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Comment by gargravarr | Hacker News Reader

Seems like the only way people want to make money these days is through invasive advertising without the end-user's explicit consent. Granted the expectation of free software is driving most of this, but it starts a vicious cycle because those who get annoyed with them develop countermeasures, which the creator responds to with more aggressive ads, ad infinitum.

It does start explaining some of the highly controversial telemetry MS was collecting in Win10 - turning everyone's PCs into billboards.

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Having read the article, this is about the "Windows Spotlight" feature -- which shows you a different wallpaper just before you log in. For me it's usually the default "cave and beach" wallpaper[1] although it's shown interesting photos from time to time, so I've left the feature on. It's on by default but pretty easy to disable.

Not sure how I'd feel if it started showing me blatant ads. I'd probably just turn it off. And if they annoy me too much, well, hello Mac or Linux.

I'm going to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt here, they're still trying to figure out what "Windows as a Service" looks like. Note that Google has ads on its homepage and even Apple delivers ads via push notifications, breaking its own rules in this regard[2].

[1] http://betanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Windows-10-lo... [2] https://marco.org/2014/12/01/app-store-rule-5-6

That cave and beach is by my house in New Zealand. Was super confusing when I saw it on someone elses computer as well and realized the photo wasn't one of mine

Is that Cathedral Cove?

Yes

Nice, I was there last week :)

I saw this too. If it didn't have the tiny text there that said "Discover the adventure inside." Then I'd hardly consider it an ad. It is then almost "free" wallpaper. Which I frequently have to go out and find for games I actually like and play.

It's such a fine line between delivering something people want without them having to ask for it (nifty feature), and shoving things down peoples throat (ads). I really hope they address this properly.

I have a hard time calling this an ad. It was one of the wallpapers released for the new Tomb Raider game, and it's a pretty nice lockscreen picture in it's own right.

It's sponsored content, which is still advertising, just that it's not a "native ad".

Hopefully they'll fix it soon so people can't disable any of this stuff, and the ads get really blatant and annoying.

It's just like the old adage about boiling a frog. Except that in reality, frogs aren't actually that stupid, and will jump out of the pot when the water gets too hot. Humans aren't that smart.

Except windows isn't free. Even users who upgraded for free initially paid for a windows license (at least outside of China).

Paying for the privilege of seeing adverts. So fundamentally MS.

I'm so glad Win7 will be supported until 2020.

Too bad about Intel dropping support for Skylake and newer CPUs on Windows 7.

you mean Microsoft dropping support for Skylake

Can't drop something that doesn't exist.

You can drop something that doesn't exist but was announced. Thechnically Skylake support for Win7 wasn't announced, but the effect is the same since there was an implicit expectation that the feature would come.

But I presume dropping support just means not being able to use the latest features.

Even a very old system image of windows 7 will run on the very latest skylake. It doesn't need the very latest updates. I doubt they will create a kill switch in a windows update that refuses to boot if the system detects a too modern CPU.

They can refuse to provide a signed driver for the platform, but like you said it is unclear how far they will go.

Still better than Chrome endig support for Windows Vista this upcoming April...

>Thechnically Skylake support for Win7 wasn't announced, but the effect is the same since there was an implicit expectation that the feature would come.

From where did this implicit expectation come from?

Windows 7 mainstream support ended in Jan 2015 and that was known since forever.

Extended support implies:

>Microsoft no longer supplies non-security hotfixes unless you have an extended support agreement

>All warranty claims end

>Microsoft no long accepts requests for new features and design changes

It's more prevalent than you would expect. People pay for cable and magazines. People even pay to become walking ads when they buy brand name clothing.

edit: comma

When I was still reading paper magazine, the first thing I did when I received a new issue of The Economist was to shake it over a garbage bin to remove all the inserts and tear up the card board insert in the middle...

Hahah, I did the same.

It was either the Economist or FT that did a cost/benefit analysis of removing those inserts for their already-subscribed customers copies, and found that it would cost more in lost new subscriptions to remove them.

> it would cost more in lost new subscriptions to remove them.

How does that make sense?

Some of those inserts were invitations to subscribe to the Economist.

I guess because people are reminded weekly to resubscribe or buy subscriptions as gifts.

I dunno if it applies to me since I would habitually forget to resubscribe until they sent me the YOUR LAST ISSUE wrapping like an invasive Santa Claus.

Opportunity cost of lost subscriptions. A certain percentage of those inserts will convert to new subscriptions, even if the person receiving the insert was already a subscriber.

Wow, that really brings me back. I remember reading on Quora TE's chief editor explaining that the reason digital and print subscriptions were the same price was because digital ads were easier to avoid or block and were worth less to advertisers than print ads, which are more prominent and harder to ignore (unless you fold it over, but even then you'll certainly notice it).

those cardboard inserts made the best joint filters

I remember that process used to be called 'deboning' the magazine.

For a while, there were people who used to drop them all in the mail.

Force the publishers and advertisers to pay the postage for them with the idea of making it less profitable to include them with the magazines in the first place.

I used to do that, back in the 90s in college. First I just put tons of trash paper in business-reply envelopes and drop them in the mail, then I started filling them up with gravel.

Years later, on the internet, I remember seeing some article about people doing this, and they had pictures of things like business-reply envelopes attached to bricks, which the USPS had received. IIRC, they said that the USPS didn't actually send these or charge the business for them, unfortunately.

So stick with just dropping them in the mail as-is, to make sure the business gets charged for it.

One time, back in the 80s, American Express had some kind of disagreement with the union that my step-father belonged to and the members of his union went out and every time they'd see the American Express credit card applications, they'd take them all and send them back in blank.

They had been told that each application cost a dollar to have mailed and processed.

I was a child so I never cared enough to ask about the details of the dispute and I don't know how long they did this, only that they did.

With magazines, at least those for very specialized audiences, the ads can actually be quite useful. For a general interest magazine, like TIME, or Scientific American, the ads are just filler for me. I'd rather have an ad-free version of the magazine.

But for something like QST (a ham radio magazine) where almost every advertiser is offering something I have an interest in, and where there are no physical stores in my area where I can go to browse the merchandise in person, the ads do a great job of keeping me current on what is available but are easy to ignore when I'm reading an article. I'd be disappointed if QST was ad-free.

My brother cut me a login to his Comcast Xfinity. I tried watching "The Magicians" on syfy.com--- and there's 100 seconds of ads, six times over a 45 minute show! It makes the cliffhangers and pauses even more obnoxious. I'm going to go back to torrenting.

No TV/cable, but on a trip recently I tried to watch syfy on the hotel TV -- and it was more ads than show. I can't believe anyone puts up with it; I swear it was five minutes of ads and five minutes of movie. No thanks; I'll just wait until things come to Prime or Netflix.

Yeah, if you stop watching TV for a few years, trying to watch again after is really jarring. The volume-boost of ads, while not as bad as it used to be, is still pretty obnoxious, and the sheer quantity of ads makes shows much less enjoyable. I really believe that our parents are the last generation to really put up with all the ads, and our generation will just torrent / wait for Netflix / Prime or something else with minimal ads. The days of paying $100/month for 60 channels with linear programming spending a third of their time on ads are numbered.

Unfortunately the industry's response to people avoiding explicit ads seems to be including ever more product placement. At least I can skip the ads with my PVR. Better that than having immersion in a show I enjoy totally broken by some blatant product logo or, worse, a really out-of-place line delivered dutifully but still awkwardly by an actor whose character would never say that.

Possibly the only more annoying thing in TV is when some totally out of place, usually bright and animated logo pops up a couple of minutes before the end of the show I'm actually watching, usually with a boxy ad for some other show on the same channel next to it. Way to completely ruin the ending of the current show.

It won't be too long before someone figures out how to de-product-place a show. Your dvr will scan for brand names like "Dell", "HP", "Ford", etc., and blur them out. The audio can also be similarly processed. Eventually, we'll only see what we want to see, which is what "on demand" should be!

I don't know about other people, but I put up with it using a DVR and liberal use of the fast-forward button.

When cable TV first came out, way back in the previous century, one of the benefits was supposedly going to be no commercials. Because you're paying to receive it. Now I'd guess more commercials are delivered via cable (and all those channels) than broadcast.

This is precisely why my household got cable, and precisely the reason why years later we stopped having cable.

It seems weird in the computer world...

but I see a ton of paid cars driving around with advertisements stuck on the back too

It seems weird in the computer world because unlike with your car example, the ads actually track you.

Cars track you too: http://www.kliemanlyons.com/2014/09/vehicle-telematics-a-use...

The logos and model numbers on cars seem to be about as weird as having Microsoft's name and logos around the OS and the logo of the hardware's manufacturer on the outside of the machine. Unless you're talking about dealer-provided license plate holders. Those are much easier to remove than most of the logos in software would be.

Unless you installed the tech preview. I didn't pay a dime for Windows 10.

People want free. Things aren't free. But people want free, so let's give them "free" and monetize them indirectly with surveillance, invasive advertising, etc.

The entire Internet has gone down this road since it's very hard to compete with someone who is giving something away for "free" (note quotes). Free has given us George Orwell's bidirectional it-watches-you TV set.

Free was fine back when people paid their ISP or university to host their pages for them. The stuff put up by hobbyists was a lot more interesting in general anyway.

Free didn't ruin the web, advertising did.

I want a fully supported OS that will see upgrades. I'm willing to pay. I guess that means OSX or Linux for the forseeable future.

I used to think PCs that were sold had some vendor bloatware, but now the OS itself is bloatware.

Were Stallman & Torvalds simply precient for their viewpoints 20+ years ago?

I wouldn't put Torvalds in the same category as Stallman here. IIUC, Torvalds initially made Linux free simply because he was doing it for fun. Now he couldn't change the license if he wanted to, and he's getting paid to work on it anyway. In any case, it seems that he's always been much less idealistic about software freedom than Stallman.

What's the difference between OSX and Windows, in your mind? It's even more "free" than Windows is, since you can't buy it separately and all OS updates for the last few versions have been free.

Telemetry: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-w...

Can't disable unless it's Win10 Enterprise or Education editions (does any PC sold come with Win10 enterprise or education editions)?

>it's very hard to compete with someone who is giving something away for "free" (note quotes)

There's at least one very promising competing model: give something away for free (note lack of quotes) and offer people the option to pay.

In the software world we usually do that by using the free version as advertisement for a better paid version, Patreon (and Dwarf Fortress etc) show that the model can even work if paying offers no notable advantages.

I agree with your point but I doubt that something published by such a large company which many consumers have a distaste for ("my stupid computer is always blue-screening; I hate Microsoft") would be able to sustain such a huge development effort on just donations.

Edit: if it were open-source and they paid some people to work on it still, that would be...interesting.

I believe getting enough people to donate on a regular basis requires two things: a certain amount of customers have to be real fans of your product, and they have to be aware that the product ceases to exist if nobody donates.

Both aspects are a challenge for software: most people see software as a mere tool, and most people don't see the need for updates (and in fact see them as annoyance).

That's why a twitch streamers or youtube creator can easily get decent amounts of donations while donation buttons in software go completely ignored in almost all cases.

Open source is the one existing model in software development where donations work with some consitency (though donations are mostly in terms of development time, and some widely-used projects still go completely ignored).

For closed source there's are a few working examples with passionate fanbases (mostly games), but for the most part we haven't figured out how to do this well yet.

Yeah, except Windows 10 actually does cost money. And the people who pay for it still get to see ads.

It seems like the only sure way to avoid all this tracking crap in Windows 10 is to pony up for the Enterprise version (which is basically impossible if you’re not a business).

Arguably, with where the TVs nowdays are going; that story haven't even started the plot.

Not quite the entire Internet has gone that way. However, it's frustrating seeing sites that offer original content with paid access being criticised all the time, as if they're somehow evil or trying to rip visitors off by honestly charging a reasonable price for their work instead of giving it away for free and making a deal with demons to fund it some other way. This is what we get for letting $0.99 ifart apps become the benchmark for a whole generation, I guess.

Isn't pretty much all advertising everywhere "without the end-user's explicit consent"?

Websites, TV, radio, print media, billboards, sides of buses, posters in public bathrooms, Disney-branded kids' food at the grocery store, product placements embedded in actual Hollywood movies, desktop search in freakin' Ubuntu...

I didn't sign up for seeing ads in any of these. They're just an implicit part of the social contract in 2016.

You can block websites, only listen to radio channels without ads, switch to another TV channel when ads are coming up, use print media that have no ads but are subscription financed, etc.

In many cities you’ll even find that bus advertisements are toned down, and in public bathrooms there are no posters either.

I don’t remember when I saw or heard an ad the last time, but it was not this week.

I don't remember signing such a contract. So I would say these are not consensual

>Seems like the only way people want to make money these days is through invasive advertising

Edit: I see "want" in there now..

Microsoft had over $12BB in net income last year, so I'd hardly say the "only" way to make money is through invasive ads like this. I can't really explain why they do this (other than "why not?"), but any revenue from this is sure to be a drop in the bucket.

It's not a drop in a bucket, but a drop in Windows sales. By giving away free upgrades to Windows 10, revenue for Windows has dropped. This is their answer.

If only there really was universal expectation of free software. Then we'd really be getting somewhere.

Are you talking about free as in freedom? I think gargravarr meant free as in cost.

I did. But as discussed elsewhere on this page, libre software has its own set of drawbacks.

Software will never truly be "free" because someone pays for it to exist.

It has upfront fixed costs and variable costs to maintain, which need to be covered by the developers, users, advertisers, or some combination of the three.

By that definition nothing can be "free" (as in beer), there's always someone paying for it (even if it's just opportunity cost). For any useful definition of the word free there can also be free software.

Yep, also called TANSTaaFL (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch).

Which is the point in context to someone saying "If only there really was universal expectation of free software...". With IP, the costs are hidden and it's easy to fall into the trap of expecting it to be totally free.

The problem with TANSTaaFL is that it uses a completely different definition of the word free than normal English. Normally the word free only references the price paid by the consumer, not the cost of production.

If I give you a lunch without asking for anything in return, and without inconveniencing you, that's a free lunch for you. Of course somebody paid for it, but that doesn't stop me from giving it to you for free.

>Which is the point in context to someone saying "If only there really was universal expectation of free software...".

"I get my software for free but be offered the option to donate" is the model that's giving us Dwarf Fortress. It's free (as in beer) software in any useful sense of the word free.

Oh definitely, the "with donations" is also TANSTaaFL since it acknowledges costs. You're just arguing semantics.

I don't think they meant "universal expectation of free software with donations only".

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