For people who say you should read the contract before agreeing to it. What about the hundreds of thousands? No, millions of people buying new windows laptops every year. Are they presented with any kind of agreement? I don't think so.
They are. It is a huge problem that companies are allowed to do clickwrap bullshit with no human-comprehensible summary. But people are agreeing to this stuff.
I keep flip-flopping between Kate and pycharm community. I prefer Kate's LSP access, but pycharm's management of multiple projects is great.
I wish I could easily set up Kate so it would open random text documents in a separate session from my session that's running a certain project. And I wish it were aware of whether a session is running on the same activity. (In fact what I'd really like is per-activity Kate sessions).
Trouble is, I'm not good enough at C++ to make a merge request for those features.
Tbh, it just fits my workflow better. I would find myself editing stuff in nano more so than something like vscode because navigation in a file browser gets a little clunky for me. So it seemed fitting to learn neovim. I find the features more of a nuisance than a benefit at this stage and I want to properly understand how to use the underlying technologies these programs extract away.
I typically know exactly what I'm looking for and if I need more help I could check something out like fuzzy find. Those search boxes on file browsers are hit and miss for me, especially with Dot files. I store my scripts in a folder called .scripts and I reference them alot while building my apps.
Actually most my apps start out as scripts because prototyping is easier when you don't initially worry about UI or optimization and focus on the core functionality.
"just legal consent"... I mean sure, but you know how stupid most people are, right? There is no way to get the type of consent you want from them for any slightly complex topic.
Your point of view makes sense. In my opinion though, when you agree without reading the terms, you're basically saying "you're allowed to do whatever you want"
You are consenting, not with this or that, but with anything regarding that product, probably because you trust the company, or you don't care enough
I think people here are misunderstanding reality evaluation with judgement of value.
Every time you sign up for something without understanding what it is exactly, they are setting themselves up for failure. This doesn't mean that the company is right, or what they are doing is fair and just. Microsoft is clearly morally dubious, but they did technically get you agreement with it. The one who signed up is wrong, not in valuing privacy, but in expecting, even for a single moment, that a corporation would have their best interest in mind. They only have revenue growth in mind, and that's bu the very nature of how their business is organized.
That's why zero trust systems are important, and FOSS is a way of getting it. Being open source allows for anyone with enough technical knowledge to audit every part of the system, so you don't need to trust a businessman
So what you're hand waving away here is legalese and how no one can understand much of it even if they did read it. Absolutely no one reads every page of the 50 you're required to sign when buying a house, for example.
But we have trust that society wouldn't allow us to buy a house if people are hiding sneaky shit in the contractual language. Yes we have a few things like variable interest rates but no one is signing away their privacy rights in perpetuity in exchange for the chance to buy a home. We have a society that gives us certain expectations, and quite often those are met.
No, to use a computer we should not have to read 100 pages of documents and understand all of them. It's impractical and that's illustrated by the fact that billions of people so far haven't read any of that shit.
You are right that we ought to be more careful signing stuff, but that's a separate discussion imo. We shouldn't even have the option legally of accidentally agreeing to such self sabotage
Say I buy a tomato. Tomato is sold to me as tomato, grown in a green house. It's a good tomato.
I bring it home and I cut into it to make salsa and find a razor blade. I didn't see any markings on the outside. I don't know how it got there.
I go back to the store and say, "Dude, what the fuck is up with the razor blade?!"
They say, "Oh, we noticed a lot of people buying tomatoes to cut them so we decided to include a razor blade! You're welcome!"
I say, "But I don't want a razor blade. I just want the tomato!"
They say, "Oh....that's too bad. We think you'll really like the razer blade."
I say, "I don't care. I want a tomato without razor blades."
They say, "ok. Just make sure you present this very specific, very distinct bar code to the check out person."
I go and buy another tomato, present the barcode.
I bring it home and it has a different type of blade inside it.
I go back to the store and they say, "Well, you opted out of blade model a. This is blade model b."
I consented to buy a tomato. Not to buy a razer blade.
I consented to install Windows OS, not fucking copilot, Cortana, Xbox central, etc.
I should have full control over my OS, regardless of who makes it. Even Ubuntu Linux had some sketchy adware that had to be removed (this was like Ubuntu 18 or something can't remember).
Most people are too tech illiterate to understand it all. I doubt people would agree to such a level of data collection, if they knew more about it. I believe it can be compared to making illiterate people sign a contract, when they can't even read it.
Yeah this reminds me of the time I argued with a guy who stood firmly by the opinion that because Facebook has terms of service that people agreed to, there was nothing wrong or unethical about Facebook business practices and everyone who used it deserved what they got
I don't use Facebook or any other privacy invading service. My point was that part of the issue is people being lazy and not caring about the terrible things in the terms of service they totally bothered to read.
From my experience Windows have this system program called "CompatTelRunner.exe" that run silently in the background maybe once a month it's send data to M$ and using a lot of CPU power while collecting data, now with Al being pushed to windows who knows what it could be doing in the background without user knowledge
Has what you said been proven and documented anywhere? All I can find is threads of people claiming things, but no actual (investigative) journalism that covers these parts.
Toggling on data collection without informing the user would mean billions of dollars worth of fines in Europe, so I doubt that happens regularly. Still, I don't mind being proven wrong if you got the proof to back it up
Toggling on data collection without informing the user would mean billions of dollars worth of fines in Europe, so I doubt that happens regularly.
More like a few thousand euros symbolic fine and an angry letter saying "don't be an ass again pls our infrastructure depends on you" after years of blatant abuses and anti-consumer practices, followed by an ambiguous law (with positive effects affecting only european users) they will definitely not manage to circumvent withing the next week and a half. Not this time 🤡.
The problem here is the fact that most people just do not give a fuck about this; that's why there's no coverage in the (mainstream) media, why the only people who cares end up just leaving windows and why this kind of options are usually opt-out and they can actually afford to silently re-enable them cuz who's gonna check anyways? Random people ranting on meme communities about my fancy malware?
You seem to forget what kind of fines the EU hands out. specifically against Microsoft in 2004 the EU fined then 500 million. And then another few 100 million.
Has it been proven to happen on Windows 11? Not that I can point to specifically. 11 hasn't been in general use long enough to see a real pattern of behavior.
I was a mixed Windows and Linux user through the full life cycle of the Cortana implementation. The number of times they changed or moved Cortana related settings through the years was just ridiculous. It finally came down to having to manually change registry settings to keep it from scanning your files and messing with basic local search, and even if you did that you had to make sure the registry values were still set after version updates because they would get unset without warning.
I have no trust left for Microsoft, only suspicion.
My windows install enjoys rebooting itself unexpectedly a lot. There is no chance I ever checked a box that said "update then reboot my computer at some time in the future"
No it doesn't, at least not if the update isn't already a month overdue
But a future Windows update will reset them without informing the user.
I've done 3 years worth of updates in one day cause I needed too. Pretty much everything was reset including registry edits, but the privacy toggles were one of the few things that stayed persistent. Maybe it's a EU special feature (wouldn't be the first), but at least here they won't change back silently.
And this update outside active hours will have a good chance to "fix" your privacy settings again. Without you noticing. One basically needs a tool that confirms that your privacy settings are still active. And then wait how long it takes Microsoft to declare that tool as "malware".
I find it hilarious that Linux users STILL continue to hate on Windows Update when memes like this exist.
In my experience, Linux wants to update itself far more frequently than Windows (which is really generally no more than once a month these days), and it DOESN'T EVEN OFFER THE OPTION of automatically postponing it to a more convenient time. Yes, you can always say "not now", but then it'll just keep bugging you again until you say yes.
Ironically, at this point, updates on Linux are basically everything that Windows used to get made fun of in the past (for good reason!), but while the situation has actually improved on Windows, on Linux it's only become worse as distributions grow and updates become even more frequent.
Upgrade to Enterprise
(upgrading to enterprise will also remove ads in settings)
in gpo editor:
Set updates to Manual
set the telemetry level to "Security" in group policy (iirc can also be called "Compliance"). This only works on Enterprise.
opt out of Microsoft accounts. This will force account creation to skip right to local accounts as if MS accounts were never a thing. This only works on Enterprise/Pro.
