Sadly, How Windows 10 Reveals Microsoft's Ethics Armageddon | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, How Windows 10 Reveals Microsoft's Ethics Armageddon

lauren.vortex.com

47 pointsmortenlarsen62 comments

Does P2P Windows updates really count as a question of ethics? I don't think so.

Any privacy options are quite clearly stated in the installation options, and they are in the settings menu in easy to find places.

Security is another issue, I'm not a fan of the OneDrive bitlocker key that MS automatically gets, or the Wifi Sense, but other than that I think MS has been quite transparent.

Considering that most privacy settings revolve around Cortana (i.e. the flagship feature for the OS), I don't see why people are getting their pants in a twist over it. For most people that pick the express installation, that will by default send all data to MS, their experience will be vastly improved.

For everyone else, you can switch the settings off, and for people who still have an issue generally use Linux (or OSX if they're that way inclined).

So really it isn't that MS thought you would say no to all their privacy questions. It's because Cortana doesn't function all that well if she's not able to send data to MS. Would it be nice if MS were more open in what exactly they were sending to their servers? Yes. So if that's the real problem, then don't question ethics, question their documentation.

Does P2P Windows updates really count as a question of ethics?

If a user is on a metered connection, and "seeding" Windows updates pushes them over their bandwidth cap, then MS is quite literally stealing from them.

I'd say that's an excellent example of a question of ethics.

> If a user is on a metered connection, and "seeding" Windows updates pushes them over their bandwidth cap, then MS is quite literally stealing from them.

That scenario would never happen since P2P updates (a.k.a delivery optimization) won't use metered connections [1].

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-10/windows-update...

From the linked page:

"If you use a WiFi connection that is metered or capped, make sure that you identify it as a metered connection."

The behavior is opt-out: you have to tell Windows you're on a metered connection. Or did you think it would somehow figure that out on its own?

It's not opt-out with mobile broadband connections. These are automatically set to metered by default [1].

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/metered-interne...

I can tell if you are on a cellphone network.

They can tell the scent of premium packets

My surface correctly identified Vodafone connection over Wifi and Ethernet as a metered connection without any hassle.

That's great that it correctly detected your connection as metered but to think that it's going to do that perfectly every time is just naive.

Even if it only messed up and misidentified a connection as non-metered one time ever, you'd still be pissed off if it was you and it ended up costing you real money.

I don't know where you live but here in Canada we have bandwidth cap. If you go beyond that, you pay 2.50$ for every 5 GB (I'm really impress by that price, in the past we were billed 8$ for every GB, up to like 10 GB, at that point you could use as much as you wanted).

And the fines could potentially be more than the cost of the operating system over the course of a year.

I think the issue with the p2p is the Microsoft is leveraging consumer's paychecks to lower their server costs all without even reasonably informing the consumer, let alone asking for permission. This feature could end up charging those with data caps. When I use p2p program, be it some chat system or bittorrent, I make the choice to use it. I understand that I am using my resources to run an application. But Microsoft seems to be making that choice for me.

I have very little interest in Windows so I haven't really been following this, but game developers have been using P2P updates for almost a decade now. It's a good feature. Especially if you have everybody grabbing updates at roughly the same time (which is likely), this is going to free up congestion and make it work better for everyone (including ISPs!).

What kind of data sizes are we talking about here, though? And at what ratio does it seed to? Without knowing details like that, it's hard to tell if the user will really be negatively impacted in a practical sense. Like I said, the games I have played that have automatic updates all have this feature turned on by default and I've never heard anyone complain (except for NAT issues making the P2P updating not work ;-) ). Admittedly I'm not a gamer, so possibly I have a skewed perspective from the few games I have played.

I think it's pretty well-known, though, that game updates are delivered using P2P file-sharing. Like you, I'm definitely not a gamer (we've got a Nintendo Wii and an Xbox 360 but I've never played either of them and the last PC game I played was MS Flight Simulator for DOS, if memory serves) but even I'm aware of that -- and apparently you are too.

I think the bigger issue is not that they're using P2P to deliver updates (or the plethora of other things that Microsoft is doing with Windows 10), it's that it's all being done without the user's knowledge or -- more importantly -- their consent.

The user benefits as well: if you have multiple machines in your home, only one set of updates will be downloaded and all your machines will share it. Until now, each machine had to download its own updates.

That's not the point. The point is that MS defaulted to using your bandwidth to send update data to other users over the internet P2P style.

If MS were benevolent, they would have made this an opt in feature, not the default behavior. They have the option of sending updates to PC on your local network, but that isn't selected by default.

So did spotify, if they didn't then no one will opt-in not because they care about their "privacy" but because it takes effort and knowledge.

They set the LAN option for enterprise and education SKU's not because they care about their privacy but because the network setup will not make it functional as UPNP and other types of port knocking are not something which is available in an enterprise environment.

UPNP and/or port knocking typically aren't available in an enterprise network because they aren't needed or wanted. Neither of those is necessary for P2P delivery of updates, though. I think they turned it off by default for those customers because Microsoft knows the ass chewing they'd get if they didn't.

Besides, a typical large enterprise is already going to have a system in place to handle the delivery of updates (e.g., WSUS, SCCM, or whatever they're using/calling it nowadays) to PCs such that the bandwidth savings aren't going to as noticeable.

Deleted comment

It's not free if they expect for you to pay for it in time, privacy, and bandwidth. Presenting it as free while still trying to extract value from the recipient is where the ethical murkiness comes in.

Actually that is what free is. Just like Facebook and Google, Microsoft can very clearly and truthfully claim that their product is free if and only if they do not charge you money to use it.

It's free in the strict sense that you are not exchanging money for it. While that is perfectly legal, people are saying that you pay in a different way.

> Does P2P Windows updates really count as a question of ethics?

How could it not at least be a question? You could answer the question in the negative as not an ethical issue, sure. But a company using resources of their customer for their own private purposes without a very clear, up front and explicit opt-in is quite new and radical. It seems like a no brainer as an ethical question.

Spotify did this for years. I don't think it's right to be opaque, but it's not radical.

Spotify, Skype before microsoft, Blizzard... It's not all that uncommon and seriously for updates this is not a bad thing.

It will share between your machines on your local network and SAVE you bandwidth.

Windows 10 doesn't present the "diagnostic and usage data" option during setup. It' also impossible to switch off in anything but Win 10 Enterprise.

It also doesn't present the fact it's doing P2P Windows Update. And the setting to disable this is hidden away in a sub sub menu

You can disable all of this on Windows 10 Home

Does P2P Windows updates really count as a question of ethics?

Did you not read the post? Using customer's resources without permission for profit?

Any privacy options are quite clearly stated in the installation options, and they are in the settings

Many users are barely competent to initiate & complete the upgrade and find Solitaire thereafter. Data caps and P2P are incomprehensible to them, much less how to adjust settings to stop abusing limited bandwidth.

This hyperbolic drama has really gotten out of hand. Microsoft isn't doing anything with Windows 10 that Apple and Google haven't been doing for years on iOS and Android. Yet, because Apple and Google have become darlings of the industry, they are somehow not subject to the same moral outrage. But there is a more important reason why neither of Microsoft's competitors are receiving similar moral scrutiny over the exact same functionality: they're not doing anything wrong.

Microsoft has historically made some major missteps, moral and otherwise, but the insistence that they are somehow "ruining the world" by catching up to the functionality of their competitors is both ludicrous and ignorant. I suspect that the largest portion of public outrage comes from the desire to generate clicks, but I find that to be a genuine disservice to the industry.

Willful disinformation can only be destructive. It will never have a positive outcome, and nobody will ever applaud you for spreading it.

What I wonder is what happens down the road? After a year goes by, is MS going to start charging to keep the OS updated? Will users feel so locked in now that they've turned over so much data to MS that paying a monthly or yearly service fee would be easier than enduring the pain of learning a new OS? I'd love to see a glimpse of what the roadmap looks like down the road. If there remains a "free" version, I suspect MS users better get used to more targeted advertising thoughout the OS, not just in solitaire.

This is what always confused me.

Microsoft has always been "late to (insert technology) game" while other companies who have steadfastly copied, taken and re-used pretty much everything Apple has done are apparently being "innovative" by not taking huge risks with their platforms?

I feel like a lot of people who've hated MS will always hate them, even if some day they find a cure for cancer - because in their minds, they'll always be "late to the game" regardless of how innovative their products are.

This author is really on an anti MIcrosoft tear.

Her right to do so, but I don't agree with much of what she says.

Microsoft's data collection seems similar to what Google Now does. Sometimes I go on a privacy tear also but I just run a locked down Linux laptop for a while. I set my Windows 10 privacy settings. It took me less than a minute.

Also, P2P sharing of updates happens I think on local networks, at a company for instance.

The sources of distribution for p2p sharing can be configured in the settings panel.

Setting 1: "Download updates from multiple sources to get them more quickly?" - yes - no (choose one)

Setting 2: "Download apps and OS updates from Microsoft and..." - PCs in my local network - PCs in my local network and PCs on the Internet) (choose one)

Lauren is actually male. I met him once.

"Ethics Armageddon"? Click baity?

I'm sure she's just talking about some hill. It's fine.

The only thing really bothering me atm is the forced automatic updates and the 'telemetry' you can't turn off unless you're an enterprise user. The continued dumbing down and integration of Windows Defender, or Security Essentials, or whatever they're calling it, is also an issue.

I'm mostly reserving judgement until someone does a proper analysis of all the privacy sensitive features and what is being sent back home.

Hopefully they learned from the NSA documents and are encrypting the "telemetry" they're sending back now -- though that will just make it that much harder to determine exactly what that "telemetry" contains.

Is it really still a thing to lash out at m$ft as the root of all evil? More importantly, is an article that calls p2p technology an 'ethical armaggedon' good for anything other than laughter?

What I find most interesting is that Windows 10 seems to signal that MS has given up on deploying privacy as a marketing strategy. Either they have made a conscious and deliberate change of strategy (quite possible under Nadella's leadership), or the whole privacy strategy was never anything more than a temporary ruse, designed to distract people while MS went the full Google under the covers. The irony of the result is that it sounds like advertising is more insidious and pervasive in Windows 10 than it is on any operating system that Google ever shipped.

Microsoft has been going full Google for some time just as Google has been going full Microsoft. But, Microsoft has never beaten Google in anything they've tried. If anything, all of their attempts to battle Google have resulted is spectacular failures. The lack of privacy in Windows 10 is Microsoft finally acknowledging that Windows is the only thing they have left and they're going to do whatever they can to remain competitive against Google. They're now treating Windows 10 as their trojan horse to overwhelm you with their services. Unfortunately, this is also going to backfire. Microsoft is an enterprise software company. That's where they make the majority of their money from and they should stay focused on the enterprise because the consumer market has already made their choices.

Perhaps that's why they're doing things like this (enabling P2P delivery of updates by default). They're not worried about what the consumers think because those who would leave Windows for another platform over decisions like this have already left. The ones remaining are going to stick with Windows no matter what, so they might as well go ahead and (attempt to) slip in whatever they want -- the consequences will be minimal.

Not to hijack the thread, but is anyone else noticing all the anti (or even neutral) MS posts are being greyed?

And the FUD surrounding Windows 10 continues.

I like Windows 10 so far, with the exception of all the crap that is hard, messy, nearly impossible or impossible to disable or uninstall.

I couldn't care less about Cortana, Xbox, or the myriad of other consumer junk that comes with it. I don't want any data going anywhere and the only connectivity to the Internet I want to see is through a browser, FTP client or telnet.

As a first exposure to Windows 10 --before considering it for the office-- I purchased two HP laptops for my kids and upgraded both to Windows 10.

At times uninstalling things felt like a game of whack-a-mole. You right click and "Uninstall" on the program list off the start menu and crap seems to come back to life. It took multiple passes to get rid of some items. Yet others required nuking them manually from the Programs directory.

Why can't I uninstall Xbox? I don't get it. The same is true of other features. I don't want anything that requires a login or an account with Microsoft to be available.

It actually didn't help that the laptops we got came with Windows 8.1. We should have cleaned them up first and then upgraded. The HP's came with a bunch of crap-ware already and it was hard to know exactly what belonged to Windows 10 and what was crap-ware that came with the computer. McAfee, of course. It seems like a virus that's everywhere.

Anyhow, not a rant but rather an expression of frustration at Microsoft. I know that the developer community or professional engineering users are grossly overshadowed by "civilian" users. However, it wouldn't have been too hard for them to allow us to very quickly reduce Windows 10 down to a clean and streamlined engineering workstation without all the bullshit, data leaks, crap-ware, etc.

When it comes time to upgrade our various workstations at the office it will have to be a very carefully planned transition with tweaked installation scripts to migrate or rebuild systems to Windows 10 without all the junk we don't want. Most of our systems have two or three monitors. I am eager to learn how well Windows 10 handles that.

The other peeve is this business of upgrades starting with Windows 7 and not Vista. We have a number of systems running Vista. It looks like we are going to have to upgrade to 7 first and then to 10.

Just in case anyone is curious: why Vista? Because when re-installing and re-licensing tens of thousands of dollars of engineering software on a workstation takes a month worth of work you don't upgrade operating systems on a whim. In fact, you almost always build a new machine with the new OS while work continues on the old machine and then transition the engineer onto the new system. Complex hardware, software, FPGA, mechanical design and CAM workstations have piles of software that takes a massive amount of time to install, update and configure. Not to mention OS, hardware and driver dependencies (for example, Solidworks).

Wondering if anyone on HN has used Paragon's tools for migration to new hardware:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-professional/

Or instead of getting all panicky you could just do what every enterprise does.

Run the various apps e.g XBox, monitor your firewall and simply block the requisite URLs.

> Run the various apps e.g XBox, monitor your firewall and simply block the requisite URLs.

How do you guarantee that you've blocked all the URLs accessed by the application, and that they're not going to change with the next update?

Panicky? Funny.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Windows 10 was the final straw that pushed Linux to the desktop?

It doesn't help Linux it helps Apple.

That would never happen. The Linux desktop for the normal user is simply not going to happen with the current incumbents. If it does happen it'll be a new competitor because the current ones are not user friendly at all.

You can learn and figure many things out but once you run into any type of problem you have to go to terminal. Windows and Mac OS X do not rely on terminals so much. It's part of their better user experience.

Arguing that Windows and OSX have a "better" user experience is like arguing that cars with automatic transitions yield a "better" driving experience than cars with manual transmissions. In each case, the better interface is determined not by objective analysis but by the user's priorities.

Edit:

I assumed it went without mention that it is possible to do objective comparison of functional aspects of the system, but seeing as that's not what the parent was discussing, that's not what I responded to.

> Arguing that Windows and OSX have a "better" user experience is like arguing that cars with automatic transitions yield a "better" driving experience than cars with manual transmissions. In each case, the better interface is determined not by objective analysis but by the user's priorities.

I disagree. I believe you're saying that a more terminal focused interface is deemed better by some people's priorities and therefore could be said to give a good user experience whereas someone who doesn't value or want to touch the terminal would think Mac and Windows have better user experiences. But that's such a tiny variable in the overall user experience that I don't buy it though with my comment I wasn't specific enough and it did kinda sound like I was only calling out terminal vs terminal.

I think Linux has a lot of room to improve as far as usability goes; I just don't think that the comment I originally replied to is in anyway accurate in that any mistakes from Microsoft could open the door for Linux.

"Objective" just means "factual."

There can still be an objective analysis, it's just that different things are better for different people, so the analysis has to be done on a per-person basis.

What is objectively the best UI for me is perhaps different from what is objectively the best UI for you, but it's still a factual (objective) issue.

While a "better driver experience"is difficult to quantify, if you mean ease-of-use an automatic transmission is objectively better. Sure, you can argue that having a stick shift provides a subjectively more enjoyable experience, but an automatic transmission is less susceptible to errors and requires less attention from the driver.

you've given great examples as to why Windows does not compare favorably to an automatic transmission. thank you.

This could have been ReactOS's moment to shine, if that project were further along. Desktop Linux isn't a platform that most commercial application developers target, whereas ReactOS at least aspires to be binary-compatible with Windows.

In the form of Android.

I read the title too quickly as "Microsoft's Aesthetics Armageddon" and was disappointed that the article was not about inconsistent icon styles.

"the ethical collapse that Windows 10 appears to represent for a once great company."

I kinda stopped reading there. The mere implication that Microsoft was ever an "ethical" company in any form is patently ridiculous. This is simply dyed in the wool Microsoft behaviour, totally expected and utterly unsurprising.

anyone downvoting you has clearly not read the Halloween Documents[0].

0. http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/

This is utter drivel.

Where else would data collection practices be documented but in the Privacy Policy ? This is what every single company on the planet does.

P2P for updates will yes save Microsoft money but it also will save money for consumers and businesses. In the case of the latter massive amounts of money if they aren't centrally managing updates. It's a very useful feature that in no way compromises security or privacy.

Solitaire yes has ads but only for a new feature of the game. The existing features do not have ads. But the fact that they couldn't confirm this indicates that they haven't actually installed Windows 10. Which makes the entire article rather pointless no ?

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