Microsoft uses malware tactics to foist Windows 10 on more PCs
smh.com.au
smh.com.au
After rebooting, neither the keyboard nor the trackpad would work. I had a spare USB keyboard (no mouse), and I managed to delete the faulty drivers, which were replaced on reboot by valid ones (the bad drivers were reported as 'up to date', so updating wouldn't do it).
Disabling all the spyware features with only a keyboard during the post-install setup wasn't fun. Thankfully, the device manager is still his old Win95 self, and I could easily navigate through it even though I haven't owned a Windows machine since XP.
I learned after the fact that refusing the User Agreement would revert to the previous version of the OS. I wish I had known that before finalizing the impromptu upgrade.
"Less evil than Oracle! And cheaper!"
Heady days.
You're probably right, it's probably the future of Windows. Adobe moved to a subscription based service, users hated it yet numbers don't lie, Adobe made tons of money with that move.
If they can convert 50% of Win10 users (.625/1.25 billion) to subscription that's $6.25 billion / month or $75 billion / year. Their yearly revenue for 2015 was $93.6 billion. With a billion people (their stated goal for Win10) on a subscription model for $12/mo that is +50% yearly revenue -- enormous growth for such a large company. I do not doubt that is the end goal.
EDIT: "current count" of 1.25 billion windows machines was an estimate by business insider from 2011.
After restoring Windows' messed-up intestines the machine booted up again. I'd removed all traces of KB3035583 in the hope that this neighbour - a farmer's wife in her 60s - would not be bothered again, nor tricked into 'upgrading'. Being the wise person I am I decided to keep the machine in quarantine for another day, just to make sure Microsoft would not come up with yet another way to foist this miscarriage of an operating system onto hapless users' machines. And, lo and behold, the next day I was greeted by yet another 'update', also summarily hidden and scrubbed, but still... I do these people a favour in helping them with technical stuff, but I don't want to become a full-time guardian. If this keeps up I'll just put some form of Linux on the thing and be done with it, all she uses it for is some light web browsing and mail-related stuff anyway.
To paraphrase a well-known quote, the harder Microsoft pushes, the more users will slip through their fingers and move to better pasture. That they don't realise this is something of a mystery to me.
Why wait?
This notification means your Windows 10 upgrade will occur at the time indicated, unless you select either Upgrade now or “Click here to change upgrade schedule or cancel scheduled upgrade”. If you click on OK or on the red “X”, you’re all set for the upgrade and there is nothing further to do.
If you're determined to avoid Windows 10 you've simply closed that pop-up by clicking the little X in the top right corner, by now it's probably second nature. This week Microsoft took advantage of this by changing the pop-up so that clicking the X to close it implies your consent to upgrade, tricking even more people into installing Windows 10 against their wishes.
It started with OK and cancel, then changed to Upgrade Now and Upgrade Later, with the close button being the only way to decline. Now it is being pushed as an automatic upgrade with a deliberately small and unobtrusive cancel link instead of a prominent button. Also, if you are away from your PC, it will happen automatically.
Look at their own UI guidelines: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn7...
Dialog boxes always have a Close button.
Don't disable the Close button. Having a Close button helps users stay in control by allowing them to close windows they don't want.
The Close button on the title bar should have the same effect as the Cancel or Close button within the dialog box. Never give it the same effect as OK.
Also, read this: http://blog.ultimateoutsider.com/2015/11/the-gwx-control-pan...
It does seem that, on more than a few occasions, Microsoft has gone out of its way to bypass workarounds people have found that disable the GWX app, from resetting registry settings to re-releasing KBs that were explicitly declined and hidden by users.
Basically, it brought up a window with a countdown saying that an "update" (won't say what) is scheduled to run in 4 hours. I had the option of changing the update to happen tomorrow, the day after, or the day after that. No close gadget. No opt-out. No alternative. Killing the window via task manager just caused it to relaunch. Cutting the power just made the update run when it restarted. I'd already backed everything up, so I wiped and reinstalled windows 7, and then used Never10 to hopefully stop that shit in future.
Not calling out you in particular, but I see a lot of people saying "it's not so bad"... In what world is an upgrade where parts are "not so bad" and "avoidable" an upgrade? :)
I really wish they'd make the LTSB Enterprise version available to consumers as a kind of "stable" version. I've used it at work, and I find it to be nice and lightweight compared to the pro version.
I wait until there's been a service pack release before ever installing a new OS. Also I was perfectly happy with Win7.
They're also pushing out non-security bugfixes faster than they have in the past; the monthly Cumulative Update packages include security and non-security fixes, including some of the sort of hotfixes you might've had to call MS Support for back in the XP era.
Can you share the names of the software you use that doesn't work on Windows 10? I'm really just curious. The product I work on in my day job is a Windows application that started its life as a DOS application and uses a graphics library that was designed around Windows 3.1. We really didn't have do to anything to get it to run on Windows 10. In fact, the only real problems we had were due to us still using some 16-bit compiled applications, and those wouldn't run on the 64-bit version of Windows 10 we had.
Starcraft 2 was broken for months and I still see occasional reports of it crashing. It crashed for me back when I had given W10 a try. It appears to be driver dependent, but many visual novels don't function or will crash or need to be ran in a compatibility mode (and may be missing audio when if that is done).
A few things I rely on have been updated to support, others will never be updated (due to dead development). For example, QTTabBar (a shell extension for Explorer) has been updated for nearly a year.
I use W10 at work and have no issues with it. I will probably be purchasing a W10 laptop soon for when I travel. But I have to jump through far too many hoops to update my home machine.
My real issue is I should be using a UNIX machine that gives me total control over everything without ugly hacks and disabling half the OS (almost literally...) to do what I want it to do. :) However, back when I built my machine, the games I was playing wouldn't run on Linux so I was stuck with W7. Now my station is so customized that replicating it on Linux isn't worth the effort in my eyes....
Now Windows 10 is refusing to recognise the Logitech wireless mouse USB receiver that works fine under Linux and also worked fine under Windows until a few weeks ago.
Honestly, I think Windows now has worse support for legacy hardware than Linux.
I don't know where people got the idea that Windows ever had good hardware support. I switched to Linux right after win7 came out because it ran like shit on my laptop. It said my graphics drivers didn't support aero transparency but my laptop graphics supported transparency on Linux and a whole bunch of other cool shit with compiz and Linux ran flawlessly.
When the laptop switches on, it makes a horrible sound which reminds me of my 8bit audio days. And impossible to connect an external monitor, while the same laptop on windows could drive a 4K monitor. And couldn't find any useful fix on google.
I am sorry but linux desktop is far far from being ready for primetime.
That model comes with Ubuntu pre-installed and it does run flawlessly. I've seen people run ubuntu on it my self. So perhaps there was some other problems.
I can't find a single bad review except yours.
Because of the built-in spy functions (in Germany this is a highly sensitive topic for the two dictatorial regimes on German ground in the 20th century where lots of people went to prison because of the surveillance).
With Windows 10, Microsoft infringed the acceptability line for this.
Further dubious point on Windows 10 are that Windows 10 will be the first version that also supports Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). If you don't know about this sensitive topic, go read about it.
And the cavalier approach that Microsoft is adopting to force that upgrade on their users is obliterating the little faith and goodwill I had.
Those are things that I would've probably come to terms with sometime, or taken the time to find a work-around for. At one point, I'd made the decision that after a couple of years of Win10 being out, I'd consider an upgrade (assuming that the claims of increased performance stood up in the real world). What completely turned me against it is the determination with which they've decided to pursue getting people to use it, going as far as several levels of trickery. It's the difference between "Here, have a cookie if you'd like." and "Eat this cookie. Now." that upsets me.
Great. Now, please tell me how to make my hardware older.
I still don't understand why this doesn't trigger anti-trust scrutiny. Anyway, I just installed GRC Never10[0], so let's see what happens. I'm guessing MS will roll out a new update to work around it, too.
Mine, as explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416488 , are that Windows 10 lacks the subsystem and toolsets that are a major part of my use of Windows 7. Microsoft removed them from the operating system.
Not only is this evil but it's really unprofessional and not what I expect from a company like Microsoft. Forcing the update is one thing, but breaking thousands of machines?? And how could they really not see what was going to happen? What is happening up at MS HQ?
And all the guy does is look at porn and browse facebook, literally that's all he does with his laptop, he would be better off with Linux.
I'm glad I don't have to deal with Windows anymore. Once you switch to Linux/Unix and experience a simple OS that stays the hell out of the way using Windows just feels like a chore. Why can't Microsoft make Windows good?
Too many people are running insecure versions of Windows, and frankly I'd rather break them (the small percentage that they are) than have that many botnets out there, sending spam, breaking bitcoin consensus, and all kinds of other nefarious things.
Sure, OS X has new releases, but adoption rate is high, and Apple is quick to cut support for legacy versions. Microsoft is working towards that.
The visceral reaction towards Microsoft for trying this is just a general "I want to be in control for the sake of being in control" reaction that carries no legitimate value.
Since Windows 10 brings built-in surveillance functions to the table and will be the first version to support the dubious Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions), it is much better to be safe than sorry or in your words: better to be in control for the sake of being in control than in no control.
It's got GPS in it, they know where you are all the time!!!
Give me a break...
That is one of the many reasons why I don't have a cell phone.
I think you're either not being very honest, or you don't know about the myriad of privacy issues Microsoft has had over its entire lifetime...
I nevertheless still stand by my thesis that the privacy issues that Windows introduced in the past have been far less severe than the privacy issues cell phones introduce (let alone for the fact that one can be geolocated for the whole time).
By the way: I know quite some people who don't have a cell phone for similar reasons.
Please, I beg of you -- don't even pretend like this view holds a significant percentage of the greater population's mind.
1. You assume another person has a cell phone, a spying cell phone at that.
2. Even if your assumption is true, that makes Microsoft's actions okay because ... ?
This actively harmful view of how computer security works needs to be swiftly punished.
They're the ones telling you to upgrade.
They never said how they would offer you support.
Edit: Also, I'm not entirely sure there are any support contracts for Windows by itself, I think you need to buy a contract from Microsoft for something like that.
Did they not say they'd offer "security fixes", and not "complete UI changes, deprecation of perfectly working runtimes, shoving of new runtimes". The former is support; the latter, is finalization of misleading marketing.
In effect, you're agreeing with RMS. (I'm thankful I don't use Windows, precisely for this reason that Microsoft may do whatever they want with my hardware and my data, and without even playing fair to get my consent.)
Your unhappiness as a customer of Microsoft is completely worth it for me, as someone who would eventually otherwise get spammed by the botnet on your computer, not to mention the Iranian citizen who thanks you for not participating, unwittingly, in a TOR identification network.
I don't know how to put this in a way that will break through your selfishness, but being on the Internet is not just a "you" thing. You're participating in the worlds largest network of computers, and if you get to pick and choose, manually, when you update your computer, then you're going to be a bad actor.
Your "kid" and my "kid" are in the same "classroom", so I'd like for you to keep up with modern "medicine", even if it's temporarily inconvenient to you.
There isn't a specific unsupported thing that's currently out there, but only because Microsoft has committed to supporting legacy versions of Windows. There is a fundamentally superior solution to fixing bugs in many places, and that solution is to only have one place to fix a bug.
This isn't hypothetical, look at OS X. There have already been a number of vulnerabilities they've simply refused to fix in relatively recent legacy versions of their OS, because of the cost in doing so.
From a "how does this personally help me?" standpoint, if Microsoft can cut legacy teams, the people on those teams get to work on new cool things that make your investment in their latest OS more valuable. By forcing them to support legacy versions, you're holding them back, and therefore holding yourself back (since you bought their product).
They will have to provide security fixes anyways for the product lifetime of Windows 7 and 8.1 they promised, because I don't see large companies, governments etc upgrading now just because. They are not going to shorten the announced life-time, and they will keep providing updates during it.
So even if you don't believe they shouldn't interrupt their users like this, they won't save money by badgering people now about Windows 10 and they are generating a lot of bad press that possibly even actively stops people from upgrading (at least in the computer press I read, focus on windows 10 has shifted from "quite good, we recommend you upgrade" to "Microsoft is fucking their users even worse than last months, here is what you do to stop upgrades")
So from my perspective they are causing massive negative disruption for not much gain.
My grandfather doesn't care, he just wants to not have his credit card stolen, and upgrading to Windows 10 is Microsoft's recommendation to make sure that doesn't happen.
Seriously? I think this old Hacker News comment thread¹ does a good job of covering all the points outlining why that’s a bad idea. Also, do you seriously think that upgrading their OS will stop users from continuing to download and install malware?
――――――
Yes, I do. An operating system without a particular vulnerability cannot be infected by malware that exploits said vulnerability.
As for that thread, you're going to have to be more specific, nothing I read in there is much more than what I said earlier, control for it's own sake.
This is tantamount to the antivax movement.
Imagine waking up one morning and realizing you can't use uppercase on your file names anymore because of a rolled back vulnerability.
Could you please not be offensive. Vaccines don't have keyloggers or forced-adware.
It did. There have been documented cases, and I have discussed this in the past.
----
> but the fact that this comment actually "offends" you
It does. In another comment, you call people refusing to be force updated from a perfectly working (and security-supported) OS (in the name of "security") "luddites". In this comment, you generalize and compare us with a movement that can only be characterized as "willfuly ignorant", to say the least. That is offensive.
I do get the parallels you were trying to point to: people running insecure OSes are detrimental to the rest of the internet community at large. But you get carried away and set up a far too extreme comparison. The people/kids that need vaccines are those that don't have security against pathogens (you wouldn't give someone a second dose/shot of a vaccine, when they've already been vaccinated and it's not even close to time for a booster dose, would you?), but Windows 7 is a perfectly secure OS (at least against non-Microsoft-affiliated agents).
One has to be careful when setting up analogies, for while one may see only the similarities, others will see the differences also.
> tells me we're not playing on a level field
So what? Are you claiming I unleveled the field? The field was already unleveled, especially when you begin with a view that all those who disagree with you are "luddites" "as wrong as the antivaxxers".
You made some claims from a certain level, and I made counter-arguments from a certain level. If the field needed to be level in order to "play", I wouldn't even have presented any counter-arguments from the very beginning.
What you're doing now is invoking moral outrage, which is completely useless in any real conversation, so what you're signaling is that you've completed being useful to talk to, and are now commencing your own justifications for continuing to believe as you do, despite a well-reasoned argument to the contrary.
You've unleveled the playing field by removing rationality from this conversation, but by continuing to use terms from the world of rationality (evidence, claims), you try to mask that fact.
Do you realize that when you do this, you isolate yourself and alienate the person you're talking to? I don't want to talk to you anymore, regardless of the validity of your other points, simply because of how... annoyingly self righteous you're being. It's like a religious conversation now, and why would I engage someone on the Internet in something like that?
And it is necessary sometimes, to discuss the individual parts. Just because one strung together a big comment doesn't mean others shouldn't be able to question an individual part of that bigger comment.
> and is intellectually dishonest
One could argue the same about trying to hide a weak argument in a bigger comment with a plea like "please don't break up the comment, it removes context".
> What you're doing now is invoking moral outrage, which is completely useless in any real conversation, so what you're signaling is that you've completed being useful to talk to, and are now commencing your own justifications for continuing to believe as you do, despite a well-reasoned argument to the contrary
Funny, I see the same in you. I feel you were trying to provoke moral outrage by using words like "luddites" and comparing to antivaxxers. If you wanted to have "real conversation", you should have treated your conversation partners with a reasonable amount of respect.
You think your argument is well-reasoned. Guess what, almost every participant in every debate thinks their argument is well-reasoned, or they wouldn't be debating any longer.
> You've unleveled the playing field
Again, our perceptions differ, yet in a mirror-like manner. I felt you had unleveled the playing field by being so sure of your beliefs being well-reasoned that you think anyone that didn't agree with you were stupid; elevating yourself.
> by removing rationality from this conversation, but by continuing to use terms from the world of rationality (evidence, claims), you try to mask that fact.
Completely disagree, and totally understand why you'd think so. Only your own reason makes sense to you (this has been a theme in your other comments, also, see above), so obviously anyone that disagrees with you is unreasonable and irrational.
> I don't want to talk to you anymore ... It's like a religious conversation now
Same here. Only, it seemed like a religious conversation from the beginning that I took a risk while getting into. I guess when one describes thoughts or beliefs (or conversations) as "religious", they mean firm, unbudging belief. And I guess you see that in my arguments as much as I do in yours. Obviously, we can no longer discuss with each other.
Good day to you, sir.
I didn't read what you wrote, but I'm sure it was important enough to use tricks like selective quotation to get across.
I had to fix the network issues they had connecting from win10 to win7. Took all day. Just didn't want to work.
I set the other machines to never upgrade using this tool:
https://www.grc.com/never10.htm
Probably the same as the reg hack others post about.
They're a bit blurry because I was using the outrage filter.
I suppose the settlement would be a free one-month trial of MS cloud services. And at the end of the month they'd auto upgrade you to the highest cost tier.
I have no compelling reason to upgrade my Windows 7 machine to Windows 10; 7 performs all the tasks I need it to. I do not trust the privacy changes in Windows 10, which is more reason for me not to upgrade.
I've disabled the Windows 10 upgrade path, but otherwise keep it up-to-date on all patches.
What do I do when Windows 7 support ends? I'll cross that bridge when I get to it... but that bridge won't be to Windows 10.
At least once a week, it takes about 30 minutes to apply updates. Where my computer would restart several times.
In my mind, auto updating was not one of the most attractive features of Chrome. In fact, auto updating for Chrome was one of the reasons I and some others I know stayed away from it for so long.
Web apps aren't binary blobs that users have to download and implicitly trust to not do nefarious things to their system. In fact, most browsers sandbox web pages to a large degree. Not to mention it's an entirely different architecture...with its own challenges.
Operating Systems run on hardware ostensibly owned by individuals (although this is constantly being diminished by corporate practices). But average Joe running Win 8 is not a security risk for MS...it is a security risk for average Joe. Backwards support is a huge cost for software companies in general...so I think the auto updating is not so much about protecting you or I, it's about protecting Microsoft's bottom line. And using nefarious tactics to force and trick people into upgrading just underscores this point. It's taking (some) control of "your" system away from you and giving it to Microsoft. Not to mention that OS's are very close to hardware (about as close to hardware as software can be).
Basically...there are tons of reasons why OS's are not mobile apps, desktops apps (like browsers), etc. and shouldn't just be auto-updated with whatever Microsoft decides to send down to your machine on a whim.
It is true that it's a security risk, but instead of forcing something that people clearly do not want, why not make something that they do want. Make a product they want to upgrade to.
Everyone is framing this like it's all for the user's benefit, but lets tell it like it is: It's a huge money-grab for MS that happens to have small benefits to users.
Two things. First, people want their computers to be secure. Most users do not seem to understand that keeping your system patched is a prerequisite to remaining secure, and those people have to be dragged kicking and screaming into running updates, which is why Windows 10 has gotten so aggressive about enforcing it. If someone gets exploited through a hole in Windows, it comes back to haunt MS; they learned that well and good in the Windows 98 days, and they learned that users will never install updates without being forced to do so in the XP days.
Second, the kind of people who are afraid to install security patches cannot be enticed by any new program or UI modification. They have an defensive dislike of computers. They just want it to stay the same forever, and even if you release new versions that are identical at the UI level, people still won't upgrade to them because they're afraid it'll "break shit", as you succinctly put it.
End users may not like MS's aggression about updates but it is actually sensible for 99% of the userbase out there. MS's problems are unique among desktop OS vendors because of the wide and varied audience that relies on them to provide a good general-purpose OS.
It's reasonable that power users would resent MS's update policies, but MS does not have the luxury of tuning their release policy for the power user. Power users should be using not-Windows.
The type that are afraid of patches are often also afraid of the network, which is quite prudent. You judge them unfairly.
"Power users should be using not-Windows." Well then...
While theoretically possible, it is not currently reasonable to employ this model for modern general-purpose operating systems. We're going to have to live with requisite patching and updates for a long time yet.
k
Except that even power users like having large libraries of available software, including things that may not be available on "not-Windows".
I'm fine with aggressive defaults and sensible settings for the 99%, but I'm accustomed to being able to disable things that cause me problems or get in the way of doing what I want to do. If a system doesn't get out of my way, it's possible for it to become more of an impediment than a tool.
Most non-game software works on WINE, or, worst case, within a virtual machine. At Windows scale, your software must permanently operate in idiot-proof mode. If you don't need that protection, I believe you should use a different OS as your primary.
I think that's a smaller problem than not being able to flip the switch at all.
> someone will write spyware to flip it so that the computer becomes exploitable at a future date
...And I think that's inevitable, whether or not there's an official way to do it.
> Most non-game software works on WINE, or, worst case, within a virtual machine.
Wine's a wonderful piece of software and a great work-around in many situations, but I wouldn't want to rely on it as my only option.
When OS X came along, it shipped with an entire virtual machine for its previous OS. And while some low-level things didn’t work there, a surprising number of things did work. It gave people a path forward without requiring instant-OSX-ification of things.
My computer, my rules.
Oh, and also, their choice to decline this particular update is being actively subverted using dark patterns to try to trick them into upgrading.
"6. What is the difference between Mainstream Support, Extended Support" https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/lifePolicy
Where else do people expect a single anonymous purchase of around a hundred dollars to last them for 5+ years with a vendor constantly making improvements to it?
It's a good upgrade, it's free, and people better get used to it. It's a good choice for most people, so unless you feel like compiling your own OS, it's gonna be stuff like this, chromeOS, or buying hardware/OS as a single package (apple).
Yes, plenty of us on here are hackers, or "special users" that might not think it's a good choice, but for the bulk of windows 7, and 8 users this is a good path and their experience will improve with it.
And they slowly ruin the UI and introduce incompatibilities with other software that I'd like to use. It's why I'm in Pale Moon instead of Firefox or Chrome right now.
> Web apps can auto update whenever they want.
Are you saying this is a positive attribute of web apps? I suppose it is, from the development side. From the user's perspective, it's one of the things I hate the most about web apps.
> Mobile apps auto update.
Often removing features I like and adding ads or features that I don't, and chewing up my system resources while they do it. I've got auto-updates disabled for most apps on my phone, and I read the changelog before manually updating them. Exceptions: financial apps, e-mail, encryption, and other sensitive pieces of software. I'm not insane...I just don't like things changing out from under me with little-to-no warning.
Of course, if you have special needs (games, proprietary Windows-only software, etc.), you might have to run Windows. My advice would be to simply use an Enterprise version of Windows 7, which doesn't "upgrade" you automatically, and work on moving away from any Microsoft platforms as quickly as possible.
And perhaps many new problems introduced (as you point out), so... no, not really.
Just saw a whole school switch to ChromeOS.
In short, Ubuntu's been shipping a broken libcurlpp for something like a year. Further research tells me that's not the only package affected, and GCC 5 has generally made life entertaining.
I'm also running 16.04 on a Raspberry Pi, and oh boy is that fun! An even less tested architecture!
* Chromium segfaults on startup, and appears to have been doing so for about a year. Ubuntu continues to package completely broken updates occasionally.
* Most audio from Firefox goes through what I've been calling the noisy Satan filter.
* Initially, all programs segfaulted in ld.so when running in GDB. Currently, it spits out a couple errors and continues.
* nm-applet reliably segfaults a few minutes after starting.
* For some unknown reason, wlan0 has 7 global IPv6 addresses and counting.
But at least it doesn't update without asking. I suppose there's that!
Edit: Not that I think what Microsoft is doing is OK. Just think "just use Linux" often causes more problems than it solves, especially for people who just want Word and Facebook to work.
Can't believe I wasted my time putting up with the lag to fix my wifi so I could install updates.
Do we need a new story about this every day. ugh.