Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some tweaking and setup and a bit of command line hacking, but it's really awesome to have all my machines doing my bidding -- I tell them what to run, when/what to update, and I'm in control of synchronizing settings/files between them.
With Windows/OSX (and Ubuntu to a lesser degree, which I'd used previously), you can only kind of hope that it does what you want, and when it doesn't work, you kind of bang on it a bit to try and get it to change its behavior. All the while, the computer is doing a large number of things you don't really want it to do (what are all these processes? why is it connecting to x.y.domain.net? what data is it sending? why does it insist on trying to get me to log in to XXCloudY? I don't want to use that), but which you're kind of powerless to stop (aside from e.g. blocking connections with another physical network device), even if you knew what was happening. But you don't.
While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being an island. I like handing off calls from my phone to my laptop when I'm at work. It began frustrating me years ago when I couldn't just flick a few files off of my e-reader to a friend's phone despite the prevalence of available networks.
Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers. And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.
I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on.
I'm hopeful that people will find ways to invest in its development and find a way to introduce a competing product that is both secure, in the control of the user, and a delight to use -- able to integrate with a plethora of devices and, for the most part, just work.
Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled.
> It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers.
Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is!
> And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.
All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.
> I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on.
Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Unless you are heavily dependent of Microsoft Excel worksheets and their arcane proprietary macros, I don't see a reason not to switch (besides just being lethargic to learn something new).
This is not really true. For example, high-dpi is still a complete crapshoot, font rendering is often bad bordering on terrible. Unity itself is a usability disaster that hides some of an applications most important elements (menu bar) most of the time. Network manager (Ubuntu) breaks frequently. I could go on...
I don't know Unity; are you referring to it using a global menu bar, as OSX does? Because the latter is a wonderful idea as far as I'm concerned - it save screen real estate, reduces unnecessary distractions, and has no negative effect on functionality.
Don't say that thing until you try something for yourself! In the latest versions of unity, the global menu is integrated with the title-bar of the window itself. It means, you move the mouse pointer to the title area (which the user naturally does to invoke a menu anyways) and the menu appears there. Moreover, once you get into the habit of doing this, it comes naturally, so the above point that it is non-intuitive to user is just ridiculous. And speaking of:
> Is there any advantage to that as opposed to the OSX method
The advantage is that unity makes a more sensible use of your screen-real estate. Firstly, by combining both title bar and menu bar into one, you have just one bar on the screen when the window is maximized (which is how about 95% of users use it about 99% of time).
Secondly, since menu bar is hidden by default, the only thing you focus on is the window or app content, and the title which also relates to the content. I personally find this kind of workflow much better to work.
And Unity works well for me, my wife, and daughter.
Yes. Photoshop and Lightroom.
And before you all jump in and slather me with suggestions of Darktable, Shotwell, GIMP, ASP, RAWtherapee et al please know that NONE of these are a true substitute for Lightroom and Photoshop.
Individually you can put together a decent work flow with Linux programmes but it's slow. Particularly for wedding photography as there's just nothing that can offer the same level of speed AND quality that you get from Adobe's programmes. Running them on WINE is hit and miss and very slow for me, and the newest CC versions don't seem to be supported as far as I could see.
I ran Linux Mint for the last year and switched to Windows 10 a few days ago. I absolutely love Linux Mint and would switch back to it immediately (especially as Windows seem a lot more long-winded in terms of 'developer' stuff so far) if I didn't need Lightroom and Photoshop but I just couldn't get a fast enough workflow together.
I'm a massive Linux fan, and I'd literally jump back to it this evening if someone can show me in the comments below a workflow that can match what Lightroom/Photoshop offer. But the reality is there are certain types of requirement that Linux just can't provide yet and, tough as it is to swallow, that's the truth of it.
Have you tried PlayOnLinux (a very, very good and very easy to use WINE wrapper).[1]
It supports CS6 (including PhotoShop) and Creative Cloud installs on Linux.[2]
[1] https://www.playonlinux.com/en/
[2] https://www.playonlinux.com/en/app-2316-Adobe_Photoshop_CS6....
So... you're saying that there are substitutes, but that they aren't as fast, you don't want to use them and that (getting back to the discussion) you don't view the privacy concerns with commercial OSes as sufficient incentive.
If so, why not just say that and avoid all the pointless flamage.
That's sort of the story of desktop Linux, to be honest.
And Ubuntu was keytracking in searches, collects data on its users usage, and does centralized update authority as well. It's marginally better for a substantially inferior experience with much worse hardware support. Especially if you're on a modern laptop.
If you'd kept going, speed was only his (comparatively minor) opening bullet-point. Most of his comment discussed quality issues.
Perhaps privacy isn't their exclusive value. I think that's also a perfectly valid argument in this discussion.
I'm not hating on Linux, I have just used it totally as my daily driver for the last year, I prefer it and would go back to it as I said but I actually need the speed and quality that Lightroom and Photoshop afford.
They cannot currently be replicated by FOSS alternatives unfortunately.
Partly I think the UNIX philosophy gets in the way slightly, as Lightroom offers both catalogue, RAW development, printing, book creating and galleries in one place. This is important as when you manage multi terrabyte catalogues and hundreds of thousands of photos, having a single tool to keep track of everything is a real speed boost.
There are some pretty awesome options in Darktable and RawTherapee but it takes longer to get to the same place as Lightroom and neither tool offered the same ease of noise control.
GIMP on the other hand isn't Photoshop, doesn't aspire to be and is no substitute for the full power Photoshop gives you. It's just got non-destructive layers in the latest release hasn't it? Maybe it'll start to be a bit more of a contender if that's in place now.
I wish Adobe would just bite the bullet and release on Linux, there are tens of thousands of votes/comments for it on the various forum and feedback sites calling for it stretching back probably 10 years.
I'm always surprised how Photoshop is the first thing that comes up when naming software not available for Linux.
Truth is, unless you're in the business, regular people don't need more than what Gimp offers. Never speak of CAD software etc...
They make terrible examples as to why not use Linux. Additionally, as a Linux user I can't think of working with Windows because all the things that it lacks: freedom, software quality (no one sane would trust software from an appstore as you can trust a distro repository), the shell, the efficient use of memory/cpu, the simple software that does the job, all the tools at hand for anything, the fact that 99% of the times the solution to your issues is in stack overflow already, the fact that you're not a customer, but a user. Linux has KDE/Gnome for those that prefer shiny heavy desktop, xfce/lxde for those that like it simple. So many things that Windows just can't offer because it tries to monetize you, regardless of it's countless teams of well paid devs. So I personally can't switch to Windows because it lacks basic functionality that I'd expect from an OS.
IOW for most users, including me, gimp 2.9 will be good enough for most anything we're likely to throw at it. And BTW I think xfce works well, reasonably complete (except for controlling Wacom drawing tablets). To me KDE/Gnome, might as well be using Windows...
Maybe you prefer a terminal and maybe your terminal can do what my GUI tools can do or maybe they can't or vice-versa. There's going to be a lot of bias when you work and give your life to these things. To me, Linux is a really nice server or device that I use to run stuff but that's all it will ever be until it has a plethora of high quality GUI apps that I want to use.
There are some pain points and growing pains. It could take a while to put together the kit that works for whatever you're doing. One thing that really annoyed me about VS was that it was adding UTF-8 BOM and CR/LF to every file. I had to install and configure extensions like "line endings unifier" and "fix file encoding" to change it. But I always just stop what I'm doing and lookup how to change VS or Windows if it does stuff that I don't want and I usually find an acceptable solution.
I get that and I don't want to denigrate contributors. I've contributed to FOSS of one stripe or another over the years myself.
However I'd probably do a much better job at it if I was paid a decent salary and allowed to work on it full time. And the software would be better for it if I had a team of similar developers, user experience and design people, etc.
Being all things to all people is a great way to be nothing particularly amazing at one thing... something a desktop experience needs.
> All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.
It's tough! I think that's the primary reason for porting games to Linux. It'd be great if there was more to the gaming world than Windows. However for small studios there's no incentive to develop for Linux: there's just not a market big enough to sustain a business.
How do you break out of that? I dunno. A black swan maybe.
> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.
Wacom drivers. There aren't any shipped by Wacom for Linux. The open source ones are a stop-gap and better than nothing but aren't as good. Ergo Gimp is a marvelous piece of software but not comparable to Photoshop for professional uses.
I'd add that any alternative that wants to gain traction must provide some benefit over its contemporaries. Software freedom just doesn't cut it for more pedestrian uses of computers.
I can think of several applications provided by the Omni group which have no real analog in FOSS that I'm aware of.
I just suspect if I load Linux to revive say my aunt's old laptop, it'll probably struggle with wifi, have printer issues and she'll be annoyed if she bought taxcut at the store and gets home realizing she can't use it.
a big plus is I think netflix runs natively in the chrome browser now, or pretty soon. Netflix was a hassle for years that made it so I knew I couldn't just recommend Linux to the common man.
IMO Windows is a primitive development platform out of the box, one needs to install many tools, a lot of them commercial to replicate what's available on Linux. I've done my share of development on both and strongly prefer investing more effort and time into open source tools instead of some proprietary solution that I have to pay for and which I am not guaranteed to be able to use in future projects.
I think it'd be hard to argue that a fresh, clean install of windows isn't an absolutely primitive development platform.
Not that I think it's too relevant of an argument in this discussion, as no developer runs an "out of the box" install as a dev platform, but countering arguments that were never made doesn't seem too productive.
I can't even find a diff/patch tool on any platform as good as BC. It has all sorts of heuristics and plugins for different file types and a ton of really advanced features that are easily accessible from it's UI. And those are just 2 of my most basic tools that I use heavily (and I use the keyboard to do everything).
Moving onto text editors, I think the choices on Linux are basically like having to choose between learning Klingon or Vulcan. It's exhausting just thinking about it.
Woah, really? There are plenty.
Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately.
AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one).
Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are the reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn't possess. That's why free stuff available sucks or even doesn't exist.
Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.
OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.
To put it shorter: pretty much any software which isn't trivial to write or requires domain knowledge. The only decent examples of these in the FOSS world I can remember are Blender and Krita.
Nuance Dragon SDK runs on Linux, it's not FOSS but it runs there. Just no GUI / Command Line App.
> OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.
Nuance and ABBYY SDKs running on Linux. Quite well. Just no GUI / Command Line App.
Oh and you don't need to use FOSS only just because you are using a FOSS OSS.
And yes Audio / Video is pretty weak on Linux, thats true. However for most other things there are good enough tools. Especially LibreOffice is really really great. It's better for Users migrating from Office 2003 than to migrate to 07/10/13/16. However there are weaknesses, too, like the Dictonary.
Also some bigger Office's Macro's aren't easy replaceable. However Linux is good enough for the most.
Ardour is the basis for Harrison consoles which are fairly well respected. I would also comment that open source audio plugins tend to look much worse than they actually sound. Totally vanilla UI for an audio plugin doesn't inspire much confidence in the audio quality (watch Century of the Self for more on that). I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason. Cubase is far less programming work than Reason IMHO.
Sample libraries aren't "source code" and in that sense they cannot be truly "open sourced". Creative content such as this is more on the Creative Commons side of matters -- for better or worse.
UI is usually bad indeed, but I wouldn't really care that much if the actual effects would be done alright. They are not.
> I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason
Well, doesn't really matter: the point still is there's no decent FOSS DAW. Ardour is not terrible, but… just no. And there still is no real use for DAW without any instruments or effects anyway.
But, as a side note, I've never heard of a musician writing some more or less sophisticated music (that is not Prodigy) with Reason. I've used it for a while, and it's pretty nice, all this "hardware interface" concept is really cool, but it's very limited and very limiting. It's like, well, using Mac or Windows vs using Linux — what I can do is strictly defined by the developer, no much freedom out there. Cubase is complicated and glitchy as hell, but with it I really can do pretty much whatever I want. Simpler (and much cheaper) alternative to Cubase I would say might be Reaper, but not Reason.
> Sample libraries aren't "source code"
No, that's not the problem. Sample libraries for KONTAKT are sample libraries for KONTAKT. It is not a bunch of .wav files, it's a proprietary format, which wouldn't work with some other sampler out of the box — unless you specifically make it to, which (I guess) might be not trivial, as it's made specifically to avoid competition. So even if you buy sample libraries for that, or download it from torrents or whatever — it's not about library licensing, it's about being unable to use it with anything but KONTAKT.
That makes nice PR to bad it isn't all that true. According to the linux foundation more than 80% of kernel development is done by people being paid for their work.
Of course, something that satellites and most embedded devices have in common is minimal need for user interaction. It would be perfectly unsurprising if the world's best embedded OS turned out to be the world's worst desktop OS.
I think these "spyware features" actually help a ton with that. Without some level of usage data (anonymized is great) how are you supposed to know how your product is actually being used.
1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now.
2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them.
3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.
4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX.
5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.
I've done "Windows" development for about half of my 20-year career, and PHP/Rails for the other half. (It's all mixed together; I'm talking about overall effort.) My job, for the past 2 years, has been 100% Visual Basic .NET. (Personal projects continue in Rails.) I'm sick to death with it, and eagerly await a side gig in Rails and OS X, which should lead to a massive side project in Java. I can't wait. I'll take development on OS X and Linux every day of the week and twice on Sunday over Windows and Visual Studio. Some days, like today, I don't know what I was thinking taking this job.
I guess it all comes down to personal preference, but today was a perfect example. I spent half the day fighting updating packages with NuGet, from one machine to another, and a sudden incompatibility with Azure database exports with my local version. Sure, there are problems with every dev environment, but it just seems so much MORE of a hassle with Visual Studio on Windows, since, for all their money and effort and marketing and the fact that they own the whole stack, the pain ought to be much LESS than the alternatives.
And I mostly HATE IntelliSense, always popping up and covering what I'm trying to type, and Visual Studio's stubborn way of screwing up my code with its auto-completion of IF statements. Yet I leave it on, for the 5% of the time I want to actually use it.
It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run. (So I do that work on my home PC.) And they run their own DNS system, which doesn't know that about half the internet exists. Oh, and the proxy has recently started killing my application for one user at random. No, these aren't Windows or Visual Studio's problems, but these SORTS of problems are frequently part of a "Windows development ecosystem" found in large companies that pay a lot of money to rubbish consultancies.
I know, I know. Horses for courses.
Well I mean... I could tell you my java/maven nightmare stories as well. Dependency hell is not something anyone gets to escape, even if you're using newer hotness like NPM or Go. Oh god, Go's dependency management is a trap.
> It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run.
There is no escape for us, except to burn our way out.
That seems to be subjective. I like the debugger in Visual Studio but I much prefer emacs and Makefiles. Even if emacs is often slow to highlight large C files.
To each their own.
> 2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them.
The article is fairly light on comments regarding retention policy.
> 3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.
The surface book is intriguing to me due to having the built-in pen support. I love my Wacom but I hate lugging it around.
Otherwise, meh. Apple has the better hardware design that fits my preferences.
> 4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX.
I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. When I can hand off calls from my iPhone and get the same level of integration you get in the Apple ecosystem the deal will be sealed.
> 5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.
This is an interesting turn of events. It's also the new black it seems: Apple with Swift, CLR.
I mainly want it because hardware vendors support it. You most likely can't get better than OpenGL 4.1 until the next major update to OSX even if your hardware supports 4.5!
You can use makefiles. I use leiningen, without docker.
> Otherwise, meh. Apple has the better hardware design that fits my preferences.
Specifically referring to Surface. In general, Microsoft makes pretty good hardware. But uh, Apple's hardware isn't good in anything but a relative sense. Their build quality has been on the decline for a long time.
> I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. When I can hand off calls from my iPhone and get the same level of integration you get in the Apple ecosystem the deal will be sealed.
That's not something Apple will let happen, though. We both know that. Android though? Already works via Skype. I'm not sure I like that tech stack either but... it's not like google hangouts is exactly "good."
A dearth of something is a lack of it (see http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dearth). So a dearth of problems is a very good thing. I think you mean a plethora or an excess.
I need to support Windows for a paycheque, but I use Linux and free options wherever I realistically can, and it has improved my quality of life drastically. Even before I cared about privacy, I grew sick of the constant licensing treadmill. The privacy concerns, however, have long-since passed my tolerance, and I now consider proprietary software itself to be a backdoor. If I must run proprietary software for some practical reason, I will use tools like firewalls, virtualization, and proxies, to limit its potential.
I don't quite understand this. I've been on the bleeding-edge (using testing packages) of Arch for quite some time now and have had fewer problems than when I used, say, Fedora or Ubuntu.
What sort of problems were you having?
I'm glad to hear this "out there." I've run Linux on the desktop for 20 years now, and just concluded, as of today, that I was done forever. It was my main OS at home AND work for probably 15 of those years. I've done many years each with Slack, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. I know them all very well. When I ran them on my desktop, I was running them on all my servers too, and getting both sides.
With all the kerfuffle, I decided to reboot out of my work-from-home Visual Studio gig into my Ubuntu install yesterday, and I did the apt-get update and upgrade bit, and then COULD NOT LOG IN. (It would think about it, then kick me back to the lightdm login screen.) Simple reading of the logs showed me that the nVidia kernel module was out of whack. For about an hour I purged the packages and tried reinstalling. I tried the x-edgers PPA packages. Then I remembered that I had had this sort of trouble before, and had concluded that Ubuntu's graphical "restricted hardware" driver-installer widget does things outside of the normal package management, and decided that I didn't care any more. I scraped the whole thing off my machine.
But I couldn't just NOT HAVE a Linux installation, so, today, against my better judgement, I installed Fedora. Within 5 minutes -- FIVE MINUTES -- of trying to install software, I had 2 SELinux error messages. Why in the world would installing native packages cause SELinux errors? And trying to install the Chrome browser RPM gave me some cryptic Gnome library error. I decided that was enough of THAT too.
I've fought this kind of stuff for a couple of decades. I was using Linux when getting it going required asking for advice from the most pretentious jerks on the internet -- #linux on EFNet -- because the "internet" wasn't big enough to have a lot of documentation about it yet. I've learned the ins and outs of RPM, apt, and portage. I'm just done. I have enough trouble with Windows, and Linux is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse. (I'm typing this on OS X, which an order of magnitude better than Windows.)
I BRIEFLY considered trying Arch, since that seems to be the only other viable alternative for Linux besides Ubuntu or Fedora, but my experience with Gentoo leads me to think that, like you say, it's just going to be a hassle. Even more of a hassle than either Ubuntu or Fedora, and I'm already DONE with them. So I guess that's that. Linux will be ready for the desktop just in time for everyone to stop running desktops in favor of tablets, phones, and -- according to Cringley, recently -- gaming machines in the cloud.
If handing my activity stream to Microsoft and Apple is the price to NOT have to faff about with tweaking package management systems, then I guess I'll pay. As Murdoch said, in the Lethal Weapon movies, "I'm too old for this st."
The initial setup takes about an hour if you've never done it before (I keep the installation guide open on my tablet and go through it step by step.) Once you've done it once, reinstalling takes maybe 15 minutes on a fast internet connection.
That said, if you've decided your tinkering days are over, then your best bet is OSX. Myself, I have to use OSX, Windows and Linux for dev work, and Arch is the only distro I can tolerate these days. The lack of a graphical installer means it's certainly not for everyone, however, once the initial setup it's a breath of fresh air, compared to the constant buginess of Ubuntu and ($god forbid) Fedora.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208(v=vs.85...
While the Enhanced level accounts for a lot of the usage-specific statistics detailed in TFA, Basic still sends a lot of valuable data to Microsoft. And, despite paying for Windows, you can't turn it off unless you get an Enterprise/Academic license.
[0]: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208(v=vs.85...
If they want to do research they can use their own resources.
Obviously consumers would like Microsoft to sell them a product with more features for cheaper. But that's no different from any business ever, yet people are throwing a shitfit all over the internet based primarily on misinformation.
And of course, mobile apps are saturated with complex metrics collections. Every major phone app ships with a huge sum of metrics embedded that can be monitored and almost no mobile apps discuss this.
Need we even mention web sites and their inescapable universal surveillance of their users? Even if cookies are turned off, there is so much we can (and do!) use to track users with startling specificity.
Microsoft is just a brand people like to yell about. It's a well-known brand name and people who want to express but not actually show education about digital privacy desperately cling to it to signal they are "IN THE KNOW."
I just blocked it and didn't bother to inspect the packets.
That's the core of Stallman's point. He's an extremist, but there's merit. If it's my software, I need to be able to turn parts of it off.
I understand that if you choose to use Google, you are paying for it with your privacy, which is why I avoid using it. But when I pay real money for a piece of software, it should not be violating my privacy anyways.
I use VS Pro and wish it had the testing tools that Enterprise did. Not enough to pay that much, though. Should I be mad about a violation of my right to IDE test suite integration?
Complaining that the professional license doesn't have all features available in response to my own analogy with VS makes me think you have no interest in the actual truth and just want to argue for its own sake. Is that accurate?
It doesn't matter what their 'primary business' is. What matters is that their reputation plays into decisionmaking. What someone has to deal with at home is going to remind them of their irritation when it's time to make up their mind on a purchase at the office.
I'm currently using custom-built desktop systems (which run arch linux like a dream; most everything just worked out of the box) for most of my daily work, though, and my longer-term plan is to sell off my mac hardware and replace it with hardware that runs linux with less fuss.
The unfortunate reality is that non technical uses will never achieve the same level of privacy and security as technical ones.
I personally feel like I have no choice Windows is collecting way too much data for me to be conformable using and Apple is just a benevolent dictator for now it can change its mind at any point and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it so I see Linux as the only choice.
Not to mention that most development tools i use these days are way easier to use on Linux then on Windows.
If I need Photoshop or some software that only runs in Windows I can always run them in a VM.
Or try running it in PlayOnLinux (a very good WINE wrapper). It supports all of CS6 and also Creative Cloud installs on Linux.[1]
[1] https://www.playonlinux.com/en/app-2316-Adobe_Photoshop_CS6....
I believe they are going down that road too, eventually. They are also going to dump Intel at some point not too far off, which may not matter to many Mac users but it will be significant to the hackintosh crowd.
"For privacy's sake, you must avoid nonfree software since, as a consequence of giving others control of your computing, it is likely to spy on you. Avoid service as a software substitute; as well as giving others control of your computing, it requires you to hand over all the pertinent data to the server."
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.en....
But free software can still do bad things. RMS is currently discussing (within GNU) standard guidelines for privacy expectations for GNU projects, which I'm encouraged by; once those are released, it'd be a good thing for other non-GNU projects to follow as well.
on another note, i just helped my mom set up an iPhone. try it once with no previous accounts for anything. it's maddening! dozen of EULAs, several different accounts needed for every menial thing, dumb and dumber password restrictions, options to skip useless accounts hidden in the UI...
They've been getting so much goodwill for all the other great things they've been doing lately. It just seems downright foolish to squander all of that for a few extra basis points in their telemetry data from those rare few users who care about privacy but are forced to use Windows 10 anyways for whatever reason.
Those who care about privacy but do have a choice in OS will simply avoid Windows 10 altogether because of the mandatory telemetry, which is telemetry data that they wouldn't be getting anyways. A certain percentage of these people could be Windows 10 users if it weren't for the mandatory telemetry. Would they really rather have people using other OSes, than having them use Windows 10 without giving them telemetry data?
So many aspects of their position on this issue seems completely irrational to me.
But regardless of that, from Microsoft's perspective, does it make any sense to not offer the option to disable telemetry on all versions? From what I see, all it's doing is giving them bad publicity while driving potential users away to other platforms. And for what? Probably a few basis points in telemetry data that won't even make a dent to the overall trends in their telemetry data.
What software dev doesn't think logs and crash dumps are useful?
It's just creepy and invasive.
That part jumped out at me too. This probably means they're recording the name (or even hash?) of every executable you run and comparing to a list of known game .exe files. In addition they're recoding how long you have been using each executable (if not start/stop timestamps).
I'm not a security expert but it seems like this kind of information could be correlated with (for example) Tor exit node traffic to unmask a Tor user or other fun surveillance uses.
Also, the Microsoft Store has an entire category called "Game" and can just use that.
Worst case though, by "game" it might just use the Window's Xbox app's determinant for shortcuts like Win+G which is essentially, from what I gather, "Does it use DirectX? y/n".
Visual Studio is probably the primary reason I'm even bothering with Microsoft but fuck me they collect a lot of unnecessary shit. They claim its "anonymous"... Some of this doesn't seem so anonymous to me:
"Context.Default.VS.Core.User.Location.GeoId":x, "Context.Default.VS.Core.BuildNumber":x, "Context.Solution.LastSolutionBuildID":x, "Context.DebugSession.VS.Diagnostics.Debugger.DebugSession.StartupProject.UniqueGuid":"{x}", "Context.DebugSession.VS.Diagnostics.Debugger.DebugSession.UniqueGuid":"{x}", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.IsInternal":"False", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.IsOptedIn":"True", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.IsMicrosoftInternal":"False", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.Type":"External", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.Id":"x", "Context.Default.VS.Core.Machine.Id":"x", "Context.Solution.ActiveProjectGuid":"{x}", "Context.Solution.SolutionSessionID":"{x}", "Context.Solution.SolutionID":"{x}"
Short of actual source they send everything (and details) you do in VS in real time.
That intersection of users seems absolutely miniscule relative to the overall Windows 10 userbase, and in most cases the telemetry data they contribute is not going to be any larger than a margin of error in Microsoft's Windows 10 overall telemetry trends.
Nobody is going to argue that telemetry isn't useful for developers, but at some point you have to decide if it's worth it to force users into giving you telemetry data if it means driving potential users away to competitors and giving fuel to a very vocal minority of users that write unfavorable articles and comments on news sites, blogs, and social media at every opportunity because of this decision.
> many UX studies have shown that this applies to only a tiny percentage of users
Ironic because that's exactly the kind of thing telemetry is excellent for proving. It's quite useful for informing and providing quantitative feedback on UX.
Uh, no, it's really not.
If you offer the option to disable telemetry, some people will disable it. If there is any pattern to which people do this, and we all know there is, it introduces sampling bias and casts aspersions on any conclusions you draw from that data.
Personally, I'd probably be satisfied if Microsoft gave me the tools to examine the telemetry that my computer wants to send. Not making that available to users makes me feel like they have something to hide.
They also tell you exactly what types of data they collect, along with where and how. That's not consistent with wanting to hide the extent of their telemetry.
where?
This is the Windows 10 retail EULA: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Useterms/Retail/Windows/10/U...
It links to "aka.ms/privacy", which takes you to: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement/default.asp...
There are some good examples of the categories of data that they collect and some information about which features, programs, and apps might collect that data. There are examples within the categories, but not an exhaustive list. Maybe there are more complete lists available for each separate feature. I'd be interested in seeing an explanation, collected into one place, of which pieces of data are influenced by which settings, which ones can't be controlled, etc.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt577208(v=vs.85...
I've seen hand-wavy explanations, in general terms, of the data collected. I don't want that. I want to see the actual data collected from my specific machine. Even a bullet-point list including items like "total time executing binaries tagged as 'game'" would be preferable.
Users who turn off telemetry can still give you one crucial data point: the percentage of users who do care enough about privacy to turn off telemetry. But this data point is something they simply can't capture because of their insistence on making telemetry mandatory. And any future decisions they make with regards to privacy and telemetry usage will now have to be based on speculation instead of hard data.
In addition to biasing their telemetry data to the subset of users who don't care strongly about privacy, this decision also has a real cost in terms of adoption rates, market share, and damage to the goodwill they've slowly built up over the years in other areas. I just can't see why they'd think this is a worthwhile tradeoff.
This is true enough, but consider this: Giving the option to disable telemetry will result in users users who would disable it. Not giving the option to disable telemetry will result in users who who simply won't use Windows 10 because of mandatory telemetry.
With the former option they still get a data point in terms of the percentage of their users who care enough about privacy to turn off telemetry. With the latter option they don't get this data point, but in return they get some telemetry data from users who would disable telemetry if it was available, but don't care enough about privacy to use a different OS because of it (i.e. the telemetry data they have available is still biased to the subset of users who don't care very strongly about their privacy).
Is the data from this latter group of users important enough to be a worthwhile tradeoff for getting data on the percentage of your users who do care strongly about privacy and the damage to their market share and the damage to the goodwill they've built up over the years? My answer would be no.
Microsoft still thinks the will get away with this. Their bad. They will get problems with their mass collection of data from sensitive areas like doctors, lawyers, etc.
Windows 7 is a very good OS until at least 2020 (minus recent phone-home updates). And every other OS including OSX, iOS, Android and Linux are more forthcoming and less hostile to the end user. (all tracking, crash reporting and phone home features can be deactivated in all OS except Win10)
It wouldn't be the first time they overplayed their hand in the area of privacy. Recently they were trying to tell everyone their new Xbox was going to be constantly on and watching them in their living room even if they shut it off. When there was a huge uproar they backtracked.
The cost/benefit decision here for Microsoft just makes no sense.
The only reason I can think of that doesn't resort to tin foil hat theories is to prevent a rise of "windows 10 privacy enhancement" software.
What's more concerning about these data aren't these specific numbers, but what other data that implies that they have, what they can do with it, and what they can infer about you from it. Privacy and anonymity aren't (reasonably) possible on a Windows 10 operating system.
Any entity knowing that I have even turned on my PC---without explicit action to notify someone of such, such as posting this message or sending e-mail---is a privacy violation.
Just think of the targeted advertising opportunities based on toilet usage statistics!
"New York'ers goes to the toilet x times a day" is fine vs "John Doe goes to the toilet x times a day" is not.
But they should always be opt-in.
three strong startup/KS ideas right there
The argument that "it's OK because it's on the web" just doesn't cut it anymore guys. An application is an application.
We should just be as angry about browsers that do tracking and web apps that do tracking as we are about OS'es that do tracking.
To me, privacy is about control (deciding who gets to see what) and having an OS that phones home with who knows what information means I have no control once information touches my PC.
Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collect any information.
Last I looked Microsoft's privacy policy was vague enough that it could include almost anything and everything on a PC as well as whatever Windows can infer about your local network.
> Of course, there's always the chance that Microsoft is lying in their documentation, but if you mistrust them that much, you probably shouldn't use their software even if they claim to not collect any information.
You're right, at the end of the day it comes down to trust. Microsoft's behaviour in this case - making it hard to disable telemetry, being vague about collection details and unresponsive to questions - means that it's hard to trust them. In a hypothetical world where they were upfront with what was collected, responsive to questions, and allowed users to disable all data gathering easily the same feature set might be easier to swallow.
Edit: I forgot to mention how aggressively Microsoft has been shoving Windows 10 down user's throat. I've had several non-technical friends end up with Windows 10 by mistake (and against their wishes) - another sign that Microsoft doesn't give a shit about users' wishes.
And that's an understating.
An OS can know all your passwords, can look everywhere around on your network, can sign documents legally impersonating you.
Which is often enough to completely divorce you from your identity legally, steal all your money, and possibly incriminate you.
That's all. But hey! My porn browsing habits are SAFE ON MY OS.
When you started using Windows, it was pretty much offline affair. Many people were connected to internet only occasionally, if at all.
So basically, Gmail/ChromeOS was adding something to your options - you have a new service, you can decide whether you can start using it - or not. Windows is taking away from you - you were using it for years, maybe decades, most of the world is dependent on it, and suddenly, the rules of the game change and you cannot do anything about it.
It is when you change it to an individual level that it becomes problematic. Instead of talking about what is happening with a product across all users, you are now talking about what a specific person is doing. And that is why tracking at the OS level is more problematic than at a web server level - by definition, my OS is personal usage.
If you have any feeling at all for how an OS operates, Windows 10 with default settings has the air of someone creepily muttering to themselves and fidgeting with something under the table (half the time some component is eating 20% of the CPU). Then the second you walk away they spring up and maniacally run into a closet and commence making mysterious banging noises (walk away and some component spins up to 100% CPU and stays there, fans commence howling). You walk back into the room and there they are - sitting, red, panting, comically failing at looking nonchalant. It's a unique combination of creepy and comical, all in all.
Whereas with Google docs, you really have to know what you're looking for to see manifestations of all the tracking, though of course that doesn't make it better.
It seems I can disable the windows tracking. Microsoft can spy on others, but if can opt out I don't care that much, it is just one more annoying default to change when I use a new machine like unchecking the "hide known extensions".
I run my own mail server. But gmail, yahoo and hotmail represent like 99% of my personal contacts. That means that these three companies have pretty much access to all of my personal emails, with personally identifiable information (my first name, last name, email address) and I have no way to opt out, other than convincing my contacts to stop using these services (good luck with that!). I didn't ask for that tracking. I do not agree with google having access to my emails, I did not agree to google's terms and conditions. I am not a gmail customer. But my private correspondence is still recorded by gmail.
I wonder how much of that was spent downloading Firefox or Chrome?
"30% more Bing search queries per Windows 10 device versus previous versions of the OS"
I can't imagine that this is due to anything other than the OS and browser defaults?
wasn't IE/Bing the default in previous versions of the OS too?
Can you turn that off? So that it only searches your local pc?
But at least as far as regular old Win-key search, you can definitely change a setting to only include local results. I tend to do it simply because I'm in the habit of typing to search local files in the Windows/Start menu and doing web searches via the browser. Web results in my Start/Win searches would just clutter up results so I've been disabling them since Win8.
Not sure if this extends to the search bar in the taskbar but I'm reasonably sure they're the same thing with a different location/interface. I'll have to enable the search bar to check for sure though.
[1] Last lines of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission
The moment Ballmer switched from "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!" to "Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers!", I knew it was time to start migrating myself to Linux and Mac.
The messed up thing, is that they are getting such good press on their open-source initiatives and research projects, but really seem to be screwing themselves on the OS.
Then again, maybe they know something I don't know, and we will see some resurgence of Windows somehow.
What ballmer actually meant in his demented rage was "Developer lock in, Developer lock in, Developer lock in!". Linux is a million times friendlier to developers.
The new MS is getting there, but the new MS also has its glaring flaws, like the ones being discussed here.
... and they're probably right anyway. Computing went mainstream, people who need tools and not toys are niche now, and mass market doesn't cater to niches.
My point with the above is that the risks are far less than with a general purpose operating system. How can I ever trust Windows as a platform for running the Tor Browser on? How could I trust any closed system?
Honestly, most people are fine with the magic until they realize how much surveillance the magician does. I have no idea how they think it's supposed to work, but then most folks don't know how any part of their computer works.
Windows 8.1 with Bing (come on, who thought that's a good name for an OS?) has tiles that are ads for aps and games in various stores. No searching needed, these ads are baked in and served when you click start button. (Or whatever that's called now.)
Everything I hear about Windows 10 confirms my choice to steer clear.
The live tiles for stores can show pictures of products. You can elect to remove them if you don't like them.
Live tiles are one of the most powerful and useful features of the windows start menu. Like any feature, it's conceivable they could be misused. Unlike notifications, the user has complete, simple, and quick control over offending input.
You're missing out. Win10 is very good to developers these days.
That's very misleading. The option is called "Suggestions" and it's on by default. I'm convinced they called it that because if they called it "Ads", everyone would turn it off.
> By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps
That is far from only problem. Here is a screenshot of a Win10 start menu, out of the box, at default settings. Count the ads:
http://cdn5.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/img_55b...
Should they have displayed a totally empty start menu to start? I think people are getting way too upset about the smallest things.
Yeah, those are ads. It's like when the homescreen of my Kindle that I paid more for to get without "Special Offers" started showing books I may be interested in buying based on my reading history. Also known as ads.
It's insulting. I'm sure over their entire customer base it comes out as a positive feature for them, though. People more likely to click through to the store when they see a game name or screenshot they recognize, while only alienating a few.
At least, as you said, they offer an explicit and easy way to disable them, unlike Amazon at the time, who then took years to add an option to disable those.
Which, by the way, is all I'm asking for on the telemetry front as well. Opt-in by default all you want. Bury the setting three panels deep (don't reset it at your whim, though). I'll feel insulted and slightly dirtied, but I'll disable it and move on, active Windows customer that I am.
If you 'absolutely must' use Windows 10, would it be possible to firewall off every outbound port from this machine to prevent this sort of tracking? Or does it just use Port 80, piggybacking on the normal http traffic?
Has anyone done a comprehensive analysis of exactly how this info is being sent?
You can find all the known domains and addresses for the Microsoft telemetry and advertising networks through some searching online. I added them all to my hosts file as well as block lists in Comodo Firewall.
I did both because I assume Microsoft has wired access for some of these services in such a way that the hosts file would be ignored, as well as Windows Firewall.
I have my firewall also set to request user action on EVERY outgoing connection (all incoming stealthed, so no open or closed response) and so far all I have allowed out in terms of Windows processes is Windows Update. I haven't even allowed the error reporting.
The OS is still ticking along just fine.
Honestly though this whole approach they ahve taken with Windows 10 has really turned me off. It reeks of anti-consumerism. I basically just use this Windows 10 machine as a gaming machine now, and all my personal and professional computing is done on a separate Debian machine.
Microsoft won't be getting another penny from me for anything ever again.
And sure - stick it behind a NAT, learn the servers that the systems reports to, block those (or set up your own DNS); nothing that the average mainstream consumer is capable of doing.
This is what I do when I run Windows XP under VMware Fusion. Works like a charm for the few apps I need. I don't care if my XP is unpatched, it can't get to the Internet.
But I thought that Windows XP SP 2 (what I use) was the final version of Windows that didn't need to check in with Microsoft periodically (every few weeks?) or it would stop working. At least that's what Microsoft's original plans were; perhaps they relaxed that requirement?
I also ended up buying a new laptop that came with Windows 7 so the Ubuntu one sits in the attic rotting. Still, I'm still tempted to move back to a good GUI based Linux distro if I can find one. I just haven't got the time these days to start installing different ones and testing then out.
I love XFCE, It's fast, stable, easily configured, uses normal GTK stuff so fits with the Gnome apps, is a regular plain old desktop (main menu, window buttons/taskbar).
Mostly the thing I like about XFCE is I don't have to think about it, it just does it's thing, stays out of my way and doesn't break a user interface covenant I'm used to all the way back to Win95.
Of course you can run XFCE on pretty much any distro but the Xubuntu folks do an excellent job of packaging it all up and having access to Ubuntu's PPA's is a big win since pretty much everything is packaged for it.
They still come with some kind of tracking, like Chromium downloads binary blob that manages your microphone, or Firefox that includes telemetry and crash reporting, but at least you can easily recompile Fx without pocket, WebRTC etc. which you can't do in Win10.
Personally, I use Hardened Gentoo and actively avoid downloading binaries + a lot of other tweaks to the "standard" Linux setup to patch what I see as obvious holes. Perhaps I need to elaborate more on a blog post.
It is very inconvenient yet for me I accept it as a price worth paying. The great thing about Linux though is that there are many middle roads. On one hand, you could just use Ubuntu (hey, they even turned off the tracking stuff in 15.10) and the Tor Browser, and then you've pretty much eliminated most of the casual advertiser-level tracking (if you follow basic hygiene). On the other, you could go and build your own custom distribution with packages audited by you and always built from source, only after having verified personally all the developers' GPG keys...
"3. Advertising Data We Don’t Collect
Unlike some other platforms, no matter what privacy options you choose, neither Windows 10 nor any other Microsoft software scans the content of your email or other communications, or your files, in order to deliver targeted advertising to you."
Most people would read that as "MS doesn't scan your files, communication or email period" when it in fact just mentions one case in which they dont...
https://blog.onedrive.com/onedrive_changes/
> a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings.
I'm pretty certain they didn't get permission to look at their users movie collections or DVR recordings, they were just flagged for high usage and they went right in to see what those users were storing. For any form of data collection they do, it's a guarantee they're analyzing the outliers... in fact they're practically bragging about the fact they do.
I still haven't upgraded and I'm preventing the updates to 7 that add the telemetry nonsense, but I can't help feeling like I'm getting more and more watched every day.
Of course, Caspar Bowden was fired years ago, but I have a feeling Satya probably only made this culture worse. I remember this for example too:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/ballme...
Tracking usage in Microsoft's own software is one thing. But for the OS to understand which 3rd party apps are games, and track hours spent on them has some deeper implications.
75% of our users watch pornography at least twice a week. On average it takes 4.73 minutes for males between 28 and 33 years of age, with a household income of between $65-75k pa, who work in the advertising industry and who are married with 2 or more children and personal debt over $25k and at least one car, and a search phase of "mature big tits" to finish watching it.
Then, open Services and stop & change startup to disabled on "Connected User Experiences and Telemetry" and "dmwappushservice".
There are bunches of tools and scripts around to do it, but those 2 things are really all that you need to do. Microsoft doesn't stop you from "opting out" of Telemetry by making these changes. All windows updates / etc still work.
You can get around that by blocking it with a (non-Microsoft) firewall though.
"2.4 billion questions asked to virtual assistant Cortana"
Things like that are really completely harmless. Microsoft already owns your ass by means of auto-updater (so does every vendor from which you download software updates) It is not time to be paranoid. As long as Microsoft keeps releasing quality products, they can anonymously track how long Windows users watch porn for all I care.
Just think of it as Microsoft Total Information Awareness.
No explanation. This is hostile computing.
The word for it is telemetry and every medium sized app or bigger has been doing it for a really long time.
What's the big deal?
On the other, it's a pretty big deal because I view my computers as extensions of my brain. And I view the ability to do things privately in my brain of paramount importance.
Now, I understand why software builders like to build in telemetry (it allows them to tweak their products to be more popular and sell data to advertisers) but I cannot accept such a thing for a general-purpose operating system.