Microsoft will allow uninstalling Edge, Bing, and disable ads to comply with Act
windowscentral.com
windowscentral.com
Most recently: you cannot even change where notifications get displayed or their behavior.
What??? Why am I forced to have them in a place where they interfere with the input box for many sites that I use? In my arch install I have them in the center middle with a hotkey to dismiss one or all. And that's just a basic setup.
I got mine to perm disable not by uninstalling, but by changing the folder permissions so nothing has access.
For example, my printer randomly disables itself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, but I have to go into the settings and enable it before anything will print. Searching for solutions to this and the best I found was a suggestion to add a cron job that enables the printer automatically every x minutes.
I have some notes I add to every time I find an issue like that. It's a few pages long as this point.
I still don't really want to go back to Windows. They really have ruined it.
People act like Windows is somehow the only software in the world that you can’t customize to fit your preferred usage /eyeroll
No, what we don't like is the bloated, boggy UX, the built-in always-on spyware, and the product-on-rails BS masquerading as predictive features intended to ease use. It's the OS for the lowest common denominator, and we avoid it because of that.
"But iOS/Nintendo Switch/OS on your dishwasher..." ok there is a reason I don't use these as my desktop.
But then whoever in the company ruined it by forcing awful start pages full of horrific news stories on new users.
Did they not understand what made Chrome and the simple Google homepage so popular?
MS seemingly can’t help themselves with the cheapening of every experience they present to users.
Working for MS as a dev must be so frustrating at times!
That is, how long will I have to tunnel my traffic across the pond to keep this cruft uninstalled?
Brazil basically cloned GDPR and it worked (LGPD). For example, look at this Samsung tool: https://imgur.com/a/ycgkSCI
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2023/11/16/preview...
"Just don't buy it" is inversely proportionately silly to how many options people have (and how educated they are about them). In this case they have 2 that are roughly similarly viable and the vendors of both are increasingly pushing their services.
Consumer protection has been invented because it has been found that consumers don't deserve some types of harm, even or especially if they haven't been able to educate themselves about it and the market hasn't been efficient enough to provide (viable) non-harmful alternatives.
I am curious at which Linux distributions are showing ads to you? I have yet to see one doing that.
Assuming the HN definition of ads, where any kind of service promotion is shown.
Just like there are bigger issues with alternative OSes
But are they still going to collect people’s data and push ads on them?
Not that i’d care, linux distros arent in the spyware business.
North Korea even has one called Red Star OS. You can bet that has spyware.
In fact they are trying to get a backdoor into our chats themselves.
127.0.0.1 data.microsoft.com
127.0.0.1 msftconnecttest.com
127.0.0.1 azureedge.net
127.0.0.1 activity.windows.com
127.0.0.1 bingapis.com
127.0.0.1 msedge.net
127.0.0.1 assets.msn.com
127.0.0.1 scorecardresearch.com
127.0.0.1 edge.microsoft.com
127.0.0.1 data.msn.comUnless of course W11 kernel now silently ignores those host file modifications but pretends they work by only enforcing them when the user space apps tries to access them.
Reminder: It means that additionally to assuming the liabilities of a purchase you also assume the liabilities of renting, but lose out on most of the benefits of both: You pay "owning" price, but still have to rent the service, having to regularly pay and depend on the vendor doing well and supporting the product for it to be useful for you. They have a monopoly on the service and can thus do classical rent seeking in nearly unlimited ways. Many companies have explicitly announced that this will be their strategy going forward, so the problem will almost certainly grow bigger: What's the consumer gonna do? Return the device they already started to depend on? Get one of the many alternatives?Haha, sure! The potential for abuse is huge and the future for abusive companies bright. Not only will you own nothing, you will also still pay a big upfront price to not own things.
If there was a provision that forced interoperability between platform services (e.g. let me configure my own iCloud server), there would be a market and competition for these services, which would keep companies honest and mitigate a lot of e-waste.
If MS actually wanted to do the right thing, this would be global, not region locked.