Listing from pays the bills to just for fun:
MS Office (Lync “Skype for business”)
Sonar
And… that’s it really.
Last I checked, a bit more than three-quarters of my Steam library runs natively in Linux. Not Skyrim, though, unfortunately. I had to leave my dual-boot desktop behind six months ago, and have been relying on my laptop that runs only Fedora Linux, but I’ve had no shortage of good quality games to play. wine has gotten pretty good, and I’ve had good results with playing games that lacked Linux-native versions through wine.
Steam’s still not going to make RMS happy, but it’s harm reduction.
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I’ve used Libre Office running on Ubuntu for heavily formatted professional documents prepared to exacting specifications and can report vastly superior results — esp. when navigating shared documents in various formats.
Though on the other hand, I’ve never played Skyrim …
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You need solitaire.exe and cardgames.dll. There’s a lot of how to guides on how to do this 
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Here’s one - THERE IS NO KEY LOGGER. None. Period. Covert listening? No. This lie was also applied to Samsung TVs a few months ago. Also wrong. Just like your phone, it may, if you choose, listen LOCALLY for a specific key phrase to trigger Cortana to start listening for your commands. The key phrase listening happens in your computer. Nothing is sent through the internet, unless you’re asked something of Cortana. Anything “heard” that doesn’t match the key phrase, is discarded. If your OS was transmitting or storing everything it “heard”, it would be pretty obvious, especially to those with limited disc space, or a metered Internet connection.
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Oh, don’t forget that Xbox one is obviously a bug that watches and records everything you do and transmits it back to microsoft - which was absurd even at the time, but people believed it.
And the time that people were saying - and I swear to you this is true - that after Facebook bought Oculus, the Rift was going to have a Retinal scanner, and use your retinal scans to record your social media identity. That is literally impossible with current technology, and pointless even if it wasn’t considering basically nothing within your internet footprint is actually tied to your retinal scan(and frankly, practically nothing in the real world, unless you work in a high security position) and paranoid motherfuckers still believed it.
The internet has ruined conspiracy theories. I remember when they were deep, dark rabbitholes of weirdness and lateral thinking combined with paranoia and ad-hoc reasoning that went on for days, you could really deep-dive into some super interesting(and absolutely crazy) stuff, it was such a tangled, weird web that it was compelling, and took effort to debunk.
Nowdays, conspiracy theories are always incredibly mundane, shallow, and trivially disproven by anyone who manages to let their critical thinking rise above their paranoia for 30 bloody seconds, or has a slightly-better-than-basic understanding of how their magic internet boxes work.
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Only if you’re doing it wrong!
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I think you’re overstating the Linux learning curve. It’s different, yes, but not completely alien. (It’s true that some things have weird names, like The Gimp (OK, it’s a terrible name).) If you use one of the XFCE, Mate or Cinnamon desktop environments, it’s much like XP or W7…moreso than W8 or W10 (though I will say I haven’t tortured myself with those yet). I’ve been using Ubuntu for a number of years, and I’ve never had to compile anything. Unless you need to use specialized software, such as Adobe, it’s worth checking out. I switched when I was confronted with Vista, and I never looked back. It doesn’t have to be either/or–you can dual boot or use a virtual machine.
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W10 is worlds better, the tiles are on the start menu and you can customize it easily, more of where the should have gone with w8 for a desktop and I am kinda liking the flat look for the new theme.
I’m certainly not good enough to trust my results; but I’m in the process of setting up a suitably tapped-and instrumented WiFi AP and wired port to see how chatty my Win10 test devices are. Once available, probably worth bouncing every other networked device I own off it. You can, alas, barely stay paranoid enough to be counted as ‘realistic’.
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Just don’t install flash 
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If win10 wants to be a modern operating system, microsoft needs to meet two requirements:
- Open source
- Gnome 3 support
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Yeah, fair play man. I suppose there are still some deep-and-twisty conspiracy theories that arise in the internet age. They’re still not quite up to snuff with things like the JFK conspiracy theories, or the Denver Airport conspiracy theories(which are from after the internet was invented, but early enough that the modern internet didn’t fuck it up), but they’re still around.
Cory, come on - you didn’t use the terms “evil corporate,” “jack-booted,” or “smokey back rooms” once.
[quote=“singletona082, post:7, topic:63020, full:true”]
I recommend everyone on windows 10 hit windows key, and type in ‘feedback’ then click the thing that pops up. Then file reports that you want updates where all of these things are by default turned off and want these things to be opt in rather than opt out.[/quote]
Can’t you just mumble “I want my privacy back” within earshot of Cortana?
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If you want to blame someone for my “paranoia”, blame
Edward Snowdonthe NSA.
FTFY
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[quote=“art_carnage, post:65, topic:63020”]
Here’s one - THERE IS NO KEY LOGGER. None. Period. Covert listening? No.
[/quote]In my opinion, your SCREAMING makes you appear utterly flabbergasted that anyone would question Microsoft on this.
Yeah, Microsoft wouldn’t lie about this kind of stuff, right?
Latest Snowden Release Details Microsoft and NSA Relationship - link
This was not the only area where the company was at the beck and call of the NSA. They also let NSA’s PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management) have access to emails before encryption. That’s not all. Microsoft helped the FBI and the NSA gain access to SkyDrive, a cloud storage service. This service has more than 250 million users.
One of the most disturbing factors seems to be that Microsoft blatantly lied about the way they helped the government in these matters. Initially, they said that they only worked with the agencies when they had a legal obligation to do so. According to information and documentation from Snowden, that’s not what happened. It seems they offered help to the NSA to spy on their own customers without legal obligation.
The NSA even collected information from Skype. They allowed the NSA to take audio and video data, even though it is against the privacy policy for the service. They claim to respect the privacy of their members and customers, but that’s clearly not the case.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/11/us-usa-cybersecurity-microsoft-idUSBRE96A11R20130711
I don’t blame people for not trusting Microsoft and I’m happy to see that people are suspicious and attempting to dig further into this issue. You may be right that Microsoft is innocent here, but you’d be wrong in assuming they don’t deserve mistrust and the extra scrutiny they’re garnering.
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Thanks for the clue, but I’d still rather take the reverse engineering route. Good practice with ProcMon.
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It’s GCHQ in my case, but it’s nearly the same thing.
But I live in a country where this happened in recent memory
and this
and this
and we have the PM saying things like this
so you might understand why I, a disabled transwoman with anarcho-syndicalist sympathies who has previously had a suspected data leak from the DWP regarding my gender identity, view on by default monitoring with a huge amount of suspicion no matter how benevolent the intentions behind it.
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You can get them to do what, now? I don’t appear to have sudo privileges on my kid. How do I get them?
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