Windows Copilot's is showing third-party Ads to Windows users | Hacker News Reader

Windows Copilot's is showing third-party Ads to Windows users

ghacks.net

191 pointsgoplayoutside123 comments

This reminds me of that satire post that went around right after ChatGPT release about the future of LLMs. The model basically always found a way to insert product placement or praise of the Chinese government into every other line.

Hey, that was me! Am I internet famous now?

I still have a few pennies of OpenAI credits left if you want to try it: https://future.attejuvonen.fi

Lol, thank you! I love this.

Everyone I have shown this too over the last two days absolutely loves it! Hopefully doesn't get hugged to death.

Thanks! Out of OpenAI credits now. The fallback prerecorded queries are static content so they are free and can be delivered via CDN.

That's gold, well done and thanks for sharing!

It's something easy to experience yourself. Just ask ChatGPT (especially GPT-4) to write you some thing, and tell it to also insert sneaky references to a specific product, and/or make it an explicit sales pitch for that product, etc. Press "Send", and watch in horror.

Microsoft couldn't convience people to use Edge, so it is now converting Windows into a web browser.

Welcome to Windows 98 and Active Desktop.

"Sorry start menu is not work. Please install Active X"

To quote Richard Stallman. It is time to defenestrate your computer. Either throw windows out of the computer or throw the computer out the window.

Sadly, the other alternatives are very expensive both in time or money

Using Linux for doing exclusively what windows allows you to do isn't really time-expensive. When you get into the weeds and try to go outside of that, sure, but before then Linux is a very capable OS with modern browser support, enabling use of 90% of modern workflows.

HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot

DWORD TurnOffWindowsCopilot set to 1.

Do any of you know if this just hides the UI, or actually prevents it and all of its components from using any resources other than disk space?

Also, expect the registry key to change in a future release, "accidentally" re-enabling it and/or a pester widget to periodically ask you if you really meant to turn it off.

It's rather annoying that Windows 10 still periodically pesters me to set up / link a Microsoft account. I expect no less from this AI widget. Thank goodness Win11 doesn't support my laptop (though, I seem to remember getting pestered a few times to upgrade to Win11).

I don't know about Copilot specifically, but for Widgets, no matter where you disable them (Settings app, registry, group policy) that only hides the UI entry point, while Widgets.exe and WidgetsService.exe happily continue running in the background, taking up RAM, CPU and -of course- doing network activity.

Does renaming Widgets.exe or WidgetsService.exe disable them completely?

Missed opportunity for MS, they couuld promote Win11 to users who have old laptops, and show them ads for new compatible laptops.

Until the next update.

You can execute this on every reboot.

I'll keep a post-it on my monitor /s

cute that what used to be a bit is now a DWORD

And booleans are actually int32s in modern C. Storage is so cheap that it's not worth the cycles to try to pack booleans together for general purpose.

Windows is dead, there's no good reason for most people to use it as their primary OS anymore. Desktop Linux has proper fractional scaling support (or KDE plasma does anyway) AND doesn't catch fire every five minutes now, now's the time to make the switch.

This is the first time I hear Linux has better fractional scaling than Windows. Is this because of Wayland or something? Windows always had reasonably good fractional scaling story. Wanted to hear why you think Windoes fractional scaling is broken.

I don't, windows fractional scaling is very good, until very recently there was no good solution on Linux, but Plasma implemented a proper solution a while ago and it works about as well as Window's. This was one of the main things keeping me from making the permanent switch.

The only issue is the shitty support for nvidia cards courtesy of nvidia.

At least AMD cards themselves are really good now, I just wish there were more of them.

There are still some kinks in KDE fractional scaling on Wayland unfortunately, like Aurora window decoration themes not drawing elements correctly. If you want to use something other than Breeze your only choices are a handful of C++ window decoration themes (usually forked from Breeze).

I think they were remarking that fractional scaling on Linux is no longer a dumpster fire so you can ditch Windows for the reasons that make it a dumpster fire.

Yeah this is what I meant, Linux on desktop is now stable enough and sufficiently usable to be an actual viable replacement for windows.

Linux is slowly getting better with time, Windows is rapidly getting worse.

Mint Cinnamon had the best support I've seen in Linux. Maybe KDE is better, but I know for sure Windows is way better haha.

I think you misunderstand. I don't think the parent is saying fractional scaling is better than Windows, just that it sucks less than it used to and is almost usable now.

X and Wayland has had fractional scaling for a long time, but getting apps updated to pay attention to it is moving at the speed of Open Source.

I prefer Windows as my host OS and I've primarily worked in Linux professionally for 13 years.

Prefer it to OSX and every Linux desktop environment. IMHO it's just a superior windowed desktop experience.. I prefer to develop in Linux since my background is Linux systems engineering..

So, hard disagree.

Interesting, what about the windows experience do you find better? I don't use a desktop environment and haven't used Windows since version 7 but I'm curious.

> what about the windows experience do you find better?

Everything outside the terminal(though Powershell is pretty cool tech). Wifi, bluetooth, HDR, fractional scaling, tiling/snapping, virtual desktops, general device compatibility.

I use Linux professionally and personally. Out of all of my peers, at work and my personal circles, osx or Windows is preferred.

Our senior-most devops guy even claims that Windows is the best Linux, because of wsl2 (he knows windows itself isn't a Linux, but he likes to get a rise out of people).

Windows is still the best average-user OS after Chrome OS (not exactly Linux, IMHO) and maybe osx.

I think this boils down to the state of DEs. GNOME and KDE have come a long way but aren’t quite there yet for different reasons. The former goes too far with minimalism (outstripping even Apple in some ways) and KDE has just enough idiosyncrasies and lingering rough edges to be offputting to users who are uninterested in desktop tinkering.

To help address this at some point I’d like to build a DE that’s a near-clone of the XP/7 desktop as well as one that clones macOS (both classic and modern). These would make switching more painless and would eventually become very stable due to targeting fixed feature sets with development being focused solely on optimization and bug fixing once feature-completeness is achieved.

I think it would be more impactful if you contribute to Linux Mint and Elementary. The former reminds me of Windows 7 and the latter is a MacOS lookalike.

Elementary is a non-starter because even if it resembles macOS aesthetically, it’s more like GNOME or iPadOS in how it eschews a proper menubar in favor of hamburger menus or removing functions that don’t fit in the toolbar altogether. It’s also missing number of other power user oriented features like a GUI for modifier key and per-app key shortcut remapping.

Mint/Cinnamon are nice but I think its ties to GTK+ and various GNOME components are a liability.

It seems like you already have a list of pain points you can improve on.

Not if those "improvements" go against the desired grain by gnome/etc maintainers.

If I'm not misremembering, the gnome team is especially notorious for being closed to changes that go against their desired design goals.

Trying to get changes upstream like what the parent was suggesting would be somewhere between arduous and impossible, let alone being a pain to implement.

Edit: case in point: https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2023/01/05/on-the-gnome-pr...

I use KDE plasma without any customization and I find it perfect. What "tinkering" is required according to you ? I even found the defaults super powerful. I got a notification on my NVMe having a failure, and I wouldn't have thought of this if it didn't show it to me.

Nothing major, just lots of little differences from Windows that in aggregate are enough to bother a lot of people.

Not really a KDE thing but having multiple screens with differing refresh rates is a pain on all distros I've tested. Either you add a lot of buffering to avoid screen tearing, or you get screen tearing.

I use KDE Plasma on Fedora, Wayland, and it works in the latest kernels. I remember it was an issue for me before, but now I have my laptop screen (120Hz) and desk screen (60Hz) working well.

For me it's stuff like the size of toolbars. They are too small and i tried a bunch of scaling before but couldn't get it right. The size of borders is also an issue where it seems like theres a few pixels i need to grab onto to resize a window so its difficult to do. Recently i ran into an issue in Nautilus where it doesn't auto refresh the contents of a folder when files are added, and there's no refresh button in sight either - you have to know the shortcut is F5. There's just a lot of tiny issues like that that keep cropping up. Then linux people will say "oh it works for me" and that's the end kf of the discussion.

There are also plenty of apps like Unreal or Davinci that while supported on linux tend to be more buggy just because they have a smaller user base and less investment by companies.

Yes, I get you, I also sometimes run into tiny issues when I try to shape the things how I want to be. That's why I kind of abandoned this mindset, and use as many defaults as possible. If I use KDE, I'd use the default file browser etc. I'd use the default functionalities and shortcut provided... I still run into some annoying issues (like, can't properly write with the korean characters).

For apps that "should" run on Windows (game, game dev, or other stuf), I'd just boot Windows yeah. Honestly it's so much time gained in just running the stuff how it's intended to be. As a bonus, I think it forces your brain to "adapt" to the stuff you have in hand (which sadly means that yeah, you won't be a power user most likely)

If reading/writing files isn't that slow across the host Windows and WSL, I would agree that Windows is the best Linux.

I've definitely joked that WSL makes Windows the most popular Linux DE.

My parents use Linux for daily browsing and general computer usage. My dad is pretty computer savvy but all his experience is with DPS and Windows. Since I convinced them to switch, they haven't needed to learn much about Linux to use ubuntu & debian on a daily basis (for almost 10 years now.) My mom knows virtually nothing about computer internals but she's at least been a desktop computer user since the days of DOS. I rarely get support calls from them about Linux problems. It's solid and reliable.

Plenty of good reasons. Best reason world be because you need to use software that only runs on Windows to do your job.

I don't have that problem but using wine or even spinning up a VM is always an option. My advice is to choose something more open though, almost everything has an alternative and even when the user experience is worse the freedom is worth it.

I'll never understand people who put up with an OS (at this point spyware) they don't like because they "have to", like being stuck in a abusive relationship.

Windows has 68% desktop market share vs. 3% Linux[1]

Hackernews User: Windows is dead

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-has-over-3-of-the-deskto...

Windows is certainly dead to me. Grew up using Windows, bounced off of desktop Linux a decade or more ago, then eventually got fed up with the increasing ad infestation as Windows enshittified and realized the desktop Linux is lovely and usable nowadays (and the Steam Deck exists for any games I want to play). I'd sooner give up on computers entirely than go back to Windows, unless they drastically change course and remove all ads from the product, permanently.

I haven't used windows since 2013 and I haven't ever looked back. Don't miss it one bit. I used MacOS for a while and then went fully Linux by 2015. The world is getting worse every day but at least my desktop OS isn't.

Parent is not talking about market share, they're talking about utility. The utility in using Windows over the alternatives is none, they're saying.

And you could argue that, if you wanted. But pretending they were talking about market share and then using it as a "lol HN" generalization is disingenuous, at best.

I saw an article on stable diffusion for Linux and how to set it up with some extra.

It went reasonable for a moment, git this, pip that…

Then as predicable as ever, the Linux pseudo-child sacrifice routines began, some sudo JRE incantation to move JRE version up or down, then some absolute voodoo with piping something or another to some what’s it, then some command line apt deal with a very specific package name and version that you are just supposed to know is the exact one that is quantum linked to the code you want to run.

… I WANT to get away from windows, but learning and remembering all that nonsense that doesn’t make me money is exactly the issue with Linux and I assume the massively autistic crowd that likes that process.

But still unable to do this simple task: use the external screen when I close the laptop lid! I've tried everything on multiple distros but the external screen reduces to 1 FPS as soon I close the lid. My laptop has multiple GPUs but still!

Mac laptops are also superior in every way (excluding gaming).

Is this true for Windows Pro users? Sounds like it could be.

I pay for Pro(multiple times) so I have access to Hyper-V and Bitlocker. With some config/opt-out I've enjoyed pretty much zero ads in Windows. Would be a shame if this changes..

Yes. I can confirm it’s regardless of SKU

Jesus, I can't imagine paying for something and still getting ads shoved down my throat.

Most people who watch TV are very used it.

In $current_year? Sure some cheap Android TVs are probably littered with suggestions to offset the price, but wouldn't it be strange to pay for Netflix and still have to watch ads?

I meant 'TV' as in TV channels provided by a cable provider, not 'TV' as in a large monitor hanging on your wall.

I got that, hence "in $current_year". I don't know of anyone who has a cable subscription and my country even shut down the analog signals. I understand many people are paying for and using products subsidized by ads and personal data, but they usually don't know any better and don't realize they're doing it.

If one is infected by a virus collecting every keystroke sold on the black market there is reason to worry. But when it's part of a product sold by a multibillion dollar company and collected on a global scale it's just monetization. Don't forget we're speaking about the PRO version here. I will never understand the people who knowingly don't care.

The parent may be referencing cable TV.

I hope the European Union goes in full attack mode against this and force them to make it opt-in (not opt-out), and also demands some economic penalties for trying to use their OS monopoly to impose it.

They didn't do it for widgets (news&weather&slimy ads), why would they do it now...

I can't seem to find what the original prompt was in the article? I'd hate injected ads, but if the prompt was literally "What are the best gaming laptops of 2023, how much do they cost and where do I buy them?" I don't think the screenshot response is that bad.

Windows is dying. Instead of offering this as a free service until it's actually useful enough to make people want to pay for it, they instantly turn to ads. That means that they see no more potential in windows, it's not worth investing into it anymore.

Which is a shame. I use Mac, Linux, and Windows pretty much daily, and I actually like the Windows UI/UX a lot, more than Mac in some ways. With WSL and tools like Bash, you can do a ton of things with Windows and make it more *nix-like than ever. Hell even Powershell is pretty damn good.

The one thing Powershell has going for it is, that does treat output as objects or output of commands can be objects, so that there is no need to re-parse everything in the next command.

That and it runs on linux

Netcraft confirms it ...

People have always paid for it. OEs famously were forced to buy a Windows license for every PC they sold, whether the buyer wanted it or not. The problem today is it doesn't generate recurring payments, which is apparently the way software is supposed to work now.

Operating systems were the original subscription service, in a way! If I recall correctly, up until Mavericks and Windows 8, both macOS and Windows were paid updates.

> Operating systems were the original subscription service

A subscription is something you pay for regularly and predictably, and lose access to when you stop paying. Saying that operating systems were subscription services is like saying cars or computers were subscription services. You paid for the OS once and were not forced to upgrade, that’s just a regular sale.

Yes, I was being a bit facetious. However, my point was that OS upgrades used to be a source of income for Apple and Microsoft, and now they are not.

Sounds like some sort of deranged experiment to see how much abuse Windows users can take.

And when I saw add in the start menu search on insiders a couple years ago is why I changed my default not to my Linux drive and started driving it daily.

First fuck up your UI over about a decade, then claim AI is the fix (and not building less hostile UIs)

What's the difference between this and Google showing you ads in search? What's the difference between this and Facebook showing you ads? What's the difference between this and YouTube showing you ads?

Your OS is meant to be neutral ground. Injecting ads into Windows is just unwelcome. I use macOS and if Apple ever did something similar I’d be jumping ship.

Why is Microsoft doing ads? Does that make any sense, or are they just really stupid?

What is it with Microsoft's infatuation with ads in software?

Of course it has ads. Running an AI in the cloud costs money.

It’s completely impossible to get users to pay for it, the users that would pay can’t possibly justify our investment in this amazing technology… /sarcasm

When did advertisements become the universal currency?

Since 1999.

You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product. If you charge for your product you will always have people who do not value your product at the price you need to charge.

If you make it free you will always get more people to use your products. This helps a lot in getting funding in case of startups. Look at our user base if each user paid 1 dollar we would make billions. Of course you can never turn 100% of your user base into a paying customer.

If you want to keep your massive user base you have to resort to ads. If you switch to a paid plan your user numbers will decline and investors will complain. If you do not show ads you will continue to bleed money and make no return on investment.

At some point in time having a small paying customer base became unsexy to a lot of investors who wanted to chase after the next potential unicorn.

> You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product

The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself. Or... iOS?

Users pay indirectly for those, they don't see it as a standalone paid product.

Both of these get bundled with the Hardware so people do not really consciously chose them.

And for windows it seems the microsoft actually started to go the ads route by putting them in windows 10 and 11. And you do not have to pay for the OS anymore to use it as you do not have to activate the license.

>The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself. Or... iOS?

Or hardware, even. Just look at the iPhone...

Even hardware can become victim to this look at Alexa:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2023/08/20/ji...

One example surrounded by many other pieces of hardware that don't do this doesn't do much to solidify your "cannot" absolute.

Edit: Your second link makes it pretty clear that it's not Alexa's lack of profitability that seems to be the issue with regards to ads playing between songs. Apple Music has a free, ad-supported tier - meaning that on whatever device you use it on, you'll hear ads. If your Alexa is set to access your ad-supported Apple Music account, then of course you're going to hear ads.

Or coca-cola, or baby formula, or the myriad of construciton materials that we all consume but are produced by a few obscure, giant entities.

> You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product.

That really depends on how we define "gigantic user base", but I think Adobe, Valve, and Autodesk all disprove it.

> If you charge for your product you will always have people who do not value your product at the price you need to charge.

It doesn't matter how many non-customers you get, only how many customers you get.

In general, I think you do have something of a point in that it is easier to get more users with a nominal price of $0, and it might be a way to get enough users that the small $/user from ads works out. That doesn't mean that ads are always going to work or that other models can't work, though.

This wasn't invented by the internet either. Free newspapers or TV are examples of services funded by advertisements.

Ads is theft (of our attention and of our data) and theft is committed without consent of the victim. It is for this reason ads can "pay" for things that money cannot. Similarly, if the law allowed extortion or blackmail, corporations that embrace it would outcompete those who don't.

If I am not mistaken, when Marc Andreessen was building the Mosaic browser (1993-ish) he and his co-founders contemplated the monetization model for the web. Since micropayments were not possible, the only obvious choice was ads. In this sense, reliance on advertisement as the primary way to monetize online businesses is as old as www.

I think it goes further back than that. You can find early radio broadcasts where the story was brought to you buy some brand. They would even work the brands into the stories sometimes.

Indeed:

> The term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas originally being sponsored by soap manufacturers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera

Yeah. I believe that's where the term "soapies" originated.

Shows originally brought to you by washing powder manufacturers.

G'day, mate? (I've never heard the term "soapies". Is it Australian slang? Having lived a decade in Hong Kong, I got exposure to a fair amount of Australian slang, and this fits the character.)

South African ...

Although I was under the impression that soapies was an American word.

I've only ever heard "soap operas" or "soaps" in the Upper Midwest and East Coast.

Let's blame Australia.

I've found that quite a lot of South African slang is mistaken for Australian slang, while a South African accent is often mistaken for a British one[1].

[1] I've actually been asked, once, "You're English, right?", when I was in the states.

I've never heard "soapies" in my part of the US. It's "Soaps" or "soap operas" here.

> I've never heard "soapies" in my part of the US. It's "Soaps" or "soap operas" here.

After reading the other replies, I believe that it's not just your part of the US.

I'm going to put this down in the TIL column - I always thought it was American slang, TIL I learned that it's not.

It’s pretty close even if it’s not actually an Americanism.

"ies" doesn't sound very American.

It may be. It could be a very regional item. Like soda vs pop.

I personally never heard it until this thread. I have heard 'soaps'.

> micropayments were not possible, the only obvious choice was ads

this is completely specious .. source: present at the time

Please elaborate. Curious.

there are people here that can tell the stories better of course. MarcA was building the browser with other grad students and whomever, and they ultimately formed a company called Netscape. That product was called Netscape Navigator, and sold to consumers in a commercial software box, like a big book, similar to Adobe Photoshop and dozens of other huge programs in that day ("shrink wrap software").

Through the 1990s many Usenet users talked about ads on the Internet via usenet lists, everyone knew about AOL and their business model. The opinion among most coders in public was that ads on the Internet would "ruin it." Public surveillance on the scale that is common now, was a topic from comic books. etc

Micropayments, which are now possible if you accept cryptocurrency (specifically Solana) as the intermediary instead of Visa/MC, work. But how that would work is that you'd scroll past an article and pay for scrolling down. Instead of doing that, we put an ad in so when you're scrolling down, it costs the advertiser a micropayment and sends it to the ad agency (Google) at the expense of the viewer's time.

How do I convert Flooz to Solana?

Responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what you said, as per the guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, it looks like you'd have to use something more mainstream (BTC/ETH/USDT) as the intermediary as https://flooz.xyz/trade won't convert Flooz directly to Solana. Getting money in and out of the Solana ecosystem is part of being able to do micropayments. USD to Solana (and back) is supported by Coinbase, however. My main point is that the code to make it so that scrolling down the article you're reading sends sub-cent amounts to the author is actually possible with today's technology, whereas it wasn't back in the 90's.

Attention is the currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy

During the golden age of software piracy.

Early newspapers, even paid ones, often had an entire front page of only ads. And then more ads within.

They aren't a universal currency, they are just something that you can always add to a product that already makes $X, to make $X + $Y, instead.

Most firms seem to prefer to make $X + $Y, over making $X.

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