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Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to believe that the same company putting out such awesome stuff as the fully open-source .NET Core is also displaying nagware popups with "OK" buttons that can easily be accidentally clicked. Talk about dark patterns...

Even more amusing: My wife has an older Dell Precision laptop that, according to Dell's own website (and my own experience trying to upgrade it) cannot be upgraded to Windows 10. Yet, the upgrade icon is in the system tray. I've warned my wife to be aware of this nagware popup and to be careful about accidentally accepting the upgrade.

To Microsoft: Remove your invasive, difficult-if-not-impossible-to-disable telemetry and data-gathering services and you will eliminate perhaps the biggest reason to remain unupgraded. Until then, this nagware screen just throws fuel on the fire.

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>It's hard to believe that the same company putting out such awesome stuff as the fully open-source .NET Core is also displaying nagware popups with "OK" buttons that can easily be accidentally clicked. Talk about dark patterns...

https://i.imgur.com/nfMeFm0.jpg

That was true once, but Microsoft has since been reorganised internally, IIRC.

It's a question of differing incentives, I think. Pushing open-source and aggressively trying to reduce fragmentation are not really contradictory.

That reorganization hasn't made it to all teams equally I'm quite sure.

The telemetry is what gets me about Windows 10... why do they need so damn much of it?

In days gone by it was a purely opt-in process for various applications at install time and their applications seem to have benefited from it (SQL, Visual Studio and so on) so why do they need to monitor the living daylights out of everything now? And why can it not just be opt-in?

I had been using Windows 7/8.1 for several years and decided to try 10... in the whole time I used 7/8.1 on my computer I had no issues at all. No crashes and everything just worked.

I had Windows 10 for 1 month and I had 3 blue screens. This was around Feb this year.

Uninstall!

Back to 8.1 with Stardock and cannot see any reason to upgrade.

I have "fixed" my neighbours's computers and my parents several times now with the Windows 10 stuff.

It's malware/adware plain and simple.

>And why can it not just be opt-in?

Right now, it is opt-out.

The reason it can't be opt-in is that basic users will never enable it. They want data on how the majority of the users (mentionned above) are using their OS to improve it for their use case.

I'm not saying I agree with it (I disabled every telemtry option there is), but I see their point.

Previous versions of Windows didn't require all this 'telemetry' and those operating systems did just fine without it. Why now all of a sudden it's this important? Pretty suspicious imo.

It's nice to know what's popular and what's largely unused; this helps Microsoft figure out where to allocate scarce engineer time for feature development and maintenance. You'd generally want them to fix the most common crashes and UI weirdnesses before fixing the uncommon ones, right?

Sure it's nice. Sending data to Microsoft is fine if and only if someone gives their informed consent to give that information (which includes a manifest of the exact information that will be logged and transmitted).

Microsoft isn't entitled to this information. Asking is fine, but tricking people with opt-out settings - which they know most people won't notice or understand - or simply exfiltrating data unasked or against the user's wishes is patently unethical. Stealing data like this should really be seen as the digital version of trespassing or larceny. Unfortunately, the law is slow to change and this isn't a crime.

"Legal" does not imply "moral" or "acceptable to society", and extrapolating your own opinions to other people is the "projection" fallacy.

Compared to web apps which have this * 1000000? Have you seen how many xhr tracking calls a SaaS product does to often dozens of different services?

It's malware compared to actual software applications. "Web apps" are, by definition, spyware.

> SaaS

Service As A Software Substitute[1] has always been about lock-in. It shouldn't be a surprise when developers that use an unethical, user-hostile business model also write spyware.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

I use NoScript and UBlock so I see that $hit all the time unfortunately but I have come to expect that with cloud-related stuff but we are talking about a stand alone product here... not some cloud-based scheduling app.

It should be my call whether I want to "improve" their product.

Block it on your firewall then? What's the difference?

Really? Is this what you have to do nowadays in order to just use your computer?

You sound like this is acceptable to you but what about my parents and neighbours and so on... should I tweak their firewalls?

What is M$ changes the URLS/IPs!

I am not in a position to boycott them and I don't know what the answer is except to not use Windows 10 but I know I can't use Windows 8.1 forever.

You don't have to disable it to use your computer.

You have to disable it if you don't want to be tracked.

Which is why most people who comment on HN confess using adblockers. Are you suggesting that because there is Ebola in africa, it is fine to introduce in the US? How does websites being infested with trackers justify introducing tracking inside the OS?

Shouldn't be hard to believe. Sure, theirnipen source projects viewed in isolation might give one a certain impression. But, when considering corporations one must consider the whole picture. One must "incorporate" all aspecta of behavior and structure. To this point I would point out their stewardship of Skype. Once a secure platform, no longer secure. Looking forward, consider their motivations for purchasing LinkedIn. Personal information. Direct relationship with the customer. Very much in linenwith their investment in Facebook. To Microsoft, the customer is just as much a resource as any of their employees.

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