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Comment by ManFromUranus | Hacker News Reader

You were always free to not use new MS operating systems. Nobody forced you to make any MS accounts or use Window 8,10 or whatever, so if you installed Windows 8 and didn't like it, that doesn't make MS evil, just don't use it. Anyone who inclined to use CentOS as their daily driver probably was never going to like MS OS's anyway. You probably only ever installed it just to find out what you hate about it.

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I'm actually not free to not use it. I have to test our product on these systems and therefore I will need at least a virtual machine instance of it. I have no option not to use a Microsoft account because the majority of the functionality has shifted to behind the privacy wall.

Actually I installed it to test our desktop windows product against it as well as our web application in Edge.

This was a decider for us: do we move it to Windows Runtime or move it to Qt/JavaFX, to the web or something else?

We're evaluating Qt and JavaFX going forwards.

As I said I've been using Windows since 1993 as my primary operating system. I've used Unix (Solaris, HPUX, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) over the years but never in a desktop capacity.

Also one of our clients, a big financial company has rolled out RHEL6 as a desktop platform instead of windows 8/10. They are not trend-setters either.

That's pretty specious. Your work requires you to use it. So presumably you'll only be testing on your VM instance. And if you are using at work, then use the Enterprise version, which doesn't use a Microsoft account whatsoever. And lets you control all of these privacy concerns, including telemetry.

You bitching that your job requires you to test a product against Windows in a VM is not the same as Microsoft holding you personally hostage to give up all your personal information, however you try to spin it.

I assure you this is not specious.

We have to test against the lowest common denominator so we're not using Enterprise or VL for this nor are the machines domain members.

The privacy policy changes violate our network AUP, security policy and compliance with a number of regulations. We handle confidential financial, insurance and medical data.

That's where the catch-22 is. There is no possiblity for us to use this and remain in compliance.

Not only that, every version of windows since 8 has called home. There is a lot of traffic outgoing from our network we block from machines. And that is with a heavily locked down GPO and custom WIM deployment.

The argument "Don't use it if you don't like it." certainly applies to many things, but when a company gets to the scale of Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc, the context is not the same. It seems reasonable to hold these behemoths to a higher standard than scrappy startups.

This argument is specious at best. We must hold all parties involved to the same level of standard as any, at all levels because a breach of trust at any size is seriously damaging to the consumer. It doesn't matter about the size of the Corp.

I think it matters, if only because it's more efficient to complain about the big corporations that everyone is familiar with than about some unknown startup few people care about.

If you only have limited time and energy for activism, you have to go for the bigger targets (to make it easy to collaborate with other activists) or go for the most local targets (because you may have a comparative advantage).

It does matter for a couple of reasons.

One is having approximately equivalent alternatives. If something is wrong with a particular kind of chewing gum, I can easily switch to the next brand over. But when that's not the case, standards should be higher, because normal market forces no longer constrain players in the same way.

The other is the size of the potential impact. If one corner-store merchant keeps their credit card receipts in a box under the counter, it's a much smaller problem than, say, Target or Home Depot keeping them in a poorly secured network.

Imagine if we could bring them to court over bundling malicious software with their OS and not giving the user a choice.

You were always free to not use new MS operating systems.

Are you also free not to have your private information (personal data, trade secrets, whatever it might be) given to Microsoft by others you interact with who do use Microsoft's new operating systems?

I am hearing the "if you don't like it don't use it" loud and clear. I did that for Windows 8. Looks like I will do that again.

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