Windows 10

Chancellor Alkorin

Part-Time Sith
<Granularity Engineer>
6,029
5,915
Most of the phoning home is easy to shut off/defeat, for now, anyway. There will always be more, and it won't always be readily obvious. The part that really gets me, beyond the clear comparison to cell phones and their absolute lack of privacy, is that people think that this is a new thing and that Windows hasn't been spying on them for the last 15-16 years. Every version of Windows since 2000 (and XP, after SP1) has spied on various things that you do.

This is the age of Twitter furor, so it doesn't surprise me that people get up in arms about everything, but the scale of the blowback on Windows 10's privacy issues is astounding.
 

Kirsie

Lord Nagafen Raider
58
6
I am an IT person by trade. I most definitely understand that this is not new. That being said, previously, I've turned off whatever I can turn off, and tried not to sweat the other stuff. I just feel like it's getting a bit ridiculous now that every communication device that everyone owns is a free for all, for these companies/organizations to just collect whatever data they want, often not ALLOWING the end user to opt out. I'm sure they'd still get enough data back from people who DIDN'T opt out, that it wouldn't affect them/their studies/their numbers that much.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
24,689
32,076
Apparently Microsoft pushed another update to 7 and 8 marked as important that downloads windows 10 even if you say No. The annoying thing in the tray wasn't enough so now you get a partial screen popup telling you to upgrade to windows 10. Apparently if you downloaded 10 and then tried it and went back it downloads again, as well as if you deleted it. I'm sure there's a registry hack around it.

I know I will come off a conspiracy theorist but seems like Microsoft collecting info now is the "cashing" in part now that they gave it away to nearly anyone who already had a previous version legal or not.
 

Luthair

Lord Nagafen Raider
1,247
85
Most of the phoning home is easy to shut off/defeat, for now, anyway. There will always be more, and it won't always be readily obvious. The part that really gets me, beyond the clear comparison to cell phones and their absolute lack of privacy, is that people think that this is a new thing and that Windows hasn't been spying on them for the last 15-16 years. Every version of Windows since 2000 (and XP, after SP1) has spied on various things that you do.

This is the age of Twitter furor, so it doesn't surprise me that people get up in arms about everything, but the scale of the blowback on Windows 10's privacy issues is astounding.
In the past AFAIK it could all be disabled by opting out.
 

Chancellor Alkorin

Part-Time Sith
<Granularity Engineer>
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In the past AFAIK it could all be disabled by opting out.
Somewhat, but that depends on your definition of "phoning home". Windows Update phones home all the time and contains plenty of info about your system. Sure, you can turn it off (well, you could), but not patching your system is insane.

Everything's cloud-based now. It's not a fad and it isn't going to go away, so the days of your system keeping yourself to yourself are mostly gone. Sucks, but that's life.
 

Chancellor Alkorin

Part-Time Sith
<Granularity Engineer>
6,029
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I'm sure they'd still get enough data back from people who DIDN'T opt out, that it wouldn't affect them/their studies/their numbers that much.
Yeah, no one's gonna argue that Big Data isn't greedy. Data mining is starting to become a big part of everyone's bottom line, so there's no way they'll let go. It's a huge cash cow for them now. The good news is that there will always be a huge following of people that want nothing more than to rain on their collective parade and disrupt their data gathering.
 

BrutulTM

Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
<Silver Donator>
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What exactly are you guys worried about? Every google product does this constantly and no one cares because google doesn't ask permission. And the products are better for it because everything stays updated. All that's going to happen from your precious datas being stoled is that the ads you see will be more likely to be something you are interested in.
 

Skanda

I'm Amod too!
6,662
4,506
With the increase of ad blockers over the past couple of years along with the growing attention on how sites are cheating advertisers by buying fake traffic it will be interesting to see if we're not close to the end of the data scraping bubble. It probably won't ever go away but there does seem to be a crash in the works.
 

Kedwyn

Silver Squire
3,915
80
Added and pruned some files on my phone via USB on Windows 10 and noticed that there were many instances where explorer would hang and say "Phone is busy" and never recover from that. Tried on 3 different devices and had the same error. Phone reboot would sometimes fix it.

Moving files to the device is fine but moving files around the device to say a different folder, even on the same drive, generates the hangup.
 

meStevo

I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
<Silver Donator>
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New fast ring build out now.

Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 10565 | Windows Experience Blog

This sounds like a nice, welcome addition:

Device activation improvements:We have received a lot of feedback from Insiders on making it easier to activate Windows 10 on devices that take advantage of the free upgrade offer to genuine Windows by using existing Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 product keys. If you install this build of the Windows 10 Insider Preview on a PC and it doesn't automatically activate, you can enter the product key from Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 used to activate the prior Windows version on the same device to activate Windows 10 by going to Settings > Update & security > Activation and selecting Change Product Key. If you do a clean install of Windows 10 by booting off the media, you can also enter the product key from prior Windows versions on qualifying devices during setup. Refer to the Insider Hub for more information on these activation improvements including requirements.
 

Mist

Eeyore Enthusiast
<Gold Donor>
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Praise Jesus. Why in the FUCK it wasn't like that from the start?
So they could guineapig early adopters into testing the in-place upgrade mechanism for everyone else?

They did give the option of signing up for Insider and just getting full installs for free.
 

Luthair

Lord Nagafen Raider
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So they could guineapig early adopters into testing the in-place upgrade mechanism for everyone else?

They did give the option of signing up for Insider and just getting full installs for free.
Unfortunately they shoved the Upgrade Me! windows update on everyone and it repeatedly pestered average users.
 

Xarpolis

Life's a Dream
14,144
15,638
I still haven't taken the plunge. I love Windows 7, but hate Windows 8. Both of my current computers are still running Win 7 Pro. Is it worth swapping?
 

Skanda

I'm Amod too!
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I still haven't taken the plunge. I love Windows 7, but hate Windows 8. Both of my current computers are still running Win 7 Pro. Is it worth swapping?
I was in the same boat with Win 8. Totally hated the way it looked. In 10 you never see that shitty ass tile screen. That stupid menu screen on the right side of the monitor is gone. Turn off Cortana, worthless bloat. The default start menu isn't all that bad but I downloaded Start10 anyway and now it is pretty much exactly how Win7 use to look.
 

Eomer

Trakanon Raider
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I still haven't taken the plunge. I love Windows 7, but hate Windows 8. Both of my current computers are still running Win 7 Pro. Is it worth swapping?
I upgraded my home desktop and laptop, but still use 7 at work. I don't even notice the difference, for the most part. And the things I do notice are better on 10. Just do it.