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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

Yeah there should definitely be a "Hey Cortana, off the record,..." query mode.

I'm a bit conflicted now. My girls are 7 & 9 and they've been using Microsoft Accounts. With the final Win10 build having all this (none of these settings worked a few months ago), it looks like I've got a lot of reading and explaining to do for them.

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If you don't have any Windows-only applications keeping your younger-than-double-digit children on Windows, well then now is your chance to put them on anything-other-than-Windows.

My own children are still using computers with Windows 7. They play Spore (Windows only), Sims 3 (Windows only) Minecraft (Java, so playable anywhere), Osu! (no idea, really), and a couple of other games. I have no intention of upgrading Windows on their computers past 7. Take a look at your options, you might be surprised how easily Windows is replaced with anything else.

My son, who mostly plays Minecraft, does not understand why many of his friends use Apple PCs. The "render distance" and framerate in Minecraft on our home PC (running Windows 8.1) is twice that of his friends, and our PC cost half what a similar Apple costs.

As a parent, I'm also not sure if an equivalent of Family Safety exists on other platforms. Windows sends me weekly overviews of our kids PC use and blocks inappropriate content. Also, our kids log into their own profiles, I don't give them Administrator level access, they have to aks me if they want to install something.

On my desk now I have two MBPs and one windows PC. The macs are for work, the PC is for games (and occasional windows testing). I use the same kb/mouse/monitor for all 3.

After being out of the PC scene for 10+ years -- and as a rabid apple fan -- let me say this: PC gaming is AWESOME. Games I'd only played on Mac before come to new life on a proper gaming PC. That said I would probably go into a different line of work if I had to use Windows as my primary dev box.

Your only two choices are not an overpriced Mac and a cheap PC. You can build/buy a reasonably priced PC and install a GNU/Linux distribution on it.

As a Java application, Minecraft runs perfectly fine on any operating system.

As for your parental controls, if you wish to apply them you can do the exact same thing on any GNU/Linux platform.

This performance disparity between OS X and Windows for gaming may finally be diminished now that Apple’s bringing Metal from iOS to OS X (far faster than using OpenGL):

http://www.imore.com/metal-os-x-so-huge-i-no-longer-need-mac...

MSFT has done this by buying itself into the graphic API market long ago. Since then the last two main graphic hardware vendor have been poorly receptive to develop drivers for any other platform.

Hopefully, Valve OS's initiative might bend this and allow the Linux world to be at least on par with MSFT when it comes to graphic drivers. Considering that from the three main console out there, both the Playstation and the Nintendo are using a flavor or another of OpenGL, there is some hope for the future of alternative to MSFT outside the office and MSFT centric software development.

I'm really hoping STeam OS becomes a viable desktop gaming OS (play most if not all PC games) at some point.

I would drop Windows in a heartbeat if that happened. There is no other reason keeping me using it other than games.

I still think Win2k was a great operating system and I wish I could go back to it, but you do eventually have to upgrade. I eventually had to upgrade Win2k to Win7 because of the many performance benefits and the lack of support for the OS.

Even though I personally hate literally almost every new feature of Windows 10 and the design of the entire OS, I'm still running it, simply because I get much better performance out of it than I do on Win7 - and I can generally customize my UX.

I have no idea about the Sims, but I've run Spore under Wine without noticable issue.

Linux Mint has many usability features similar to Win 7, is free/free, and I've not had any issues with Win games ( wine / etc ) - plus they can learn command line & packages!

worth the time it takes to check it out, imo...

Have you looked at Linux with WINE? That could be a good transition from Windows into, eventually, pure Linux.

This is a great suggestion. I'm getting sick of having to open incongito mode on Chrome unless I want Google Now to happily repeat whatever I was looking at later. Uh, I don't need reminders for sales on hemorrhoid medicine or news alerts about the side effects of MDMA. I don't need that popping up where others can see it.

Some kind of "off the record" mode would be invaluable for voice interfaces. Hell, it would be nice if there was a check box under the Google search box as well, but I imagine Google would never make it too easy to avoid their data mining. I feel like we never had the proper privacy conversation we needed to have with companies like MS, Google, Facebook, etc. I think some level of easy to use yet strict segregation between what I consider my public life and my private life should be cooked-in, and enabled by default, into all this software.

I agree completely. The split between public and private life is so natural that we sometimes forget how important it is. Sometimes people need to be able to experiment and access information privately so they can think it over without being judged. It leads more genuine expressions in public life, even in simple ways. Maybe I want to experiment with listening to all the worst pop music to see if there's something in there I like without my music player thinking I love all of it.

Absolutely. Or take for example my friend, who's a literary translator - she sometimes has to research online the most outlandish and obscure subjects, which have no bearing on her own interests...

> I'm getting sick of having to open incognito mode on Chrome unless I want Google Now to happily repeat whatever I was looking at later.

Isn't that what incognito mode is for? If don't want your searches in cards at all, you completely opt-out of the cards that are strictly based on your search history. Ctrl+Shift+N seems like a small, reasonable step to go off the record. What is the alternative?

Why are you complaining about having to wear a bag over your head whenever you go out to pick up your prescriptions or meet your mistress, citizen? It's a small, reasonable step to go off the record. What is the alternative?

I mean, if you wanted to be sure you wouldn't get caught with your mistress, you basically would have to wear a bag on your head, no? Or at least her meet her indoors. You certainly wouldn't complain about invasion of privacy when your wife's friend sees you with the mistress on a date.

Hyperbole much? You can still simply not log in to Chrome and/or Google Search. But if you want to be logged in by default, then you'll have to tell the browser when you occasionally don't, no?

Most people don't intend to log in to Google Search, as far as they're concerned they're logged in to their email account. This is why Google got in so much trouble in France and the EU over the past couple of years.

This. I don't use gmail, but I use youtube. And when you've logged into youtube, you've logged into your "Google Account". So you can't have youtube open in one tab, and not have your history from other (non-incognito) tabs logged (modulus some tweaking of various preferences that aren't obvious or intuitive).

There's no reason why they couldn't to the same thing Mozilla does: a) have a pretty clear account thing for "sync", b) have a pretty clear page for opt/in out on what to sync, c) Have working self-host sync solution, d) have an open source sync solution so you can easily see what's going on, and how things are encoded/stored.

Here's the thing - I want my history to be available and searchable to me, because I often want to go to a page I visited previously. However, I'd prefer if others couldn't read it and I wasn't showed ads based on that. At the moment, Firefox provides a good browser that doesn't profile me or share my history with "trusted third parties".

One of the best things ive done is to shift my kids onto Linux computers. They really enjoyed "Tux" the built in Mario like game featuring the Linux penguin and it helped them connect with the 'Linux brand'. Now when my kids are wanting to install more advanced things they are naturally exploring package management and typing into the terminal to get a new thing going. Wish I'd had better Unix terminal exposure as a child.

For the US market, the way you frame the concern is the legal reality for Microsoft...parents who will blame Microsoft when information about their children passes online...are why there are no privacy guarantees in Microsoft's new policy. It's just too easy for a lawyer to convince a trier of fact that Microsoft "should have known".

Doesn't the US impose privacy guarantees on those storing data about the under-13s anyway?

I don't think Cisco's routers or Youtube's CDN or the typical iPad application have that capability. Stuff gets cached and logged automatically. Microsoft is a big target for lawsuits.

Sure. The way around that is to simply not allow users under 13 to have an account. If a user lies about his age in order to get an account, Microsoft is no longer liable.

Yep. We use fake birthdays for my kids' accounts. First it is an opportunity to explain to them that you simply don't need to answer questions truthfully just because a form asks. There's zero benefit to being truthful here; only potential downsides. Same with real name.

Second I explained that under 13 means stuff won't work, so let's add 10 years or so to make sure they don't have trouble.

My girls are 7 & 9 and they've been using Microsoft Accounts.

Well, maybe Child Protective Services should be involved? They intervene when children walk home alone from the park, perhaps they'll start to intervene when children are raised to use Microsoft products? http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/13/parents...

Just kidding, of course. But my daughters are now 14 and 17 and I don't think they know how to use Microsoft products. We've been on OS X for about 10 years.

So maybe CPS should investigate me? Am I doing my kids a dis-service by not exposing them to the dominant OS?

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