Spyware windows 10 now worse then ever:

[irsuv]

The general problem with Windows is that it's infeasible to disable the spyware functions without killing the update mechanism, which you need to get the security patches and other vital hotfixes. Which you -need-.

They already have a work around for a non-microsoft option to use and install real windows updates. Its really sometimes too easy to disable and remove so much from windows. There is also an option under settings to enable side loading apps. Worst case scenario some hacker designs an automated process to automate sidelading apps just like they did on windows phone 7.

[Guest]

Two articles in the news today, or yesterday depending upon when you read this.

Amazon has a tiny trash-can shaped device with some feminine name that eavesdrops on everything you say in the hope

you'll finally ask it something. The government wanted the recording it makes to diagnose a murder.

Amazon finally relented when the suspect signed a release.

(So it doesn't just listen in, it takes [60-second?] notes, that was what I was going for)

 

The second one was a little more vague, something about the CIA listening in on whatever trendy electronic device you happen to be carrying.

So, uh,  you'll have to be more breitbartish before I condemn windows for spying.

Microsoft is always playing catch-up with the rest of the world, so it is said, and their level of spying hasn't reached the level everyone else has gone beyond,

it seems to me.

Maybe not, maybe some snowden-type guy will release "the Microsoft papers" and we'll know what they know.

I don't know.

[t3589]

Telemetry has been backported to Win7/8 since last year through updates.  So unless you jump through hoops similar to disabling it in 10, they're already spying on you there as well.  My advice is to either A. run Win in a VM that you can control, or B. run win on a 'honey pot' like system that is never used for any personal information whatsoever (no email, no accounts, no browsing, etc.).

 

Keeping them out requires a layered level of snubbery, not only on the user level, but on the network level as well.  There are also custom versions of Win7/8/10 floating around with all that junk stripped out.  Though you'd really have to trust the source before you use them.

 

Someone above said Apple is evil.  Their corporate logo is a bite of the forbidden fruit representing original sin.  Should be a dead giveaway. lol

 

Slackware has been my desktop OS since version 3.  Never looked back.

 

 

EDIT:  Interesting note.  Certain businesses require that most if not all of these spying functions are capable of being disabled.  So on the enterprise level, MS MUST acquiesce to these requirements.  Something they don't have to do for the average user.  Considering that could give you some ideas.

 

For example.

[lurkalot]

have any of you heard about vault 7 no its not fallout do any of you recognise this ( As an essentially new Git user (and a lazy one, who prefers using GUIs over CLIs), I've found that the following workflow seemed to be the easiest one to pick up:)     . I have seen this on labs  in one of the mods . It comes from the CIA ) labs dont ban please  me for this .please check for you selves type in on line Vault 7 or You tube . 

[calranthe]

I love windows 10 and I signed up and ticked all of Microsoft and Google services, I have them so well trained now that 99% of all adverts I see online are now ones I am actually interested in, (now and then I leave my pc on all night on the Fatal crash youtube videos just to mess with there metrics but its all good), A month ago I tried to build a modern dx12 linux gaming machine and it failed on nearly every point plus both my Vive and Rift ran at 25% slower speeds .

 

Yes I know Microsoft and the other evils of the world are recording everything I say and do and thus I act accordingly, Windows 10 is still the fastest gaming kernel when compared in independent tests to Linux/Windows 7/XP  and I am a gamer.

 

Google Analytics knows all of my fetishes desires and needs thus it offers me some really interesting search results . 

[Guest]

Google Analytics knows all of my fetishes desires and needs thus it offers me some really interesting search results . 

 

This is supposed to be a problem, a privacy-killer, not a boast for an OS or a browser    imho.

[Kimy]

I love windows 10 and I signed up and ticked all of Microsoft and Google services, I have them so well trained now that 99% of all adverts I see online are now ones I am actually interested in, (now and then I leave my pc on all night on the Fatal crash youtube videos just to mess with there metrics but its all good), A month ago I tried to build a modern dx12 linux gaming machine and it failed on nearly every point plus both my Vive and Rift ran at 25% slower speeds .

 

Yes I know Microsoft and the other evils of the world are recording everything I say and do and thus I act accordingly, Windows 10 is still the fastest gaming kernel when compared in independent tests to Linux/Windows 7/XP  and I am a gamer.

 

Google Analytics knows all of my fetishes desires and needs thus it offers me some really interesting search results . 

 

See, the thing is that you consent to these features and use them by your own will, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

 

The thing where I disagree with what they are doing is when they stopped asking me if I want to be tracked and analyzed by every Tom, Dick and Harry out there for a bit more of additional convenience. It would be super easy to add a "Don't track me, ever!" toggle to Windows that would just disable all features that track and analyze you. But they don't do that, because they don't respect me enough as both a customer and a human to give me an actual choice if I want to give away my privacy. To them, I am just a sheep. That's what I resent to.

 

Btw. You cannot build a DX12 Linux gaming machine. WINE doesn't support it and won't for a while, if ever. There likely won't be a need for it anyway. Linux uses Vulkan, which is arguably superior to DX12 and similar enough to it that all major engines will offer render paths for both. The performance losses you currently experience in Linux are caused by OpenGL being outdated and inefficient. Every other component in a typical Linux distro is either on par or superior to its Windows counterpart, -especially- the kernel, which is ridiculously better than NT-Kernel.

[calranthe]

Microsoft is not evil, they are just a business and it has been calculated that just 1% of one days data would take 10^7 of our fastest supercomputers to sift through and organise, your credit card, Amazon, Google, Tesco, ATM, Gas station and city cameras take more data than anything else, lets not even talk about tumbler/youtube/facebook all of them take and keep more data than MS could ever handle via Windows.

 

Lets look at windows compared to the much vaunted Linux distro's Microsoft created Direct X a library specifically for games developers and with out the driving force of Dx and microsoft the games we have today the whole culture may never have happened, you pay on average $80 for a windows distro and it is supported for 5+ years, a system that allows you to run nearly every game with a simple install and key press across thousands of software and hardware configurations and while a windows kernel can cope with multiple hard resets and punishment most Linux kernels can die in the first power outage.

 

Its always easy to kick the big target but I do not see anyone else doing better. BTW Vulcan looks great on paper and in theory but lets wait till it has been in a live situation for 12 months with all games that require advanced libraries working on it.  AMD does not have the greatest track record when it comes to software (great graphics cards let down by dodgy software).

 

[Kimy]

Microsoft is not evil, they are just a business

 

They are not more evil than other large businesses, but every sufficiently large company I can think of is evil. Which is why I don't get why society allows companies to become so large that they can abuse their market power, but that's a topic for another day.

 

Vulkan is not a AMD thing btw. If you read the membership list of Khronos Group, you will see that basically every major player BUT Microsoft is a part of it. The first games using it are out btw, and the results look very promising. Mind you that DX12 isn't widely used at the moment either. In this case Microsoft kicked its own arse by making it Windows 10 exclusive, which means developers will need to offer DX11 legacy support for years to come - a weakness Vulkan doesn't have, in addition to (arguably) being better than DX12 anyway.

 

In the end, what I am saying is that the reasons not to use Linux for gaming are getting fewer by the day.

[Guest]

 

I have a suspicion that amd intel and microsoft have been in bed with the guberment for decades now and they just do whatever they are told to do. Once that article came out in mid 2000's or maybe later about how any hard drive made by 2001 or later has a backdoor built into it for guberment agencies it seemed obvious. All this crap is designed to give guberment or worse total control over observation of anyone with a computer not active but passive so if they knew who they wanted to observe they could just pull it up in seconds either from records stored with the alphabet agencies or a direct connection it would just depend on what they wanted to know and how badly they needed to know it. I remember when intel released that unique identifier thing in all pentium III chips saying it would provide security with e commerce sites or whatever but dam did people have a fit about it and so mobo manufacturers had to build in an option to disable it in the bios. Now we have all kinds of crap in any intel chip after 2011 and you can't really turn it all off either. But the guberment doesn't totally need cooperation from intel amd and microsoft they can buy data from third parties any time and those third parties are getting better and better at data mining us to death so that someday any company or guberment will know what to think of someone before they get out of childhood.

 

I heard the same. Must be true.

I also heard that the gubbernmint are alien reptiles. 

Which gubbernmint you ask? All of them since gubbernmints are evil. The world would be a better place without any gubbernmint whatsoever.

Also they don't talk like you and me. So they definitely have to be reptiles.

 

 

There was a TV show years and years ago about huge lizards masking as humans.

their biggie thing was to dangle mice just above their mouths, with scary music playing.

Go back even further to vampires who used lots of extra motions to draw blood.

Swinging their cape, opening their mouth dentist's-office style to hiss and snarl.

   This sounds a LOT like people who watch saying

"I'm watching you"

"I'm watching you!!"

"Better behave, 'cause I'm watching you (hiss, snarl)" 

And those with Linux jump in on the bandwagon to say "Come with me if you want to live"

  Except,

uh,

Linux people go to black hat conferences to learn to hack.

"" to reveal hacking secrets from the previous few months.

AND they can write their own packages and stick them in a distro, promising pink pixels (whatever) and you'd have to be a hacker yourself

(or download a spyware-antivirus) to know if it is legit.

Microsoft scans my computer daily, seeking what child-porn it may devour, and that's freaking creepy, but

All have sinned and fall short of pure innocence.

 

[t3589]

Its always easy to kick the big target but I do not see anyone else doing better.

 

lol  Ma Bell couldn't have said it better.

 

Microsoft is not evil, they are just a business

 

Because they are not in any way politically motivated right?

 

[calranthe]

I am a gamer In the early 2000's like most of us we went down the AMD path, I loved my old Athlon but then Intel finally kicked it into high gear coming out with the core2duo some actually called me traitor because I switched all the house computers over to Intel "dude don't ya know they are EEEEevil!!!" Each year It came time to upgrade the house computers, now and then I would build an amd with the best they could offer only to see last years Intel tech kicking its ass, now this month Ryzen appears and it looks like things may be turning, hope so it would be nice to build AMD machines again.

 

Same thing with linux, I am not blind and at least once a year I pick the best gaming Distro to test and as a Gamer I give no quarter on these tests, when a Linux distro can play all of my Steam/Origin/Uplay library and all my Hentai games then I will switch the entire house.

 

Linux as some one has pointed out is vulnerable and like most things only give you an illusion of privacy.

 

Yes they can data mine our information and sell it on but this is the age we live in and unless you want to go back to the stone age what choice do we have, if Linux became as popular as Windows and took the number 1 spot, how long do you think it would take for the mega corps to get involved and start turning it into something even worse than windows.

 

Although I will admit, I love playing around with Kali

[D_ManXX2]

 

 

Yes they can data mine our information and sell it on but this is the age we live in and unless you want to go back to the stone age what choice do we have, if Linux became as popular as Windows and took the number 1 spot, how long do you think it would take for the mega corps to get involved and start turning it into something even worse than windows.

 

I hope by that time we get world war III at least this will fix allot more problems in the long run. because most nations will be forced to fully start over. I? think fallout was based on immaginary world war III maybe it is now closer then ever. so we can live that in real life instead of playing it.

[t3589]

It's not about Win vs. Other OS.  Hell, it's not even really about privacy.  It's really about the freedom to choose to opt out of becoming 'the product'.  If that's for you, that's your business.  Personally I think that turning people into faceless commodities by taking advantage of their vulnerabilities is unethical at best, and nefarious at worst.

 

EDIT:  I don't like it when MS does it, just like I don't like it when Canonical 'wants' to do it.

EDITx2:  I would love to hear what Zappa would think about all this right now.  lol

[DoctaSax]

EDITx2:  I would love to hear what Zappa would think about all this right now.  lol

 

I think he already told us his feelings on all that in "The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny".

 

[Krh]

Yes they can data mine our information and sell it on but this is the age we live in and unless you want to go back to the stone age what choice do we have

 

We can communicate our distaste for such practices as consumers and paying customers. Vote with your wallet, that's the consumer's power in this age we live in.

 

Cutting down rain forests for plantations, using child labor in third world countries, hawking off mined data and constructed profiles... there's no reason to let companies get away with the heinous shit they do on the quest for more money. If we just shrug and go "oh well, nothing we can do," they're guaranteed to take it further and further.

[Bazinga]

Despite all the spyware included I'm starting to grow fond of this shitty tablet operating system. And after I turned off all the unnecessary crap like Cortana etc it almost feels like an operating system for Desktop PCs. Almost.

 

There's one thing I really like though, which is the idiot proof way hardware updates are handled by Windows nowadays. I just replaced most of the components of my computer and was afraid that I'd have to reinstall everything, just like in the old days (meaning more than a few years back).

But no, I could simply put the Windows SSD in the new case, connect it to the new Mainboard and boot that shit. And it worked! Even the WiFi network connection is still working fine.

Amazing, there will be a time when even my dog can handle a computer. Mark my words.

[t3589]

 

EDITx2:  I would love to hear what Zappa would think about all this right now.  lol

 

I think he already told us his feelings on all that in "The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny".

 

 

rofl  That's hilarious.  It's unfortunate that so few people are going to get that.

[Blackhearted]

The general problem with Windows is that it's infeasible to disable the spyware functions without killing the update mechanism, which you need to get the security patches and other vital hotfixes. Which you -need-.

 

I'm still using XP and have update turned off for years now without issue.  I use a slew of 3rd party apps for my security and have my browser locked up tight most of the time.  Outpost isn't updated anymore so I shut it's AV off (I prefer on demand anyway so use Malwarebytes) but I still use its firewall and it halts pretty much anything that tries to mess with windows or critical areas of my drives in any way.  Also on a hardware firewall with my router.  Sometimes makes it a pain to view some websites and install stuff though but I still manage and I think the trade off is worth it.

[mangalo]

This is what Linux looks like today, and it's not even tweaked.  I'd say it's pretty close to being an absolute Windows alternative.

 

One of my favorite little features is the ability to connect to my ftp server from the file explorer, it's not much but damn it's convenient

[firehawksh]

Whoa, which Linux is that? If it keeps evolving like that I'll throw Windows away in a heartbeat if I can run the stuff I play with there.

[mangalo]

Whoa, which Linux is that? If it keeps evolving like that I'll throw Windows away in a heartbeat if I can run the stuff I play with there.

 

Linux Mint, a derivate from Ubuntu.  It's pretty good in terms of hardware and drivers compatibility and it's super easy to install (even in dual boot with Windows if the switch is too hard for you).

 

On this screenshot you see the Cinnamon version of Mint, plus the arc theme.

[firehawksh]

That's pretty slick. I never used Linux though, so I'm worried if older games can be run on it or those that require the system to be in East Asian language mode.

[mangalo]

I don't know about foreign languages support but Wine is quite awesome when it comes to use Windows applications on a Unix OS.

 

You can search the Wine database to see how your games will perform : https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=24749

 

I think it's a good thing that Windows is turning to shit, it's making people consider alternatives such as Linux, and the more users Linux has, the better for its future.

[Kimy]

 

There's one thing I really like though, which is the idiot proof way hardware updates are handled by Windows nowadays. I just replaced most of the components of my computer and was afraid that I'd have to reinstall everything, just like in the old days (meaning more than a few years back).

But no, I could simply put the Windows SSD in the new case, connect it to the new Mainboard and boot that shit. And it worked! Even the WiFi network connection is still working fine.

Amazing, there will be a time when even my dog can handle a computer. Mark my words.

 

That's how Linux handled most hardware changes for a while now. *shrug*

 

I swear, if not for the lack of willingness of some game studios to deploy on Linux, we wouldn't even have this discussion here. Tit for tat, Linux is technologically superior to Windows in pretty much every possible way, except it took until 2016 until they released a decent 3D API for it. OpenGL has unfortunately held back Linux gaming for years and is largely responsible for its bad reputation as a gaming platform.