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EU Privacy Watchdogs Say Windows 10 Settings Still Raise Concerns (reuters.com)
Julia Fioretti, reporting for Reuters: European Union data protection watchdogs said on Monday they were still concerned about the privacy settings of Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system despite the U.S. company announcing changes to the installation process. The watchdogs, a group made up of the EU's 28 authorities responsible for enforcing data protection law, wrote to Microsoft last year expressing concerns about the default installation settings of Windows 10 and users' apparent lack of control over the company's processing of their data. The group -- referred to as the Article 29 Working Party -- asked for more explanation of Microsoft's processing of personal data for various purposes, including advertising. "In light of the above, which are separate to the results of ongoing inquiries at a national level, even considering the proposed changes to Windows 10, the Working Party remains concerned about the level of protection of users' personal data," the group said in a statement which also acknowledged Microsoft's willingness to cooperate.
Microsoft's refusal to allow us to turn off their intrusions smacks of incredible arrogance but their 90% domination of the PC market means most of us are stuck with them anyway. It's time for the EU to step in with a bat and end the Microsoft Monopoly with a Ma Bell style break-up.
When consumers can pick between a Windows that's riddled with spyware, and one that isn't, then they will finally have a choice.
We need to create an app called "GIGO". We'd give it a mascot, maybe a big yellow friendly llama, with a long tail and pointy ears grinning. Make it look like some poindexter that cannot shut the heck up.
Upon installing, it asks you for a personality; neurotic Nancy, paranoid Paul, Bodacious Bob, and so forth. It then turns on every conceivable tracking option and signs up for every account Microsoft wants you to like a good little MS Drone.
It does bing searches for random key words, logs into random websites, turns on every conceivable tracking option, it browses sites like Salon, looks for sentences with a ? at the end, then copies and pastes them into Cortana then randomly clicks on a link, over and over and over again. It brings up youtube videos, enables audio loopback, and plays speeches back to microsoft off of youtube. It would browse twitter, and reddit, and 4chan, and and wet sweaty armpits of google image search, download random pictures, then rename them similar to digital camera files, while changing the color, pitch, resolution and so forth slightly each time, and upload them to onedrive; if it's neurotic nancy she uploads and deletes a gig of crap every week. If it's paranoid paul, he only puts a few images a day up, and also copies and pastes random sentences from books together.
In other words, we'd build a bot to harass Microsoft. A team of people would get together and determine what the next thing to feed Microsoft would be. Every month we'd do another kick starter; vote with your dollars to hire people to find and photo shop pictures of Microsoft employee's as Borg drones and upload them to the mother-ship. Upload tons of cat picks to Microsoft but in every conceivable spelling and mis-spelling of pussy.
The ultimate goal would be, since Microsoft has decided AI is the future and everything they do is pointless, we'll simply feed Microsoft a never-ending stream of complete, utter, and total dog sh!# data. We'd want to get to the point of ridiculousness where Microsoft has to sue the app creators for damages or ask the FBI to arrest them for hacking, but the only real hacking going on is they're enabling the automation of friendly GIGO, talking about whatever people wanted GIGO to talk to Microsoft about. We'd advertise GIGO as "A friendly computer use assistant that makes your computer feel loved by using it when you aren't".
That's what needs to happen here. Fatten the hog on garbage, then slaughter it.
LOL yeah right, the list is thousands long and that is just the publically available apps, spend 10 seconds and do an online search. Most have been listed as needed for over a decade, the reality is OSS people program what they enjoy, not what is needed. Nothing wrong with that, but it is a problem when it comes to plugging holes.
Not really. There are thousands of apps companies write to support their widget. For each app there isn't enough interest (mostly because you need $companies product to need the app) for the OSS folks to care.
If you have to buy a $20k doohicky that takes a dedicated windows app to control, how many OSS folks will be chomping at the bit to write the control program?
I was constantly fighting my computer when it was running Windows 10.
Disabling annoying telemetry stuff (only to be re-enabled by some random patch), trying to constantly kill Windows Update so it didn't force a reboot in the middle of something important (only to have that re-enabled by some random patch as well), etc.
I went from "hey, this is a pretty reliable machine I can actually rely on for daily use" to "what the fuck is Microsoft going to screw up today and cost me an hour or two of work to fix?".
In the end, it wasn't worth it. Reverted to Windows 7, haven't looked back. I don't really know what I'm going to do when they fuck up Windows 7 just as badly or try to depreciate it, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. It'd sure be nice if ReactOS was capable and stable enough to run x64_64 applications, and enough of them that I could use it as a daily driver.