But if the friend who got the password via Wi-Fi Sense has access to the network, that means that at some point, the password had to be in clear text on their computer (since otherwise it wouldn't be able to authenticate to the network). This means that at best, they use reversible encryption, and at worst, it's just stored in cleartext somewhere (this being Microsoft, my guess would be in the registry).
I guarantee that someone will create a tool to get wi-fi passwords shared to them if there isn't one already.
> This means that at best, they use reversible encryption, and at worst, it's just stored in cleartext somewhere (this being Microsoft, my guess would be in the registry).
The status quo is that your password is already stored on their computer with nothing better than reversible encryption.
The status quo is that random business acquaintances and whoever gets automatically added to contact lists via some vulnerability (just wait, it'll happen) do not have my wifi password. Not on their machine, not to share, not access at all. I like it that way. We have something-guest as a SSID for a reason, after all.
You'd need to look up the details, but I think the key derivation for WPA allows you to store a hash of the password. It's almost just as valuable, but technically means you don't have the plain password.
Hmm, interesting. It sounds from your comment like you would still be able to replay the hash in order to connect though, unless there's a bigger system at play that I don't know about.
Perhaps, but as I understand it if I do or have in the past given my friend the wifi password, it will then be automatically shared with his/her friends?
And what if I don't want my password to be stored on Microsoft servers where it can be accidentally leaked, stolen, handed to security agencies, and so on?
You know, you can always ask your friend to let you enter the password on his computer yourself without telling them. It will be stored on their computer in both cases anyway.
If you are already doing that, then you also don't have to worry about WifiSense as the checkbox to enable it for that SSID is right there (and only there) and you can make sure that you don't check it when you type in your password.
But there is less concrete evidence to support the pirates’ most worrying claims.
less, or just none (e.g. the claim about data being sent from local disk)? In any case this is turning to be far from ideal for MS and makes me wonder if they really didn't see this coming when defaulting to not-so-private defaults: I already know people asking 'I heard this new Windows sends all your data to Microsoft, is that true?' because they picked up something vague about privacy in the local newspaper..
Any junior level engineer, product manager, or professional panhandler could have seen this coming. Microsoft is betting on their marketshare and the stupidity of their average customer, as they have always done in the past. Unfortunately, out of 4 OS releases, 3 have been outright failures (Vista, 8, 10), one was decent (7), and even your average computer using idiot is aware of the horrible software quality that Microsoft is putting out these days because they have to use it. While disasters like removing the Start button are much more prone to stir ill will in privacy-ignorant consumers than privacy concerns, I'm sure there are no shortage of bugs in Windows 10 to further antagonize Windows users to the point that they might start to care about privacy and see it as just another way they're getting fucked over by Microsoft (which it is). In my testing for example, the Edge browser is completely unusable and can't even paint its own window. With software like that and all the privacy concerns, it's likely Windows 10 will have even less adoption that 8. I guess all the executive shifting and layoffs really can't change Microsoft's root problems (but at least they're now releasing interesting open source software.)
I use a free operating system (Linux, currently Slackware) because I take property rights seriously. Years ago I decided that I did not want to use 'cracked' software and didn't have much money.
> I use a free operating system (Linux, currently Slackware) because I take property rights seriously.
That's weird. Physical property rights are very different to Intellectual Property Rights (copyright, patent, trademark).
IPR can lead you to absurd conclusions: I own a DVD, and copy data to it, and the data is under copyright, the DVD now belongs to 2 different parties ?!
Or, if I develop a widget, and manufacture it, it can somehow violate a patent and I now owe them large sums of money... or the patent holder can use the customers that purchased them?!
Or I grow crops on my field using seed stock form our family. And Monsanto patented plants' spores cross-pollinate into your field. Now, you either are required to destroy your seed stock because of genetic pollution, buy Monsanto seed, or lose your farm. Yet again, IPR removes rights from property holders.
So yes, you may take property rights seriously. But IPR leads to insane conclusions and absurd reasoning. IPR exists to take physical property rights away from you.
Your "absurd" conclusions seem to be based on limited understanding of IPR and related facts.
1. The DVD example: if the data is under copyright and you do not own the rights, you cannot legally copy it (except for fair use etc. exceptions). The data on the DVD is an illegal copy, but it does not mean the rights holder owns the DVD itself.
2. You do not owe anyone anything for infringing a patent unless it is asserted. If it is asserted, then it's something you negotiate with the patent holder or go to court over it. It's no different from when people accidentally develop things on somebody else's land. I don't see what's absurd about that.
3. Accidental cross-pollination only ever results in negligible fractions of fields being covered with patented genes. If you look at the history of Monsanto lawsuits, each and every defendant was proven to have deliberately cross-pollinated their fields (e.g. Bowman had 80% plus of his field covered, and it was undeniably non-accidental). So the concern of having to destroy any significant part of your seed stock is purely theoretical.
It doesn't matter much what the current implementation does, when Microsoft has asserted (and demonstrated in practice) that they can send arbitrary updates at any time (and without explanation).
This is an overkill I believe. Are Android devices banned from torrent sites? Chromebooks? Windows 10 is a cloud-based operating system, as is Android and ChromeOS -- most of the code runs locally, but it heavily relies on cloud functionality.
It is extremely naive to think that if MS tells you in the EULA that many services in the OS work based on the user behavior suddenly opens up new doors for spying. If MS wanted to spy on you, they could have done that already (they might or might not, I don't know, but it's certainly not the EULA that prevents them from doing that).
/snarky comment:
I guess most people on the torrent sites already give full permissions to the torchlight app on their phone.
Privacy issues is all about scale. When groups of people can be mapped, it allows for discrimination and prosecution and that thought scares people into submission. Android and ChromeOS users are small minorities, while if you monitor all Windows users you more or less can map out the whole community, and that is a very scary thought for a lot of people.
I absolutely agree, but I don't see why Android users would be a minority -- I don't know the latest numbers but I guess there are more Android users already than Windows (10) users.
I'm pretty sure that people won't use their 3G / 4G mobile plan to download movies, music or the latest Linux ISOs from torrent sites on their smartphone with 16 / 32 GB of total storage.
It's not overkill when a company scans every single file you have in your PC, keeps those logs on its servers, and then eventually can and likely will share that information with others, from law enforcement to MPAA or even advertising companies.
Microsoft has already admitted in its "privacy" policy that it can and will do such thing:
> “We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), --- when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to ---.” [1]
I mean - are you kidding me? Like "whenever we'll feel like it"? That's so reassuring that you respect your customers's privacy, Microsoft...Really solid privacy policy right there.
You left out the circumstances under which they will share your data.
> comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process, including from law enforcement or other government agencies;
> protect our customers, for example to prevent spam or attempts to defraud users of the services, or to help prevent the loss of life or serious injury of anyone;
> operate and maintain the security of our services, including to prevent or stop an attack on our computer systems or networks; or
> protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including enforcing the terms governing the use of the services - however, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property of Microsoft, we will not inspect a customer's private content ourselves, but we may refer the matter to law enforcement.
Additionally, the privacy policy section you and I are quoting applies to many Microsoft services, including, for example, OneDrive. Otherwise, the "private folder" data they're talking about could only be whatever bits and scraps telemetry and Windows Defender picks up, based on my reading.
That seems perfectly reasonable and also confirms they won't be sending any of your data to the MPAA.
That's literally a bog-standard privacy policy clause.
You can find the essentially same four points on everything from Ubuntu to Wikimedia.
Can you be more specific about which part of it you find particularly unreasonable? Can you explain how the claims that the privacy policy allows MS to share data with the MPAA are founded?
Normally these kinds of terms appear on web services where the scope of disclosure is contained to the information you upload to the service (e.g. repos you upload to Github or posts you make to Reddit). Windows 10 is fundamentally different because the scope becomes everything the OS can suck up including everything on the hard drive and keystrokes from the keyboard.
You no longer have the option not to disclose something because anything that shows up on the PC may be fair game. Privacy is all about controlling who gets to see what information. Windows 10, being an OS, removes your ability to control what is shared in any meaningful way with its privacy policy.
> Can you explain how the claims that the privacy policy allows MS to share data with the MPAA are founded?
The MPAA could be a Microsoft "customer" that needs protection from piracy. The MPAA could run a service with Microsoft that needs protection from being "defrauded". There are holes in the policy large enough to drive a fleet of buses through.
If you use Dropbox or Google or any other cloud service the same applies. Google actually goes further and makes some nice sounding TOS text at first glance, but if you read carefully you will find that it carves out a super-vague disclosure for "technical" reasons loophole which can easily mean "because we feel like it, technically".
Furthermore, if you actually bothered to read the damn Microsoft TOS rather than seance over the tea leaves of copypasta confetti, you would see that this is clearly in the context of the cloud services that can be enabled in Windows 10, not Windows 10 as a whole.
I understand that there are legal barriers around it per the privacy policy but the fact that someone at Microsoft can just decide that they need file X off my laptop and then fetch it is way beyond the pale. If someone wants the files off my laptop, they can get a search warrant and successfully convince my lawyer that I am legally obliged to decrypt.
There is no evidence that Microsoft currently has the ability to arbitrarily fetch files from your computer.
If your argument is that they could implement such a capability, that's always been true for any OS, including free operating systems, unless you audit the code and compile it yourself.
The issue isn't whether the functionality is currently built-in (it'd be trivial to add later). The issue is that Microsoft states its intent to do so (relevant section underlined):
>we may access, disclose and preserve your personal information, including your private content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or ______files in private folders______), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary...
I understand that you'd have to do a full code audit of every application that has permissions to read files off your local disks to ensure this wasn't already being done by someone, but at least as a Linux user, I'm not used to software openly expressing its intent to feed private files off to any like-minded entity that asks for them. Definitely a red flag for me.
> The issue is that Microsoft states its intent to do so (relevant section underlined):
The quoted section is from the privacy header which also applies to Onedrive, which is essentially Microsoft's version of Dropbox.
They're not stating their intent to collect files in private folders on your computer aside from bits that have always been collected, like whatever parts of a crash dump Error Reporting sends on.
>It applies to Bing, Cortana, MSN, Office, OneDrive, Outlook.com, Skype, ___Windows___, Xbox and other Microsoft services that display this statement.
It appears that you're making an assumption that they only intend this to apply to OneDrive, but they explicitly state it applies to Windows too. My Linux installation definitely didn't come with such boilerplate.
I'm glad to see HN's mindless love of Nadella going out the window. I've been railing against his leadership for quite some time and have often been told how wonderful he is, apparantly because he's not Steve Ballmer. I can't imagine anyone defending his policies now. This scenario is far, far worse than anything during the Ballmer/Gates years. Nadella may be the CEO that watches the world shift to a non-MS OS in significant, company threatening, numbers. Its incredible how he just couldn't deliver "Windows 7 but better," instead of this privacy nightmare OS.
And just to nitpick, we had to change our patching policy at work considering how badly QA has fallen under Nadella's watch. Pretty much every patch Tuesday is a problem for us. There's always a rotten patch that breaks something. I also am unimpressed by all the marketing surrounding the start menu coming back. Its barely a start menu, its just a panel to stick Metro-style widgets onto. The default widgets are a lot junk. The Win7 defaults of Documents, Computer, Control Panel, Printers, etc was near perfect from a productivity perspective.
Sounds like clickbait, did not find content interesting. It makes you think windows 10 users a banned by microsoft. Should be "torrent sites ban windows 10 users".
It is very well possible that behaviour like This will result in massive problems in the European Union with its much more atrict privacy laws. Microsoft should ask Intel about huge fines.
> It is very well possible that behaviour like This will result in massive problems in the European Union with its much more atrict privacy laws.
Unless TPP passes[1]. One of it's provisions may result in a weakening of privacy laws. Unfortunately it's hard to tell since the whole thing is secret.
This is small stuff, compared to the headaches MS and Windows 10 will have with foreign governments. Snowden showed us that the US regularly spied on the German, Brazilian, Mexican and French governments. I wonder how anxious those governments are for Windows 10 adoption.
I mean a response now that there has been a sizable backlash (especially from the tech community) on the privacy settings on Windows 10. The consistent "phoning home" no matter what privacy settings are used.
The backlash is a bit of an overreaction, although justified due to the lack of total transparency of what's being sent. This is no different than any other cloud oriented services offered by Google/Apple, etc. Edit: blog.laptopmag.com/windows-10-privacy-issues-exaggerated
The phoning home isn't new, is it? Licensing validation was done every few months on Windows 7.
The only thing Microsoft is guilty of SO FAR that I'm aware of, is providing slightly better transparency over the data it sends to its' and third parties' servers, and now they're getting called out for it.
Great news for Linux. Reading almost every comment (out of 270 atm), I see only good in this, windows will surely lose a small percentage of it's user base, and (hopefully) a lot more in the long run.
Ask HN: Could Win10 data leaks be managed by some kind of firewall or parental-control software? I mean, if we know what sites are being accessed, just block those sites.
Yes, but the lists I've seen look huge [1]. It also requires 3rd party software/hardware to block since the name resolution for many of the endpoints seems to be hardcoded into dnsapi.dll. There's also no guarantee that some security update will add additional server names that Windows can talk to. Basically you end up in a security arms race with your OS provider - which is hard if not impossible to win.
Then watch all that hard work get undone the next time Microsoft forces an update and bundles a "fixed" dnsapi.dll with some other important security fix.
Are you going to verify that there isn't a new backdoor in every single update that works around your changes? Or are you going to bypass that impossible task by not installing any future security updates?
Workarounds that try to make a hostile OS "safe" is doomed always having to play catch-up, and Microsoft can probably add problems faster than you can find them.
The real question is how often does dnsapi.dll change, and when it does, can you reapply your patches? The crackers were quite successful in bypassing the activation scheme for previous versions and made autopatchers that would find and patch the right places, in a generic way that worked across many versions, so I'm reasonably certain that this could be done to preserve privacy too. And with more people on their side now than just pirates, there's all the more reason to do it. It's essentially taking the files that would be changed in an update and passing them through a filter that automatically maintains the pieces you want.
Drivers: Linux usually supports almost everything, there was even a build of Fedora for the Nexus 7.
UI: KDE especially has very good touch screen support, including a thing that automatically changes system UI when you connect a mouse, or keyboard, or so on, and switches between phone style, tablet style, desktop with touch, and desktop style on the fly. (Essentially Microsoft’s Continuum) Since 2012.
I used KDE Plasma Active on my Nexus 7 for some time, actually.
That's actually one thing I miss from Windows when I'm on Linux: Git for Windows is wonderful in my opinion. I don't know how to use Git on the command line (or rather, I'm not terribly comfortable with it). I don't use Git every day or even every week, so Git for Windows is a godsend to get me to actually commit things. Git on Linux is much, much more difficult for me.
There are Git GUIs for Linux as well. I don't use them, so I can't recommend anything personally, but I'm sure Google could turn up something useful :)
There are numerous sites (eg [1]) which claim to provide a list of FQDNs associated with Windows 10 telematics. These sites usually advise you to reroute those FQDN to localhost via the hosts file.
To my point of view this is a endless game of cat-and-mice... finding the (changing?) telematics FQDNs and updating the hosts file. By design this cannot be a permanent solution.
There is a weird catch 22 in that the pervasive use of TLS makes it much more difficult to firewall things like this. I suppose you could setup a MITM that checks everything before it leaves your network but that just feels wrong.
There's an easy way to do that: when the browser makes a request to some web site, the server serving it will detect the browser's user agent (which the browser sends with the request to the server) and will check the operating system specified. If it's Windows 10 - don't fulfill the request.
They are talking about trackers, not anything web based. So unless a client announces the underlying operating system there shouldnt be any way to implement such a block.
Sure but chances are that 90% of the users don't know how to do it. Also it's a good warning for the users. It's primarily not for protecting the torrent site but for protecting the users anyway.
I have no idea if the the trackers are doing this or not, but you could use TCP/IP stack fingerprinting. It's a bit costly, so I doubt it's in use. But it could be one way to achieve it. It's certainly not 100% accurate, but my experience with nmap is the detection works surprisingly well:
It means Microsoft losing market share to Apple when people tell their friends that they can't download the latest episode of the Kardashians if they upgrade to Windows 10.
They typically report a name, version number and sometimes the operating system. Normally, they wouldn't report enough information to let the tracker know if it's actually a windows 10 machine running the client.
I don't think it does, it's just a few bytes. There's a client with a different identifier for the major platforms (µTorrent on Mac, Linux, Android IIRC) but that doesn't include the OS version.
Has anyone compiled a privacy checklist for Windows 10? What settings people have determined are best to use? I was somewhat forced to do the upgrade and didn't have the time to explore all settings (also they got more confusing since Windows 8).
IMO the thing is You can never be sure what the system is doing underneath. It's like a rooted box, you need to wipe it clean cause you can never be sure if the backdoor is still there
Then, I installed a traffic monitoring tool - and surprise surprise - I still found some stuff trying to randomly connect to Microsoft's servers, similarly to what Peter Bright from Ars discovered (btw, "telemetry" can only be fully disabled on Enterprise version of Windows 10):
I blocked those, too, and for now the Windows 10 spying monster seems to have settled down - BUT - new story points to the fact that you won't even know what Windows 10 updates will do in the future. That means that on machines where they see they can't spy on you anymore, they could push an update to bypass those protections and still spy on you.
Windows 10 really seems to be designed based on an NSA/law enforcement's wishlist. Any security or privacy measures you might take on it can be rendered useless by an update, and some articles even say Microsoft gets all of your typed keys (so all passwords).
I didn't but I suspect because their first link looks like a malware pinata. They should have just linked to Github, rather than to some site with a whole host of fake "download" buttons, that looks a lot like CNet/Download.com.
I am also seeing downvotes in this thread I would not have expected, for what appear to be legit issues with Windows 10, even if some of the rhetoric is a wee hyperbolic.
I dont normally like to go meta and talk about voting, but this is the worst example I have probably ever seen.
There were like 3-4 open source projects posted here (yeah, people don't get that the point of publishing an open source project is to actually collaborate) aiming at making privacy on Windows 10 one click away. As far as I can tell, they all did a miserable job and blocked some legit features (like Windows Update) and domains and never updated their projects once we told them about the legit features they're blocking.
So, there's plenty of checklists out there, but none of them is actually useful at the moment.
The problem with a one-click approach is that one person's "legit feature" is another person's privacy nightmare.
I have no use for Cortana, so for me, it's nothing more than an annoyance to be disabled. But for others, it might be the one reason why they upgraded to Windows 10. Likewise, some tutorials out there advocate disabling Windows Defender, but I consider (at least some parts of) Windows Defender to be a legitimate feature.
I'm trying out Windows 10 in a VM, and so far I've managed to disable: everything in the privacy control panel, advertising ID in Edge, Cortana, OneDrive, web search from the taskbar, feedback, telemetry, and the half-crippled Start menu. Now it's just a slightly faster and flatter Windows 7. I'm not sure if I'll ever let it out of the hypervisor though.
> The controversy began because of a line in Microsoft’s service agreement. This allows Microsoft to issue updates that will stop users “playing counterfeit games,” according to TorrentFreak.
Game companies have been issuing updates that stop users "playing counterfeit games" ever since it was possible to do so. Microsoft is a game company, or one of the divisions are. It's interesting that they would stop there, rather than say "use of counterfeit software". That would be much broader.
Microsoft has been doing that for some time so what is the justification for gamers all of a sudden freaking out.
Happily using OSX, Linux, and Chrome (with crouton).
I only need Windows now if I want to play a game, but the consoles at home, and steam under crouton/linux/osx solves that for some of the games I play.
Does anyone know how the trackers themselves can detect Win10 users, is the Win10 TCP/IP stack sufficiently different to previous versions of Windows that you can fingerprint it?
Yes, private trackers. These private trackers can only be accessed if you have an account on their website, where you then download the .torrent files.
Indeed, I can see this turning into a "if you don't use Windows 10 you must be a pirate/have something to hide" sort of argument. Ten years ago, when filesharing was the awesome new thing, that would've been almost a compliment; but given how the population's view of piracy seems to have changed now, I don't think that will be the case anymore.
Personally, I'll be getting a windows 10 box running soon enough. It's going to be headless and only have steam installed on it, and I'll be using it to play windows only games over steam in-home streaming on my linux desktop and laptop.
Last time I read something about this, it was specifically the original underground sites and trackers which were banning Windows 10 users. Not sites like TPB, KAT, etc.
Although his writing style isn't always consistent, the book is totally worth reading just to get a clue on how 'cyber criminals' (used to) operate on a global scale. I said 'used to' because the facts narrated in the book occurred mainly in 2009-2011, but in the final chapter there is also some recent events.
Although the title refers to the spam problem, It's not just about spam itself, but it gives a full image of the surrounding cybercrime environment. Give it a try ;)
No, it's just positioning in the wake of Snowden leaks. If it was a core philosophy/value that the company collective felt then this image wouldn't exist: https://imgur.com/iHEtqaE.jpg
Which is why I'm on board. I hope others take note so the "right to security and privacy" isn't only within reach of those who can afford Apple devices.
Basically M$ adoption of this strategy is the death knell for any semblance of privacy on the PC. It's amazing how far we have come to accepting such draconian measures in order to further marketing. There is still time people, come on over to Linux, the privacy here is still fine and will continue to be fine. And if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux and all the collapse of privacy will be a bad dream. Barring that, every single thought you have you will not be able to record or publish without the surveillance apparatus of your country and the US knowing about it.
This is not some unfounded fear this is pretty much the current reality. Anyone who doesn't agree lives in a Pre-Snowden fictional world.
I've deactivated all reporting and services that call back home (at least which I was aware of). In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities.
So far I can assure you: Compared to my Android phone Windows 10 is absolutely mute. There're no noticeable differences compared to Windows 7.
You seem to be more driven by your hatred towards Microsoft than by real privacy concerns.
>>I've deactivated all reporting and services that call back home (at least which I was aware of). In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities.
I'm going to recommend to you, or anyone, wanting to verify Windows 10 network behavior to do it without depending on software running on the OS itself. Try verifying it again using network analyzing software on linux or macosx, running downstream of your network setup. e.g., a router that's running linux you can ssh into and run "ngrep"(kinda like a commandline version of wiresahrk) and verify from there.
I'm going to recommend deadlisting/disassembly instead. Network analysis doesn't give as much context for exactly what is sent, and there seems to be - as far as I can see, yet? - a total lack of hard data and verifiable evidence about what all this "telemetry" actually is, what can be turned off, what can't, and what actually gets sent to whom, when, from what, and why.
The "evidence" I have seen so far that Windows 10 communicates with its maker is, let's be honest, pretty scaremongery and includes things like LLMNR traffic - which is link-local! - and neglects to consider that Windows Update now checks much more frequently (because of the accelerated release cadence of a rolling release) and essentially torrents its updates now, P2P-style.
If there's a real privacy issue - and there may well be, especially on default settings - we need reliable, detailed, hard information to see what binaries send what to where to begin to address it, and to see what can be turned off, what should be, etc. Does anyone know if anyone's begun that analysis yet?
(Of course it really should be Microsoft openly discussing this, but in the absence of that, the mantle inevitably falls to independent researchers.)
I would be astonished to see "below the stack" communications for anything official from Microsoft, because that takes the public conversation from "look at all these features that affect privacy" to "look at how Microsoft is TRYING TO HIDE privacy invading features."
Since MS knows that Windows communications are going to be under a microscope anyway the odds of them expecting to successfully hide the very existence of communications seem low to me, and once they're known to exist they WILL be inspected and publicized.
I'd expect the below-stack communications to be from espionage folks instead, quite frankly.
That is just plain naiveté. Big corporations don't have the accountability as individuals or smaller companies. They can just scrapgoat someone. Just watch some docus like the enron one http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/. Those dystopian futures many writers romance about are going to come true soon.
Could you recommend a resource that would provide some good information on this? I keep hearing about ways to modify routers to operate this way, but have yet to come across something that clearly describes how this is done.
It's probably overly complicated, but because I happened to have an extra router laying about it was the easiest way for me to do it. The setup ultimately looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/klNvoTS.png
The spare router is really only needed for the smartphone. Anything with an ethernet port can be connected directly to the linux laptop.
As someone tech-savvy and having used WireShark, even, I'm curious to know from my sibling commenters, what are you thinking? Of course you start by buying hardware or modifying a router. Parent comment is specifically asking for "good information" and something that "clearly defines how this is done." IMO, xfalcox and lewiseason come closest to actually answering the question, because their links mention specific software.
But simply installing software isn't enough, it needs to be configured. How does one set up OpenWRT or WireShark to filter for this kind of information? What pitfalls might one encounter? Do you need a CS degree in order to interpret the data? What keywords should one use when searching for more information?
With vague answers like the ones so far, you're just making it seem more difficult and intimidating for anyone that has little to no experience in this area. If we want people to be more concerned about their privacy, it needs to be as easy (or easier) for people to take control of their information as it is for them to give it away.
Edit: smtddr has the right idea, thumbs up. Should have hit refresh one more time before posting.
As bitwise said, best is to use a small linux computer on the same lan. You could use any computer really, just make it different than the host you are trying to capture on!
Even easier (buying hubs is hard) and possibly cheaper (switches with mirror ports aren't the cheapest) is to just stick two network cards into your linux box, set up a layer-2 bridge and sniff everything going between.
If you happen to have a computer with both WiFi and ethernet (many/most laptops these days), set it up as a bridge, connect the Windows machine to one of those interfaces and use the other one to connect to the internet.
Deactivating the services that call home doesn't stop Windows 10 from calling home. You can only completely disable "telemetry" if you have Windows 10 Enterprise Edition and even then I'm not entirely sure it does completely shut down.
And anyway, even getting to this meant manually ticking out dozens of boxes in several settings windows and installing a packet sniffer to check your own computer for unwanted connections. Nevermind that running a packet sniffer on your outgoing connections usually means you suspect you have a virus (which is what Win10 is?), it requires technical expertise that 95% of Win10 users won't have.
No I don't think GP was driven by hatred of Microsoft, as much as a genuine dislike of an operating system which hands over control of your own computer to someone else. I always thought Stallman was being hyperbolic when he said "with free software the users control the computer, with proprietary the computer controls the users", but I don't anymore.
The good thing is that those 95% are often willing to pay for services like virus removal and the like, so maybe Microsoft has created a new industry for surveillance removal!
> Compared to my Android phone Windows 10 is absolutely mute.
I think this says more about Android than it does about Windows 10. Windows 10 has crazy defaults, but so does android and many android apps want access to my info for no good reason (e.g. news apps wanting access to list my accounts, my phone number, my contacts, precise location etc.). Comparing privacy defaults of Windows to Android is not comparing it to a particularly high bar.
This is a main reason that I have avoided Android so far. The iOS permissions model is a far better model. At least with the next release of Android (Marshmallow) they are fixing some of this and hopefully you will be able to use apps without giving them access to so much info.
If your phone is rooted, you can try installing XPrivacy to manage permissions for Apps. I used it for a while when I had to have Skype on my phone. It worked great to lock Skype out of GPS, Contacts, etc.
There was a noticable performance hit, but my phone is 3+ years old. It likely would not be as much on a newer phone.
As far as I can tell, I still only have the option of accepting or denying apps' permission on CyanogenMod. Also, I can hide my contacts and location from apps, if I'm really persistent about clicking the deny box a million times. But I still can't approve only the app permissions I want and not approve the ones I don't (which coincidentally are not essential to app functioning).
> But I still can't approve only the app permissions I want and not approve the ones I don't (which coincidentally are not essential to app functioning).
Hmm? I can do exactly this in the Privacy Guard settings.
You can choose which permissions you want an app to have and which you don't. You can also set to Ask every time as well as just blanket blocking/.allowing permanently.
Oh wow. You're right. The option does exist. It's just hidden behind a stupid, non-sensical UI. Apparently if I long tap the app name, I get a lot of options. This is great. I don't understand why they hide it behind such a stupid, non-obvious UI. Do I need to long tap every single other UI element to get some functionality that should be obvious? Until they make a proper UI for it, it might as well not exist.
I'm unsure why I cannot replt to ionised to ask which version he/she's running. I remmberPrivacy Guard briefly had those features, or was it when 'Roid inadvertently included the privacy feature they pulled d right after the EFF praised them for it? Either way, I'm sure my new flip phone will spy on me, I'll minimize what I give them... a removable battery doesn't interfere with elegan design on a clam, apparently.
In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities.
How do you know glasswire sees all network activity? What about data that piggybacks on legitimate network activity (e.g. the requests to update.microsoft.com)?
I have a license for like every single Microsoft's product (Windows 8.1, Office 365, Dreamspark account, 1 TB of data on OneDrive, some Skype premium minutes) and yet, I completely agree with him. I love Microsoft's products and I'm using them when I need to use them, but Windows stopped being my primary operating system ever since that whole Snowden scandal.
People just automatically assume that I hate Microsoft because I'm using Linux as the only operating system on my primary laptop. That's not even remotely the case.
> but Windows stopped being my primary operating system ever since that whole Snowden scandal.
Snowden released nothing specifically about Windows. No backdoors, no specific cooperation, only the NSA's bespoke malware (but they also have malware for everything under the sun, Linux, uEFI, RAID firmware, cell modems, etc).
Sure, the NSA were spying on Microsoft by hooking the fiber lines between Microsoft's data centers in order to gain backdoor access to Hotmail (now Outlook.com). But they did the same thing to Google and several other organisations.
> Snowden released nothing specifically about Windows. No backdoors, no specific cooperation.
This is the exact opposite of what was claimed in many of the documents that were leaked. One example;
July 31, 2012
Microsoft (MS) began encrypting web-based chat with the introduction of the new outlook.com service. This new Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption effectively cut off collection of the new service for FAA 702 and likely 12333 (to some degree) for the Intelligence Community (IC). MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL. These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012.
Did you not see the evidence in the bottom left corner?
( Microsoft 9/11/07 )
> Microsoft weren't an adopter at all
They were compared to the other businesses listed on that lide.
> PRISM is the theft of unencrypted data on dedicated lines between data centers.
This is as common misunderstanding. There are quite a few NSA programs that tap lines, which serve as inputs to XKEYSCORE. Some of these taps are line taps or Tailored Access based attacks, but those are not PRISM.
PRISM is the "polite" way the NSA gets their data, using FISA warrants and the cooperation of the business. They ask for a tap, and the business accommodates them. IF a business decides to not be part of prism, that's when the NSA simply takes the data via other means. The entire point of PRISM as a program is that it involves asking private business to participate.
> PRISM has absolutely nothing to do with Windows at all.
When windows 10 decides to make all those network connections, where are they going? They're writing to some sort of database at Microsoft. Now that windows has made the network part of the OS, the situation at the remote data center becomes relevant.
The key here is the tap. People are under some delusion the NSA/FBI presents a list of actual suspects to said companies (regardless if they have "cleared" employees or not).
Microsoft (MS) began encrypting web-based chat with the introduction of the new outlook.com service. This new Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption effectively cut off collection of the new service for FAA 702 and likely 12333 (to some degree) for the Intelligence Community (IC). MS, working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal with the new SSL. These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012.
OP's point is that the whole Snowden thing was about datacenters, which happened to all biggest players so not using Windows is not going to mitigate that fact.
Even if that were true (as another commenter pointed out, Snowden's leaks are about far more than just datacenter snooping), that still puts Windows users at a lot of risk; when basically your whole computer is being continuously synchronized with Microsoft's servers, your whole computer is now vulnerable to such datacenter attacks.
That whole PRISM thingy was the reason why I tried Linux. I didn't continue using it because I was scared for my privacy. I continued using it because it was awesome and satisfied every single one of my needs.
I must say that privacy is a matter of trust. We rely on code that we haven't inspected. Even open source software doesn't get that much scrutiny as the various major recent vulnerabilities have shown.
So getting worried because Microsoft is turning against their users by exploiting their data is a legitimate concern. I have disabled all these settings too but I must say that Microsoft damaged the trust I had in them. I always used windows and I am a big fan of the .net framework and of visual studio. But I am now considering learning Linux. I have zero interest in an OS that leaks my personal data.
And you seem to be driven by pure passion toward your beloved corporation that you felt the need to create an account here, 1 hour ago, just to inform us how mute Win 10 is compared to an android phone.
>>I've deactivated all reporting and services that call back home (at least which I was aware of). In addition I've installed glasswire to check the network activities.
That's great. And what have you done about Microsoft not telling you what is inside each Windows Update?
Here's what I've been using, in addition to all the manual stuff and things like Destroy Windows 10 Spying[1]:
https://gist.github.com/LordJZ/70d463335b2b7ab06e4f
(still contains some stuff from DW10S because I started collecting snippets before it was released)
Microsoft is not driven by stupid people. I would expect that system update packets to home base would possess information that would be useful to MS researchers, among other things. Even if it's not there, MS should be experts in steganography. They don't have to leave you clues what they use.
The questionable part is that they're there in the first place and enabled by default. I'd be fine with that if the telemetry and what not was opt-in as opposed to a lot of toggle switches spread across multiple settings.
Not really, there's a bunch of other options that are not in the privacy section and need to be explicitly toggled off in the scheduled tasks manager (I forgot what was the name of it).
Hatred for Microsoft? I have none. I do hate the fact that we have an absolutely free operating system that works just fine but thanks to Bill Gates 90s shenanigans and aggressive and illegal market and business tactics we're stuck with a proprietary system that is totally unnecessary and as it continues that system becomes more and more invasive. And that system is a black box that you can't trust.
Google started engineering features that were supposedly opt-in but they were so convenient that most people opted in anyway. Google forced people to divulge their data, for instance location, for navigation. It did not actually need the level of data it collects to provide navigation, it was just a way to steal their location privacy to increase its marketing reach and to improve the service not necessarily for the user but for its own business needs. How long before Microsoft starts employing the same tactics. You know you have a choice but it's a totally false choice!
When you post "M$" in a reply I automatically mark you as rabidly anti-Microsoft and usually stop reading. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but childish acts such as those have no place in a rational discussion.
It's definitely an overplayed cheap-shot at Microsoft, but that's not to say it's anything but deserved. It's certainly not disingenuous to paint Microsoft as profit-centric above all. Historically speaking they've gone above and beyond to hurt pro-developer and pro-libre efforts in this industry in the name of their margins.
Is it so awful to use an acronym that reminds the reader of these practices? I think it's prudent to not use it, only because it detracts from his point when readers like yourself become distracted by it. But it's not as "rabidly anti-Microsoft" as you are painting it to be, either.
Okay stop reading. Your response smells of fanboyism, blind faith, and ad-hominem attacks which are rather childish in themselves. I got my point across and it seems the vast readership is behind me.
The vast readership... on a site where open source is the primary religion and the readership includes a significant population of Slashdot escapees. Look up "confirmation bias" and "preaching to the choir".
> we're stuck with a proprietary system that is totally unnecessary
I think you are being a bit biased on this one. There are a lot of applications that the "free" alternative is just not good enough in comparison with the propetary one.
Just to name a few:
Gimp and Photoshop
Inkscape and Illustrator
Maya/3DStudio and Blender
I would even add Office and LibreOffice but the later is actually good enough for a good chunk of people.
"good enough for a good chunk of people" completely describes Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender, all of which are absolutely powerful and capable of (and actually used for) the highest level professional results.
That there are features and quality from the well-funded proprietary tools that are lacking in the free/open ones is undeniable. But the examples you chose are ones where if we had to use the free/open ones, we would be just fine. These are cases where free/open options are actually pretty darn nice.
> "good enough for a good chunk of people" completely describes Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender
I said that keeping in mind professional use. There are some people who can effectly replace Office with LibreOffice at work and the number is significant.
However, when you try to do the same with a designer then Gimp, Inkscape and Blender falls behind, so yeah... A dev could do a minor manipulation on an image using Gimp, but don't ask a designer to produce a print-ready poster using it.
Yeah, but "print-ready posters" ain't the only professional use for raster graphics software anymore. GIMP (in my experience, at least) works quite well for digital work; it's only print work that it's significantly lacking (particularly due to the lack of proper CMYK support).
Surely they would use a vector graphics program for such a task? Although I'm not a designer I certainly do (Inkscape) and would hate to try to produce a poster with a raster graphics program.
Hey on the bright side, just look how far we have already got without too much financial incentives!!
My motivation for using libre software is:
- When you use a proprietary software, you are using "somebody else's software, licensed for your usage".
- When you are using libre software, you are using YOUR software.
Software built for profit have better incentives for financial development support, and that's why it's hard for libre software to catch up on features.
We can support libre software with donations (or better not giving money to the locked competence), and more importantly using the libre software that lacks of the non-vital features, at least at personal level.
In the long run, libre will outlast the locked, it's a matter of financial incentives.
If Microsoft did not advise OEM's to preinstall Windows, the cheapest desktops and laptops would be those with a GNU/Linux distro (no Windows license). Then perhaps Linux would have a wider adoption on the desktop.
And if Linux had any significant market share (I'd say even 10-20%) you would have native Linux versions of most of that software - not entirely unlike what you have on OS X.
But professionals now have a very good, non-ideological reason to choose a Linux OS over Windows. How many professionals are comfortable with an operating system that collects and sends everything they load, type or save to Microsoft and their corporate and government partners?
In some cases (e.g. legal and medical services) the very potential may be illegal in some countries -- and the proof could lose not just someone's business but their license to practice.
Any good examples of closed source applications being financially successful on Linux? How do the opportunities on Linux compare with investing in applications for other platforms?
It's not so much about "caring" as about the ability to pay programmers to create profitable software.
Thanks for the links, but it doesn't look very promising.
YoLinux looks old and has some non-working links, so I'm not sure it's being maintained. (Indeed, one link leads to Windows and Mac OS X software, not Linux.)
Lin-App, the most promising site, hasn't updated "What's up" since 15.04.2011. (Also, its most recent comments are 2 and 11 months ago.)
As it says in the URL, the TechDriven story is also from 2011, and the programs are from Lin-App.
It's hard to see the signs of a vibrant ecosystem....
Linux + proprietary 3D graphics software is very popular in large shops (ILM, Pixar, DreamWorks, etc.). 3D graphics, CAD, etc. in general tends to have much stronger roots in the Unix world (by way of IRIX, with GNU/Linux being the most common migration path) than Windows.
Basically, for the big names in computer-animated movies, the Year of the Linux Desktop has already happened.
Loads. Mainly very expensive high end niche scientific packages (scientists tend to use Linux at a higher percentage than ordinary people so the market percentages are more favourable).
I'm thinking stuff that is available on Linux as well as Windows/OSx.
Examples include Matlab, the Avizo image analysis suite, a certain simulation package that was described as AllSIM in a controversial discussion relating to CERN last week on HN and Maya (not scientific but it does illustrate the sort of high end very expensive niche stuff that tends to have Linux versions).
Inkscape is nice and I use it all the time, but I am not a designer so it works for me just fine (I suspect is the same case in your office).
On the other hand, my sister is a designer, and there are so many missing features on Inkscape that prevent her to use it in her profession life. The comparison seems unfair, but it is the closest thing to an alternative for Illustrator in the software free world.
I find that many programmers find Inkscape or Gimp more than enough for their graphic needs, but it's really hard to come across a designer that would agree. Nobody likes to pay and pirate software; if designers found Gimp really up to the task, they would be rushing to use it and drop the Adobe monthly fee. The fact that this mass migration is not happening and has never happened in the past 10 years should tell us more than our own understanding of graphic tools would let us deduce.
I think that for a professional designer a £15 (or whatever it is now) monthly charge that can probably be expensed or tax offset anyway is small compared to learning a new UI or the potential difficulties that can arise when handing a non-Adobe file to a print shop.
What Adobe have achieved with photoshop is become the de facto standard for many aspects of design and image work. They have done this through a mixture of (1) being the best practical option and (2) some vendor lock in. We may not like it but well done to them.
Well, the limitations for GIMP in Print work is obvious and already mentioned above, but also consider the fact that "Photoshop" looks far better on a designers resume than being an expert in GIMP.
FWIW, I prefer GIMP at work when Photoshop is also already available to us. I still stick to GIMP because of its ease in scripting and automating my work via PyGimp. I'm aware Photoshop can script via AppleScript, VBScript, and JavaScript, but Python just makes more sense to me.
And not on the automation side, I have also created professional quality icons on GIMP used on our web application.
Bait and switch. Release a great service with sane privacy settings and policies, make any privacy-sensitive settings opt-in at first, get people using it and depending on it. Switch it to opt-out but no one notices or cares because they're already on the hook and it's a media darling. Then change the privacy settings and policies to something nefarious while leaving it opt-out. Even if the media brings up the new privacy issues, only the folks who are already privacy-conscious will notice or care, and they probably weren't using the service anyway.
See Spotify for a very recent example of this process.
Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible. UI seems to be one area that benefits--almost demands--a central planning authority. I'm reminded of Supported Features [1]. There is some great open source software out there. But I'm struggling to think of great open source software with a good UI.
Not that I'm saying Windows is good mind you. My personal preference would be OSX, which you can view as Windows with a better underlying OS or Unix with a decent UI. Either way it's a win.
> Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible.
This claim is usually made by Windows users who don't want to invest any effort and time to learn another desktop -- which they had to do in Win8 anyway.
Linux offers several nice desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, E17, etc.) which we can freely choose from. I am a Linux user since the 90's and I have always used it as my primary desktop. It works perfectly well for me. I consider the new Windows metro "desktop" more horrible than even simple Linux desktops.
Freedom has a price. Education has a price. Both require the sincere willingness to do something for it.
I used to make this claim as someone who had been using desktop gnu/linux for several years. I've been using OSX now for a year and so stopped making the claim. But it is really frustrating to hear people say "it works for me" to rebut claims that it doesn't work for most people. Such counters and arguments over them are basically single data points. If the point under discussion is "does desktop linux work well enough to gain massive amounts of market share?", then you need to run actual large scale trials comparing how hard it is for people to...
1) Start up a spreadsheet program and do things
2) Check social media and play some random video
3) Play League of Legends
4) <insert your favorite thing here>
Some of these things are indeed comparably easy in, say Ubuntu (or were pre-unity) for me, but I was an MIT undergrad that hung around SIPB, the computer club. My massive amounts of tech privilege make it impossible to individually evaluate if the user experience someone has with spreadsheets is acceptable unless I put real study into it. The same is probably true of many HN commenters. So until someone spends the time and money to run actual user experience studies, we have no data to say that the linux desktop can take over the world.
Also, there isn't even one "Linux desktop". There is mint, Ubuntu+gnome classic, Ubuntu+unity, ubuntu+some weird xmonad setup.
Another argument I often see for why Desktop Linux has an advantage is that "Linux is free as in beer". But it is not. If someone making $15/hr takes more than 8 hours (not unrealistic, at least for an MIT CS student back in 2010) fiddling with things and trying to get them to work, then desktop Linux is more expensive.
Regarding your points 1) to 4) this is exactly what I mean with investing some effort to discover how these things work in Linux. For 1) there are LibreOffice and gnumeric, for 2) there are mplayer, vlc, and several other tools, for 3) I don't know because Linux is not a gaming system but a workhorse. A modern Ubuntu distro provides thousands of applications for many purposes. If you don't like Unity or Gnome 3 then there are Kubuntu, Xubuntu etc. Google is your friend.
Learning Linux is like learning LaTeX. It requires serious effort to become powerfully useful but then you never want to miss it because there is nothing that can actually compete.
OSX and Windows are easier to handle at the first place but if you get into the details then you may have more trouble than in Linux (driver problems, document formats) because there is no obsolescence in Linux. In OSX and Windows you depend on the cooperation of the manufacturers. In Linux drivers, applications, and document formats written decades ago still work.
My point isn't that I personally find Linux too hard, it is that for a large chunk of people, switching to Linux is far too expensive and this makes predictions about the rise of Desktop Linux too optimistic.
> Learning Linux is like learning LaTeX
This is a particularly fantastic analogy when you look at the type of error messages that LaTeX produces.
> This is a particularly fantastic analogy when you look at the type of error messages that LaTeX produces.
Nevertheless LaTeX is still the favorite DTP system among scientists. LaTeX is actually not too hard to learn. It just requires some mental effort to get it. Scientists are willing to do that. Some people obviously don't.
Linux is free as in speech, not free as in beer. You're free to use, copy, modify and distribute it subject to its license. It's not about price and never has been.
One of my gripes with Linux is that software all tends to feel like it was designed to look nice on the developer's particular flavor of window manager. The system as whole comes across as an inconsistent pile of different UIs. OS X has benefited a lot from interfaces all being put together in Xcode with elements snapping to the HIG standardized margins. And when something doesn't match (looking at you, cross platform Java apps), the users notice.
Maybe the average Linux user is OK with this, but I can't help but be bugged by it. Cost of having so many options, I suppose.
Elementary does better than most, but only by including a set of software designed explicitly to fit there.
I would point out that Windows programs written for different versions of the OS will appear different when running on the same machine. For instance, in my Windows 7 VM, LibreOffice has a white X on a red button to close the window, while Word has a black X on a grey background.
Hm, I haven't seen different versions of the close glyph, but I believe it. There are about 10 variations on contextual menus depending on what you're right clicking. I don't love that about Windows either.
As far as the general look and feel though, it still manages to feel more consistent. There are enough conventions like "clickable things have a hover effect" and relatively consistent styling of UI icons (pre-10 anyway) for it to feel like it's all one system.
Well, I don't think that Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual Studio are that similar. Both of them are using style different than the system default. Throw apps from other vendors into the mix, see Photoshop or Lightroom for example and it gets very difficult to argue, that the Windows desktop has unified style. Let's not go into the whole 'with WPF you can style your app any way you want' topic, because that's when the whole differentiation thing exploded.
Not that OSX is any better - Apple's own Pro apps always had different look that the rest of the system. iTunes was always experimenting with looking odd. Also, third party apps look different - Office, Adobe apps, etc.
So, it nothing wrong with Linux, all systems are like this.
It's funny, but my gripes with linux aren't the UI.. I use an Ubuntu Server VM via SSH most of the day... my desktop is windows, my laptop is OSX, and the computer I use the most not working is my Ubuntu HTPC (Unity)... I actually like Windows 7's UI the most.. though 10 is tolerable after disabling all the damned search options.
That said, every single time I've tried to use a Linux OS either as my primary laptop or desktop OS I experience significant problems that no end user should have to deal with... the last time, I added a drive after install... the system updates included an update to grub.. next reboot, wouldn't even load... after 3 days of setting up my environment, applications, vmware, etc, etc... I can't even fucking boot.
The time before that I couldn't get both monitors to work... twice before that I picked recommended hardware for linux support (straight intel graphics) and hit weird regressions when the OS updated on one, and the other just some wierd suspend issues..
I agree "works fine" for the desktop is a huge stretch... it does appear to mostly work okay for my HTPC, except when it resumes from suspend there's no sound (fortunately it's got an ssd and reboots fast), or that if I happen to turn it on too early before the TV is on, the display doesn't come on the screen (guessing it picks the DV port instead of the HDMI)...
either way.. still stuff that's worked in windows/osx forever, without issue.
> hat said, every single time I've tried to use a Linux OS either as my primary laptop or desktop OS I experience significant problems that no end user should have to deal with... the last time, I added a drive after install... the system updates included an update to grub.. next reboot, wouldn't even load... after 3 days of setting up my environment, applications, vmware, etc, etc... I can't even fucking boot.
was this in the 90s, early 2000s? Linux hasn't had those issues in a decade.
Suspend/Resume is horrible on Windows of me as well, my linux systems do so flawlessly, but there is a good 10% chance of blue screen when undocking my corporate windows laptop out of suspend.
The HTPC suspend issue is with current Ubuntu 15.04, Actually, I'm in pre-release channel because of another audio bug that rolled into regular updates for my chipset, I had no audio at all after said update. I had hoped the fixes would also fix the suspend issue with audio disappearing, but it hasn't.
The issue with booting was mid-late 2013, I haven't tried running Linux as the main OS on my desktop since, Windows 10 has me considering it.
I have to disagree about the linux desktop. I wish it was better, but for the first time in 10 years I started using microsoft (8.1) again on one of my computers. It has the same problems linux does: drivers, wifi connections. And when I try to close down to go somewhere, I occasionally get some kind of warning that I can't shut down or unplug because it's doing an update. Very aggravating (I'm getting a little wiser about it, but still I would like to be the one who decides when to update).
The problem, and the reason I wanted to give it a try, is software. Things like gotomeeting and such simple work there and are difficult to get working on linux. It cost me a (remote) developer, so I decided that my travel/home rig would be win 8.1 with linux in a VM. So far it's quite convenient, but I don't use much on the windows side.
I think with more adoption we could fix the software issues.
You're talking about a subjective experience as if it's something that can be objectively measured. I find it the other way around. I've used Macs since the 80's, but lately I hardly touch them, in part because I think the desktop experience is so much worse than GNOME, KDE, Unity, or even XFCE.
GNOME 3 in perticular is the best arranged desktop in my opinion because the way it separates the desktop and application launcher/switcher/search into two distinct modes and makes context switching so easy with just a key press, a click, or a hot corner. Everything is always in the same place and easy to access with little cognitive overhead. Whereas using the Mac application bar is really messy, trying to follow flyout menus that go off at odd angles, etc., and that's far from the only reason I dislike the UI. GNOME follows the way my mind works. I'm either using the applications I want or switching between them, and unifying everything in these categories makes so much sense, I'm surprised everyone doesn't follow the model.
That's entirely my opinion, and I tend to be biased and think the only reason people complain about the desktop experience is because it's not whatever they're used to, but the only thing I know for sure is that there's no one way to arrange a desktop that appeals to everyone.
Steam works great for me. There is no discernible difference to the Windows version. There are 1400+ games available now for Linux, including some (older) AAA games like Bioshock Infinite.
Just make sure to buy a Nvidia graphics card (and use their proprietary driver). The (proprietary) AMD drivers work, but their performance is much worse than on Windows.
* Steam for Linux is pretty rock-solid, at least on the common desktop environments. Some bugginess once you get into bare window manager territory (particularly WindowMaker or anything that's designed specifically for tiling), but otherwise works without issue.
* A very large number of indie games are targeting Linux either alongside or soon after Windows. Kerbal Space Program is the prodigial example here, and seems to be leading the charge for Unity3D.
* Pretty much everything made by Valve now runs on Linux natively, for obvious reasons. A part of me hopes that - when GabeN gets over his fear of the number "three" - Half Life 3 will launch on Linux/SteamOS first.
* Some non-Valve big-budget games and publishers are gradually making their way to Linux - both new and old. Borderlands 2/PS, much of the Tropico series, Cities: Skylines, Serious Sam 3, The Talos Principle, KoToR II (no KoToR I yet, alas, but since it's the same engine, there's probably a good chance of that changing soon), Civilization V/BE, various others.
* SteamOS is, in my experience as of late, excruciatingly difficult to install; Valve, in their wisdom, ships it as some zip archive instead of a more typical DVD/USB image. Perhaps the SteamOS installer is meant to be written to a USB stick with Windows rather than with Linux? Whatever the case, I've yet to get SteamOS to actually install, though I'm planning on revisiting it soon.
* Single-monitor setups are generally fine. Multi-monitor setups become problematic, since the games tend to do wacky things with their resolution and fullscreen-window sizes; I generally work around them by running games in windowed mode.
* Which graphics card vendor to go with depends on whether or not you want to stay strictly on the free software path. AMD's cards are currently vastly superior to Nvidia's when running on FOSS drivers, in no small part due to AMD actually participating in said driver's development. Nvidia's cards are currently superior to AMD's when running on proprietary drivers, though this might change once AMD migrates from fglrx (the current non-free driver) to something based on the FOSS "radeon" driver.
* Wine is quite fantastic nowadays, though game compatibility is still hit-and-miss. I regularly play Fallout: NV on Linux+Wine with very few issues (namely, the occasional crash after a few hours of gameplay); Fallout 3 is playable, but you can't use the Pip-Boy radio due to a bug with Wine and DirectSound (?) (sound will be garbled, and the game will crash with a deadlock after a half-minute or so). Valve's games are naturally very Wine-friendly (though this is no longer necessary, of course). Steam works reasonably well, but requires installing some font packages in order to get text to show up. Older games tend to work better than newer games.
I have no love for the direction in which Linux desktop seems to be heading today, but engineering concerns aside, it's been working fine for a long time.
No, it's not. Besides driver problems, missing support for newer OpenGL standards, fragmentation of desktop environments and a dozen of other problems, it doesn't even have GUI isolation (meaning that any X11 application can sniff your keyboard input):
As long as you stay away from perpetually-beta distributions that I shall not name, driver problems are really a non-issue. I haven't had a malfunctioning peripheral under Linux in a very long time now (years?). Driver problems are on-par with what you see on Windows :-).
> missing support for newer OpenGL standards
This has been a common complaint about OS X for a long time, and no one thought desktop on it didn't work.
> fragmentation of desktop environments
As long as the desktop respects ICCCM (hint: they all tend to do) and you don't write your application using some obscure, non-ICCCM compliant toolkit, this tends to be a non-issue.
> it doesn't even have GUI isolation (meaning that any X11 application can sniff your keyboard input):
This is true. However, the expectation is that you'll usually run open source software from trusted sources (and you can run untrusted applications in an Xnest session). Methods aside, it's just as easy for a malicious user to keylog you on Windows or OS X, the Linux keylogger is just more trivial to write.
I don't think it's even true that keyloggers are any harder to write on say Windows. The only thing they can't trivially get hold of is your password for the machine itself. (Of course, if you write a naive keylogger you're going to get caught by any AV software worth its salt.)
I don't think it's even true that keyloggers are any harder to write on say Windows.
This is false. Windows has a mechanism since Vista (UIPI) that provide some UI isolation (lower privilege processes can e.g. not listen to keystrokes on higher privilege processes):
E.g. web browsers normally run at the 'low' integrity level and cannot eavesdrop on other processes (which are normally at the 'medium' level). It would be nice if someone with knowledge Windows internals could explain UIPI a bit more, I gathered this knowledge a while ago due to being interested in the topic :).
Of course, if users just accept anything at UAC prompts, everything is lost ;).
As long as you stay away from perpetually-beta distributions that I shall not name, driver problems are really a non-issue. I haven't had a malfunctioning peripheral under Linux in a very long time now (years?). Driver problems are on-par with what you see on Windows :-).
I recently installed a workstation for using CUDA, with X11, using nVidia's off-the-shelf packages (the Ubuntu CUDA packages have some compatibility problems).
- On Ubuntu everything worked fine first (LTS, 14.04), after some upgrade, X11 did not come up anymore. Some problem with DKMS. While debugging, it doesn't help that Canonical has made disabling the display manager completely non-sensical. Something akin to
update-rc.d -f lightdm remove
does not work anymore. IIRC I had to pass a parameter on the Linux command-line through GRUB (really?). Of course, this was not documented in any logical place like a manpage.
- On CentOS installing the CUDA package simply gives a blank screen and you cannot switch to TTYs anymore. You still have to manually disable nouveau, etc:
Of course, this is just an anecdote. But my experience while still reading Linux forums and helping other people, it's often still work to get and keep hardware running.
I don't have much experience with Windows. But on the few HP/Dell workstations that I have set up, Windows generally worked out of the box.
As long as the desktop respects ICCCM (hint: they all tend to do) and you don't write your application using some obscure, non-ICCCM compliant toolkit, this tends to be a non-issue.
There is much more to a desktop than just being able to display windows rendered by a random toolkit, such as: consistent keyboard shortcuts, consistent look an feel, etc. Every time that I tried to switch back to Linux, the lack of consistent keyboard shortcuts drives me crazy (though they are typically somewhat consistent within the applications provided by KDE, GNOME, etc.).
it's just as easy for a malicious user to keylog you on Windows or OS X
OS X uses GUI isolation, only applications that a user has explicitly enabled in the accessibility options can listen in on keyboard events or send events. Moreover, app store applications use sandboxing by default and can't see files outside the sandbox. So, this is false.
> Nothing about Linux on the desktop "works fine". It's horrible.
I disagree. MS-DOS "works fine", and had many users. I would say that on average, UIs on Linux (both commandline and GUI) are better than those on MS-DOS, hence Linux UIs also work fine.
I wouldn't claim that the average Linux UI is great, or follows any HCI guidelines, or whatever. What I would claim is that it doesn't matter; all that matters is that it's possible to get the job done. Just like it was possible to get the job done on MS-DOS.
Regarding the XKCD reference, I think that's covered in the parent's statement "if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux". Those kinds of distinctions make it all too easy to move the goalposts; eg. "Linux is useless because it doesn't run MyProprietaryApp(TM)".
<rant sorry="yes">
Somewhat disagree. I use GNU/Linux-based OSes as my primary systems (because alternatives are less usable for my purposes), and I perceive them all being an ugly mess of barely cooperating pieces of software with piles of hacks to force those to work together.
Seriously, I don't have enough fingers on my hands to count different UI toolkits (every other one having its own font rendering, duh), service/daemon management subsystems, audio subsystems and VFS implementations, each having incompatible API and behaving differently. Every other program has its own standards - what would happen upon just clicking a link heavily depends on where you do this. Most software "somewhat works", not "works just fine". Besides, maybe, the very core GNU userland, which is, indeed, rock solid and quite consistent.
I'm unaware of alternatives, though. Fear, there aren't any.
</rant>
As far as OSS interfaces go, I wouldn't be surprised if you're using an open source browser right now, seeing as the closed source alternatives don't compare.
Windows has nothing to show for the billions of dollars put into it. Every installation of windows I've ever had was a piece of crap that got bugged out after a months use. It would be snappy at first and then it would start taking five minutes to boot, then when it did boot the whole OS would choke as soon as I opened the start menu. Then you have to give it a "cool down period" before you open any programs or it'll choke again.
Linux doesn't have this problem. It's a myth that Windows "just works" or that os x "just works". You have just as many buggy drivers and weird issues on those operating systems as you do Linux. For me, Linux with GNOME is just the easiest to use, most stable, prettiest, OS out there. I didn't have to use the command line or configure any text files. It just worked.
> As far as OSS interfaces go, I wouldn't be surprised if you're using an open source browser right now, seeing as the closed source alternatives don't compare.
Since he's a Mac user, that's not necessarily a good bet. Safari wins out handily in battery life, and Firefox's UI text rendering (tabs/URL/bookmarks) is comparatively atrocious.
Chrome benefits from its cross-platform bookmark sync, but the snappier interface, extra hour of battery, and the fact that it comes preinstalled all make Safari a pretty popular choice on OS X.
EDIT: Though I suppose Safari is a sorta-open-source project in the same way that Chrome is. Mostly it's the same as WebKit, but not entirely. Does Apple get much in the way of community contributions, or is it a "we have to publish the source, but we're not going to take your input" arrangement like Android?
Are you kidding me? If you're a full-stack developer, then try opening Android Studio & PyCharm IDE at the same time, and after approx. 1 hour, things just get horrible. Everything is stuck.
I don't know exactly what is happening, but somewhere the Swap handling horrible wrong.
This is not the general public experience. Sure, I've had similar issues before. Usually, I could trace the culprit to a specific motherboard chipset, or graphics card, not swap. Unless one of these apps is leaking memory.
On the other hand, I've had my fair share of windows weirdness. My work machine will from time to time not shutdown and I'll come the next day to a bluescreen. What does that say about windows? Nothing at all, it's likely a driver issue too.
I'm not sure how they could. It's just a text file.
There is however the issue that adding entries to the hosts file may not change anything, as the domains for this telemetry collection might be hardcoded elsewhere and would likely override/ignore the hosts file.
So you think customizing the OS fully to turn off the privacy intrusion and using a network monitoring tool is an "acceptable" solution for the mass market (99.99% of the users)?
Not addressing any potential privacy/security concerns but as far as daily operations, I've had it on my primary desktop workstation, my higher-end laptop, my girlfriend's budget laptop, and my work Surface Pro 1. Haven't noticed any slowdowns or lockups. If anything it's on par or a little faster than 8.1. I had a minor issue on my laptop at launch because it kept trying to install the wrong touchpad driver but I used the little "hide updates" app they provide and that sorted it until the underlying issue with Windows Update was addressed and it stopped trying to pull the wrong driver after a few days.
I use 10 at home, works perfect. Some people have issues with GPU driver support (old Nvidia card in my bro's case), and 100% cpu issue, also sounded like driver/software related.
I wouldn't update on a work machine however - no need to put your time at risk.
"port their software to Linux". The main issue there is that there is not one single linux, the market is very fragmented. Getting the binary format right (which is the same across distros) is the trivial part, just set the proper compiler backend. The hard part would be getting all dependencies and especially IO sorted out. The wide range of display managers, audio drivers that needs to be supported to simply "port their software to Linux" means that this is unfeasible yet I'm afraid.
Yes if you actually write software for desktop Linux you know that it's not that much of a problem to actually do it if you want to. There is enough free software available, you know often written by individuals without multi-million dollar budgets, that I have not had need for using a Windows machine other than to compile software for Windows machines. If multi-million dollar companies actually wanted to support Linux they could do it without breaking a sweat. The only reason they don't is because Windows user base is so large and Linux's is so small that the benefit does not justify the cost.
All you have to do is add a significant user base, say 5-10% of the market and it will be competitive with Mac and I am sure there will be lots more commercial software for it.
I would also like to mention that my sister is a total computer dummy. Her computer always gets infected with malware and lots of it. But I installed Linux on it because I did not have a Windows install disk. And she loves it because it doesn't get malware anymore. And she loves the fact that she can install free software using Ubuntu's software center. That's a true story.
For what it's worth, I had the same experience with my parents. I installed Ubuntu on my dad's laptop and my mum's desktop. They loved it for quite a while - it was much faster, no security problems and no weird errors. I was so happy that I left a few comments online similar to yours.
A year or so later, they both use Mac. In both cases, the inevitable question came "so I bought this <peripheral/software>, how can I get it to work?".
If you develop for Ubuntu and Fedora, many distributions will mostly work with your program : all Ubuntu flavours (Unity, GNOME, XFCE, KDE) and derivatives (Linux Mint, Elementary), maybe Debian, Fedora flavours (GNOME, KDE) and derivatives (Red Hat, CentOS), etc. You'll have to decide for a widget toolkit (Gtk+ or Qt), but a Qt program will run fine on GNOME (the design won't be perfect, but it's like a Qt program on Mac OS X or Windows). Dependencies isn't the big problem : you have a single sound server to look for and other drivers aren't important for a simple program.
Of course it's complicated, more complicated than Windows, depending on your type of program. But seeing how Valve made it work for games, I think it's going to be seen more and more.
At work all our desktop software was ported to linux and it works fine. Linux web servers, of course, mostly. Well there are some non linux web applications and numerous embedded devices with web access.
All I run natively is MS office stuff, chrome/ff, and vpn/vnc/ssh remote access type stuff. I have a linux desktop box on my desk running all the remote stuff plus native emacs that I use for most real work, the little old MS box is just for opening Excel sheets and legacy Word docs occasionally.
Its been a long time since I've run a non-MS (and non-chrome non-FF) binary on a MS desktop at work. Many years at least. The future is the web not native apps. IT will no longer deploy native client apps as a policy, so its not like any are officially ever coming back.
Decades ago its amusing to recall how much work IT folks had to do to install dozens of 3rd party applications on desktops before we'd get to use them. We had multipage checkbox forms. Now its "office, FF and chrome" and some corporate secret sauce (corporate anti-virus whatever type stuff) and they're done. A more draconian employer would just install office and force minions to use MSIE. And google docs and competitors are taking over all non-corporate "productivity app" work. With web access and outlook web mail and free viewers, technically most worker drones don't need anything more than a MSIE bootloader, although its more humane to let people use FF / Chrome.
For most employees, if it boots and runs FF or chrome, that's all they use to earn their pay, so no difference if MS, linux, freebsd, or mac.
You mean "window manager", right? Why would depend on a specific WM unless you were writing a WM-specific utility where no decision would be necessary? Your application only needs to target X11, which is implicit when you use a pre-existing toolkit.
> audio devices
What audio devices? Just write to the default ALSA device. Better yet, delegate the problem by linking to something like OpenAL.
I'm sure there are edge that are more complicated to port, but that is true for any OS. For most apps, porting shouldn't be particularly difficult.
This may be true for games, but it's less of a problem in general. If you don't want to release the sources and have it handled downstream, you can always statically-compile everything and call it a day. Most commercial vendors tend to do that. Display managers are pretty much irrelevant, I can't think of any application that cares if you're running gdm, sddm or anything else; the ALSA backend pretty much guarantees everything is fine in the sound department.
I guess it depends on how many dependencies you're relying on and on what those dependencies are, but the process is pretty smooth.
If they manage to develop things for Android, it can be done for Linux, too.
(Source: developed and packaged a commercially-distributed Linux application. Not too painful a process.)
Windows 7 is the last Microsoft OS I will run. Never used it for work anyways and very rarely game anymore. Maybe I can even find a way to run BNet on Linux. You can have all the freedom you want. Nobody is forcing you to use those programs.
Fortunately most or all of those updates are "Optional", in particular the two mentioned in the main body of the articlen (KB3075249 and KB3080149). So if you're set up to only install "important" updates you'll have skipped them, as I did.
Basically M$ adoption of this strategy is the death knell for any semblance of privacy on the PC.
I think if anything it would be users accepting this strategy by installing the new OS that would be the death knell for privacy on the PC. So far, it doesn't seem clear that this will happen, though.
The reaction from business is predictably hesitant anyway. Some of the concerns about Windows 10 won't apply so much with the more business-oriented versions, but in any case it seems likely that large organisations are going to do their homework, other than maybe a few high-profile early adopters who may or may not have been offered unusual incentives in return for being flag bearers.
As for home users, there was reportedly a post from someone on the Edge team a few days after the launch that gave some figures about adoption generally. They looked quite impressive at first sight, but if you extrapolated from the reported adoption rate, it would still take a substantial increase or a very long time to shift the market as a whole onto Win10, despite all the incentives and nag messages and free upgrades Microsoft have been pushing this time.
The one tiny data point I can contribute myself is that based on analytics I just checked for a consumer-focussed site I run, Edge hasn't even moved the needle on browser distributions this month.
So I'm not sure Microsoft get to sound the death knell for privacy on the PC. They can provide an OS that reduces privacy and raises concerns, but that doesn't necessarily mean people and businesses will choose to use it. Time will tell.
SMEs won't touch it because of the privacy concerns. Corporates who have access to the full privacy features in the enterprise version are still suspicious of it.
Its main USP for the general public is that it's not as bad as Win 8 - which hardly seems like a win at all.
I'm happy to use Linux for some applications, but realistically I think most Windows users who are switching will move to a Mac.
Personally, I'm keeping well away from Win 10. The one machine here with Win 8.1 isn't getting upgraded - ever. I may even downgrade it to 7.
I'm genuinely a little worried for Microsoft's future at this point. I've said before that I thought they would recover from Vista and 8 because XP and 7 were solid, but I wasn't sure they'd be able to recover from two turkeys in a row. If 10 turns out to be that second turkey, commercially speaking, I don't see how they come back unless the board have the stones to replace Nadella, the top man they themselves appointed surely expecting just this sort of corporate strategy.
I haven't seen enough to make a firm prediction yet, but I do think if MS can't get a handle on these update and privacy issues very soon and they increasingly become the story instead of any of the new features, the writing may be on the wall. Microsoft seem to have attracted some overall positive reviews at launch for Win10 in the general press and non-geek PC sites/magazines, but a lot of that positive early coverage is getting drowned out by concerns about reliability, privacy, and whether the relatively few big new features (Cortana, Edge, DirectX 12) are actually worth much anyway (with, respectively, questionable effectiveness, lack of plug-ins, and few if any games available that take advantage of it any time soon, among other challenges). "It's not as bad as Win8" is not a pitch that is going to support sales for the next several years, particularly when so many of their business customers are still on 7 anyway and have nearly 5 more years before they're going to run into end-of-support issues and be forced to act one way or another.
Microsoft seem to be throwing everything into cloud and services and mobile-friendly software and new devices, at the expense of solid server/desktop/laptop software that until recently has generally just worked and aside from the occasional blip stayed just working for a long time. Which of these areas has historically yielded Microsoft's more successful offerings, and which has had a string of disappointing results? Exactly.
> There is still time people, come on over to Linux, the privacy here is still fine and will continue to be fine. And if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux and all the collapse of privacy will be a bad dream.
I use Ubuntu almost daily as a desktop for programming. While it's way better than linux desktops 5 or 10 years ago, it's still a far cry from even Windows even with mainstream apps like Spotify and Dropbox. The UI (Unity, Gnome, and even KDE) still feels like a work in progress, sleep doesn't work for laptops and I feel like almost any update I do beyond security updates, will break my laptop resulting in fresh re-install.
Moving over may work for us, but I doubt it'll work for most people (for now). OSX is the only place left for now.
I don't see a normal PC linux distro winning as a desktop in the future. If I were to guess, the closest to linux most people can flock to for a desktop PC would either be some variant of Android or Chrome OS.
The Spotify client on linux is a beta application made by some developers for themselves because they wanted it. Spotify released it because they are a fairly decent company and why not? Many of us use it but we should not regard it as a mainstream offering. (In spite of this I find Spotify on Linux to work better than Spotify on Mac.)
> The Spotify client on linux is a beta application made by some developers for themselves because they wanted it. Spotify released it because they are a fairly decent company and why not?
That still doesn't detract from the point that I'm making: normal people will have a lot more troubling transitioning to Linux as opposed to OSX (or even Windows - if coming from OSX). Linux GUI apps just aren't very polished compared to Windows or OSX.
> Many of us use it but we should not regard it as a mainstream offering
Why not? It is being offered by Spotify itself even though it's labeled as 'beta'. It's also branded as a Spotify app and not as a 3rd party client.
> (In spite of this I find Spotify on Linux to work better than Spotify on Mac.)
That's different from my experience. Spotify for Linux didn't even display properly for me. When I scrolled up and down, there's always tearing. At least you gave a reason for your down vote, even though I don't find it valid just because we disagree.
I actually agree with you on the transitioning thing.
The reason that I said don't regard it as mainstream is (1) this is what they themselves say on their website and (2) I know someone who works there who told me not to rely upon it even existing in the very long term as it just isn't a business priority for them to maintain it.
I don't get the tearing I guess we have different set ups (see what I said about not being a mainstream product). On the Mac I find the newer spotify client to be very slow and heavy on resources. On Linux we still have I think the older version that on my laptop uses far less memory and processor to sit in the background and play music.
Yeah, like every single other Linux distro. I think Ubuntu is actually the only one doing this and yet, even in Ubuntu, it takes literally two or three clicks to turn this feature off.
True. But Ubuntu is one of the most popular distros. I have noticed, for many non-technical users, the name "Ubuntu" is synonymous with linux.
At the end of the day, most of the technical users know how to stay protected. Atleast the type of people who can install a linux distro on their main computer.
It's kind of our fault, we need to make the general public understand these risks, we need to make solutions more accessible. Because, if this sort of thing continue, we would one day suddenly wake up to a world that would not respect anyone's privacy. How many big companies are caught violating user's privacy, remember superfish?
The funny thing is, big companies are starting to be more and more confident violating their user's privacy.
I was trying to point out, that even when you disable everything using the provided controls, the OS still doesn't respect your choice.
Be careful regarding the searchui.exe firewall rule. It names specific assembly version - one silent update (is there any other in win10?) and your rule is invalid, instead a new rule that is enabled is suddenly in effect.
It was announced yesterday in the Swiss newspaper "Le Temps" that the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner has started an investigation on the privacy issues with Windows 10. He will contact Microsoft to better understand what data is uploaded, where it is stored, who has access to this information and for how long it is archived.
He may seize the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland if required. I don't think Microsoft will care too much but it's good that our government is at least considering what is happening here. Note that all that was triggered after an open letter sent to the Commissioner by the Swiss Pirate Party.
The thing is what now? Using Linux everyday is atleast problematic, sometimes impossible (I've had like 20 distros and played with it a lot, used it in my job, etc.) cause of apps/drivers/etc.
And what about phones? When iOS/Android/WP is a mobile botnet node what should I use? A 3310 Nokia? Is there any viable alernative? Is iOS/Apple the same vultures as Google/MS when it comes to privacy?
Don't forget, system updating typically isn't straight forward depending on distro. I was explaining to my brother the other day the need to perform diffs on system configuration files after performing a system update. His eyes kind of glazed over as his brain understood the concept, but refused to accept that major linux distros hadn't evolved past it.
I've used Ubuntu for a considerable amount of time and done numerous system updates. Please tell us what diffs you needed to perform, otherwise I call FUD.
From the blog you linked: "Dpkg keeps a checksum of the last installed version of configuration file. When it must install a new version, it calculates the checksum of the currently installed file and if it doesn’t match anymore, it knows that the user has edited the file. In that case, instead of overwriting the configuration file, it asks the user what to do."
If you didn't modify the system config you don't get prompted about what to do.
> There is still time people, come on over to Linux, the privacy here is still fine and will continue to be fine. And if you come over, then all the desktop software makers will port their software to Linux and all the collapse of privacy will be a bad dream.
Mmmh... Did I actually go to slashdot instead of Hacker News?
There are still people who believe this nonsense in 2015?
I'm not sure why you think it is nonsense? Surely companies will sell their goods wherever they can find a worthwhile market. NB that some very expensive niche commercial software is available on Linux.
Shouldn't the built-in botnet/spyware push all major companies and goverments away from Windows? I don't know how they would be ok with all they're data sent/shared with them (and probably a dozen of US agencies). It's like buying a rooted by design system
For this reason I'm considering updating my Terms of Service to include a 'Windows 10 clause' clarifying that any OS that can't be trusted in its default state is in direct violation of any NDA provided by me and would nullify any NDA imposed by other parties.
This because, imho, the issue with every proposed 'fix' for Windows 10 is the same: The deal the Windows 10 buyer made with Microsoft is that Microsoft is allowed to monitor you. There is no guarantee that Microsoft won't disable any fix at a future time, like they do now with methods to bypass their software features (like activation).
The Enterprise version (reportedly) can disable the call-home "feature". Even that is in contention thou. Yes. I think this is a massive mistake on Microsoft's part.
Or alteast you think it does. The thing is as I said with a rooted box, after it's rooted you can never be sure there ain't no backdoor left. It doesn't need to regularly communicate with an external server, it can probably dump data at some odd dates so it's much harder to track. The thing is there is no damage control with a botnet client by design like Windows 10
Didn't I qualify my statement and choose words to castigate Microsoft? It's amazing to me that keylogging is now reduced to injecting something into hosts and decoding their protocol. The latter may be tricky but knowing MS security record, inevitable.
Not yet forbidden, but their Prosecutor General's Office has received formal investigation request from legal firm in Moscow (Windows 10 privacy policy is in confict with local russian laws about personal data protection of lawyer's clients).
When I read the #1 comment here by someone I can't depict other than George Orwell himself, I started shouting "THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!"
