Windows 10? Here are privacy issues you should consider
Be concerned. Be very concerned. If you haven't already accepted the "free" upgrade, I'd suggest avoiding it for as long as you can (not that they won't find another way to get the information they want)
1. Never buy a new release. Wait until it's at least three years old.
2. When in doubt read rule #1.
What do you call it when a corporation continually as a matter of doing business sells unfinished products as 'ready to go out of the box? The legal term is fraud.
What do you call it when a government that allows no unfettered capitalism to exist fails to investigate and prosecute yet accepts campaign donations in the multi mega million bracket?
Conspiracy works for me.
So you want to vote for a government that is culpable under RICO?
When in doubt look at the competition and never hire a politician until they are at least 150 years old.
This isn't a matter of fraudulently selling unfinished products. A lot of effort goes into testing and debugging, but they are enormously complex systems and it's inevitable that problems will be found.
It depends on what you are interested in. Once you understand what it is in terms of design changes do you want it at all? At the other extreme, some people begin using beta releases of products because they are interested in getting advances as soon as possible, knowing that the producer has warned that it isn't ready for general use and to expect abnormal problems.
In a bizarre twist, the most hackable systems on the market are the wireless home security systems. I have a hard-wired system with a battery backup and cell phone callout, biding my time until the new systems become more secure.
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts...
W7 changed a lot to obstruct configuration that was routine on XP for those who exploited it, as well preventing some programs from running that still depend on XP drivers. It even abolished ntbackup that ran from tailored shell scripts.
This part of the video was especially appropriate in a way not intended in the original:
"We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity" -- followed by another fuzzy image.
2020 seems a good time to try w10, but I may decide to switch to Linux before then.
The latest fully supported version is 14.04 and is available at: http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Linux-...
But I wish I still had my VAX/VMS system. Now that was stable. None of today's companies make an OS that can go 10 years without rebooting. That seems like a market failure, though maybe the marketplace can still solve it.
I have been using Debian Linux (parent to Ubuntu Linux) since 2003, and haven't looked back. It's been great to see Linux evolving to become so much more stable and user-friendly over the years. These days, for over 95% of users, there's really no reason to stay on Windows. Even if there are certain specialised "Windows-only" programs you have to run for work, there are ways of getting them to run within Linux.
I switched to Linux over 12 years ago and haven't looked back.
Use Linux Mint, Fedora, SUSE, Debian, CentOS, and Libre Office.
Or use MAC OS...Windows is not now, nor has ever been the ONLY game in town.
Windows? We don't need no steenkin' Windows.
I read a year or so ago, I think from security expert Bruce Schneier, that W10 security would include a facility for usoft to block installation of programs it doesn't approve. usoft recently announced that W10 home edition would no longer give the owner the option of rejecting "updates". Their idea of "security" seems to be their own, not yours.
The usoft business emphasis is also reportedly changing to the "cloud", in which all your application programs and data are run and stored on their remote servers under their control. Your pc would be no more than an approved appliance mostly operating as an interface to and dependent on their servers.
Say goodbye to Bill Gates' original conception of personal computing with multiple hardware vendors selling personally owned and controlled computers designed to compatible standards and running the software of your choice available from anywhere, for you to do what you want with in the privacy of your own home.
The marketeers have evidently determined that a lot of people will go along with the new Big Brother emphasis, just as they put up with mass privacy violation on the internet. It's a good reason to start exploring linux substitutes, but once personal computing is only used by a minority, the growing statism can be expected to squash that, too, starting with controls on who can use the internet for what.
(I just switched to W7 about 2 yr ago and have extensively modded the interface to keep it "classic" and I do NOT accept updates from MSFT.)
As machines go, I had used IBM/Lenovo for a number of years for an employer and it went well. Then I find that since then, the Chinese bought Lenovo and this spring started marketing machines now loaded with all this crap on it. The State Department has actually banned them from government use, because of the spying.
So back it went to Lenovo and I instead bought a Dell. I have been setting it up over the last couple of days. It has gone much better than the Lenovo, but it still has come with a bunch of adware and added apps that keep popping up etc. Partly because of the learning curve with the Lenovo, this one is in pretty good shape pretty quickly. Antimalware and virus protection has cleaned it up quite well.
So, how much have they started with all this added crap with 8.1? Any advice on things to disable?
I read they are touting W 10 even though 8.1 substantially fixed W 8, but the damage was done to its PR. And now I have read that w 10 doesn't gain you much over 8.1 except for negative concerns as was raised with this post.
The main issues I have had with 8.1 is all the adware and webbars they packaged with it. Lenovo's release was particularly bad with the Superfish malware and the embedded certificate issue. It is all this crap that seems stupid from a customer satisfaction perspective.
Third party malware packaged by Lenovo is separate issue.
Microsoft was late to the party with a mobile interface, so to try and catch up, they think that for some reason every device needs to be "web-enabled". Microsoft has never been the brightest bunch (see "Pirates of Silicon Valley), because they fail to recognize that people use a tablet or phone in a completely different manner than they use a desktop. Trying to force everyone to use the same interface on both types of devices actually hampers productivity, and the learning curve for the tiles on a desktop is prohibitive for most users - not to mention the admins like me who have been sick of Microsoft's ever-changing admin consoles since Windows 2000...
Microsoft just needs to allow for two different interfaces: one for mobile devices (where the tiles work fine) and another for desktops/laptops which uses standard icons/menus. Its just that because they've been a monopoly used to pushing out whatever they want for 20 years they think that nothing has changed despite the fact that they're getting absolutely killed in the mobile world.
Then there were Allchin's revelations about the political infighting and how unless your project had Ballmer's personal okay that your funding would get cut, the unwillingness of the various business units to work together on product testing and interoperability...
We'll just say I've always taken a somewhat jaundiced view of Microsoft even though in the world of tech you're pretty much stuck with working with at least some of their products. I'm really hoping that Android does to Windows what Windows did to Novell so many years ago and becomes a viable competitor. I'd also love to see Apple get more in the mix there (they are making inroads but their boutique approach doesn't really engender popular appeal). I'm all for competition and Microsoft has been without it for so long that they have really languished. I'd love to see the market force them back into actually paying attention to customers' demands rather than just slapping a new look and feel on things and calling it a new OS.
I just watched a cool little segment about entrepreneurs in South America. Both farmers and merchants were using mobile phones both in price discovery (farmers would take their goods to the markets with the best prices, merchants would search for opportunities) and in payments. Due to the number of highway robbers, electronic payments now mean that there is nothing to steal because noone carries cash except very small amounts for food, etc.
I've been in IT for 20+ years, I have been MCSE certified, and my company was a Microsoft System Builder and registered solution provider..the assumption thats okay to collect data without your knowing consent (who really reads the license agreements?) is as arrogant as is its obnoxiously invasive.
While its not okay to have those tools there to begin with, had they deployed the OS with those tools turned off by default would have made things more palatable.