Comment by hda2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hda2 | Hacker News Reader

The "hold-your-offline-device-hostage-until-you-attempt-to-connect" pattern. It goes something like this:

When setting up a new unlinked kindle device, Amazon tries to trick you into connecting to the internet by showing a wifi setup screen that cannot be skipped. The only way to skip it is to supply the device with bad credentials and let it attempt to connect and fail. Only when it fails will it allow its owner to skip that step.

Microsoft has also started employing the same strategy in windows 10. Within the first year of setting up windows 10 locally, the user will be presented with a screen they can't dismiss until they link their local user account with an online microsoft account. Again, the workaround here is to let windows try to connect with bad credentials. Once it has failed to login, it will allow the user, a child who urgently needed to get to her online classes in my case, to skip this step.

Words can't describe the contempt I have for companies who engage in these patterns.

Since beginning of the year, I have installed two Win10 two times. As I expected some dark patterns, I made sure that these machines were not physically connected to any network. Even this worked, it still managed to piss me of by forcing security questions for admin user. Seems that only way to avoid this "feature", is to modify register. Even on pro-version.

There might have been some obscure way of avoiding connecting via installer (perhaps a link inside EULA text). But as long the internet is not available for the machine I believe that this workaround should be possible to use, until MS decides that internet is required for installation.

Edit: After doing the install without Internet, I do remember that they were trying to get me to create MS account. However I have not created one. It is possible that they give up after some time or maybe I found some way of disabling this.

The way I avoid that (forced questions) is to enter no password during setup. Then add the password later in settings. This was also how you avoid setting up a pin in a previous version of windows.

This was for windows pro, I believe they are more pushy on online accounts in windows home.

Not sure when they'll inevitably change install again to try to force more issues.

Microsoft has really pushed this in the recent(?) versions of Windows 10. When it was first released it wasn't this bad, now it pretty much forces you during install to link an account then also forces you later (as you mentioned).

Yeah this is still happening in Windows 10. I reinstalled Win 10 Pro recently and the only way to make a local account during initial setup was to unplug the ethernet cable on my desktop. As long as an internet connection is up, it isn't even a hidden option.

I did a reinstall of windows pro N last week, and had the PC connected to the network. It required a few non-prominent buttons, but I manged to only make a local account. I was still caught out by the security questions though.

I suppose this might be the difference due to the N version. If I recall this leaves out some of the default media encoders to avoid some anti-trust legislation in Europe. Might be that they are slightly less aggresive with these dark patterns in that version.

You can delete the security questions after setup.

I think this is probably the darkest pattern of all.

So many offline devices are forced to have an online component.

Simple IoT devices with just bluetooth - they require an app that will phone home.

More complicated devices with wifi or ethernet - they will nag you again and again until you are connected to the mothership.

Even apple with all it's "privacy is a right" won't turn off bluetooth or wifi in the quick menu - they just toggle it and it comes back. You have to dig into settings to turn them off "for real".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com