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Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

Which one should we have handed the web over to?

It's the 'One Ring To Rule Them All' problem.

They are fine until you hand it over to them and then they are a problem :)

The pragmatic answer is firewalls between layers (i.e. browser separate from search), and competition in layers, plus decent legislation, plus some degree of decentralization.

> The pragmatic answer is firewalls between layers (i.e. browser separate from search), and competition in layers, plus decent legislation, plus some degree of decentralization.

A long-form way for saying 'unusable'.

Not Microsoft, thats for sure.

Microsoft still largely operates by you paying it money in return for software and services. Hell of a step up.

Paying for things does not stop ads, telemetry, and various other malware from being part of a product. Microsoft is a prime example.

I’m seeing this in other businesses too. Hell- some airlines now run ads on their inflight tv systems right after their safety videos. You, as a passenger who has paid their fare for a flight, must sit still, strapped in, and watch an ad on a screen straight ahead of you, with sound playing through the cabin, with no way to opt out. Ads are a disease.

> You, as a passenger who has paid their fare for a flight, must sit still, strapped in, and watch an ad on a screen straight ahead of you, with sound playing through the cabin, with no way to opt out.

If someone in the seat next to me decided to opt out by colouring over their screen with a sharpie, I would not stop them.

There's really nothing more offensive than buying a product and seeing ads show up months or years later. That should be illegal.

Like cable tv and streaming right?

I’m seeing this in other businesses too. Hell- some airlines now run ads on their inflight tv systems right after their safety videos. You, as a passenger who has paid their fare for a flight, must sit still, strapped in, and watch an ad on a screen straight ahead of yo, with sound playing through the cabin, with no way to opt out. Ads are a disease.

Telemetry is not really a problem except to the paranoid.

Not only is it anonymized, it's very useful. It helps provide essential data for bug fixes, especially for an OS and application software that rely so much on not breaking backwards compatibility.

> Telemetry is not really a problem except to the paranoid.

How can you call anyone paranoid after all that we learned in the past decade?

> Not only is it anonymized

Oh so that's why Microsoft uses a hash of your mac address in multiple products. To make it more anonymous. I'm sure your unique advertisement id is also very important and efivars are only used to make sure your activation is legit.

Based on their handling of marketing Edge right in my task bar, I'm pretty skeptical it'd be a step up in any sense of the term.

That's because it's an enterprise company. Consumers won't pay for software.

Hasn't seemed to discourage them from vacuuming up information and handing it to the NSA.

You can use Windows 10 for free with no limitations.

Windows is far from the only product Microsoft makes.

Not legally.

They did that back during the Halloween papers, and their embrace, extend, extinguish phase, and funding the SCO court case.

Operating by "us paying them" doesn't stop them doing a lot worse than google has ever done.

Arstechnica.

Such a crummy headline. In all honesty, Google has been an extremely competent organization. Don't hate them just because they are at the top. "Rich get richer, poor get poorer" rings true for a reason, they had the first mover advantage in a lot of things. Monopolies are always a danger, like a once competent ruler turning into a tyrant. Having structures in place to deal with them is a must.

NASA

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