Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade | Hacker News Reader

Windows 7 computers are automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrade

reddit.com

260 pointsmendelk233 comments

Maybe the way to block it is still:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3080351

    Subkey: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
    DWORD value: DisableOSUpgrade = 1

The MSFT decision to perform forced updates is covered, for example, by Extreme Tech, February 2:

"Look out: Microsoft shifts Windows 10 to ‘Recommended’ update, automatic download"

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/222326-look-out-microso...

I still believe they shouldn't have done that and I hope they get sued, heavily. Even if nobody dies, it's not OK. People had fully working computer and some of them wont. I have one such computer, which works on Windows 7 but doesn't on Windows 10.

I'm really hoping this crap badly affects the computers of some large justice/gov systems around the world (and/or the home computers of senior judges).

That should get the right people involved for sticking the boots in.

If the IT staff for any large organization hasn't reviewed their inventory for affected systems and taken appropriate steps... that's outright incompetence. The writing has been on the wall for years and MS clearly documents unaffected systems (which includes Windows 7 Enterprise) and the required Group Policy to block the update[1].

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3080351

Senior judges often don't operate that way. ;)

It's the same link I've already given above? And fascinatingly for you, "the writing was on the wall," and for some other commenters, it's unimaginable that it even happens. The perceptions of individuals are really hugely different.

The difference in context is important. If you're working in IT, the writing was on the wall.

This is exactly what I was getting at. For individuals and small organizations that often have no dedicated IT staff at all, they're the ones who'll get hit by Microsoft's forced-upgrade policy.

But for any large organization with deployed Windows systems, that absolutely requires a managed Windows environment for an ocean of reasons. That means a competent Windows IT staff that handles all those things, including: security configuration and updates, controlled testing and release of updates, data retention and deletion policies, and on and on.

For such shops, handling a change like this from Microsoft is already day-in-the-life. They already have to vet updates that may (and do) break business-critical software, while also ensuring that critical security updates are pushed out in a timely manner, etc.

There are literally millions of businesses with no IT department who bought consumer workstations or laptops running outside of a domain. There are millions of small businesses who literally don't have the expertise (or frankly, the need) to run a domain controller, and who certainly don't have enough money to justify purchasing a server and a Windows server license to do so.

I'm genuinely curious as to whether I'll be down voted for this. It's completely the case, and I'm not asking not to be downvote do, but could folks at least explain why they don't like the comment?

Not sure why someone would downvote this.

Incompetence is pretty much a constant in IT in varying degrees, but I'd expect IT professionals to know about kb3080351.

It's certainly not "news" given the media attention this subject has had ever since the "explosion" in June/July, when Microsoft chose to ignore that opt out setting, and even re-enabling telemetry prior to the upgrade.

Edit: I can take a downvote defending a factually correct point, which was originally posted by saidajigumi (who was downvoted, which is why I posted my somewhat cheeky (in retrospect) response, and why I upvoted his post). I don't think most people disagree about it being unfortunate for normal users to be upgraded, but that wasn't what our comments were about.

If the sys admin is doing there jobs correctly than system updates should be coming from a Windows update server using group policy rather than directly over the Internet. Nothing kills productivity like 1000 PCs trying to download the same files simultaneously.

What about a lot of computers which aren't in the possession of huge enterprises?

"the computers of some large justice/gov systems around the world"

For example, the computers important guys use at home, and somebody still dies because the computer isn't available when it should have been? I know, EULA.

That EULA is a "wild card" is the main problem now.

the computers important guys use at home

Hillary's email-gate?

So, no, important guys should not be using home computers that control/decide life or death situations.

> Hillary's email-gate?

I'm failing to see how the topic you mention helps to understand better the issue discussed here, that people can and should be able to depend on their own personal computers even for some life-influencing situations, and that it's bad (in my opinion) having EULAs which absolve in this case MSFT from absolutely everything. You really believe the proper use of personal computers is just for playing games? OK then, I don't, but no need for further discussion.

"I'm really hoping this crap badly affects the computers of some large justice/gov systems around the world"

Enterprise editions are not eligible for free upgrade to W10, so it's not likely. Also, there are additional safeguards, for example, you must get upgrades directly from MS, not WSUS (as per standard business practice). I'm sure MS thought that well and chose targets that are not likely to defend themselves in courts (home users and small business).

It's unfortunate, but that's probably correct. :(

Kind of wondering if this action by MS would count as abusive behaviour by a monopolist.

Reading that KB article and Microsoft are being total dicks with such complicated instructions when they could have offered a download to a tiny program which simply allows the user to opt-out of all upgrade prompts for N months.

This upgrade occurred to my father's Dell laptop, which became hung during the install and essentially "locked" from his standpoint. (He lives in another state and I'm not able to assist his technical needs.)

In any case, he took it to Office Max where he bought it and asked them to fix it. They did: they wiped his hard drive clean and installed Windows 10.

With none of his files.

Aggressive updating of an OS is not always a good thing, even with the best of intentions. It feels more like a desperate attempt to force some people into a world they don't want to be in so Customer Support can have a better time of it (I doubt customer support is having a better time of it right now).

I also have a computer that Microsoft "decided" is "upgradeable" even if it's not. I guess they estimated that the total number of such computers is not going to cost them much.

I do hope some class action suit happens. Only big companies install Enterprise versions of Windows, so a lot of users will have problems on the computers that otherwise normally worked. Even some that do very responsible work.

And I hope that EULAs in which we give them our firstborns and become the organ donors are finally going to be burned in courts.

Does your father still have the laptop? If so, ask him not to use it until you can get hold of it, and when you do I'd suggest running a Linux live distro on the machine with tools to recover deleted files, there's a decent chance you'll be able to recover many of them.

I've had success with the tools included in Trinity Rescue Kit before, so I can recommend that to you. I've used it to recover a bunch of pictures that were lost with a drive reformat.

http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?content=TRINITY_RESCUE...

I agree. Depending on the size of the HDD and the amount of data lost, there's a good chance that some data can be recovered, especially small files like office documents.

That said, it's a HDD wipe followed immediately by a full Windows installation, so there's a high chance a lot of the data were overwritten already.

Sure, there's a chance some of it was overwritten already, though hopefully Windows 7 and Windows 10 are a similar size on disk, which would mean that it'd mostly be OS files that were overwritten (as Windows should be installed on the early sectors of the hard disk in both cases).

> as Windows should be installed on the early sectors of the hard disk in both cases)

Not after enough updates.

I'm suggesting his father stops using the laptop until his son can attempt recovering the files to get around problems like this.

Yes, if it's possible, it's certainly worth at least trying rescuing what's left. It's very possible however that the rescue operation can simply be too complicated and too time demanding for the people involved, and that at the end the amount of the rescued data is too small. Apparently what is missing is "all the organization and notes" of the scanned photos.

Probably a lost cause. He had over 4K photos that he had taken in the 70s digitized from slides and organized.

All that work was blown away. He has digi backups of the files, but all the organization and notes are gone.

He's 77 with a quad-bypass in December, and the thought of starting over is, well, depressing for him. Not sure he's going to even try at this point.

How do you do a backup that retains Windows metadata?

It's hardly a proper backup if file metadata is not preserved.

> "He's 77 with a quad-bypass in December, and the thought of starting over is, well, depressing for him."

I'm sorry to hear that.

> "Not sure he's going to even try at this point."

I'm not suggesting he tries, I'm suggesting you try on his behalf.

That's the trouble - the organization isn't simply by date. It was by country - he travelled everywhere. He would actually know what goes where... But my brother (who helped him the first time) might remember what to do.

Will give it a shot.

A hard lesson in the value of backups. His hard drive could have crapped out (nobody's fault) and he'd be in the same boat.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Windows badly needs a better update mechanism. This has been a huge pain point for consumers for a long time, which often results in buying new hardware instead of updating the browser, etc.

On the other hand I think this will drive people away from Windows and towards OS X and Ubuntu.

Oh right, there is no downside to this!

Haha yeah! I really can't wait until I can do ALL of my day-to-day dev work on a Linux OS. Soon though... very soon...

Just out of curiosity, what dev work can't you do on Linux? I usually only hear that case for games or graphic/video editing.

Haha actually that is the case! I need to use Unity and the latest Linux build[1] doesn't yet have all of the features like in the latest version 5.3.3 for Windows/OSX. It's still experimental but now that I think of it... I might not need all of the features in the latest release, hmmm.

Also I need Remote Desktop Connection to do some contract work. I know other non-Windows remote desktop applications exist but I'm currently stuck with what their IT department will give me. :)

EDIT: Thinking more about the remote desktop connection. I could just use a Windows VM on Linux. Dang, that never crossed my mind before.

[1] http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/08/26/unity-comes-to-linux-exp...

Haha, sorry about that. I forgot about game dev :O

No worries! ^_^

The rdesktop (and GUI frontends) Remote Desktop client on Linux is perfect for this. Supports the Windows RDP protocol. All you need is to find the raw connection data (if they don't give it to you, e.g. if they use "remote desktop connection files"). We have various Windows servers at work yet no developer uses Windows (it's all OS X and Linux).

Whoa very cool! Never heard of rdesktop before but I'll definitely check it out. Thanks!

> On the other hand I think this will drive people away from Windows and towards OS X and Ubuntu.

They already pushed too far. Was a life long Windows user, used at home for gamedev and Steam, chosen at work (mainly QA) because it's what I knew extensively, VS is great and it's what users used. Was literally the only Windows user in a sea of OS X machines at some companies.

Now? All my personal and work devices run Ubuntu or Arch. My partners devices now all run Ubuntu or Arch. Projects I'm planning that were going to be "Windows first" will now be "Linux first".

Sounds silly, but I was enjoying the progress Windows was making security-wise. From Vista to 7 and 7 to 8 (and even to 10) the "under-the-hood" part of Windows seemed to be making great strides in protecting the user, even if they were screwing up the UI.

But everything they've pulled with 10 have completely pushed me away from the platform. Adverts in my OS? The nagging? The "updates can be installed even if you really don't want them"? Phone-homeing I can't turn off at all with a consumer edition? I understand wanting to make it hard to turn it off so they can collect reliable stats or protect the consumer from themselves but as a technical user I want my OS to do exactly what I want it to do. MS completely killed that.

IMO Microsoft has completely pissed-away huge amount of accumulated techie-goodwill in an astonishingly short period of time.

I think it's due to how much of it really does look like malice (or at least disrespect for computer-owners) rather than mere incompetence.

On the one hand, a bunch of old insecure machines will get fixed. On the other hand, a bunch of other old insecure machines will get bricked.

In other words, win/win for security teams fighting botnets.

> On the one hand, a bunch of old insecure machines will get fixed.

That makes little sense. If a machine is automatically installing Windows 10, it was already automatically installing security updates. Windows 10 won't make it and less "insecure" than it was with Windows 7.

I believe 10 has some security improvements over 7. At least I hope so. I was thinking of upgrading my mum's pc basically for that reason.

If it has, they're not to the point of making Windows 7 "old and insecure" in comparison to it.

But if it has, I'd like to know what they are. About all I've heard about Windows 10 are its privacy invasions and its attempts to take control away from its users.

My original comment was tongue in cheek, trying to mirror the OPs "everything's an upside!" post.

That said, MS does tend to roll out major security architecture improvements between versions. Incremental updates are helpful, but new architectural defenses against malware happen with major revisions.

As a consequence, "old versions of windows" (though admittedly mostly XP) are one of the worst things about the internet right now. As someone who works in security, MS moving to the forced upgrade model that Chrome pioneered will solve one of my biggest headaches in the long run. I know that's selfish, and the tradeoffs for users may not be worth it, but man, old versions of Windows are the bane of my existence.

Anyway, as to specifics, the DEP and ASLR in Windows 7 were the big enhancements, but Windows 8.1 had better sandboxing features that are carried forward, and Windows 10 has improved encryption and authentication. Forcing people away from IE to Edge is huge. I probably can't do this topic justice in a comment, but if you're really interested in more info, lots of info can be found spread across several articles by just googling Windows+10+security.

As the lead developer of the Slack Windows app, this move is absolutely phenomenal for me. Win7 is a huge proportion of our support tickets and causes us no end of grief.

To put what these Windows users are doing in perspective, Windows users are holding onto an OS that was released at the same time as OS X 10.6, and not only doing it, but demanding that developers support this version. If you asked any Cocoa developer to support Snow Leopard, they'd laugh you out of the room.

So don't support Windows 7 then. But forcing upgrades which can lead to machines no longer functioning just means that person wipes the HDD and reinstalls Windows 7.

You miss the fact that Windows 8 was such a botch job that most of us didn't start upgrading until Windows 8.1 - and this isn't just end users, but a hell of a lot of IT professionals. This never occurred on OS X.

This isn't about you as the Slack Windows app developer.

Windows 8, and even Windows 8.1 were so utterly terrible its no wonder people are asking for windows 7 support. I'm betting 90%+ of business has stayed on 7, which often translates to individuals sticking with 7 too as it's what they know, and their IT dept / guy told them as much.

Your blame is misplaced, these Windows users are doing nothing wrong. Microsoft did terrible releases for years, and is trying to recover from that mistake in a terrible way.

Windows 7 support is a critical feature of slack for me. Every version of Windows after 7 is increasingly some kind of year 2000 era flip phone OS/dark age of computers BS. It's 10 steps forward, 1000 steps back.

So what exactly do windows 7 users call in about? Is that because there is some major API difference between 7 and 8 or is does it represent people who buy computers less often?

> So what exactly do windows 7 users call in about? Is that because there is some major API difference between 7 and 8 or is does it represent people who buy computers less often?

Windows 7 doesn't have a notifications / toast API which means we have to implement notifications ourselves. It also lets you turn off desktop composition and throw the UI into a completely different rendering path, which Electron doesn't support properly, so we then have to implement notifications again in a fallback software rendering only way. It also doesn't have a spellchecking API, so we get to ship Hunspell in-box and deal with updating dictionaries, the list goes on and on

For support and/or programming (in the context of slack), is Linux generally better or worse than windows 8/10?

Linux is a mixed bag - while it's actually way easier to support in general and people write in with way more detailed actionable feedback, it also has its fair share of glitches, especially around video hardware.

Here's the update:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/3035583

...that explains the Windows 10 update, but on my machine it just says "Install this update to resolve issues in Windows. blah blah blah" which is the same boilerplate they all use. The update size is uniquely given as a range 722 KB - 821 KB, which is probably a low estimate for an OS installer. So, no indication of the magnitude of this. Since it isn't a security update, anyone with a properly-configured system (IMO) shouldn't be bothered by it. Unless Microsoft updates it to a "security update". Which seems possible.

The whole "auto update and restart" thing seemed like a potentially global-scale Therac-25 style bad idea when I first heard about it on Windows XP (or whenever). But it never happened--I guess not too many critical systems use Windows. Just millions of people losing millions of hours of productivity...

That's just for the (non-removable) button in the taskbar. There are in fact a number of different updates related to the upgrade from windows 7 to windows 10.

Prompted by Windows 10 privacy issues, I switched to Mint on my laptop recently and was pleasantly surprised. I've been constantly trying to switch to Linux but having to revert because of driver incompatibility. That has completely changed in the past 3 years.

It makes my laptop feel speedy again. Before it was really slow with Microsoft sitting on top of it. I recently slapped an SSD into it and it's even better. Turned a no starter laptop into a real machine.

It's still not an operating system that can be used by new users, but I have a lot of fun with it. It helps a lot that Steam has a Linux client now and I don't play many big name titles.

Windows 10 isn't that bad if you don't mind buying a new computer, but I think it may be the bane of people like my parents who use a computer for 10 years without upgrading. You would think that with the minimal changes to the Windows kernel that the driver support wouldn't be an issue. The invasive marketing and privacy violations aren't anything new. Just more so.

Re: Steam support in Linux, do you have any idea about VR support? I'm not a huge gamer and I'd consider ditching Windows over this incident, except that I want to play with my Vive when it gets here.

I recently switched to Mint from Windows 8.1 and it's been shockingly easy. I run triple monitors at work and I was worried getting them all working was going to be a terrible experience. A coworker who runs Ubuntu offered to help me get it set up, but in the time it took for him to get a cup of coffee and come back, I had installed the driver Mint recommended and everything just worked. It runs great on my laptop too, so far I haven't had any driver issues.

Not all of my steam games run under linux but quite a few of them do and the ones I've tried so far have run just as well as they do under windows.

Dual booting with Fedora. I voluntarily upgraded the Win 7 partition to give it a whirl a while back. They said I would have 30 days to go back.

Less than 24 hours later ... Nope.

The only place I want Windows running on my personal hardware is in a VM. Done with them.

I use Windows Media Center on my machine so I'll be pretty irritated if it automatically upgrades - MS removed it in Windows 10.

Why not VLC?

I think you're thinking of Media Player, not Media Center.

Media Center is a whole DVR package, consumes TV streams, TV guide data, recordings, can be connected to an Xbox 360... and so on.

Ah, gotcha.

While it comes down to some level of personal preference - VLC is not faithful to source material in regards to color balance/contrast and this is apparent in scenes with shadows. VLC will have a "washed out" look. Some users prefer that "washed out" look though (for scenes with very heavy shadows it often does look aesthetically better) but others prefer faithfulness to the original.

MPC-HC is more faithful to the original product - so I recommend it over VLC.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/TJng0HW.jpg

Not my image and I noticed the frame is different. I can assure you that the difference isn't due to being different frames. You'll find no shortage of better examples by searching "VLC washed out".

This is an artifact of hardware YUV->RGB conversion, and can often be fixed by adjusting your video card settings. See e.g. https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Video:Color_washed_out/

I was running under the assumption people ran their software "out of the box" and wouldn't want to adjust settings given an absurdly low number of people actually change defaults.

If we're going to take into consideration configurations... even when adjusted it still isn't quite right. There are also issues with debanding and sharpness, see: http://i.imgur.com/qrutuP6.jpg

A properly configured MPC-HC will beat a properly configured VLC. Although many people probably wouldn't care about such minor differences - some people do.

I'm not too heavily opinionated since the end result is visual and thus comes down to personal preference. Given the details are minor and most people wouldn't even notice without showing them, I don't think its of great importance. But if someone's going to be digging through config files and taking time to set something up - they should start with better software and adjust their settings from there.

This is the exact reason I have been avoiding 10. I still use the DVR capability. I know I don't have automatic update on, but still getting paranoid about it reading all the issues people are having.

I've been trying to move away from WMC - trying MediaPortal, NextPVR and Emby, so far, but the interface on all of them is sub-par. It's very frustrating - I'd gladly pay a chunk of money, but I guess I'm part of a small audience that doesn't make such development worth it.

Yeah, I utilize a CableCARD and WMC is the only thing that ever got certified to use it. If there was an alternative, I would use it, but there is none that I can find.

This is probably like having your car towed: technically there’s something that says they are allowed to do it but you sure as hell don’t expect it to happen, you don’t want it to happen, it will cost you time and money and at the wrong time it could really screw you. Thanks, Microsoft!

At some point recently windows update on windows 7 decided to change settings from "tell you about updates and you choose when to download and install them" to "I'll download everything and nag you to death with countdown timer until you update"

The most infuriating thing about that being that if you turn your computer on in the morning from hibernation go make a coffee and get some breakfast, by the time you come back your computer has restarted (because apparently who cares you weren't logged in and your screen was still locked, fuck you we're forcing a restarting and you're losing any unsaved work, bad luck sucker!)

I killed the windows update service permanently it infuriated me so much.

When you say "killed permanently", do you mean more than just disabling the service, and if so, what? I have it disabled but I don't trust Microsoft not to somehow override that.

Just disabled the service. I do want the option to periodically turn it back on so anything more serious than that isn't on the cards for me.

I also disabled the service "Windows Update" in services.msc.

Interesting thign happened. I stopped the service but left it on "Automatic (Delayed Start)". Came back a while later and the service was magicall restarted. Could have been anticipated by me. So I stopped the service again and set it to "Manual". Came back a while later and, you guessed it, Windows Update service was restarted. So I now set it to "deactivated". That was yesterday. I am really curoous to see if it still comes back to life.

We’ve been getting a lot of calls from home clients since last Tuesday that their computer now runs Windows 10. There are still some printer and software issues, which were the reasons why they arestill running Windows 7.

This happened to my co-worker just the other day. He develops native windows software so it was pretty annoying for him.

Yeah, a couple of mine had it over the weekend too. One with good results, and doesn't care. The other with a couple fails in the house that had to spend time to reinstall from scratch.

Wouldn't the automatic upgrade mean you didn't agree to any T&C?

You did agree if you set Windows Update to automatically install updates. The upgrade to Window 10 is being treated as an "update".

If they changed the T&C, that ain't gonna go well for them.

(IE it probably won't be held to be consent)

Unless the auto-update terms in Windows Update expressly state that using it means you agree to any future, unknown terms that may apply to those updates, then agreeing to automatic updates would not be sufficient.

That is, unless the terms for Windows 10 are exactly the same as the version from which you are upgrading. That hardly seems likely, given that it is free and comes with new features, such as advertising, etc.

All I can tell you is that it's listed under optional updates, and it's automatically checked[0].

[0]https://imgur.com/wOO1jzz

It still brings up a EULA....

In 2010 Microsoft's update of Security Essentials changed Windows update from manual to automatic. [1] With an installation base in the hundreds of millions, if even 1% of users didn't know about this and switched to manual update, then that's a hell of a lot of people who are affected.

1. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2627526/antimalware/warning...

I had a client to whom this happened, they install W10 and THEN ask you if you agree.

He said no, they uninstalled w10 back to w7 and he can't login anymore.

Holy fuck are you serious?

It force-upgraded me and I declined the terms when it finally booted up, it rebooted and went back to W7 luckily working correctly but with un-closable popups everywhere demanding I either install W10 now or schedule an update within a week or so.

Microsoft has taken to installing malware on our machines using their update mechanism and signing keys; I'd delete their cert if it were feasible. I think the CFAA is broad enough to make this a felony if this has bricked machines/destroyed data (apparently it has), it certainly should be illegal. If I were running the machine in a medical system someone could have died.

uhh. Could this not set them up for a lawsuit? I mean, I assume and argument could be made that there's some liability involved in MS screws up the installation or if some program fails to continue to function. This should be fun to watch.

I just got upgraded Saturday and the EULA specifically says that you can't bring a class action lawsuit against them. They want you to try arbitration for 60 days and if that doesn't work then you can try small claims. Yeah, sure.

Anyway I had two problems afterwards.

It logged me into a TEMP account so no config changes were saved and my files appeared to be all missing. They weren't, it just the shortcuts all point to the C:\users\TEMP\ directories. There's a few fixes for that one. Mine was checking the box that stopped OneNote from auto loading at start up.

After a reboot the start menu went away. The logo button is there but the menu doesn't come up. I found a site with a few fixed and tried them all in succession. I don't know which one solved it because I only rebooted after doing all of them.

So now I have 30 days to downgrade to Win 7 or forever hold my peace.

EULAs aren't legally binding in some countries because they're not disclosed before the sale. So this might protect them in the US but I could imagine it becoming a problem in other countries still.

I know clickwrap EULAs have been contentious, but can a EULA for something you didn't even ask for and didn't want in the first place be forced on you against your will?

I had the option to not accept the EULA. In that case I was then free to not install Windows 10 despite it "prepping my system for the update" for an hour.

I figured any attempt at a roll back at that point would have been worse than just proceeding. =(

That's interesting. If the OS upgrades to Windows 10, does it prompt you to accept a new EULA after upgrading? If so, what does it do if you don't accept the new terms? And how can they ask you to accept terms AFTER upgrading?

The comments at https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/49eahx/computer_up... say that, if you decline the EULA after installing, it rollbacks to the previously installed version.

Bloody hell. And this rollback appears to be less than reliable.

Why not ask for the acceptance and then upgrade?

Do we know what data is lost when a rollback occurs?

I believe this stuff is contained in the EULA you've already agreed to, not the new EULA.

> the EULA specifically says that you can't bring a class action lawsuit against them

Yeah, best of luck to them with this. It's not possible for them to put a condition into their EULA negating all legal rights. Imagine a completely ludicrous scenario: a Microsoft executive decides that they install an update that wipes your computer if it detects your version of Windows isn't licensed, and then another update accidentally causes your license to be invalidated. Then millions of computers get wiped. You think that licensing term is going to protect them from a class action? Think again.

If enough people file complaints with the FTC and/or state Attorney Generals, they might get involved as well.

I wonder how privacy settings are being handled, and whether harm is being done to those who are automatically upgraded.

I know one of their Windows 10 preparation updates reset a telemetry setting in Windows 7.

I recall it was "Turn off Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program," which is disabled by default. There might have been other settings. (Search for security hardening guides for Windows to get a check list.)

What prompted me to check this was when Microsoft chose to willfully ignore the opt out setting they had handed us prior to the release date of Windows 10.. Let's not forget that either!

Edit: Oops. Double negative.

They will have done a good job covering themselves against class-action lawsuits with the arbitration clauses in the EULA. But one area where I imagine they're vulnerable is when an individual user who was force-fed Windows 10 loses access to some important third-party software or hardware that for whatever reason doesn't work with 10.

Imagine being Stephen Hawking. You wake up one morning to find you've been "upgraded" to Windows 10, and your assistive speech hardware no longer works. That will blow away anything in the EULA, as far as any judge is concerned.

The degree of irresponsibility required to pull something like this is simply staggering.

Is there any evidence this isn't just a bug? I admin several Win7 machines at work, and haven't seen this behavior on any of them. I didn't do anything to prevent automatic updates, or otherwise disable a path to Win10 (they all have the upgrade available).

I can see how someone could accidentally install Win10, since windows update has it automatically selected, but I have yet to see a machine just restart itself and start installing Win10. The machines I have upgraded to Win10 took many clicks to actually install - I can't imagine Microsoft would intentionally let users skip the EULA at the very least.

My gut says at least half the people have accidentally initiated this update and half are experiencing a bug -- my counter anecdata says this is NOT being pushed to all Win7 users with automatic updates enabled.

I hope that Microsoft don't survive their Windows 10 release...

Windows 10 was their last release.

I know that it was their latest release, if that's what you meant...

GWX Control Panel http://ultimateoutsider.com/downloads/

Solves all W10 upgrade worries.

I'm not normally an open-source zealot, but I'd really like something a little more... auditable.

Doesn't seemed to be maintained anymore but https://github.com/rn10950/I-Dont-Want-Windows-10

MS is getting pretty draconian with the Windows 10 shtick. I'm not sure why there's such a push, just let people buy a Windows 10 computer when the Windows 7 machines fail.

Fighting MS on this is a losing battle, all the workarounds are going to be a non-stop, futile exercise. Unless I have a specific needs for Windows, if this makes anyone uncomfortable to read (like myself)- I think this is the ideal time to jump on Mac, Linux Mint, Ubuntu Mate or Antergos.

> MS is getting pretty draconian with the Windows 10 shtick

They likely have a long term strategy around Windows 10, what it is I don't know but I know for a fact that it requires pushing W10 on as much PC as possible, whether the user wants it or not. I'm on W8. I will upgrade one day, I don't want to do it now (I'm working with an old soundcard that barely supports W8, so there is a risk with upgrading to 10), yet everyday I get a "Upgrade to 10" popup which almost tricked me into upgrading once. They are so aggressive about updating I fear this "free" upgrade might be a trap on the long run. I feel like I'm no longer in control of some software I've bought( yes, because licenses aren't free).

I recently bought a new Win10 laptop while giving up my Win7 desktop. I honestly wouldn't have if I thought I could continue getting the most out of my system (gaming and doing other fun things) well into the future.

I'm pissed off beyond belief about the egregious privacy overreach, but realized that my info is already out there, so I just need to continue taking whatever precautions I normally do and pretend like all my info is public anyway.

That said, I can only imagine that the long-term play is to one day give people a countdown on Windows 10 becoming a subscription, and you can either pay it or lose access to everything (or be severely crippled or something).

That's the only angle I can think of, and it jives with their approach to Office and everything else. They know damn well that people don't always want something new (and often that is because of conflicting interests and them pushing crapware like the privacy stuff), so they need the ability to control whether that happens or not.

I personally am holding out for now with Windows 10, but if they ever pull that move I will say to hell with it and fully switch to Ubuntu and do what I can in terms of gaming (maybe buy a Playstation).

> I'm not sure why there's such a push

They stand to make a shit load of money having people on Windows 10.

Calm down and relax! Microsoft knows better than you what is good for you ;-)

Honestly, I ditched Windows since XP completely in favor of Linux, and it turned out to be a very good decision.

MS' extremely unfriendly behavior to its customers is indication of desparation. WinPhone failed against iOS and Android, and PC purchases are shrinking continually. This means MS is shrinking continually, and they know it very well.

What do you think about this script on Voat? : https://voat.co/v/technology/comments/853510

I'm really curious to know your opinion Hacker News. Is this a good way to live with Windows 7 now? It seems to be open-source, easy to apply, it disables telemetry and Windows 10 crap.

Any better alternatives?

Shutup10 and Spybot Anti-beacon

And why those?

Shutup10 gets rid of the nagware, anti-beacon stops the phone home.

This seems to disable 51 updates from installing. That is quite a list. Some of the updates are blocked for other issues than privacy - one of them for example is a graphics stack security update which is blocked because it broke some older games.

This reminds me of the older "registry cleaner" apps which are highly debatable.

Considering it stops updates to IE, I would never recommend that. I only ever use IE if I'm on some ancient (often government) website that doesn't seem to work in FF/Chrome, but even the default IE homepage (Is it still MSN?) has ads, which means a very real possibility of malware infections. The risk of being one TMZ page away from a malware infection is too much IMO.

I am thankful that a random Windows update broke some of our software a few weeks ago. It prompted me to disable all updates and allow only essential updates. Small business so I'm it for IT. Never heard of kbwhateveritis required to avoid the MS invasion. Thanks for breaking our system weeks ago MS!

Meet the new Microsoft, same as the old Microsoft.

Seriously though, I hope they receive some major backlash for their behaviour over the last few months. It's incredibly aggressive and anti-consumer.

The old Microsoft would have been blasted into oblivion for doing this. For some reason, the "new Microsoft" is getting a free pass on behavior that would make Larry Ellison queasy.

Upgrading to Windows 10 from 7 requires a single button click after opening the upgrade reminder in the task bar.

Dismissing the upgrade reminder is impossible and requires a registry edit:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3080351

Microsoft is a disgusting company, and I hope they are fully aware how much social capital this has eroded.

Today I woke up to this message on my Windows 8.1: http://i.imgur.com/4jvC8Q0.png

They are not asking if I want to upgrade anymore, they are asking when I want to upgrade :/

What a coincidence - 4 days ago I disabled auto updates on Windows 7 because it would force me to restart all the time. I'm glad I did that. Forcing Win7 to Win10 Upgrade? Disgusting practice by Windows, will switch to Unix-based systems asap.

Now with more ads, spyware, constant logging of everything you do to Microsoft, and telemetry!

No thanks. I guess MS wants to cede the entire high-end market to Apple and Linux and re-position themselves as a bargain basement low-end vendor of spyware ridden junk.

The high-end market is mostly gamers, which is 95%+ Windows.

Microsoft's Windows Store/UWP push has scared some game developers, most notably causing Valve to make a Linux version of Steam and their own OS. A concerted effort by the games industry could see Windows's market share fall there.

Just got my new laptop with Win10 because I'm a gamer. That was pretty much the only reason.

If they ever pull shit with Steam, are proven to have mishandled my data as part of the telemetry bullshit (well, the stuff I couldn't disable, because I spent half an hour trying to turn off all the various settings I could), or ever force Windows into a subscription model, I'm done with gaming on Windows for good and I'll suffer through the Linux gaming experience.

Hopefully by that point there will be enough weight behind it to make switching an easy choice.

My logic: Time for another tool that goes deep in to the autorun.dll's and deletes the update prompt..... Oh wait...

Funny, I've been trying to get my Windows 7 laptop to take the upgrade, but it strangely won't.

Use a disc or the Media Creation Tool (which can directly start a Windows 10 install). Both methods are much more reliable than the Windows Update method.

I wonder if there are pages on reddit commenting a comment page from HN...

https://reddit.com/r/hackernews

Re-posting my comment from the other thread which didn't get as much attention:

I spent about 3 hours this week doing tech support for my mom over the phone because of Windows 10's aggressive upgrading behaviour.

I told her to keep her the best way to keep safe security wise is to make sure the os/browser is up to date, and because Windows 10 keeps asking to upgrade, she went ahead and did so. After upgrading to Windows 10, all network access (wired and wifi) stopped working completely. The worst part of this is that if you can't get internet, you can't even download new drivers to try and debug the problem. We tried a few things, and eventually just did a system restore back to Windows 8, but unfortunately, the system restore didn't work completely and there was more mucking around to try and get the computer into a bootable state. Then, last night, she said the heard the fan making a lot of noise, and looked down to see that Windows had gone ahead and started installing Windows 10 again. Fortunately, wired network access works now, but wifi is still broken. Hopefully Windows will push an update that fixes the wifi access soon.

Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control? Some people have doubted that Windows is doing this automatically, but during the above debacle, my mother actually spent time to make sure that 'Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them' was selected. She even sent me a screenshot asking if this would prevent Windows 10 from installing. A few hours later she had Windows 10 again.

On that topic, she just said that she has spent that past 2 days trying to get wifi to work. Does anyone here have suggestions for fixing/debugging this? I haven't used windows in quite a while, so my approach is just to go into device manager and try to click on 'update driver', find and diagnose problems etc. Tried deleting and re-creating the wifi connection, re-entering the password. The wifi connection appears, and we can 'connect' to it, but it says 'no internet access' but wifi can't access 192.168.0.1 (the router). The wired connection works fine. I don't know much about Windows sub-systems. I'm pretty sure all the Windows 10 updates have downloaded and installed.

Given that it appears to partially work, I would guess that the auto-updated driver doesn't work properly on Windows 10. Can you determine the model / chipset of the wireless card?

Dell Wireless 1703 802.11b/g/n is as much detail as I've been able to get. She's trying to download some drivers from the Dell site at the moment (I'm very fortunate that she is computer literate enough to do this much).

My fiancee (at her daughter's recommendation) allowed the Windows 10 upgrade to proceed on her Lenovo T530. It suffered the same Wifi symptoms you reported. We followed the same course of action to repair the problem, to no avail. Reverted to Windows 7 using the Windows 10 downgrade procedure, but the Wifi still failed to work properly. We successfully restored Windows 7 from a recent image backup.

I've had no problems performing Windows 10 clean installs on several machines, but have been far too skeptical to believe Microsoft could pull off a mass upgrade of the Windows 7/8 installed base.

I wonder what upgrade failure rate they deemed acceptable during their deployment testing?

I faced an issue on my new Asus laptop Atheros wifi adapter. Changing the channel from 11 to Auto on my roouter did the trick and things are fine since then.

> Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control?

While I appreciate the rest of your comment, I personally find comment like these are obnoxious. I sincerely doubt that vote and comment brigading are anywhere near as prevalent as reddit and this community seem to so routinely imply. Perhaps I'm the naive one, but it is tiresome to so regularly see comments (especially those close to one's own personal beliefs) consistently labeled indicators of a social media PR campaign because someone just can't believe they might be genuine.

Or maybe I should get my head out of the sand, I do not know.

Anyone who believes that it's okay to force unwanted updates onto someone's computer without unexpectedly and without their consent is a bit obnoxious.

I don't think it's OK. Is that what you wanted?

I'm not going to go into detail right now, but believe me it happens from Microsoft more than any other company I've seen.

That's just it though - I don't believe you.

For what it's worth I believe you are being wildly naive. Have a nice day.

It isn't worth much, but - believe it or not - it's not totally worthless either. Note my wording though: I believe it does happen at times, I doubt it happens with the frequency claimed on HN and reddit. Hearing more first-hand accounts of it occurring is required for me to move substantially on my opinion. As is, it's primarily speculation and people asking others to "trust them, it happens."

That said, I could do without the insincere well wishes.

First hand accounts? As in someone saying "yes, I do this"?

Well I was more thinking along the lines of "yeah, I personally saw this done for my product/company." So, second-hand I guess. But first-hand experience of the second-hand account, if that makes sense. At any rate, the point is this: I'm not going to take it on faith, and I won't naturally assume the most sinister thing is occurring.

Does this count? http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-internet-trolls-are-t...

>I believe it does happen at times

Rather like a forced OS upgrade - how many times is too often?

I apologize for the "Have a nice day." I meant it ironically rather than insincerely, it can be difficult to convey tone on the Internet.

To provide context: I was telling people for years before Snowden that "they" were recording everything. Of course, I was dismissed as a wearer of the tin-foil hat, yes? I'm afraid I find naivete a bit frustrating. No excuse for rudeness though! Sorry about that! :-)

Warm regards, and sincere wishes of kindness to you and yours.

I'm going to make a few statements here to address the parent and children; but let me put the normal disclaimers here: I ONLY can speak for myself, I do not speak for MS or any of my coworkers.

Simply put, the sort of behavior implied (vote brigading) doesn't mesh with my understanding of how I or any of my coworker/HN reader peers tend to behave. I could be totally off the mark with this but it just doesn't mesh with the culture I've been exposed to.

More relevantly however, and more in line with how I typically approach HN threads regardless of topic, let me try and pose a more "occams razor" explanation:

MS has been gaining a lot of positive press lately. The tech community WANTS to see our biggest entities succeed and "do good". We hate seeing suggestions that a "new convert" to the good side might have changed face again. Realizing that a company can do both good and "evil" simultaneously is a degree of mental dissonance I don't often see handled "cleanly" so to say.

Long and the short; I am not happy with the forced upgrades. I am still using 7, and would be rather irked if they broke everything for the sake of forcing through content I do not want. However, I do tend to attribute much more naïve explanations for the patterns we're seeing, over some sort of PR conspiracy. There was a wonderful quote a while back, "we're not organized enough to be that evil" :) I don't mean to be any sort of MS apologist in this, my comment is entirely directed at the discussion regarding some degree of astroturfing, if I got asked about my opinions on the updates, well, that's a whole can of worms on its own and the remaining comments in the thread seem to speak to the resounding sentiment in that respect.

Out of curiosity, are you an engineer there? If so I'm wondering how close you are and how much visibility you have into the marketing and PR side of things over there.

This strikes me as the kind of thing that engineers might be kept in the dark about, but some PR agency somewhere may have outsourced something like this and done so in a way as to provide plausible deniability. A quick googling shows this wouldn't be the first time MS has resorted to astroturfing [1].

So while I don't doubt the sincerity of how you or any of your immediate coworkers/HN reader peers tend to behave, I think the facts speak a bit more clearly to the possibility of other parts of the MS organism being willing to do this sort of thing.

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

I am, yes. My visibility has shifted depending on different orgs I've been in (I've been in orgs where I'm entirely disconnected from the PR side of things, and in others where I get regular mails from the marketing teams); I read some of the links on the search you provided but they seem to denote "what I'd expect", a worst case where a vendor goes too far in accomplishing a PR objective, and while it's plausible that this is ongoing (as you say, I CERTAINLY don't know what totally distinct marketing teams on contract are doing) I'd note one thing: That in the well documented occurrences in the past, it's typically been the more "standard" sort of native advertising dark patterns that are becoming prevalent. I don't say this to excuse it in the least; but to say that I tend to see "patterns" even in the more questionable actions of a given entity, and even when I looked more deeply in said googling I didn't find many concrete occurrences of that sort of truly grassroots astroturfing. Enough accusations to raise an eyebrow for sure; but I'd point out a few things on that as well: in some of the well documented cases, MS has come forward and accepted accountability for the occurrence. While this could absolutely be a post-factum face saving, the cost/benefit of enacting those sorts of campaigns seems misaligned, at least to my eyes, that I'd be hard pressed to think of any of the Marketing/PR people I've met taking that sort of risk.

Again, there could certainly be degrees of separation, and as you accurately state I can't in any way speak on that. My main goal was just to speak to the best intentions and actions of the peers I've had the opportunity and privilege to work with.

> I am still using 7,

Was in a similar boat as you, until a new build more or less forced me to use 10 (motherboard only had USB 3. yes, you can slipstream drivers into a 7 installer - but when I tried this, the machine kept bluescreening to high heck). After a few months, I'm perfectly fine with it.

Don't get me wrong, there are problems - but there have always been problems. The two competing but not quite feature matching control panels for example. I also turned notifications completely off, as they were all for trivial BS (in my case).

But overall, I am now just as happy as I was on 7.

It is just shocking to see people complaining of data loss, and other extreme inconveniences caused by this update, but then on the other hand people going so far as to flag this thread (see comments below), despite this having been experienced by thousands of people. Being skeptical makes sense, but flagging the thread? I don't see that kind of polar opposite reaction often on HN.

It can be relatively economic to pay people to post favourable comments if they already enjoy doing it anyway. I suspect that it happens more often than you think, and often takes the form of just paying people to hold biased opinions. It is not hard to imagine that if someone was holding onto a large amount of Microsoft stock, it would be easy to maintain cognitive dissonance.

> everyone disagreeing with me is a shill

Well you could just go see post history and call out the obvious one, letting downvotes take care of the rest.

Anyway I had win 10 preinstalled on a laptop and since the last patch craze my wifi stopped working reliably.

I think MS managed to bork something there independently from the os upgrade, but even more interestingly all other computers around here, same make same model, upgraded just fine, so I'd give some credit to the other voices until the actual technical issue is pinned down. At least for the driver issues, the sneaky os update is maddness.

I would normally agree, but Microsoft have a very well known pattern of astroturfing. Hell, they invented practically invented the Internet version in 2001.

I'd like to think that under Satya Nadella's reign they would have stopped, but they are still doing dodgy shit like forced upgrades to Windows 10.

To say that this is an utter PR nightmare is a complete understatement. If, as some comments indicate, they have bricked hardware then I think a class action lawsuit wouldn't be out of the question!

Whoever made the decision to auto upgrade literally hundreds of millions of computers should be fired. I believe that before the auto upgrade Microsoft said there were 110 million installs of Windows 10, but that was still only roughly 10% of total computers. There were still something like 40% of computers running Windows 7. Even if only 1% of computers that get upgraded automatically get bricked due to incompatible drivers, or whatever then that's still well over a million computers Microsoft have borked due to this stupidity.

Look, I can accept automatic upgrades for an existing operating system on consumer grade workstations. But I cannot understand or accept that automatically upgrading to a new major release is a responsible business decision. Microsoft are getting this in the neck, and rightly so. This alone is a good reason for me to recommend to my friends and family that they only buy a Mac, and if they can't that I work out if it's worthwhile installing Ubuntu or Fedora and spun up a VirtualBox VM to run their legally purchased copy of Windows.

A lawsuit would be very reasonable. The hard part would be deciding on suitable damages, because the reality is that we’re not just talking about the cost of restoring a computer; these days, a trashed machine is more like somebody breaking into your room and destroying all of your personal stuff.

The really sad thing is that it should have taken about 2 or 3 people at Microsoft, tops, to anticipate the first 10 things that could not only go wrong with their upgrade plan, but very, very wrong. Were those reasonable people shouted out of the room?

I think it's much easier to believe in Microsoft Astroturfing given all the other pretty-well-documented sleazy stuff going on at the same time. In for a penny, in for a pound...

It's suspicious as hell that Microsoft isn't being taken to task over this. If it had happened in the 2000->XP transition era, or even in the Vista->7 era, Ballmer would have been crucified.

Anyone who doesn't find the relatively tolerant/benign online reaction to Windows Update's recent behavior to be suspicious either a) hasn't been paying attention for about 20 years now; b) isn't very bright; or c) is being paid.

Downmod all you want, but somebody has to call BS on this.

I had this exact same issue with my work machine and my at home workstation. Wifi adapter completely broken, I tried to revert back to Windows 8 on my work machine and it gets stuck on a black screen for over 24 hours. I tried to power down to restart it but no luck. Somehow everything got corrupted. Had to completely reformat the drive and install the operating system all over again, which it then proceeded to upgrade straight to Windows 10 again. I lost months of work but was able to recover from a backup I had a week prior to the incident. Absolutely disgusting business practice by Microsoft. The only times where a Windows 10 installation has worked well for me is when it's a brand new machine with little to no extra content on top of the existing OS. If you've used Windows 7 or 8 for over a year and accumulated a fair amount of apps, files, content, I can almost guarantee you're going to run into something breaking after the update.

Same scenario three weeks ago trying to help out my brother on his brand new Asus that came with Win 10. The wireless hardware just disappeared from the control panel so the option to update the driver wasn't available. I was about to walk him through a complete OS re-install with the option to keep his files until he decided that a wired connection was OK. At the time there was almost no available recent support articles on this issue, but I'm starting to think a Win update caused this after seeing others with the same problem. And here he was going to blame it on his kids...

> The wireless hardware just disappeared from the control panel

I installed a fresh Win10 for a family member, and the complete mess of absent/hidden/redesigned/half-duplicated control panel stuff was my first hint that I'd want to stay on Windows-7.

Same issue here. I actually upgraded to Win 10 from Win 7 about 3 months ago. Then 3 weeks back, an automatic update, and lost both Wifi and Wired connectivity. - No use updating drivers (they are not available for Win 10). -Cannot go back to Win 7 from System Update (since that option available only for a month). -Since Win7 is pre-installed, cannot even download a CSO image file with my product key!

I am still lost about what to do. Thankfully, after a complete restore to first Win10, I have wired connectivity back.

> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft

Count me (shockingly) in the pro Microsoft group here. After years and years of supporting family PCs, I understand and appreciate what they're trying to do.

If you make updating something the user has to do, they'll never do it.

If you prompt them to update, they'll never do it. Even if they've had the why of it explained to them many, many times.

In anticipation of the inevitable "well this update famously broke X": yes, the risk of an update doing something funky outweighs the risk of running software with known and possibly currently exploited vulnerabilities.

So safety is more important than freedom? The attorney general and the FBI must really love you.

We don't force people to vaccinate their kids, even though unvaccinated kids are a risk to herd immunity. What makes you think it's OK to force users to update their computers?

Actually, we do. We here in California have pockets of parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids — to the point where a school full of them starts to lose herd immunity. Within the past twelve months, our governor signed a law significantly tightening the requirements to get an exemption; http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_28407108/gov-jerry-brown-signs... says that only medical exemptions will get you out of vaccinating your kids here in California.

Even if Microsoft was just tired of having to ask the user for every little thing, there is a gulf between “ask the user if he or she wants to update” and “auto-install multi-gigabyte blob that changes everything, over a data plan that we don’t pay for, affecting users in dozens of ways that we cannot possibly know in advance” (as Microsoft has now chosen to do).

Microsoft could have started really small with this, even updating a single app. There is no non-marketing reason to simultaneously change massive amounts of software. And since it is now clear that parts of Windows 10 really are half-baked (like duplicate settings panels), there are clearly some things that should have waited for a later update, once there was time to finish them.

And you know, Microsoft has made billions and billions from software so frankly they do not get to screw around here. Nobody with that much money and that many engineers should get an ounce of sympathy for being so incompetent. They needed to start by doing a lot less, with a lot more care and attention.

The only problem with that is that Windows 10 is, from a privacy perspective, a downgrade from 7 and 8. Many people are not fond of the UI changes, either, and of course Windows Store is just utter shit, as well.

This is madness.

I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday".

But I repeat: this is madness. What kind of a psycho update mechanism would try to install an new OS behind your back?

> I've actually had the "opposite" problem. Ever since Win10 came out, my Win7 machine doesn't bother announcing when updates are available. I have to remember to install them myself ever "patch Tuesday".

I also had this issue until I sat down and figured out how to make Windows Update stop forcing Windows 10 on me. Basically, you need to remove KB3035583, hide it from updates AND uncheck the box to "give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates". Otherwise, it would keep coming back.

This latest patch Tuesday also introduced another "update" to trigger Win10 installation, it's called: upgrade to Windows 10 Pro, version 1511, 10586

Hiding that in Windows Update got me back to installing the normal updates.

Microsoft is making this whole process way too painful for those of us who know we don't want to update.

That will work until they make KB3035583 "Important" again.

Basically, the way they're going, it's only a matter of time before Win 7 & 8 basically don't work anymore.

Eh. I just turn updates off. It solves the issue sufficiently.

Yes. Pretty much this. You do need some updates though, and Microsoft hardly does a good job of describing what each update does from WU itself, so hope you like looking up each individual update on the MS website.

Eventually they'll just start obfuscating what an update does on the website as well, if not lying outright.

If not lying outright?

There's no grand conspiracy here. Put the tinfoil hat away...

The time to make jokes about tinfoil hats is long past. It's no longer debatable that we're seeing either incompetence or malice on Microsoft's part.

I don't know which, and don't really care. Either way, there's a case to be made for disabling updates entirely.

Well, they already say within WU itself that KB3035583 is to resolve "important issues in Windows" which is a lie. But lying about what the update does on their page for the update at microsoft.com is somehow a stretch?

I really don't care why they chose to do this hijack-update.

When I'm lied to about updating, and it takes bloody forever normally, it pisses me off. When you start trying to hijack my machine for your purposes "for Win10", you can collectively fuck off.

I'll set on my Windows Machine (yes singular, all others are Linux variants) for No-update Windows 7. And I'll also switch everyone I know to no-update as well.

That's why you "hide" it too. Then it won't come back. I have other "important" updates for drivers that have not returned.

You can only hide it for as long as they don't refresh that update. Once they make a change to KB3035583 it won't be hidden anymore and, if they make it important at the same time, guess what's going to happen?

I've "hidden" KB3035583 half a dozen times in the last year (even posting here about how ridiculous this all was and being promptly flamed to ashes). It always comes back eventually.

Well, I can only say after I have hidden it some months ago, it has never came back (on multiple systems). There could be other factors at play.

I'm pretty sure even an update changed from recommended to important will stay hidden too. Though, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that can be overridden.

At least Windows Update makes it obvious when it (Windows 10 installer) returns in some form.

EDIT: clarified last line.

> The worst part of this is that if you can't get internet, you can't even download new drivers to try and debug the problem.

I have a friend who made a slipstream installer of XP that was the barebones base installer... plus 696 network drivers. I think it was 696, may have been 676. He'd found a package of "every XP network driver ever". Anyway, "This iso will install XP that can get you connected to download everything else..." made for a very useful bit of kit.

> Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control?

Sometime in the last couple years Microsoft has realized how important online discussion is to a company's reputation and has begun an aggressive campaign of let's call it "community outreach".

Unfortunately though it appears to me to be astro turfing, the admins here and elsewhere seem to believe it to be legitimate, so whatever techniques they're using are sophisticated.

>Also, there seems to be a number of people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising.

I think it's an issue of trust.

On the one hand, Microsoft have taken some positive steps - making meaningful OSS contributions, following standards in Edge, making sensible statements about crypto etc.

On the other hand, Microsoft have an atrocious track record of corporate citizenship, typified by the Halloween memos. While they have been making progress, they are still a long way from perfect. Even if their current actions were beyond reproach, rebuilding trust takes time.

I think some people on HN want to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, while others think it's just the same old bullshit under a new coat of paint. Personally, I think we should take each issue on merit. Praise where praise is due and criticise where criticism is due.

Just anecdotally : I have my grandmother, brother, and his mother on Kubuntu, and my mother on Lubuntu. So far, the most updates anyone has gone through is 3 (my mother went from 10.04 to 12.04 to 14.04 and soon 16.04) and we have never had an issue. Oh, and you get to chose when to do the upgrades rather than having them backdoored on you.

Desktop Linux works fine for regular people. They aren't going to go digging in the terminal to brick their own computer. Show them the software center and that their app store uses things online called apt links and anyone with a smartphone understands it fine.

Set my girlfriend up with a Chromebook for this very reason.

An "open and go" computer that fits her needs (and reduces the tech support calls to me)

Drive-by-upgrade... Happened to my wife's Windows 8 computer late last week with no warning. She was puzzled to wake up to a computer that had been upgraded without asking her. Then she couldn't use our home printer. So she went to work to print something. But then she couldn't use the work WiFi.

I know that her Windows 10 experience will be better than her terrible Windows 8 experience, but this seems clearly to be a maneuver to minimize the Software Support Reserve line on the Income Statement.

I'm all for upgrading users from a crappy Windows 8 to a nice Windows 10. That said, my wife is a reasonably sophisticated user and she didn't notice any significant notification before her computer was upgraded.

[... And, when I talked with her about the upgrade, she mentioned that she was now getting toolbar pop-ups asking her "How likely are you to recommend Windows to a friend?" WTF.]

> people here commenting very strongly in favour of Microsoft, which I find very surprising. Perhaps people from MS trying to do damage control

I realize you didn't mean to, but this triggered a whole off-topic discussion about imaginary astroturfing, vote-brigading, and shilling.

When we see evidence of these behaviors we crack down on them hard. But people are far too ready (by at least an order of magnitude, probably two) to impute this behavior to others merely because they have an opposing opinion. That's not evidence, and the discussion should never go there on that (non-)basis.

All: if you suspect astroturfing in HN threads, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate, and please don't go on about it in the threads unless there's real evidence. An opposing opinion is not evidence!

If you ever asked yourself how does one feel when assimilated by the Borg... now you know.

Good, Windows 7 is a security problem (or will be, soon).

In what way? I've been planning to remain on Windows 7 for the foreseeable future and 7's security wasn't really on my radar.

Windows 8/10 has some newer security mitigations, so technically they are somewhat harder to exploit.

Strangely nobody has ever caught this on video. Just a handful of anonymous people claiming "I totally didn't hit the wrong button in the UI!!"

Now, sure, I'd agree it should be harder to accidentally upgrade your PC. In particular for layman users. But I am generally skeptical that this is any more than just user error until proven otherwise.

I have a Windows 7 PC I use regularly, I too get the upgrade prompts, but it hasn't upgraded itself just as one counterpoint.

Someone needs to catch this on video.

PS - I flagged this article on purpose because I don't consider a random Reddit thread to be a legitimate source.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3043526/microsoft-windows/m...

It's a mainstream journalist so mileage might vary quite highly, but probably a little more trustworthy than a Reddit thread. At first they talk about the Reddit thread but then say they caught it on their own box.

Dark patterns http://darkpatterns.org

"I clicked 'update security' and it gave me Windows 10!"

Microsoft did bundle the IE banner upgrade advertiser with security updates recently, and that was uncool/unacceptable.

But I've never seen an update security button that actually INSTALLS Windows 10, and that is specifically what this complaint is about, the upgrade starting on its own.

As I said if there is a bug that causes upgrades to occur without permission then people need to provide production steps. If there isn't a bug and Microsoft is doing it on purpose then why is it only impacting so few people? And how can we exclude user error?

there's a distinction between user error and forced-on-purpose

that's what I was getting at.

For example, if there was some UI which says.

"Get the Newest most Secure version of Windows (Download Now)"

with some fine print which says you will be installing windows 10 as part of the security upgrade

would that be considered 'user error' or user-hostile-design?

The IE security upgrade with the Windows 10 ads went out in the same push that seems to have turned on more aggressive auto-upgrade behaviour, so lots of people -- including media -- are conflating the two.

I wonder how many people are going to disable future security updates thanks to the media coverage?

I don't know if this was changed for the external release, but when Windows 10 was rolled out internally to employees at Microsoft, a significant fraction (but not all) employees weren't notified and had their machines reboot without warning. This happened in the middle of the workday and caused a lot of employees to lose half a day, and that's in the happy case where nothing went wrong with the install.

> I flagged this article on purpose because I don't consider a random Reddit thread to be a legitimate source.

Maybe you also won't consider a random HN thread to be a legitimate source, but if you ask MS employees you're sure to find some who were either hit by this or know someone who was hit by this.

Are employees at Microsoft using Windows Update or WSUS? That anecdote doesn't make sense because enterprise users have a completely different update pipeline with completely different controls (i.e. an administrator using WSUS can purposely force an update installation).

Just to be clear are you or are you not claiming to be a Microsoft employee?

No, it's forced. I came home from work and there was pop-up window which I thought was the usual nag screen. It said my Windows 10 download was ready.

Except this one had a count down timer at around 54 minutes left. There was also an option "I need more time...".

I X'd the box closed and went on thinking whatever.

54 minutes later, in the middle of typing an email, the system auto rebooted and "Configuring Update for Wndows 10" screen came up.

I took pictures of it with my cell which are kind of blurry because it's hard to have a steady hand during a good WTH rage.

If that's the dialog I think it is, there should be a cancel button that would then roll back the update. Takes a good long while, and is BS of course, but would land you back where you were.

Of course, they seem to be iterating on the update dialogs. I'm not saying it's to get past those avoiding the update, but it's probably to get past those avoiding the update.

Assuming you are there to respond to the dialog.... if you aren't, then the timer will go off and it will be too late.

That happened to me. I was pushing the update a week away each time it prompted me. But at one prompt I was out in the city.

When I arrived home, the computer was rebooted and upgraded to Windows 10...

The curious thing is that I have Bitlocker on all drives, including the system one, and it asks for the password on boot. Somehow they got over that (probably temporarily saved the key somewhere).

Perhaps typing the email caused you to hit space bar or the return key while the popup install windows 10 prompt was active? I've had this happen with regular reboot messages from windows updates.

> PS - I flagged this article on purpose because I don't consider a random Reddit thread to be a legitimate source.

You should be flagged here then, not because you don't trust Reddit but because you haven't checked any other sources, including these linked in the comments here, long before you posted your comment!

It's documented by Microsoft:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3080351

"How to manage the Windows 10 upgrade

Automatic scenarios

The Windows 10 upgrade is automatically blocked (that is, no further action is required) on computers or other devices in the following scenarios: .."

Note: no further action is required to stop computer to being upgraded only on Enterprise!

"Non-automatic scenarios

You can manage the Windows 10 upgrade by using any of the following methods."

Managing here means -- you can read slowly the whole article -- the ability to disable automatic upgrade! No action taken -- upgrade happens. Even if you have hidden the previous update! You have to enter the proper new registry entry or group policy:

"administrators who want to prevent Windows 7, Windows 7 for Embedded Systems, Windows 8.1, and Windows Embedded 8.1 Pro clients from upgrading should enable the policy settings that are discussed in this article."

It's not that "no click" is needed, it's that the people who do that click don't have any idea what is going to happen, e.g. they are not the "qualified administrators" of their own computers. Like most of the people who let other people installing them software. Now it's just something like:

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Win10....

Dark pattern par excellence.

Hard to believe but true.

I highly doubt that the people on Reddit and HN are just making this up. It's not like an "Automatic Update" is that remarkable of a claim. Forbes[1] a few days ago and others recently wrote about this very issue. So far it seems like a pretty real problem. Sucks it's messing with so many. :/

[1]http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/09/12/microsoft...

This isn't news, and was announced _months_ in advance. Microsoft announced back in October that they'd upgrade Windows 10 to a "Recommended update" in February.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/windows-10-upgrade-1.32965...

You can check in Windows Update whether or not to automatically apply Recommended updates the same way you apply Important updates. By default, it is checked. (By default, most users really _should_ upgrade to Windows 10.)

But, as with all Microsoft things, people will flip out like this wasn't announced and they were totally blindsided because everything Microsoft does is totally evil.

Sorry, why is this a big deal? We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago. Obviously better, compatibility improves and security issues are easier to push out and fix. To me the browser is as important as the OS, I spend the vast majority of my time in it.

Why should MSFT not do this? It's a free update. They're not charging for it. On many aspects, it's a lot better than Windows 7/8. Maybe not to everyone's taste, but Windows 7 is nearly 7 years old now. From what I can see it performs better on older hardware than W7.

We accept that Android fragmentation is terrible and Google should be doing more to fix it. Yet it seems the complete opposite reaction when MSFT tries to fix their desktop fragmentation.

> We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago.

I have not accepted auto updates that I can't turn off for anything, ever.

I sympathize with MSFT, but the main reason they shouldn't unilaterally force the issue is because it won't always work. The upgrade process is pretty reliable, but not completely, and there are all sorts of compatibility problems still lurking (Windows Media Center is gone, lots of hardware doesn't have Windows 10 drivers)

Google is taking the longer view; they want to fix fragmentation, and are moving towards it step by step, improving matters on tomorrow's devices, without bricking today's devices. MSFT is trying to make it happen sooner by forcing the issue instead of gradually migrating.

> We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago.

Enabling automatic updates from outside organizations SHOULD get you fired in any and every business where security is important. I've never seen it done in such environments, and certainly would never do it myself.

That's an understandable motivation but it has to be balanced against the risks of keeping your users vulnerable for longer periods of time. It's rather expensive to have a 24x7 security team to review & push updates.

For something like Chrome that's probably a net loss because the Google team is very good and browsers are both Internet-exposed and generally self-contained. For something like Windows, the reverse is true because there are a lot more things to test, many with local apps or settings which have a lower chance of being tested upstream in the exact combinations which you use.

Why is this a big deal? Why should MSFT not do this? Here are a couple of reasons why...

Perhaps the machine hardware is not Win10 compliant

Perhaps a machine hosts software that requires significant regression testing before permitting an upgrade to Win10

Perhaps the machine's software is not Win10 compatible and needs to be rewritten before a Win10 upgrade

Perhaps the machine in question has specific greenzone periods and should not be upgraded without an agreed outage schedule between IT provider and user base. (Think banking, power generation, healthcare, airline sectors, etc.)

Perhaps your Mom owns the computer and you want to personally manage the upgrade when you visit at Christmas instead of having to spend 6 hours on the phone with her.

MSFT has no idea whether or not its SAFE to automatically roll out an update for their OS users. They make no effort to check hardware compliance status with all hardware manufacturers. They make no effort to check the compliance status of 3rd party software. They make no effort to ensure that critical infrastructure systems (power, health, banking) individual greenzones are followed to prevent unplanned outages.

The upgrade notification system does make the effort to check against known-bad hardware and software, including 3rd party software, and will warn and/or block the upgrade if it's known to be incompatible.

As for managed machines, most won't be eligible for the upgrade to begin with (domain joined, Windows 7 Enterprise), and the upgrade can be blocked entirely via Group Policy or WSUS. Any sensibly managed machine in the environments you mentioned won't be automatically upgraded.

Yes, the compatibility checks aren't perfect, and yes, making sure the update isn't rolled out to managed machines requires that they actually be managed, just like any other update Microsoft publish. But it's unfair to say they make 'no effort' to support these scenarios.

It is fair to say that as they cannot know that upgrading to a new major release of their operating system will never lead to non-functioning systems they should never have attempted a forced major upgrade of Windows.

If they know that there are cases where their compatibility checker won't detect setups that have problems then they shouldn't iPad automatically. Full stop.

My small sample of machines, manufacturer says machine not compatible, MSFT still prompted me to install win10. If they are actually checking HW compatibility they are doing a shitty job. Which means they shouldn't be rolling anything out in this fashion.

On Reddit I read about medical devices getting automatically upgraded when needed for a procedure. Maybe the hospital network was badly managed but that does not excuse MSFT's auto rollout.

My point still stands that MSFT should not be automatically upgrading the OS without significant user oversight, agreement.

>We've completely accepted auto updates for browsers (chrme & firefox) - years ago.

Your argument starts off with a wrong assumption. I manually update all my software and only when I see fit. Sometimes feature removal prevents me from updating. http://i.imgur.com/u3qVwBS.png

W10 is completely incompatible with my workflow/customizations I've made to W7. There are registry tweaks everywhere and custom DLL's because I'm reliant on a few bits of software that keep me anchored to Windows instead of moving to greener pastures (Gentoo). Much of my software is completely incompatible with both W8 and W10.

Updating is a no-go for me and if I'm going to move away from W7 it is going to be to move to Gentoo. I've had the auto-updates disabled for ages - and it looks like I can't even trust security patches to only contain security patches, so I've disabled those too now.

Oh - and it bricking incompatible devices and losing people's files is a big reason why this is a bad idea. How happy would you be if you lost all important data on your computer?

I'm glad that you've had a good experience with Windows 10, but this is still a big deal. There are a lot of reasons this is different from Chrome and Firefox updating, or even from Microsoft automatically delivering updates to Windows 10.

Windows 10 is not just an update: it's a completely separate operating system, illustrated by the fact that you have to accept a separate TOS. And while the upgrade may be free, the OS is not. I have never heard of an involuntary OS upgrade, and it's ridiculous that Microsoft is trying to impose one now. No rational user of Windows 7 would suddenly expect to be force-upgraded to Windows 10.

Yes, Chrome and Firefox will force you to update when you restart your browser. Yet although they might nag you, they won't forcibly restart your browser for you. This is what Microsoft is doing to users' computers: the upgrade might take hours and download gigabytes of data, even if the user never asked for it. This is effectively holding computers hostage. If a computer is being used in a safety-critical situation, even if it shouldn't be, that's a recipe for disaster.

Finally, Windows 10 has downsides that Windows 7 doesn't. First, the upgrade itself might not succeed, as I learned the hard way when the upgrade process simply... stopped. Additionally, depending on your configuration, the upgrade could render your software or hardware unusable: not all hardware may be compatible, even if Microsoft thinks it is. And Windows 10 has more invasive tracking than Windows 7 did, with little or no option for ordinary users to disable it.

>It's a free update. They're not charging for it.

I'll shit in your dinner for free

Reply on news.ycombinator.com