I learned everything I needed to know about Windows 10 when I was contacted on vacation by my mother. All the pictures were gone from her computer, and the internet didn’t work.
I asked a lot of questions, and the answers just made situation more confusing. Eventually it became clear that her laptop wasn’t running Windows 7 anymore. My mistake was telling my mom that security updates are important, and not realizing that Microsoft would then lie to her about security updates.
When I returned home I found that the “upgrade” had somehow set the date years into the future. Even better, the date-adjustment tool was corrupted. This meant that all HTTPS sites wouldn’t connect. Now her complaint made sense.
Hours later we had a Windows 7 laptop again and I deleted all of the insidious updates that would try to recreate the disaster. I lost hours of my life uncompensated and my mother lost the use of her device for over a week.
It’s not going to stay free. And most users can’t make Linux work for them. Windows’ primacy in the market has a lot to do with a dearth of affordable and appropriate options. In some respects buying a MacBook is a lot like buying a lifestyle.
I see what you’re saying, but it’s hard not to blame MS for the ills of the shitty consumer-grade computer market.
you can’t shut them off and it is tied more to unity so not sure mint runs them.
you can turn off the reporting. like a lot of these things the background listeners need to be there to do things like auto sort most used items on the menu, auto search/complete the menu based on keyboard input, etc. so shutting off the service itself breaks things.
Also the other thing is a lot of people actually do like being able to say ‘cortana/siri/google where is the nearest pizza parlor’ far more than those of us who don’t.
Also the listener services are what make a modern OS pretty awesome, like real time spell and grammar check, being able to hit the menu button and type in the name of your app. It is an ugly mess that is probably going to eventually be sorted out by a government agency rather than corporations.
Do we really need to note in every article about privacy issues in any service that [insert list of other services here] also have privacy issues? How would this help anything?
Well not visit a remote server, but it “listens” to the keyboard input and then matches that up with local machine options. Like what I have been doing since vista, press the start button on the keyboard and type in the name of what I want to run rather than scroll through the thing to find it. I also use that for getting to network share just start \servername\sharename and it will parse that connect and I can even drill down more from there in the search box. It saves a lot of pain. It’s like tab completion at the command line only way way better but if it can’t figure out what is being typed in then it can’t work.
This is the underlying thing on all the siri type services they just add voice recognition and the ability to go out the web and look too which can be a sweet thing for some people.
The problem isn’t so much the ‘listening in’ as what is done with the data afterwards. How long it kept, how well anonymized it is, etc. And keeping some of it so it always knows you like Dominos but not Little Ceaser’s works into things so next time you ask for pizza you don’t get the noise of options you don’t like.
It helps because it changes the story from being typical Cory anti-Microsoft FUD to shining a light on a common industry practice.
I guess it’s perfectly fine when Google and Apple collect massive troves of data with little transparency or user choice but when Microsoft does it (with arguably a lot more transparency and choice) it’s time for the pitchforks.
This!
He didn’t report on EFF doing a deep dive on Ubuntu 2 years ago or those findings. Which I would have found interesting. From time to time the touch on Google but that is usually android apps overstepping what is necessary to function vs. the standard practice of collection.
It wouldn’t bother me so much if the data collection practices from Google and Apple got the same coverage.
Although he did mention it, as I pointed out. Also, Ubuntu has a much smaller non-technical user base, and the Ubuntu issue was just about a file searcher that roped in internet searches, which is only one of the MANY types of data that Win10 can collect and send out.
As also pointed out, there have been plenty of articles of issues with Google’s data collection.
Blathering about unspecific “problems” with Google and Apple, or issues in Ubuntu that are already resolved, is off topic and appears to be an attempt to downplay this very specific issue that Microsoft is currently doing.
This very clearly is not FUD. Microsoft is doing this, they do make it difficult for the average user to turn off, and they do have misleading settings exposed in the GUI. And as far as I know, there has been absolutely no response from Microsoft to these things being pointed out.
The main problem I’ve heard from non-techies who switched back to Windows is “I’d rather have Linux, I liked it better, but ___ didn’t work.” where ___ is whatever Windows-only software they wanted/needed to use. I haven’t looked into Wine lately, but it seems like something that packages software with the virtualization already handled for you (the way GOG does with Dosbox) could go a long way toward opening it up to most users.
take a look at PlayOnLinux, a GUI for tested Wine configs and setup scripts for a wide range of applications. ignore the name, they support much more than only games.
