news.ycombinator.com is another amazing echo chamber. Racism going one way, one-sided political views, forum sliding, dissenting posts flagged, down moderated, censored from view. One more Leftwing echo chamber to radicalize, brainwash and mislead. Training techno Marxists to destroy their own critical thinking, side always politically left, ridicule and embrace censorship of their enemies, and to bury awareness that their hungry, deathful ideology has historically killed 100 ~ 200+ million of their own people.
Do the anti-GNU, anti-FOSS advocates of proprietary software ever see theirs? The facts presented in the submission are being largely dismissed without cause.
These things are dismissed because they are dismissible.
For example, the article says:
> Windows 10 sends identifiable information to Microsoft, even if a user turns off its Bing search and Cortana features, and activates the privacy-protection settings.
And links to an Ars Technica article. If you follow this link, you will find that it says nothing of the sort: Windows 10 doesn't send identifiable information to Microsoft as far as this article is concerned.
This is just yet another FOSS fan talking about things they seem to be to arrogant to even try to understand, towards a crowd they don't really know.
I read a few parts of the article and already saw this:
"For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine ID that persists across reboots."
and
"if Web searching and Cortana are disabled, we suspect that the inference that most people would make is that searching the Start menu wouldn't hit the Internet at all. But it does. The traffic could be innocuous, but the inclusion of a machine ID gives it a suspicious appearance."
That's as personally identifiable as you need when you have an identifier locked to the machine that is sent even across reboots. This is even more identifiable than an IP address, even for static IPs (since you can have multiple machines behind it).
Is that sufficient for the claim or do you still reject it? I'm most concerned that you hold anger at FOSS people's "arrogance" over complaints about a bad software package that many people are unfortunately hooked to.
Anti-FOSS advocates here in these comments are behaving poorly; a conclusion they don't like which is supported by facts that are referenced isn't being taken well.
Here's some examples of where it is going wrong in these comments: attacking the messenger, claiming things are false / unsupported when they are, trying to find any minor flaw in what was stated in order to discredit the whole thing, ignoring facts and misleading people about what the source actually says.
That's some nasty stuff. That's Us vs. Them stuff, not "yeah that is a concern, I'm upset about that too!"
It's a GUID (as far as I know) that is randomly generated every 30 minutes. I mean, if people think that's a serious privacy problem, then they shouldn't be using any Internet protocols at all. I mean, you yourself draw the IP address comparison, so where do you draw the line? I mean, doesn't it bother anyone from the so called "FOSS" people that cell phones regularly identify themselves to supporting towers?
(As a brief aside: I don't like calling the FSF supporters in this particular case FOSS people. FOSS is a broad field and not all of it are anti-commercial zealots)
So this leaves me with a problem of defining what "personally identifiable" is. If it's comparable with an IP address, then the argument is so watered down, it's a non-starter. If you say that sending a random 128-bit number into the Internet somehow severely violates my privacy and degrades the usefulness of the software, then it's wrong.
The reason why I call FSF zealots arrogant, is that they don't seem to ever consider the needs of users, but rather try to dictate them. They assume some moral and technical superiority and never consider the possibility that people are OK with the proprietary software's trade offs. I use Windows 10, OS X, and Adobe Creative Cloud among other things. Open source alternatives to those products (in my opinion) are shit. I really don't miss literally days of configuration -when I used to run Linux and FreeBSD machines exclusively 7 years ago- and still being in a constant state of subtle, changing brokenness.
But it is a logical thing. FOSS is a philosophy, and not a business. Expecting it to produce polished end-user products is wrong: it is very hard and people doing it would like to get paid regularly, thank you very much. But that's the economics of it. Look at Ubuntu: they start to move towards a more polished, more coherent product, they become less libre and more commercial. Should we criticize them for it? No.
So unless Windows 10 is tracking my bank transactions, I'm OK with it broadcasting a different GUID to the Internet now and again. If I'll get paranoid about my privacy, I will buy a rugged laptop, put OpenBSD on it and start living in the wilderness.
And if people really want to commit to FOSS, then they should focus on writing clear and good software under public domain or MIT license and stay away from the cheap, patronising, rms-inspired politics.
Hold on a second. You can't just claim XP had longer support except for all those "continually updated OSes" and still have a point left! The submission is not FUD, if it is then please point to any fact it gets wrong.
Why are there are so many defensive anti GNU comments here? Do these actual facts that correctly paint Microsoft in a bad light really upset that many Microsoft users / workers / proprietary software proponents?
Also, what is with legitimate comments being ghosted on this site?
> Hold on a second. You can't just claim XP had longer support except for all those "continually updated OSes" and still have a point left!
Rolling release distros are a different ball game entirely. If you take a copy of Windows 7 you can install every update from the initial release to present day. It might take you a while, but you could do it. Equally with your standard release cycle Linux distros, you could take a 3 year old copy of Ubuntu LTS (for example) and bring it bang up to date. However if you took a 3 year old image of a rolling release distro, you'd find it hugely more difficult to update (if at all possible).
Rolling release distros don't have a set end of life date because they're always incrementally reaching end of life. Particularly as breaking changes become old and unsupported (eg try taking an Arch Linux ISO before the filesystem, glibc and systemd packages and watch just how poorly that ISO updates). So something being "rolling release" doesn't mean it doesn't have an end of life - it just means you don't have to perform OS release upgrades.
> Why are there are so many defensive anti GNU comments here? Do these actual facts that correctly paint Microsoft in a bad light really upset that many Microsoft users / workers / proprietary software proponents?
Why do some people think you must be a fanboy or an employee to defend a product? If you want my honest personal opinion: I hate Windows. Absolutely despise it. Please bare in mind this is just my personal opinion, but I just cannot fathom it's maze of confusing windows, I don't like that it's command line is crippled and that Powershell is about as succinct as War And Peace. I hate the lack of a proper package manager (I could write a novel on how much I hate Windows Update). I hate the poor support for nix networking protocols. I hate the outdated file system support. I don't even find it aesthetically attractive. So there really isn't much I like about Windows.
At work I run Linux and manage Linux and Solaris servers (I'm devops) and at home I run Linux and FreeBSD. I don't own nor run a single Windows system and haven't done so in any serious capacity since the early days XP. I really couldn't be any further from the "pro-Microsoft" pigeon-hole you presumed.
I know there are people who feel the same way about Linux, and that's fine. I wouldn't want a Linux monopoly any more than I'd want a Windows monopoly. And I'm certainly not going to accuse those people of being Microsoft employees :P I just believe in being objective because nothing is perfect and we can't improve things if we look at everything with rose-tinted glasses.
> Also, what is with legitimate comments being ghosted on this site?
Most of the comments that have ghosted are because they were complaining that the article was factual thus couldn't be FUD. But that misses the point of what FUD is. FUD doesn't have to be a lie, it can also be a heavily biased fact that casts the opposition in an unfairly bad light. I personally felt the Windows XP support argument was one example of that; it was factually accurate but conveniently overlooks Linuxes similar issues of long term support
I do have a great deal of respect for GNU and RMS, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with everything posted in their name.
