
Microsoft loses control over Windows Tiles - hannob
https://www.golem.de/news/subdomain-takeover-microsoft-loses-control-over-windows-tiles-1904-140717.html
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OscarTheGrinch
I've been using classic shell to completely ban tiles from my windows
experience, it does a good job of returning the interface to more or less
windows 7 familiarity.

h̶t̶t̶p̶:̶/̶/̶w̶w̶w̶.̶c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶i̶c̶s̶h̶e̶l̶l̶.̶n̶e̶t̶/̶

I'd be keen to know if anyone else has used this or some other approach to de-
candy-ify their desktop.

Edit: thanks so much for the feedback everyone, the hive mind at its best! I
learned from the cementers below that classic shell has been abandoned and
then forked to a community project here:

[https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu](https://github.com/Open-
Shell/Open-Shell-Menu)

~~~
Stratoscope
The best thing I have found on both Windows 10 and Android to improve
usability is to go into the accessibility or ease of access settings and
disable animations. This makes both systems so much snappier and responsive.

On Windows it makes the Start menu fast and comfortable - instead of having
some things slide in from one direction and others from another direction, the
Start menu just _appears_ instantly. I used to use Start10, but after
disabling animation and deleting the tiles I don't need, I'm just as happy
with the Windows native Start menu. I mostly just use the type-and-search
rather than clicking on icons, so the less fanfare the Start menu presents,
the better.

A couple of other settings I like in Windows 10 are also in the ease of access
settings under the cursor and pointer section. I changed the cursor thickness
to 3 for my high-DPI displays, and found a nice solid black mouse pointer
there too - much easier to see than the default white one.

Whatever OS you are on, take a look through the accessibility settings. That
is where they hide a lot of the good stuff.

~~~
mih
Great tip. The animations never bothered me much, but upon turning it and
transparency off, things are so much snappier. I have absolutely no need for
them on my work machine.

~~~
52-6F-62
I’m probably a glut, but I can’t help but like the transparency features even
when working.

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saagarjha
> The host that should deliver the XML files -
> notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com - only showed an error message from
> Microsoft's cloud service Azure.

Why is this not hosted on microsoft.com, or something that is clearly tied to
them such as microsoftusercontent.com?

~~~
ulldma
Well, Microsoft often uses suspicious looking URLs for their services. E.g.
Office/OneDrive connects to hosts like "oneclient.sfx.ms" and "auth.gfx.ms".
So as a user you have to trust these domains and you also have to trust the
domain management of the island of Montserrat.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
This horrible domain shell-game is really annoying if you have to manage a DNS
filter of any kind.

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sagebird
Um, let the bidding begin?

I'll bid $200 for the domain. I'm sure there are some windows 8 machines that
will never receive the patch. I don't have any nefarious plans besides perhaps
setting each tile to rick roll.

Ok, on second thought, in our society I am sure this would put my ass in jail.
I suppose it could be considered impersonating the companies behind the tiles,
damaging their brands, damaging the Windows brand, running up users network
bandwidth, stealing user's computer resources, and then the liability of an
actual nefarious hacker using it as a vector to attack or spam obscene
advertisements. (Which is kind of what happens when you visit a webpage in
2019 without an ad blocker, but it is O.K. in that case.)

~~~
delfinom
He doesn't have control over the domain. It just so happens it points to Azure
domain records. He then claimed "control" of the "hosting portion" on Azure on
the app service as whatever was there before was gone.

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bingobob
windows 10 start menu is a complete joke it never finds anything within the
apps area of my start menu

~~~
kkarakk
yeah i've noticed i tend to start ignoring windows native explorer
functionality and build my own mindspace for apps and stuff. i didn't notice
until i bought a macbook and realized i could just search apps with finder
when i thought of them instead of the path occupying valuable space in my
mind.

think the functionality broke because of them trying to include cortana
results in the search. it's completely garbage now

~~~
chrisweekly
On MacOS, I recommend Alfred as a free upgrade over Spotlight.

~~~
kkarakk
i thought alfred was paid and closedsource?

~~~
c256
There’s a free (as in beer, not speech) app that does quite a lot, and a paid
upgrade that’s largely about customizing it. The potential customizations from
the ‘power pack’ seemed quite extensive, but I haven’t personally played with
it much.

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jacobush
Very deadpan explanation, almost like it's not a big deal. I like it.

~~~
blkhawk
Its a German website - I would expect that ;)

~~~
verst
As a German I did actually get an impression of urgency / severity the way
this was written. Not everyone understands how Germans communicate as I am
reminded of every day for the past 14 years in the US.

~~~
didsomeonesay
Please share some insights about German-US communication incompatibilities
from this experience, I'm curious.

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kkarakk
So if you want to advertise to a decent amount of people, you can take over
that subdomain now. since ms doesn't care to fix it, i guess it's even
sanctioned?

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coleca
I would suppose that you could do similar attacks if someone used AWS S3 as a
static site backend, then deleted the bucket, since S3 bucket names are global
across all AWS accounts. It would be very difficult to find a target, since it
seems as though people tend to leave S3 buckets around forever (see the recent
"Facebook" leak that was caused by a defunct company leaving public S3 buckets
around w/PII).

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WorldMaker
The ability to create Live Tiles for websites, including automatically based
on RSS feeds, was a great feature that was a shame it wasn't hosted for long
enough that people realized it existed.

I used it to host a couple simple "widgets" such as a NaNoWriMo word counter
that would keep NaNoWriMo statistics front and center on a live tile. Doing it
via a bit of XML hosted on a webpage, and a couple API endpoints that
generated a bit more XML on demand, was supremely easy. It made it simple to
write "pull" notifications.

I'd may see how tough it is to rewrite it with "push" Azure Functions
eventually, but the raw simplicity of doing it as "pull" website was really
easy.

~~~
rando444
You're still looking at the issue from a developer standpoint.

From a client side, all tiles are generally needless clutter.

Even a large amount of savvy tile developers won't resolve the problem of the
general mess they create by existing.

The newer desktops that have start menus without tiles finally feels like a
step in the right direction.

~~~
WorldMaker
I hugely disagree, my love of tiles came from being a user first. The tiles
were great as a user. Much less clutter than the equivalent widgets and
notifications systems on other platforms. With good working tiles, arranged to
personal preference, the Notification Area in the Action Center on Windows is
a redundant mess by comparison.

Tiles gave an opportunity to see a lot of information at a glance, in a much
less obtrusive manner than popup push notifications that get swept into a
notification drawer.

The problem with Tiles wasn't even lack of developers building good Tiles. The
problem was Microsoft compromising the vision on them and weakening the Start
Screen to appease people that wouldn't adapt to change. (It was also maybe
Microsoft not making it easier to set Tiles on Win32 applications, which could
have been enabled much sooner.)

(I will mourn the Tiles if they go away entirely. Just as I mourn the Charms
as being good ideas not fit for this world.)

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baybal2
Does anybody remember RSS based backgrounds of Windows Vista? I think that
URLs of a lot of them are now unoccupied as well.

~~~
nightfly
No, but I loved the "Active Desktop" of Windows 98.

~~~
asveikau
The very mention of Active Desktop makes me think of the sound of a 90s era
hard drive working very hard because of so much swapping. The feature wasn't
kind on the hardware of the day.

~~~
Anarch157a
I remember calls to the ISP I worked for, complaining that the computer would
try to dial the modem every time the computer booted, so we had to teach the
user how to disable that crap.

~~~
jacobush
I worked for an ISP - we used to set the customers start page to the ISP
homepage. Then the CEO suggested we put an autoreload on the homepage, so the
modem would reconnect or keep connection open, so more minutes would be racked
up. My first exercise in saying no for ethical reasons. This seems so
insignificant today... the second was turning down a job to handle outsourcing
of medical records. I said, with the technology you are proposing, there's
just no way we can secure those records. Fun to think of sometimes in today's
break-things-and-move-fast-culture. (Late 90s, both occurrences.)

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ngcc_hk
Got a German cookie warning with English content. Strange.

~~~
slightwinder
It's a german site, the english article is just an exception. They have on
average one english article per year, so they don't bother adapting their site
for other languages.

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Causality1
In the nearly four years since its release, I have yet to see a headline that
makes me feel better about Windows 10 or happier that I'm stuck using it on my
laptop. I see at least one headline a week that makes me glad I stuck to
Windows 7 on my primary desktop.

~~~
cm2187
There are improvments, but none that I can associate to the UI, which I still
think is a massive regression.

Being able to copy paste from the console. SMB3 (i.e. offering encryption if
properly configured). Virtualization was a major leap forward in windows
8/windows server 2012. Http2 support in IIS.

~~~
Causality1
What truly turned me off of Windows 10 was something small but very symbolic.
On past versions of windows, if you want a shortcut to, say, Notepad on the
desktop, you open the start menu, begin typing the name, and when it pops up
in the list you click and drag it onto the desktop. You can also right click
it and hit "send to desktop (create shortcut)."

Windows 10 can't do either of those things. If you try to click and drag a
Start menu search result it does nothing. Right clicking only gives you the
option to add it to the start menu or task bar. So, if you want a desktop
shortcut, you have to add it to the start menu, drag it off the start menu
onto the desktop, and then delete it off the start menu.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
I experienced this problem as well, and is very disheartening. So many basic
operations from good Windows version are either missing or very hard to
discover on Windows 10. There was absolutely no _good_ thought put into its UI
choices.

