
Sadly, How Windows 10 Reveals Microsoft's Ethics Armageddon - mortenlarsen
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001117.html
======
deif
Does P2P Windows updates really count as a question of ethics? I don't think
so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
mark_l_watson
This author is really on an anti MIcrosoft tear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
sigzero
"Ethics Armageddon"? Click baity?

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

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

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

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

------
return0
Is it really still a thing to lash out at m$ft as the root of all evil? More
importantly, is an article that calls p2p technology an 'ethical armaggedon'
good for anything other than laughter?

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

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

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

------
amatwl
And the FUD surrounding Windows 10 continues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-professional/](http://www.paragon-
software.com/home/hdm-professional/)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

0\. [http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/](http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/)

------
threeseed
This is utter drivel.

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

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

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

