This video is substance-less, they hooked up Wireshark, watched packets fly past, most of which were DNS lookups, then described domains as if that is meaningful in itself. Most of the traffic is generated by Windows 11 widgets[0], which I'd suggest disabling either way.
Do I like what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11? Actually, no, I'm pretty unhappy with it. But I hate how lazy most of these critiques are. They do so much irrefutably bad stuff, this is the best you can come up with?
From my perspective it's the younger (and/or less mature) tech community that do this, and even then that's just sychophancy posts on reddit or elsewhere about how amazing C# is and you're a dumb-dumb for using anything that isn't C# etc.
Those of us with longer teeth treat MS just the same as any org: We don't trust a single one of them.
They're right about C#, it's an amazing language because it's solid + steals the good parts from other languages. The best choice I ever made was switching from Java/PHP to C# back in the early 2000s.
I absolutely hate Microsoft for what they've done to Windows and Office - both of these were fantastic products for desktop users 20 years ago but nowadays they're either a bloated mess (Office) or spyware.
We really need to see PC gaming move completely away from it.
They still are good products. If you stick your fingers in you ears and forget about the bad bits. It's like living in a garden shed which has been painted nicely inside. You can live a happy existence with a bit of ignorance.
Whether they are right or wrong is largely immaterial (fwiw, I enjoy C# and it has been my bread-and-butter language since ~2005) but I'm not tribal about it like some get. Posts about actual oddities (DateTime), bad design (LINQ + IEnumerable<T> = default interface implementations), or attempts to implement something common from another tool (e.g., list comprehensions) will get you derision and contempt for daring to question the holy C# on /r/csharp and even StackOverflow.
By extension there is a similar toxicity around Visual Studio, and MSSQL somewhat, too. Frequent "Why would you want to use ReSharper!?" or "Rider???? You need to get an employer that can afford Visual Studio." etc.
The community on twitter - where most of alt.net moved - is fantastic. It's the main reason I still use twitter. Surprised that people use reddit for coding and stack overflow for discussion.
Unfortunately there is also the side you're talking about. There are a lot of people who are stuck in the mud, and also a lot of people who are just fed up with baseless religious hate from the Python/Javascript crowd and who have never bothered trying those languages (and thus know that it's just projection) and lash out.
The thing is - just look at the work MS do. For years JSON serialisation sucked so we all used NewtonSoft. Now the framework handles JSON properly. So there's hope yet for things such the Date API learning from Noda - and when it does it's miles ahead of any language where people are dumb enough to use an int32 linked to an arbitrary epoch (from one specific OS variant) to represent date/time.
Way off-topic, but I'm curious about how you approach unit testing.
Coming from Java into a C# job, I'm used to mocking downstream dependencies, and even POJOs in some cases, that a class depends on. C# has stuff like Moq, but you _have to_ wrap everything with an interface to mock it since C# seals by default.
Meanwhile, in JVM land, you can use Kotlin, which still seals classes by default, but allows test compiles to open classes by default so you can still mock them.
Every C# thread I read suggests wrapping all concrete implementations with an interface like I'm coding in the 90's for the sake of decent tests, or they talk about how my code must be written poorly for me to be in this situation. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to get _some_ testing into this code I've inherited.
Also, C# doesn't seal anything by default. The methods are non-virtual by default, but that's a very different thing, and there's a good reason for it when it comes to libraries and versioning.
You mean local time zone? Just use UTC everywhere, nothing else will ever work no matter how you design it. DateTimeOffset miiight work too, but you'll extract UTC from it to do anything meaningful anyway, so it may as well be UTC all the way down.
No can do, and frankly is a _very_ reductive stock response.
Anyone working with Date Times more than even months into the future will have pain. Politics will mess you up. You've made a reservation for 16:00 at that fancy pants restaurant with a 6 month waiting list. But now the government have decided that Daylight Savings are too much hassle, and suddenly your 16:00 reservation is off by an hour (or whatever the DS shift is for your region.)
Then there is industry specific scenarios - logistics for example. They know the plane is landing at 18:00, but we haven't confirmed the TZ yet. Not because the airport doesn't know what timezone it is, but because the carrier hasn't confirmed which airport they are landing at. They just know it's at 18:00. DateTime is utterly terrible with "unknown"
If you want to express an unknown moment of time, no time zone will help you. Also the reminder service specifically doesn't need to be precise to the second. If you forgot your plane and got a reminder about it 1 hour before departure, will you be happy that your reminder is so accurate?
I'm fluent in C#, TypeScript, Javascript, Java and Python. I'm pretty average in C/Go. Long ago I wrote a lot of Assembly, Pascal, Visual Basic and PHP.
Javascript/PHP are broken compared to C#. Python, Java and Go are verbose and clunky in comparison (although I appreciate being able to write self-contained native code in Go for so little fuss compared to C).
My hate is Python being used for anything outside scripting. Package management is archaic and broken, the quality of libraries is mediocre and the language stewardship has been poor. Particularly the way the 2.x > 3.x migration was handled. I'm still bitter about that. It remains one of the few ecosystems where picking up a project older than 6 months is playing a game of Russian Roulette as to whether you get it working within a week of messing around with broken code and dependencies.
Just in case that maybe interested to you. Currently (with nightlies) using NativeAOT + C# you would be able to have approximate same as Go. Even fully statically linking executable. And given that MS working on making apps have less size, gopefully it would be comparable to Go in app size.
I think you're right on the mark there. I'm jaded and cynical enough to know what's going to hurt me and what's going to pay the bills and that's where my interest stops. 20 years of C# and 35 years of Unix now :(
Worshipping any vendor is quite frankly a bit sad.
I tend to avoid having to solve problems now. If I do it tends to go somewhere vendor neutral like python on whatever platform happens to be lying around and not annoying me at the time.
When I was young I kinda liked them too. From the windows 3.11 / Win95 days until the end of Windows 2000 (let's forget Windows ME ever happened please). When office was already as capable as it is now and visual basic Kickstarted new rapid development.
Of course back then they were already full into megalomaniac mode with their attempt at having MSN (Microsoft Network) replace the open internet. No it was not just a news service then. However we all laughed them away.
These days I'm more cynical. And I hate telemetry and spyware which really wasn't a thing in those days for lack of always-on connectivity.
No, I think things are also worse but you have to understand there is a generation coming of age that never experienced paying for an operating system or really even paying any kind of substantial price for software of any kind. To them it would absolutely be worse to pay for software but not have it harvest your data. Most people aren't very cognizant of the data harvesting.
For a 1995 era vision, you can make a reasoned case for MSN. The competition was not necessarily the Open Internet, it was AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve.
The walled-garden platform did offer some benefits, particularly when you've got an audience new to the medium. This was an era before ubiquitous search, so the fact everything was in a single navigable heirarchy was more valuable. (Remember, this is also back when Yahoo was valuable as a directory.)
Since there was a single gatekeeper, you could promise a safer, more accountable and family-friendly environment for the social channels. Again, appealing to new users.
There may also have been potential for more exclusive content; if the walled-garden clients offered richer media (or the services better kickback) than what can be provided by a normal 1995 HTML tag-soup site running through an early IE or Netscape, it would be worth partnering with them.
I'm actually surprised that the walled gardens went down without a fight. They could have stayed around presenting themselves as a "premium over-the-top channel" style offering-- you can get the same basic internet as everyone else, but for just $5 more, all this extra. I can recall my parents were willing to pay $25/month for AOL when generic dialup was in the $10-15 range to remain part of specific communities inside the walled garden. AOL did an incredibly poor job pivoting as people moved to broadband-- I can recall there was a package to use their propriatery offerings with an external ISP, but it was expensive, until one day it was free because they realized they needed to keep their portal/email audience from imploding totally.
They've certainly managed to rehabilitate their public image. Not gonna lie I'm very impressed by Satya's leadership in that respect. I would probably prefer old Microsoft that was transparently evil though, license fees are more honest than data harvesting. Of course we know now that the license fee strategy simply isn't viable given what happened to IBM, so I doubt we ever see a change of course.
When you use an OS that collects massive amounts of your data to use against you it means you'll be paying for it for the rest of your life. Windows 10 and 11 might be the most expensive pieces of software you've ever not really owned.
Have you purchased a Windows computer in that time period? The cost of a Windows license is hidden in the overall cost of the machine.
> Win 10 and 11
Windows is just Windows at this point. You are still using the Windows 8 license that your purchased. The version numbers are nothing more than a measurement of how brazen Microsoft is getting.
Show me where I can get a legal copy of Windows that is free to install on a pristine machine and I'll concede that it is free.
Microsoft have simply added a subscription fee to Windows, where you are the subscription fee.
Have been? You didn't have to have an already licensed Windows installation to upgrade? You _exchanged_ your older license for the newer one for free; you didn't get one extra for free.
When you purchase a complete, new computer, the windows license is included in price (OEM). If you build your computer from parts or when you spin a new VM, you have to get a new license. Windows 10/11 Home (OEM) is about 120 EUR + VAT, Pro (OEM) about 160 EUR + VAT. That's quite a far cry from free.
Microsoft is a big place. Lately, the tech community is probably focusing more on their improvements to .NET (which now works on non windows PCs) rather than their OS product line.
Um, every .Net Core developer I know, which is quite a few at multiple companies, are still doing everything on Windows and Visual Studio classic. Windows is still a massive concern for the tech community and most of those people seem to absolutely dislike windows 11 to the point they're all using Macs at home. Even our windows-centric SQL Server DBAs have macs at home.
No one is going to buy corporate Macs though because Windows and Office is the best corporate dystopia for the compliance check boxers.
There’s literally another thread on the front page right now where one of the top commenters is taking about using macOS for this. A snarky “Um,” at the beginning of your comment doesn’t negate the fact that it sounds like you’re embedded in corporate hell, which doesn’t represent everyone making software.
yes I use it on macOS as well. I'm writing this on my Mac.
I am an active independent user group member. This isn't just about startups and big tech who are actually fairly low on seat counts. There are huge numbers lots of us corporate dystopias using this stack. On Windows. And you'll have never heard of any of us.
I think some of us aren't having as bad a time as others. The trick is to carefully select technologies and pay attention to what you actually need to operate. Blindly diving 100% into the Microsoft offering hellscape is definitely going to be a bad time.
I use .NET/VS/Windows/etc throughout. I recognize products like Azure and SQL Server are a potential trap. So, I use .NET6+ but with SQLite and minimal AspNetCore projects instead of SQL Server and IIS. I could deploy our product to Linux with a few tweaks (i.e. drop System.Drawing image conversion laziness).
At work, we are a Windows-only shop for the most part. My daily driver is still a Windows PC. I have an M1 mbp I use around the house, but I generally dont get emotionally invested in exactly who vended my OS/machine. I chase the UX. I have zero loyalties to trademarks either way. Other factors are give or take depending on moon phases. If the machine feels good and fast, I use it. I don't fight it anymore. There are bigger problems in my mind.
Really? I feel like the tech community just ignores them because they've become irrelevant. Even Azure is essentially a backup for people who don't trust only relying on AWS, and haven't yet been bitten by out of date documentation and bugs that "Yes we know about that", but mysteriously there's nothing online about it at all
Tech might be in an AWS and Macbook bubble but outside of it, the enterprise world is very, very heavily Microsoft. You will need to pry Excel out of the cold, dead hands of everyone who is even peripheral to finance. Similarly, Outlook has its devotees - yeah it's a bloated mess, but it's what the execs know and want.
So that means you're deploying Office. And if you're deploying Office, you're deploying Office 365, and so that means everyone's on Azure anyway, so there's your identity management and vendor lockin.
Yeah, Microsoft is not sexy in the eyes of devs. But they are the dominant platform in just about every industry that's not-tech.
This place can be quite bipolar. I actually quit HN for a long period over the "second coming of Microsoft" when the entire HN crowd was crowing of Satya's ascent into grand hegemon position because the sycophantry was making me wretch. My comments about the same old Microsoft were downvoted to oblivion and any dissident voices squashed. The US tech community spoke and would not listen to warnings.
The widgets are a [bad] wrapper on bing.com. bing.com uses those analytics products.
Yes, it should be disabled by default, just like a lot of unacceptable practices on Windows 11. Just don't need to shoot a video with Wireshark running and talk through DNS lookups to get to that critique.
Probably because the only reason why you would do that is to bait Clicks and confuse non-tech people? Nobody would care to make news out of it if all you said was "windows is basically doing the same thing google does, or any of the most popular websites for that matter"
I honestly don’t believe that an OS should go poking around the internet at all without doing something I specifically told it to.
I’m currently upset with fedora because I can’t figure out how to turn off the automatic update feature, honestly I haven’t tried too hard, and all that is doing is connecting to servers that I would do anyways just on my own timeframe.
If it started sending out every detail of my computing sessions, like TFA is claiming and you are defending, it would be off my computer as fast as I could download another distribution.
I deal with google’s shenanigans with using chrome but that’s my choice, I downloaded the repo data, approved the signing keys and installed it manually.
Sadly this no longer works for Microsoft domains. Had Windows Defender mark my host file as having a 'severe' issue just because I copy pasted a list of Microsoft telemetry domains (1). Everything worked perfectly fine before that update.
I use DNSCrypt (SimpleDNSCrypt in Windows). It has extra features like wildcards for blocking subdomains. It doesn't touch your hosts file so it should bypass that.
Taking the risk of (fairly) being accused of whataboutism - I'm not sure what the alternatives are - Macs are just as brazenly collect date about you in the background to the point that like in Windows, the data collection bogs down the computer so that the user experience suffers noticeably.
I'm also fairly certain even vanilla Android is a privacy nightmare, and when you add in the preinstalled vendor trash, it becomes 1000x worse.
The only option that exists right now afaik is Linux, and in my experience daily driving Linux on a production/development machine is a nightmare.
Let's say I'm a politician at a restaurant. I just want to eat. But even without opening the menu, you've had the chef call every person in town to let them know you're here.
That's not what's happening. that's not even a good analogy.
A better analogy would be this:
let's say I'm a politician at a restaurant. I just want to eat. But, without even opening the menu, the waiter needs to know that I'm there so they can bring the menu to me and greet me. They also bring water in case I am thirsty right now.
BY FAR (if not entirely) this is what Windows does. Do you need updates? Are you an Autopilot machine used in the enterprise? Do any of your installed applications need updates from the Windows Store?
These are all normal things, but people who don't understand how Windows handles these things consider them all spyware. None of them seem to be aware that you can install a telemetry viewer application and see everything sent to Microsoft from your PC if you're so concerned with what is being collected. You can also, from that application, delete the stuff Microsoft has collected about you from that machine. They go straight to "oh I can get views if I complain about Microsoft and sound very offended by it!" So, that's what they do.
The app you're talking about is called Diagnostic Data Viewer [1].
However, your statement is not correct. It's true that most system diagnostics / telemetry flow through this application; however, that's only one part of the network requests going out of your system.
There are network requests being made every time you type a character in the start menu (whether or not you have web search enabled). That is not considered telemetry so it does not show up in the Diagnostic Data Viewer. It is also not possible to disable it (there were various group policy and registry settings that worked at some point in time, none of them do any more on latest versions of Windows 11).
Similarly, when the "recommended" container of the start menu refreshes itself, it does a lot of network traffic, none of which is recorded in DDV. And of course, any applications that come with the system but are not core OS (OneDrive, Office, Store, Xbox, Cortana, Explorer, etc.) will send their own telemetry (and other network requests) which do not go through DDV.
I don't think you can fairly compare XP and Windows 11 given how much more Windows 11 does than XP. even just looking at enterprise management alone, XP is uncontrollable by comparison. forget all the end-user features that didn't exist in Windows XP.
might as well compare Win11 to MS-DOS if you're thinking along those lines.
For a regular home user, what does Win11 do that WinXP couldn't? Everything I can think of (drivers, screen res, multiple monitors) is incremental improvements to what we already had, I can't think of a feature they've introduced since XP than I want.
edit: This is probably too glib; certainly more recent Windowses are superior for application developers, which end users benefit from indirectly. It's the user-facing parts of the OS that seemed to have gone in the other direction.
> "Everything I can think of (drivers, screen res, multiple monitors) is incremental improvements to what we already had"
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? (Besides, they're just improvements on what we had before so they don't count).
Apart from the drivers, screen res, multiple monitors, virtual desktops, Windows Defender, updated DirectX, newer hardware support, hypervisor isolated secure password store, app store, WiFi, audio stack with per-program volume control, OCR engine, voice recognition engine, Cortana, online backup and file and settings sync, touch UI and the $8Bn/year Surface line it enabled, improved security, hypervisor backed WSL Ubuntu and Android engines, Windows Sandbox, SSD TRIM support, Bitlocker full disk encryption, ClearType and improved fonts for screen reading, GPU accelerated compositor, face recognition biometric login, QR codes on BSODs, all of...
That isn't really "the other hand". The claim I was rejecting was "Microsoft haven't done any development on Windows since XP". I say they have, and you also say they have.
Right, the problem is the difference between the DirectX/hardware support stuff on that list and the Cortana/app store stuff - I want the first part, and will pay for it, but I'm complaining that getting stuck with the second part is part of the price.
Honest question - what features does Windows 11 have that I would want? I've never tried Windows 11, but I already hate how invasive Windows 10 is. What is your definition of "better" because if I weren't forced to upgrade to play modern games I would have never bought 10 (and I hate it even after years of using it and spending countless hours tweaking it to suck less but it still fucking sucks balls).
I feel like every time I "upgrade" Windows I hate it. And that hatred doesn't go away, it just gets normalized.
I don't know what you want, you might be happy with MSDOS for all I know. But Windows 11 has support for the 6ghz spectrum for WiFi 6(e) and WSLg support for doing ML/Cuda in WSL. Those are both of high interest to me. Otherwise Win 11 feels like a large step backwards.
From my anecdotal experience, Windows 11 works faster on the same work PC I used (up-to-date) Windows 10 on. And I didn't clean install, so it's not that kind of placebo.
>Blizzard added DirectX 12 support for their award-winning World of Warcraft game on Windows 10 in late 2018. This release received a warm welcome from gamers: thanks to DirectX 12 features such as multi-threading, WoW gamers experienced substantial framerate improvement. After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available.
>At Microsoft, we make every effort to respond to customer feedback, so when we received this feedback from Blizzard and other developers, we decided to act on it. Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have ported the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. This unblocks developers who want to take full advantage of the latest improvements in D3D12 while still supporting customers on older operating systems
The first thing to do is to choose the right game. For example, if you are playing World of Warcraft, you may need to hire a professional player https://boosthive.eu/wow/raids to help you level up. These professionals can do a lot more than just move you up the ranks, however. As with any service, you will have to pay them, and they will have to take care of things like changing your password and keeping track of your progress.
Windows keeps taking away useful features too though so either way you lose.
They took it away a long time ago, but i missed the option to arbitrarily arrange icons in folders (as you can on the desktop). It used to be very easy to sort through lots of files by moving them into piles of icons and then moving the piles into folders for example.
Also the ability to move items in the taskbar wherever you want. (for example, I want one of 8 open notepad documents moved to the end of the taskbar next to one of the 6 browser windows while all other notepad and browser windows are on the other side)
> I don't think you can fairly compare XP and Windows 11 given how much more Windows 11 does than XP
Considering how much work it took to get wrangle 10 LTSE into a usable Win environment I'd much prefer the simple OS that stayed out of my hair than one that "does so much more" I didn't ask for.
I hope someday software is regulated as tightly as other consumer goods. Abusing one's position as the issuer of security updates to force choices, undesired changes, and bloat down user's throats shouldn't be possible; users should have the option to separate the two.
I'm aware that that seems like a tall ask given the state of "modern" software development, but that's its own can of worms.
There are zero features I need from Windows 11 that Windows XP didn't already have. The only reason I'm not still running XP is that security vulnerabilities in it are no longer being fixed.
The vast majority of security issues with XP (and some with 7) are architectural. E.g.: you can't fix some security vulnerability relating to GDI on XP without essentially replacing it with Vista/7's DWM. Conversely, 7 has a few security weaknesses compared to 8/8.1 due to missing kernel security features that are, essentially, a binary diff between 7 & 8 rather than a small patch.
"Updates" for XP POS Edition and the like are mostly support filler and don't bring it up to the same security level as a modern OS. I.e.: There's still a bunch of logical vulnerabilities present.
> On the other hand, I bet there are plenty more vulnerabilities in Windows 11 that still haven't been discovered yet.
There probably are, but I'd rather have a bunch of vulnerabilities that nobody knows about yet, and that will be patched once people do learn, than slightly fewer vulnerabilities that everyone is constantly trying to exploit and that will be there forever.
That means vendors should be legally forced to publish source code of any software they abandon / stoped providing support. Hope this will happen soon. Regarding Windows XP, full source code has been leaked already (not SP3 but close to recent).
Don't be so certain --- the enthusiast community will fix them if they're important enough, even more so if they're ones that "everyone is constantly trying to exploit". Also, no one who knows what they're doing is going to be facing the Internet without a NAT or firewall that blocks incoming connections by default.
Indeed, these lame comparisons are just as bad today as I remember them over 20 years ago when I was a young lad and Windows XP launched and everyone hated it thinking it would bomb (including me) because "why do I need this bloated OS with a colorful paintjob when Win98 does everything just fine?"
It's pretty hilarious to see history repeat itself at every new Windows launch. Rinse and repeat.
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!"
What features would the average user miss out on? I'd go back to win7 in a heartbeat if I could, and I really don't remember a great difference between XP and 7 to begin with.
Now Win 11 is a data hog... It's great for collecting and transmitting personal user data and ads... Fair trade. You never really notice unless you work off of a hotspot that has a data cap on it though, so there's that.
that means nothing. fresh install of a custom image? fresh install of what ISO image? insider build or release build? maybe the DNS server being used by default is being hijacked, or the ISO they created, if they created one, has an app installed by the ISO creation tool which made it. not all of those are legit.
I set up a VM and installed Windows 11 Home on it and captured all traffic after initial setup and a reboot. I saw nothing going to any non-microsoft domain.
because you will not update until forced in most situations.
you simply are not aware of every security fix or vulnerability found, and therefore can't know when you should update.
in the early 2000s there a few very large profile windows viruses that spread like crazy, despite patches being released months or years earlier. the viruses took out networks across the globe and caused considerable mayhem for days.
congress had hearings and several tech companies testified, including Microsoft. congress wanted to know why users weren't forced to update their computers, and Microsoft said that they can't control what their users do.
congress blamed Microsoft for users not patching their systems.
so this happened a few more times and Windows Update was improved continuously going forward.
now you're forced to update, because people who thought they knew all about security failed to update when they should have.
now, users blame Microsoft for forcing them to patch their systems.
I blame Microsoft for requiring reboots for updates and making those reboots destructive to my state. If I could go to bed at night and know that everything will be where I left it in the morning, that would be fine. I can't, so I take extraordinary measures to ensure that my computer remains under my control. Up until fairly recently it rebooted while under active use; something which is never acceptable. No update ever made is that important.
It updates when I say it updates, and not a moment before. Congress and Microsoft can GFT if they don't like it.
well when you write your own operating system you can decide how that works, I guess.
If you choose to stop hiding icons in the notification area, windows will tell you days in advance of any forced reboot. It does for me, anyway. I don't know why the default is to hide icons down there, but it's probably because a lot of apps like to stay running for some reason and pollute the notification area.
If you unhide all icons there and occasionally glance down at it, you'll see when Windows wants you to reboot. It is only after days of you not interacting with that icon that the reboot is forced. That's how it's been for me, anyway.
You all just want to complain about Microsoft. None of you have anything of value to say. I wish you would all just admit that to yourselves.
The purpose of Windows is to support the staff I want to do on the computer, not to support Windows. There is a priority inversion here, refusing to acknowledge that does not make it go away. Neither does making excuses for Microsoft's user hostile design make it not hostile.
> "congress wanted to know why users weren't forced to update their computers"
That sounds made up. Happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt congress demanded to know why people aren't being forced to update Windows. It's too weirdly specific.
In the early 2000s, nobody was forced to do anything. Even for games, patches were uncommon because people bought the CD-ROM. If the game had bugs, the process of finding the patch, if it existed, was not accessible to most people.
well, it would be weirdly too specific if the conversation didn't lead to it, but it did.
"how did this happen?
> Bugs were found in windows systems which allowed this.
"can you not fix those?"
> we can.
"why didn't you fix them?"
> We did, the patches have been available for months in the worst case.
"then why are computers running your operating system still affected?"
> Because users have not downloaded and applied the patches.
"why not? are they not encouraged to do so?"
> We make them available but a user must choose to do it.
"Why do you not force this? This seems like an easy way to address the issue of unpatched operating systems."
> We cannot control what the users of our operating systems do.
"Not good enough. Clearly your current stance is not sufficient given the state of the Internet right now."
> Ok.
========
Very much paraphrased, but that's how I remember it going. I watched the thing live on C-SPAN and I don't know if it was blogged about anywhere. Even then the internet hated Microsoft even though most of its users ran Windows.
This is blatantly, flat out wrong. Even the implicit premise here is wrong.
It is not Microsoft’s prerogative to update my device. They don’t own my device. They don’t get to decide when I decide to install new software. That right exclusively belongs to me. Even congress doesn’t get to have a say in this. Users have private property rights. And this, what Microsoft is doing, is bordering illegality.
Unless it is matter of national security. Then, you put masks on, sit home, let your locations transferred to CIA/NSA, update your device, have a full body scan and go some other country to be killed at war.
I don't lose work because of an update, because I don't use windows.
I can't be why windows updates are forced, because I haven't used windows since 7. I can update a system package, a library or even a kernel without losing a process.
Tell me again why windows needs to force the user to update?
Your waiter is calling every Tom Dick & Harry to just wait. I'd say if everything requires a phone call, you've already lost me as a customer. Your analogy is worse, if we're...y'know. Doing that.
Per your own link, they can be disabled via Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Widgets.
All setting Local Policies does is force them off and stops the user from re-enabling them in the Settings (which is likely a good default for organizations).
Group policy isn't a guarantee either since at some point they can just stop respecting it. I watched this happen with telemetry in Windows 7. You used to be able to opt out of everything at one point in time.
Now you need a Microsoft account to register even non-365 versions of Office.
In non-Pro/Enterprise editions of Windows the software still generally (though not always) respects the registry keys in HKLM\Policies, they just remove the tools to configure local group policy and (obviously) you cannot join a domain to set them through AD. You can still use third-party tools like PolicyPlus combined with the freely available ADMX packs that Microsoft ships for installation into AD forests to set whatever the hell you want.
I remember when connecting Windows XP to the Internet resulted in a compromised system in < 90 seconds. That said, I agree it is a shallow look at things, I do bring up Windows machines on a network that white lists windows update servers and denies everything else. Yes it complains "The internet is unreliable" (not going to lie, it isn't Microsoft :-)).
DNS lookups are themselves alarming no? Why would you resolve a hostname and not, like, use that IP for something? Maybe some argument of pre-emptive hostname resolution but even in Ubunutu you can turn off the chatty background OS DNS resolutions.
Yeh, I was skeptical of your comment but I checked the article and video and they are utterly pointless. No substantiation that any 3rd party is actually contacted (other than your ISP for resolving DNS). It would have taken literally seconds to demonstrate actual connections being made. For all I know, this is clickbait/misinformation - the author(s) made it impossible for me to know otherwise.
Windows 10 is going to be my last windows with how MS is acting.
10 was annoying enough to configure to disable so much cruft, get back a decent startbar, disable all the telemetry etc, and much of it still sucks like not being able to have control over updates.
11 with forcing an account, forcing updates, stupid shit like nerfing the taskbar etc...there is just no need for it anymore.
Games run fine on Linux via proton, or the ones I want to play at least. The rest of my toolchain and app library is all opensource stuff that runs on *nix.
NetBSD or Void Linux with a custom configured AwesomeWM setup here I come.
As a game developer, I’m stuck with windows for the foreseeable future. The major game engines technically work on Linux but the experience isn’t smooth and the companies don’t want to invest in improving it
If they did, I’d switch back to Linux so fast—
I actually really like gnome and miss the interface. It’s a dream for people who never want to touch their mice
As a game consumer, Linux works well enough for 99% of the cases.
As a game producer, the editors and engines might work, but it's missing a lot of polish and it's kind of a frustrating experience.
I think you missed the first "As a game developer" part message of the comment you replied to, they are speaking about developing games, not playing them.
> If the one game someone wants to play most doesn't work, they're not going to switch.
People keep saying this but more and more people are using Linux for gaming and the Steam Deck sells very well + receives a lot of praise. How could that be if what you are saying is true?
People don't care by and large that the steam deck runs on Linux, they care that a trusted company (probably the single most trusted company in gaming) released a hardware gaming device. If valve had put the same effort into the same hardware but made it Windows centric, most of its problems would go away. They just have very good reasons for trying to break away that platform.
I used the word "switch" rather than "use" on purpose. Nobody with a steam deck is using it as their primary computer or gaming device. Nobody is going to at least until the biggest stuff out there runs on it
As a game developer I can see how you would be tied. I'm pretty lucky in that my gaming sticks to a few specific games for multiplayer (GTA online, counter-strike, sometimes red alert 2, nrs games) an a few specific AAA titles I want to play for campaigns.
Gnome is pretty nice...I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4. Awesome was a gamechanger for me though, when I realized how easy it was to have a perfect gui, every little details perfectly to my specificaions.
> I never understood why KDE was so popular with their childish naming scheme and some of the bloat that came in 4
And I could never understand why GNOME is so popular with its desire to be a tablet interface and complete disdain for the very concept of user customization.
Gnome 3 is kind of awesome as a keyboard driven system too. It's only really when you try to navigate with the mouse rather than keyboard shortcuts that it feels worse than more traditional DEs. Laptop trackpads with multi finger gestures feel right at home as well.
The massive and uncustomizable window titlebars suck though.
I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface. It has not. It is just repeated ad nauseam by people, who never used it.
Sure, it sucks at 14" 1376x768 displays, but 14" 1600x900 or fullhd -- you know, what you could find a poweruser using? It's perfect, without having 125% scale or whatever.
> I don't get why people think GNOME has a desire to be a tablet interface.
That seems obvious. Because GNOME threw away GNOME 2, which people liked, and decided GNOME 3 would be a copy of Unity, which was supposed to be a tablet interface, and which distinguished itself only in being terrible?
Unity was supposed to be netbook interface, not a tablet one. Tablets (as we know them today, not tablet pc, which sucked) were not yet a thing then.
Gnome 3 decided not to be a clone of Unity, but not to be a clone of Windows 95. If you want a Windows 95 clone, you have a wide range of offers. If you do not want that, the choice was much worse. Gnome 3 improved that for those, who didn't want Windows 95 clone.
Incidentally, the only people who think Gnome 3 is terrible are those, who cannot let Windows 95 concepts go. Everything that is different, is going to be terrible, simply by the virtue of being different.
> Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10.
Hi, long time GNOME user by force here. I find it very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first.
All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.
> very difficult to believe an interface with a full-screen app switcher, slide to unlock, and massive title bars and buttons compared to every other desktop UI is intended to be anything other than designed for tablets first.
If you take a note, Gnome development trails hardware development, it does not lead it. There is a lot of hardware features it still cannot use and which have much higher staying potential, ergo are much lower risk to implement than a tablet interface: HDR, fractional hidpi scaling, VRR comes to mind.
At the time when Gnome development was conceived, there were no tablets, no mass market for them, with the exception of tablet pcs, which were clunky and expensive and definitely not popular. What Gnome does with massive title bars and buttons is optimizing for a hardware that did exist then: higher-resolution, but not hidpi yet, displays.
Most software at the time was written for 96 dpi, but these displays were slightly higher (14" full hd is 157 dpi; 14" HD+ [1600x900] is 131 dpi, 14" WSXGA [1440x900] is 121 dpi). The kind of sizing Gnome uses optimizes for this kind of hardware, without having to support "proper" fractional hidpi scaling. So yes; it was cheap, minimal way to support popular hardware (and in a way contributed to a late real hidpi support). If you use Gnome on such a display, the sizing is exactly right; unlike Windows, which was tiny at these displays and was a cause why many mainstream users preferred the low resolution 1376x768 ones.
> All of these are touch-centric concepts and have no reason to exist where keyboard and mouse is the primary input method.
They are not touch-centric at all; did you ever use ipad or android tablet? Floating windows are not optimal for touch use. Tiling WM with a gesture support is much more suited for this use.
As a long time Gnome user, you probably learned keyboard shortcuts. What you consider missing there? Gnome is one of most keyboard oriented UIs available.
That's a fine reason for chunky, toy-like bars and buttons on the sub 1080P displays of yesteryear but a really shitty excuse for continuing to use that sizing when even throwaway computers nowadays have full HD displays.
Are they truly incapable of changing the widget scaling based on resolution and/or input method?
As to the keyboard shortcuts, I am familiar with them, but that's table stakes. Every mainstream DE can be driven more or less comfortably with a keyboard. That doesn't excuse the use of a full-screen, context-destroying application switcher/launcher that even Microsoft realized was a bad idea on the desktop nearly 10 years ago with the launch of 8.1. Said company even realized that touch and mouse are fundamentally different input methods and adjust UI accordingly! If only the Gnome developers were so up to date!
This is really weird. Almost no one push GNOME tablet or 2 in 1 style laptop like Surface. Red hat is a big sponsor for GNOME but they also not seems to pushing tablets. Windows 8 and successor was somewhat reasonable shift because MS has been pushed tablets.
I like having a desktop, not a tablet, GUI, which is why I like KDE. ;p
KDE and Qt apps (since Qt is so superior to GTK in almost every way) are superior to anything you find in Windows. Compare Windows's Explorer, the file manager, to Dolphin. The next best FM is PCManFM, which switched from GTK to Qt. Nautilus (now GNOME Files), which is still GTK, is a comical toy by comparison.
The GNOME desktop looks very nice and has high polish but is very feature limited. Here's a feature that might interest gamers: KDE lets you disable desktop composition, which makes your desktop (including games) much smoother, but you lose DE animations and transparency effects. Try it and then drag some windows around on a high-refresh screen, on and then off, to sense the difference. In fact, the smoothness you'll feel is how smooth the Windows 10 DE is by default (it pains me to note). This difference is also felt in games. Fullscreen games are supposed to disable composition on most DEs, but whether they actually do this is unknown and I don't think they do at all if you keep your games windowed (which I do since some Proton games, like Fallout 4, work way better in windowed mode, and it's easier to access stuff on neighboring monitors without Alt-tabbing). I don't think you have any control over composition in GNOME, and conversations with GNOME devs on this topic made it seem like they see no reason at all to not have composition in current year and that a DE without composition is broken in their eyes.
I'm not even sure if the toolkit is better but the whole philosophy of giving as many options and choices as needed is a breath of fresh air in this day where opinionated design is so popular due to people copying Apple.
If you happen to have AMD gpu on Windows you not only face buggy and unstable drivers, but also their Adrenalin control panel made with Qt. It takes up to 20% of gpu just to render text and do it so slow you have to wait it to appear. Moving mouse over consuming up to full core of 4+ ghz core i7.
I do 99% of my PC gaming with a Steam Deck. All the major games I am interested in "just work." If Elden Ring and most/all of my fav indie games work, I don't see why I will need a windows PC ever in the near future.
I was able to get several non-steam games from the early 2000's working as well with Proton.
Likely if more games are built against/for dxvk/proton things will get even easier.
I'm just annoyed how few games release for Mac. I have a nice M1 all paid for me, but I can't game on it like I can my linux laptop - except that one has integrated graphics.
My backlog of unplayed (and yet to be bought) AAA games now encompasses most of 5 years at this point.
Same, I started the process of installing Pop!_OS [1] last week. I hope all drivers and things like Fan control work will properly, so far it seems to work really well out of the box so i was impressed - but i haven't tested any games yet for example.
Yeah it's drawn my interest for a while now. I think it has a lot of interesting security features that look fun to explore, and there is some functionality I would like to try porting to it also.
Otherwise it's void if I can get it working. I use to run Slackware but not a fan of them trying to compete with Ubuntu. Not a fan of rolling release (as fantastic as Arch is) or source based, so for minimal systems that really just leaves void or alpine.
I don’t think that’s fair to say that if one is using it professionally. If it puts food on the table you just have to grin and bear the things you don’t like.
It’s not realistic to give up a tool that makes you money over personal feelings about telemetry and the like.
Artists shouldn't be tied to brands and products. Artists get shit done using tools they have available.
All you've done is list 7 Adobe products, claiming "no competition", no choice but to subscribe to Adobe. The bottom line is you make things for clients: videos, illustrations etc. If Adobe Cloud crashed tomorrow, would you remove your clothes and wander the streets in despair? Crying and begging for food? No. You'd get the job done using other tools. Because you're an Artist, you're resourceful.
"Artists get shit done using tools they have available."
Agree. Those are tools named from Adobe, not the only I use.
"If Adobe Cloud crashed tomorrow, would you remove your clothes and wander the streets in despair?"
If your ISP or power has blackout, would you?
"Because you're an Artist, you're resourceful."
Also pragmatic. I use tools to get things done faster. Adobe has top notch software developed over decade by payed professionals, with millions of investment. I strongly disagree with their terms of use (no option to work offline is ridiculous), but as you said. Artist are resourceful.
It doesn't change anything on fact that I would like to abandon Windows completely and stick with linux.
Did exactly that when unasked telemetry started to get a thing, and windows started to turn just worse. So before/with Windows 7.
Really no reason to look back. As you said since proton is a thing the last anti Linux argument of games is a non issue (it kinda was before, but with more annoyances)
If the VR story on Linux was even remotely palatable to me I'd have already switched. If some games I want don't work, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. As it is, I'm with you on 10 almost certainly being my last Windows.
When I signed up for the waitlist for the New Bing (with ChatGPT), I was offered an express lane with this copy:
"Access the new Bing even faster"
"Get ahead in the line when you complete the following"
"1. Set *Microsoft Defaults* on your PC"
"2. Scan the QR code to install the *Microsoft Bing App*"
Microsoft Defaults and Microsoft Bing App were links, which I didn't click, and there was a QR code below the second one.
For what it's worth, I did try this out. Downloaded the little Bing desktop enforcement app and everything. Also on the phone. Signed in on both.
Returned to the 'access' faster page. Nope, just same old 'Do this process to get it faster!'. So it was completely pointless. Unless they mean, jump the queue, and it's in a couple days? But it doesn't _say_ that really. So I dislike this little thing they pulled here. It could be biased too, as I was recently reading about this: Five Walled Gardens: Why Browsers are Essential to the Internet and How Operating Systems Are Holding Them Back. https://research.mozilla.org/files/2022/10/Mozilla-Five-Wall...
I'm much more prone to working with a busted Windows installation these days rather than just reinstalling because of what a nightmare it is hammering Windows 10/11 into usable shape. With Windows 7, it was just install, ungroup taskbar icons, show hidden files and file extensions, set accent color to black and turn off transparency, then go down the list of installers in my software folder.
With Windows 11, fuck, I don't even remember all the esoteric damn steps I have to do. I'm going to have to write it down the next time I have to do it.
Haven't set up Windows 11 on a personal machine yet, but for Windows 10 step one is download O&O Shutup 10 and let it set all of their recommended settings. After that all that's left is setting my wallpaper black and fiddling with some taskbar settings. I'd highly recommend checking it out if you're looking for a quick way to get sane defaults set on new Windows installs, including Windows 11.
I had not heard of Shutup 10 before, so thank you for this. Definitely keeping that in my toolbelt. Happy to report it works well on 11 and helped get a few settings that I hadn't found myself.
>I'm going to have to write it down the next time I have to do it.
Honestly, this is what I ended up doing with everything. Fuck remembering all the things. I have a note taking app (used to be a single large TXT), where I scribble down everything, from the model of our electronics, to the steps I need to do to make my ZFS backups. On one hand, it's great to feel safe in that this knowledge won't go away, on the other hand, it's also a boon to free up mental capacity. I'm much happier offloading everything I can.
According to their analysis, Windows XP doesn't even know what the word "telemetry" means: the first DNS traffic from the freshly-installed OS was to try and contact the Windows Update service, and that's all. No market research, no browsing tracking, nothing at all.
Windows from that era was indeed absolutely quiet, and the first-boot experience from a fresh install was basically a "blank slate". It just sat there on the desktop without doing anything, and waited for you, the user, to do something with it.
Now the first-boot experience comes with disturbingly creepy patronising messages, a start menu filled with ads, and immediate "notifications" which are even more ads, and while that's happening, it's doing tons of stuff in the background that they probably don't want you to know about. All of this "modern" stuff just has a very repugnant aesthetic, and acts like you're not the user, but an unknowing idiot to be milked for $$$. I guess MS saw how much spyware many users would eventually install themselves, and wanted to get their suck of the sav.
Yes, the default listening services were the worst as they were easily exploited; but most users are behind a NAT, and you could still disconnect from the Internet and apply the update first, or disable them. More precisely, it was common in those days for connecting to a network to be one of the last things to do, after already having set up a lot of other things before that.
The fact that some versions of Windows 11 require an Internet connection just to install and go through the initial setup seems like it could be even worse.
I've been using linux on my main machine for quite a while now, but I usually keep a windows machine for games (though I hear linux gaming is pretty good these days, so hopefully I can go that route before windows 11 becomes mandatory).
I liked windows 7, but always felt annoyed at being coerced onto more and more disrespectful versions of windows over time. At this point, I wish I had something like a throwaway vm or docker container for anything I need to run in a windows environment, like people use for malware research but more convenient.
As somebody with a Steam Deck it's seriously impressive what Valve has managed to do with Proton. I didn't catch the memo about the Samsung 980 Pro failure in time and my Windows 10 drive just went readonly on me, and if it weren't for SteamVR not being supported on Linux I'd seriously be considering just...not reinstalling Windows again. Once the day comes that the last few gaming issues I have on Linux go away I will probably let the Windows install rot and daily drive Fedora or Arch again.
I concur. I use my PC 8-12 hours a day, for many activities including work. Occassionally I have gaming stints, which can include VR. That is just not enough to justify having to be limited and bloated at the same time by Microsoft Windows. I took the plunge a few years ago and went for Linux as my daily driver. When I want to play those VR games I dual boot. Not looking back.
Yeah, i agree that linux gaming has become pretty painless, although VR gaming is still a big sore spot. If you want to see if a game runs smoothly with no tinkering, check https://www.protondb.com/. Any game listed platinum will run without tweaks on linux.
I set up a windows VM proxmox with GPU passthrough for exactly this reason. With parsec for remote access it is very usable even with my less than ideal LTE uplink for the occasional need for Windows.
Forced Windows updates caused me no end of problems too. I'd run a simulation overnight and discover Windows had rebooted on its own and I lost all my results. Or I wanted to show a movie at a birthday party but Windows decided it had to spend an hour updating.
I followed various instructions to disable automatic updates, and I'm someone who generally keeps things up to date, but after the third time of Windows updates ruining things, I gave up and switched to a MacBook. With Windows it seems like updating is its primary task and running applications is secondary to. There's probably someone at Microsoft who shows weekly graphs of Windows updates, and their bonus depends on the graph continuing up and to the right, so they ram through whatever update features are necessary without thinking of the customer experience.
You see, it's Microsoft's point of view that no longer we own a system and are the administrative users of it, but Microsoft by its ClippyAI uses us as a system for their needs and they are the administrative users of their lowly subjects.
The fact that you watch videos, open programs and earn a living and lay out files on the PC is merely collateral, they see it's a necessary accident to keep you on the line and plug into your essence to try to drain it.
Let's repurpose PC to mean either Piece of Crap or Post-Computers depending on how we react to the new establishment.
Under Settings > Accounts > Sign-in Options > enable "Automatically save my restartable apps and restart them when I sign back in". Most apps since Windows 7 register their current documents, workspace, etc. with Windows when they launch, and can then be reopened on next boot with the same context. If they don't support that API, Windows will just remember the command line and relaunch it.
I use this for a work computer that I shut down daily and it restores everything I had open: browser windows & tabs, email, Visual Studio solutions, PyCharm workspaces, Windows Explorer windows, Slack, etc. And update restarts use this mechanism specifically.
Now here is to hope That the next "fix" from windows does not push an update that consistent blue screens my PC [1] which is why i prefer to reject all patches.
Did you try Reboot Blocker [0]? It works by constantly rotating the Active Hours configuration so that the current time is always within active hours, thus delaying Windows Update restarts indefinitely. It works reliably on Windows 10, but I couldn’t find confirmation for Windows 11.
If you have a Pro or Enterprise SKU you should be able to disable automatic updates by messing with Group Policy (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update). Changing the "configure automatic updates" policy should be enough but you might have to change others, just go through them and read the descriptions.
Run the Windows update checker manually on a periodic basis, same as you would on a Linux server, and you will never be caught by forced reboots or patches being downloaded at inconvenient times.
...no? The GP commenter's problem-as-stated isn't that X is being forced on them; their problem is that X is being forced on them when they don't have time to deal with it. The solution is to do it when they do have time, ideally frequently such that only small incremental updates are needed, such that each update cycle doesn't take very long.
A.k.a. "if you don't want to get a toothache and have your life interrupted with a 'random' need to visit the dentist, then take a few minutes of your choosing each day to brush your teeth."
> A.k.a. "if you don't want to get a toothache and have your life interrupted with a 'random' need to visit the dentist, then take a few minutes of your choosing each day to brush your teeth."
Microsoft taking control of a computer you bought and paid for remotely to force it to do what they want is in no way comparable to a health issue and I really don't understand what could possibly lead you to believe it is.
When you go to the dentist, the dentist takes control of your mouth and forces it to do what they want. I don't see what's confusing about that.
If you think the scope of the loss of control doesn't line up: replace "brushing your teeth" with "watching your blood pressure"; "a toothache" with "a stroke"; "the dentist" with "an ICU doctor"; and "taking control of your mouth" with "taking control of your whole body" (since you're likely under general anesthesia — they've literally taken control of your body away from you to fix the problem.)
But, by looking at my analogy as analogizing two fields, I think you missed the point. I was trying to give a general analogy about preventative maintenance tasks you are expected to enact as part of the ownership of a tool; where that tool will eventually 'randomly' break down without said maintenance, effectively forcibly interrupting you to have reactive maintenance done by some external professional at much greater time cost. Your teeth are just one such tool.
A different but equivalent analogy would be to changing the oil in your car. If you don't do it, eventually at some 'random' time you'll need to spend a long time at a repair shop because your engine cylinders got grit in them and wore holes large enough to lose stroke pressure.
Also, if you mean to suggest that these cases are different because the computer is "choosing" to force the update on you, rather than "requiring" the update in some technical "being broken" sense — it's not like that's uncommon. Many tools and machines — industrial ones, specifically — come with resource and maintenance sensors built into them which will prevent you from operating the machine in a condition where it would begin to require maintenance, to prevent you from accidentally imposing an above-tolerance workload on a system that you presumably want to last a long time. Self-greasing CNC routers will stop running when they run out of grease, rather than trying to operate dry. Etc.
If you question why your system "requires maintenance" in the first place — well, this is what I addressed in a sibling comment. If you believe in vaccines, and in herd immunity; and if you understand that, for active threats (computer worms et al), computer networks have virality coefficients just like human populations do; then you should be able to see that the "maintenance" being required here, is for the sake of increasing the herd-immunity of the network by removing your node within it as a potential infection vector, rather than for the sake of your own computer's individual health per se. (Although it is also for the sake of your own computer, insofar as, besides just joining you to a botnet, a worm could also carry a crypto-locker payload or something equally nefarious.)
And if you question why Microsoft should be able to force your computer to "get vaccinated", when the government can't force you to do so — well, consider something the government can do: it can prevent you from driving a car that doesn't pass an EPA inspection. Because driving is a privilege, rather than a right. Well, operating your computer isn't a right either. It can come with conditions.
(If you, finally, notice that the distinction should actually be "operating your computer on the Internet", similar to "driving your car on the road" — such that operating your computer offline, or driving your car on a private track, shouldn't be something anyone other than you has a say in — well, I'm not going to argue with you there. Computers could certainly have the option to delay a forced restart to install a patch, but to "force you offline" until such time as the [already-downloaded] patch is installed. I think OSes only don't offer that because it'd be terribly confusing for the average grandmother. But it could certainly be something hidden in the most arcane of config flags.)
Microsoft, as a private corporation, has no business coercing a user to maintain a standard on a device that does not belong to them. Enforcing public policy through tyranny is a role that should lie exclusively with a government accountable to its citizens. The history of western democracy is littered with wars fought to ensure this is the case.
The computer isn't owned by them, but the operating system sure is. If you don't want Microsoft updating their operating system then use someone else's.
How is this an argument for Microsoft forcing updates on people's devices? Microsoft own Windows, that doesn't give them jurisdiction over people's property.
With servers it's expected to have someone to actually take care of them - I.e. do maintenance work like reboot once a month or use LivePatch or other measures.
Note though, snapd updates packages for you by default and was not an option to disable this as well.
2nd note - once you are talking about servers - I believe Windows Server has much fine grained control over this.
I generally had once or twice my Windows 11 Pro Insider Beta machine to reboot forcibly - usually I see notification on pending reboots and even been asked when to do it/delay. Cannot complain here.
Linux falls under the second category where they don't really care about securing their users. They think it's okay for a ton of servers of their operating system to exist with vulnerable services running. Every company has to dedicate duplicate resources into keeping servers up to date.
I haven't used 11 yet. When I was on 10, there was a group policy that would prevent automatic updates & restarts. The OS would check regularly for updates but wouldn't automatically download them.
If this is still available in 11, that's your best solution.
Also it is probably best opensource firewall for Windows out there. Portmaster from Stafin has similar approach but not good for managing firewall rules.
I'm entirely comfortable with configuring my Windows to behave how I want, but over the years the increasing user hostility of Windows has driven me to Linux, such that I only use Windows On a work machine, and I'm reminded almost daily about how good my decision was to make the switch.
What I mean is: even those of us who can, are sick of having to.
There are "active" threat classes (worms, and human attackers explicitly running intrusion exploits) that can infect your computer while it is sitting idle, you know.
What would you prefer: coming back to find your computer has joined a botnet while you were gone; or coming back to find your computer was restarted while you were gone, to avoid joining a botnet?
I would prefer to find it as I left it. And in 45 years of using computers this has always been the case. But then againg, I haven't used windows in more than two decades now, other than a single box here that talks to an older mixer and that machine doesn't even have an internet connection, I treat it as part of the mixer.
> And in 45 years of using computers this has always been the case
Yes, because you presumably do your computing mostly behind some kind of NAT most of the time, and without any un-patched devices hanging out on the same LAN segment, and so there's no path for worms to have ever reached you by.
That's not necessary true for the average computer user, though, who connects to shared wired or wireless networks at an office/coworking space/internet cafe/university campus/etc. Those that do this may end up with either/both of 1. a public-routable (usually IPv6) address for bots and worms to talk to, and 2. a link on a multicast-routable subnet with other already-infected devices.
Also, a few years after you stopped using Windows, cryptocurrency was invented, which "changed the game" for cybercriminals in a lot of ways. Fun, meaningless, low-penetration cyberthreats don't exist any more; as "hacking groups" are now motivated by "real money" to get root on every PC they can so they can deploy crypto-miner background services, encrypt files and hold them for (cryptocurrency) ransom, exfiltrate the user's own crypto-wallet private keys, etc.
Oh yeah, I dared to view the video and, lo and behold, the last 1.5 minutes of the video is an advertisement. Video content may as well not exist - I view it begrudgingly if no alternative is available.
I propose the term "slaveware" for software and hardware not under the user's control. In general, any software that acts in the interest of someone other than the user can be considered slaveware, but especially when it is in the interest of a company or the government. Slaveware uses dark patterns to direct user behavior, spies on users, and attempts to deceive user of its true intentions. It asserts control, overriding the user's desires. Most software targeting the general public nowadays are slaveware. The developers think they know better than you. Apple devices are slaveware, because they only allow running software they approve unless you jump through a lot of hoops. Slaveware makers often weaponize their market position to push increasingly aggressive anti-user behaviors. You might not like Facebook or Whatsapp, which does not let you opt out of sending read receipts, but you may be forced to use it because "everyone else does it".
I think the issue can only be remedied by very aggressive legislation that would cut down the network effects and market power of slaveware makers. EU's Digital Markets Act is a good start.
These comments are disappointing. In the midst of rampant disrespect of the user we have story after story such as this. Instead of discussing what is the ethics are of such behavior and where boundaries should be drawn, we get a number of complaints that there is no packet content provided? Is that really the most interesting detail to focus on?
Just to answer, I can guarantee that geolocator and marketing research pings are not there for "no reason whatsoever" aka coincidence. No, they are not just being friendly. Someone on the other end is paying for that server capacity. The capacity to handle billions of requests from Windows users. Without lots of value creation, MS would be hit with a lawsuit from the folks being DDoSed.
> These comments are disappointing. In the midst of rampant disrespect of the user we have story after story such as this. Instead of discussing what is the ethics are of such behavior and where boundaries should be drawn, we get a number of complaints that there is no packet content provided? Is that really the most interesting detail to focus on?
It's a distraction, an attempt at deflection. The real question here is: why do these fresh Windows installs need to connect to "Data Research" 3rd parties at all?
Well, unless I'm missing something, DNS lookups are of zero consequence, no? The ISP's domain name server returns an IP for the domain name lookup, and then what? Does the OS actually hit the server, or...? If nothing else happens, why would we care? Unfortunately this article/video did nothing to actually substantiate what they're suggesting.
Why would a program do a DNS lookup without going to the address? DNS is done automatically by the socket.send() API on demand 99% of the time. Code to do lookups with no send/read are written by nobody besides developers of DNS servers and the dig tool.
"They're must be doing something almost no one would ever do!"
More importantly, the author never said it only does DNS lookups. He just filtered for that to keep the amount of data manageable for illustration purposes. DNS lookup is usually the first step in opening a connection.
Do you have any information that the author(s) are lying? That it is only DNS requests? Given the hundreds of similar confirmed news stories? Dark patterns? The NSA slides pre 2013? My guess is not. And easy to reproduce if needed. My guess is that these connections don't go away with more use.
Why are we talking about this? Proverbial red herring.
I don't know why an OS or piece of software would look up an address without going to it. However, there's no reason to speculate about why. I just want to know whether it connected to those addresses or not, and the article/video made it impossible for me to know that definitively. The author(s) omitted presenting actual evidence and for some reason showed something tangential. I don't need to justify my questioning of that unusual presentational choice.
I'm not going to make assumptions about "the software MUST have connected because the domain name was looked up". It's not my job to connect the dots: it's the job of the person making the assertion to actually substantiate the assertion, otherwise their assertion will be ignored by people like me who actually expect such substantiation.
No, I have no information that the author is lying, and I didn't even begin to suggest as such. I have pointed out the absence of substantiation, which is an observation of fact.
The truth is that we in the industry already know exactly what is happening and why. Confirmed over and over and over. If you want to throw away that knowledge away because he didn't cross the t's for you, more power to you.
Your condescending attitude is unnecessary and unwarranted, and your messages have done nothing to increase my awareness of actual evidence of privacy violation. My stance of expecting assertions to include substantiating evidence is completely reasonable, and is a basic premise of accepting assertions as fact. The link you added - what's the purpose of that? It's some random user's unsubstantiated assertion. Was it supposed to be a joke, or... ?
btw RE: "everyone in the industry knows": https://www.logicalfallacies.org/argumentum-ad-populum.html I don't care if "everyone knows", if someone makes an extraordinary claim, my response is always "prove it". I don't believe things just because other people do.
Was a bit embattled due to the numerous downvotes for supporting the post, likely due to shills.
If you honestly want to learn about the subject I'd start with the PBS Frontline documentary called "The United States of Secrets."
Next, learn about "surveillance capitalism." The Facebook and Social Dilemma, on Netflix are eye-openers.
Another milestone was Apple giving their OS away for free. Combined with Linux always being free and popular on servers, that made expensive Windows a much harder sell. There's a big cost to develop a modern OS, so there's a great incentive to "monetize" away that cost. In practice that means advertising and surveillance which is exactly what you are seeing here.
This is a story developing for over ten years. That a few pieces of the thousand piece puzzle are not delivered on a silver-platter is immaterial to the discussion.
Couple that with monitoring the vast amount of ETW logging providers Windows gives you, and you'll see why. E.g.: the WinHTTP provider of who (PID) contacted where including URL, DNS ETW for lookups and who (PID), etc.
While I realize it's not a solution to the issue you raised, it's worth pointing out that Microsoft does a decent* job of documenting the types of telemetry taken across the Windows platform:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-...
* When I say decent, I mean this absolutely should be the bare minimum, but this type of thing feels rare in the industry.
> Absolutely nothing on what data is being sent, if any, or why.
Might have something to do with the fact that the data is almost certainly encrypted and the OS is closed source.
If I install a piece of software and it immediately connects to 20 random servers without asking or even telling me, for purposes other than to directly provide advertised features, I'm going to assume that those connections are being used to extract my personal data and the burden of proof is on the developer to prove otherwise.
Look - I'm not really a Windows fan (almost exclusively on linux these days) but they ARE providing advertised features.
Like - honestly - the machine is a fresh install of Windows, what exactly is the data you think is being exfiltrated? In most cases... there's just nothing there.
At best, someone now knows that ip x.x.x.x is running windows version y.y.y.y, and possibly that the user account is z. And honestly - all of those pieces of information are actually reasonable to send when providing advertised features (such as weather data in widgets, or local news).
There's literally just nothing else on the device to grab yet... There's no browsing data, there's no app usage data, there's no documents generated.
It's a blank fucking OS outside of the MS account you signed on with.
So again - without talking about the actual data in the requests (and not just a dns record...) this isn't really a helpful conversation to have.
> the machine is a fresh install of Windows, what exactly is the data you think is being exfiltrated? In most cases... there's just nothing there.
Then there shouldn't be any requests.
> At best, someone now knows that ip x.x.x.x is running windows version y.y.y.y, and possibly that the user account is z.
Is this something you have inside information about? How many requests does this take? Your sentence seems far longer than the single serialized string that would have to be sent.
edit: and to be more direct, how is it all right for you to speculate about things you don't know but not all right for the OP? Is it only legitimate to make up excuses for suspicious behavior, and illegitimate to be suspicious of it?
> So again - without talking about the actual data in the requests (and not just a dns record...) this isn't really a helpful conversation to have.
I'm not fucking speculating. I'm saying DNS records are a trash excuse for actually looking at the data. If they want to make spurious claims - the burden of proof lies firmly with them.
In the mean time:
> Then there shouldn't be any requests.
I literally just told you why they're making these requests... they're fetching data to display on widgets related to local news and weather, and they're tracking their install numbers.
You can bitch and moan about that - but they're very clear that they're doing it at install time, and most times you can opt out.
> There's literally just nothing else on the device to grab yet... There's no browsing data, there's no app usage data, there's no documents generated.
Well, there's your internal and external IP addresses, your MAC addresses, your Processor ID, your Mainboard serial #s, Hard Drive serial #s, along with your OS ID (I don't know if the Edge browser has a unique ID per install), all of which can be used to identify you/your machine uniquely. This data is now going to all these "Data Research" companies.
I wonder why they need to collect this information.
Also potentially the IDs of any Bluetooth and wireless devices nearby, MAC addresses and information about other equipment on the network. It’s a lot of data and it’s useful and valuable otherwise they wouldn’t go to the effort of collecting it.
This video and article may be about a fresh OS but this activity doesn’t stop once you start using the device either.
Over the years this has fully turned me off Microsoft products.
> Also potentially the IDs of any Bluetooth and wireless devices nearby, MAC addresses and information about other equipment on the network.
Might as well suspect every single Linux device you have sending an ARP request then, who knows where it's going? Maybe they're exfiltrating it to Canonical.
Why is it that every Microsoft thread on HN with a hint of the word "Windows" generates the most overblown theories and accusations? I'm honestly expecting someone to soon say "what if Windows 11 takes a picture with your webcam and sends it back to Redmond?".
> Might as well suspect every single Linux device you have sending an ARP request then, who knows where it's going? Maybe they're exfiltrating it to Canonical.
That's a good question. So I looked into Ubuntu, since you mentioned Canonical. As it turns out, Ubuntu the OS (22.04 LTS) does NOT send ANY data to 3rd parties of its own volition, at all. And it doesn't even send data to Canonical, of its own volition. [1][2]
Maybe I should switch to Ubuntu. You should think about it too.
> Why is it that every Microsoft thread on HN with a hint of the word "Windows" generates the most overblown theories and accusations? I'm honestly expecting someone to soon say "what if Windows 11 takes a picture with your webcam and sends it back to Redmond?".
Given what happened with Roomba, and Amazon & Google smart devices, this would not surprise me in the least.
Ah, so you looked at their privacy statement. But you can do that for Microsoft too, so why suspect that they're gathering your local devices if they say they don't? If you don't believe that, you better check all processes sending ARPs on Linux as well.
Sure - maybe. Except the article above doesn't have any compelling proof of that at all.
This entire conversation is "How dare they make requests to 3rd parties" with fuck all else as evidence of what's getting sent.
Show me where they're doing things like sending my HDD serial, or my bluetooth devices, or nearby wifi devices, and sure - we can have a good conversation about whether that's intrusive. Until then.... this is literally a useless conversation. You're making claims without any evidence (a DNS query is piss poor fucking evidence for any data collection...)
---
Also - if they want to fingerprint the device, they really don't need any of the information at all. Most folks happily leave the default settings which just generates an ID at OS install to be used for personalized content (and again - they've told you they're doing this... it's not a surprise).
That's exactly right. It's a "Personal Computer". There is no reason (that is in the best interest of the PC's "Owner") for it to connect to "Data Research" 3rd parties with a fresh install of Windows.
Because I can think of a fuck load of valid reasons my computer is making requests to these companies, and I'm not trying very hard.
Tracking is genuinely useful when providing services - gauging interest and user preference is HARDLY new to tech. Do you think your grocery store isn't tracking what their best selling items are and making decisions about shelf space? Why do you expect your digital store to not do the same?
In this case - they're also providing weather and news data. That data needs to be local to me for it to matter (I don't need the weather from 3 states away...). That data is often coming from applications that 3rd parties create (widgets) and they can and do opt into using 3rd parties other than microsoft for tracking.
Finally...
If you don't like it... fucking switch. I use Arch as my daily driver basically everywhere except work (where I'm stuck on macOS, and boy if you think Windows is bad... I've got news for you about Apple... they track the time and location of every damn app I open on their crapboxes - for your own security of course /s)
Or... just turn it off. Which most orgs already do with easily controlled GPO settings, and you can do with a couple of clicks at install time when you really should read the damn fine print that they're showing you.
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If you want to talk about malicious tracking - I want to start with my fucking bank and credit card company. I don't give a fuck about MS.
Like others said, it's news widgets. In an iframe. With zero identifying data about you. It doesn't even use your location automatically without asking. The worst they have is geoip for weather & news region.
There's no hardware-available "processor ID" since ~2004. The serial on the box isn't stored anywhere.
> your Mainboard serial #s,
Which you already associated with your MS account. If you used a local account, it isn't queried.
> Hard Drive serial #s, along with your OS ID [...] This data is now going to all these "Data Research" companies.
How are you so sure? You see a single DNS query and assume that company gets everything on your hard drive? Why? Do you have any single concrete example of your hard drive's serial number being sent to Joe's Analytics Co. out of the blue?
Sure, MS is pushing data to all these tracking and marketing companies who are collecting and storing it all from literally billions of users, but that isn't a problem because obviously that data is clearly worthless and so it doesn't matter at all to anyone. Companies just love collecting, exchanging, and keeping massive amounts of useless information. Nothing to see here!
Wouldn’t transparent TLS with self signed certificates solve this problem?
I’ll definitely try this in couple of weeks but I can’t be the only person to try this to uncover exact data that is being sent via Windows telemetrics.
Another alternative would be remote debugging the kernel and hooking into some of the undocumented API calls but that would take lots of effort.
Just spin up Fiddler with a generated root CA on the device. Or if you don't trust the network stack on the OS - point the thing at a MITM proxy and trust the self-signed CA in the certificate store.
It's really not all that hard to view https traffic...
That could be because Microsoft encrypts the data, I would be shocked if the data being sent was not encrypted.
To to me, this means M/S could be grabbing everything and sending it across, fo example browser history, files accessed, info typed into your edge browser, etc. No way to tell and no way to dispute this except for trusting M/S.
So, in reality, people should dump all M/S products.
Windows 11 is another attempt to fool the less tech-savvy crowd and get them to buy new computers through planned obsolescence and fool the users into sharing all their data through force.
Windows does not represent a software that respects the user anymore. Windows represents a tech dystopia where you own nothing and you can do nothing about it.
I use Windows Privacy Dashboard[0] to patch Windows 11 for privacy. There are many others like it, but I found this app intuitive and the ability to grab the latest telemetry block-list is great (Windows 11 introduces new and undocumented telemetry hosts all the time).
I primarily use Windows 11 for gaming and for Office 365. For anything sensitive, I use various Linux distributions. I also have a spare Windows 11 virtual machine (VM) for testing purposes and it's completely offline. I like to try out different Windows software in the VM and have it offline because some software I don't trust and I acquired it from sketchy sites, or it could be phoning home and sending sensitive data to some random server.
I knew there was spyware when I first saw it in Windows XP - the "search online for drivers" option pre-enabled which would have sent my exact PC's configuration to Microsoft servers. At least back then it could be disabled and there were 3rd party firewalls that could filter outgoing connections.
I skipped Vista.
I only connected Win7 to the internet once and I saw how the firewall completely failed to block outgoing connections. Since then, I keep my Win7 behind a filtering proxy with no direct access to internet. Only firefox has the proxy password.
Did anyone look at the Win7's scheduled tasks? It's an absolute nightmare.
No, most people simply don't care about some esoteric 'privacy' when giving it up offers them much more comfort and ease of use. It's always been this way, and will always be.
Many things about Windows we are talking about today are not about comfort or ease of use at all. Several of them substantially downgrade the experience.
I wish that the ameliorated.info project were producing up-to-date scripts for win10 and win11. Personally, I refuse to run Windows because I find it incredibly annoying. I do not believe that Redmond is doing anything nefarious to people via their PCs/software other than milking them for cash, but the UI changes I find to be going the wrong direction, the update mechanisms, the ads, etc… are all annoying, and I even find the notification system annoying.
Also O&O's ShutUp10 [1] which also works on Windows 11. It's not as complete as some of the scripts on Github but also only changes things known to not affect the usability of the OS. And it has a happy-clicky UI and prompts the person to make a snapshot first. I can attest to it quieting down the telemetry on W10/11 for my gaming machine. I still play certain games on Windows
These tools should be run after any big patches from Microsoft as they may change settings. ShutUp10 will show a diff of what features were reset.
i am constantly reminded of the "slowly boiling an alive frog" analogy whenever we talk about newer versions of software becoming worse with these things.
I had switched to MS ecosystem (invested in windows 10, onenote+outlook (client and mail service)+todo and onedrive) when 'Gmail is evil' fiasco started years ago. Sticking to it due to convenience, innovation (boards in calendar, teams for personal use, loop etc., O365 being smooth online) and affordability (stackable multi year subscription through offers -amz/Newegg).
Now rethinking after I got windows 11 in a new machine - the push to use edge is now really annoying. Xbox is nice in win11 but I have found win11 to be pretty buggy as well, hangs a lot in a gaming laptop being used only for browsing. Edge feels super convenient, like old opera with all the bells and whistles built it but at times it feels scary. Especially when it comes with your employer badge in a work computer. Similarly viva insights. MS has mastered the art of telemetry it seems. Majority of my colleagues and friends do not seem bothered.
I had debloated my win10 installations but too lazy to do it again in win11. Any suggestions?
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
This is a really dumb attempt at click bait, that unknowledgeable users will use as cannon fodder. Most of the DNS queries are likely just checking a cert revocation list or something completely innocuous, you can't make a conclusion of any kind based on this type of analysis. Low effort content creation, literally 5 mins of analysis to make dumb conclusions.
I wish I could use Linux but a very trivial task of "keep my second screen usable when I close my laptop lid" is apparently too much to ask :(
OK, I have a discreet GPU, bit still!!
Tried 5 different distros with different window managers, the closest I got was yes you van have the second screen but everything happens with on it with 5 second lag and at 1 FPS
I know there's settings for suspending in logind.conf and also in dconf, but no idea what controls what happens when you close the lid and do nothing, I use my old laptop exclusively through a screen sharing program that keeps the screen off, and it works fine, so it might actually be the graphics driver.
If it's just the CPU scheduler being changed, you could always figure out a way to run your own command when the lid closes, to revert the changes to the way you like it a few seconds after the lid closes.
I had a weird experience in that the second screen(s) (connected via a USB dock) would be laggy if the chosen 'primary' monitor was not the one directly connected to the computer (either built-in monitor for a laptop, or directly connected via HDMI / DisplayPort).
If the primary monitor was one of the two connected to the dock, they would be horribly laggy.
That problem seems to have gone away, but I've changed machines and Linux distributions since then. I think it was with Ubuntu and using a Toshiba Dynadock.
> the closest I got was yes you van have the second screen but everything happens with on it with 5 second lag and at 1 FPS
Used to happen on my nvidia laptop, you can try filing a complaint. One possible solution is to set the GPU to performance mode in Nvidia XServer settings.
I tire of this never-ending slander against Windows as being "spyware" when those saying it can't be f*ked to even prove their own point. "It makes HTTP requests" is the latest laziest slap-in-the-face low-effort "attempt" to prove this. Yawn. Personally I like Windows 11 and am amused by people like this.
There isn't enough evidence to make a decision, and your insistence that a decision mist be made despite limited information, when no one seems interested in getting better information, is frankly bizarre.
> no one seems interested in getting better information
Because there is already enough information here. It's a "Personal Computer". There is no reason (that is in the best interest of the PC's "Owner") for it to connect to "Data Research" 3rd parties with a fresh install of Windows.
Windows 11 boots pitifully slow on both my laptop and desktop with both having PCIe NVMEs. Pathetic enough to where my vintage windows 95 build boots faster than it. I miss windows when it was rather simple and not some steaming pile of spyware and bug riddled piece of junk.
Not that it absolves MS, but this is the status quo, since broadband internet is widespread. Systems in general became very chatty over the net, and every proprietary system phones home for various functionalities, user conveniences and telemetry. And very few system is explicit upfront what gets communicated over the net and what not. Even private, open source software communicates a bunch by default, like Syncthing. This one specifically is peer to peer, and advertises privacy first thing on the homepage, but two instances, both behind NATs, still can't communicate without a third party that connects them at first - like STUN/TURN systems that they themselves host (stun.syncthing.net).
"Using Wireshark to check what a freshly-installed copy of Windows 11 was doing on a brand-new laptop, what they saw was eye-opening to say the least: just after the first boot, Windows 11 was quick to try and reach third-party servers with absolutely no prior user permission or intervention."
I highly doubt that "absolutely no prior user permission or intervention" happened here. Most likely didn't read the EULA on that "freshly-installed copy of Windows 11" or clicked through the whole out-of-the-box experience during the first login without reading what it enables.
> freshly-installed copy of Windows 11" or clicked through the whole out-of-the-box experience during the first login without reading what it enables.
Isn’t that what the most non tech savvy / common user has to deal with? A mom or pop, a relative perhaps? And if it’s possible to de-junk windows 11 why bother? Who has time for that whack-a-mole game of turning things off and have them back on when the system updates? Again, why bother? Windows 11 doesn’t anything compelling to justify wasting my in the first place
I'm not implying anything. My issue with TFA is the "absolutely no prior user permission or intervention" claim. My counter-argument is that clicking without reading through the EULA and/or the out-of-the-box experience during the first login most likely results in providing consent whether one likes it or not.
There're other laptop/OS manufacturers that may serve needs of privacy-conscious folks better than Windows laptop. Whether one likes it or not, there's no constitutional right to use this specific laptop/OS combination.
The value of the video (and by extension, the article) was pretty much completely nullified when the guy filtered to just DNS queries.. How is that useful to show us? The only thing we learn is that the OS is resolving some domain names - it doesn't show how/if those domains are actually being connected to. I'm all for proving privacy-invading features of OSes, but like, maybe we could see something with substance?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT4vDfA_4NI
This video is substance-less, they hooked up Wireshark, watched packets fly past, most of which were DNS lookups, then described domains as if that is meaningful in itself. Most of the traffic is generated by Windows 11 widgets[0], which I'd suggest disabling either way.
Do I like what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11? Actually, no, I'm pretty unhappy with it. But I hate how lazy most of these critiques are. They do so much irrefutably bad stuff, this is the best you can come up with?
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/stay-up-to-date-...