. The "Ghost" upgrades I've had reported boggle my mind. For one thing, there are changes to the EULA regarding what Microsoft is allowed to collect (and put in) to your computer and since it's automated, there was no actual consent to these changes done by any human being, which I believe if tested by the courts, would prove to be illegal due to lack of "meeting of the minds" because the owner was not present to read it during the automatic upgrade. Wonder why MS didn't consider this one before trying to force feed this bloat/spyware on happy MS Windows 7 users.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
I LOVE Microsoft! I'll personally suck every one of their male employees penises. AND I'll lick every one of their female employees vaginas. And, as for the "others", I'll just fobble their gwambladdahs!
Three luddites in a row == Syzygy!
Microsoft seem to be indulging in data rape. And windows 10 is their digitial rohypnol.
I think Microsoft is sabotaging itself pushing its customer base to use Windows 10 instead of letting the customer base gradually migrate to the new OS. This was one of my biggest pet peeves that ultimate led me back to using another OS as my primary desktop.
"We believe the plaintiffs' claims are without merit"
Every Windows user in the world knows the plaintiffs' claims absolutely have merit.
I have a buddy who runs a local computer shop. He says that problems produced by forced Windows 10 upgrades is now his biggest revenue producer, jokes about how he'll be able to make extra boat payments this year ;).
Honestly, this is a disaster for the average home user where the process doesn't go smoothly. I suspect there's many more than are reported online, most just go into his shop and spend the $250 to get their Quicken and Tax files restored from unbootable machines (yeah, of course most had no backups).
Microsoft deserves a bone-crushing class action loss for their arrogance.
Latest saga - friends who are not computer savvy had a (special needs) young boy to look after for an afternoon, freeing his mom to get some things done. Well, when they looked again, their PC is running Windows 10. They are stuffed, unhappy and in a panic.
And Microsoft? They don't care. So I will be helping these folks to migrate to LINUX. Nobody should be surprised.
But the potential profits gained from spying on their users are astronomic, making breaking a few laws here and there and paying a few trivial fines (anything less than 10's of billions of dollars) is just the cost of changing direction.
Blame the shareholders for allowing this to happen.
I, for one, am thankful for Windows 10 forced upgrades. I sent out £48,000 worth of invoices since March for resolving forced-upgrade related issues. Thus far I've pulled in a little over £72,000 this year thanks to Windows 10 alone.
What I want to know is where the button is for disabling the installation of new and "popular" apps from the store.
I do NOT want my machine to download all kinds of shit wasting a metered connection for me to keep uninstalling again every week...
"In a statement to The Seattle Times, the company said: We believe the plaintiffs' claims are without merit and we are confident we'll be successful in court."
Said every lawyer ever born, even when they know for a fact that their client is as guilty as sin.
They'd say this if their client was caught on national TV red-handed murdering someone in the middle of the street at high noon with the entire country watching.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
And as SBC showed, that only let them rape people all the more fully.
Microsoft got convicted of anti-trust violations, but DID NOT GET BROKEN UP. If it had, Office and company would have been spun off into a seperate company, as had been discussed at the time. They managed to just get a bunch of penalties that mostly got overturned on appeal, and had the DOJ watching them until just before/after Vista came out, then they were more or less in the free and clear to continue their abuses. I am still not sure how the 915 no Vista Aero thing was allowed to pass (They claimed systems with 915 chipsets were Vista Compatible, but changed required driver features just before Vista was released, causing the 915 to no longer meet the feature criteria advertised that caused people to buy those systems rather than wait.)
As a result the 945 is lowest supported videocard for vista with proper 3d support, and everything lower uses the default VGA driver (If I remember correctly.) Furthermore WDDM1.0 is actually less supported than XP by Intel, Nvidia, and AMD. Meaning your choices are XP or Win 7 unless you have a very small subset of video cards (and the subset supporting XP, Vista, AND 7 is even lower.)
Anything post 260X from AMD doesn't support XP, Vista is either the same, or one generation newer. Nvidia does up to the GT6xx series, Kepler chips, maybe further. Additional bonus with Nvidia: PAE support for large memory systems. It can break due to memory pressure limitations without other registry changes on XP, but AMD's drivers don't even operate if PAE mode+HIMEM is enabled.
So this is actually a story about lawyers get paid, Microsoft takes a .01 percent hit to their balance sheets, and the public gets a message that eventually it will work out just go ahead and use it while we iron out the creases.
Stay the mother fucking FLYING FUCK away from Government Microsoft AND Microsoft National Broadcasting Company AND every subsidiary. Don't lay off a few MS employees, fire them all and find the ones guilty of treason. You can't? Because they and the US Gov are in bed together. No. Fucking. Shit.
Hard to fathom?
Thank goodness the upgrade process doesn't actually delete anything, that happens later (IIRC, old "system" files are deleted 30 days later). If anything is screwed up or missing, you can find it where it moves them too. The real problem is that not everything it thinks is a "system" file is actually a system file, so better double check that folder before the time is up! I expect there to be more people visiting the computer shops in late August and early September when those get deleted.
And yes, many of the Windows 10 programs fail without an error message, just a note in the event viewer. To diagnose problems, I've had to do my work with the event viewer open and refresh it every 5 minutes looking for error messages that should have been blatant dialog boxes, rather than being silent and showing nothing in place of what it accessed when the error occurred.
MS will just force updates to all of the courts PC's... case will disappear...
You see that a lot as well, and it always sounds like someone is being evasive and not wanting to talk.
Truth is, journalists have a deadline to meet and need to get both sides of the story. If a person they want to speak to is busy elsewhere, then they go with "not available for comment" as a way of showing they at least tried. Basically means the person in question couldn't get to the phone to respond properly, not that they had something to hide.
As long as the profit of this activity exceeds the cost, there is no disincentive.
If the user(s) have already accidentally allowed Windows 10 upgrade to take place, there's still hope. When it boots back up (after the upgrade has inititally started), you are given a few prompts, where the normal pattern of action from the user would be to choose "I Accept", then "Next", "Next", "Next", etc... At the first prompt, you can choose "Decline" rather than "I Accept", and your old OS will be put right back in place, exactly as it was before, even to the extent that any tabs that you had open in Firefox will be there.
So this is actually a story about lawyers get paid, Microsoft takes a .01 percent hit to their balance sheets, and the public gets a message that eventually it will work out just go ahead and use it while we iron out the creases.
Stay the mother fucking FLYING FUCK away from Government Microsoft AND Microsoft National Broadcasting Company AND every subsidiary. Don't lay off a few MS employees, fire them all and find the ones guilty of treason. You can't? Because they and the US Gov are in bed together. No. Fucking. Shit
Hard to fathom?