6 ms·

WindowsLies/BlockWindows

32 points by chopin 11y ago

smt88 11y ago
It seems incredibly risky to block Microsoft hosts and stop updating Windows. I'd rather Microsoft abused my machine than an attacker. I'm also curious: if someone has the privileges to run something like this, they're probably not under the thumb of an IT department, so why not switch to OS X or Linux?
- tmikaeld 11y ago
  "...why not switch to OS X or Linux" One word: Games.
  - mindcrash 11y ago
    A problem which Valve is currently solving.
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      WINE has been solving it much longer ;)
      - creshal 11y ago
        If by "solving" you mean "adding even more problems". It's a crutch at best and a nightmare at worst. Why would you ever prefer WinE over a native version?
        pmden 11y ago
        >It's a crutch at best And sometimes it is a crutch that Microsoft doesn't provide. I recall Windows Vista causing some pain for old games - such as requiring the Screen/Resolution window open otherwise Starcraft would run with corrupt colours. Wine isn't perfect, and I expect it never will be. But short of a full virtualised Windows XP, it is one of the best ways to run those old games that aren't getting treatment from the likes of GOG.
        cookiecaper 11y ago
        WINE is an amazing piece of software, one of the most impressive out there. I prefer it because it lets me do what I need to do without disrupting everything else I have going on. I do usually have to use a VM since the programs I need most struggle on WINE, but to the extent that I can run something in WINE, I really appreciate it. It's definitely better than having to lose 10GB+ of RAM and 100GB+ of disk to a VM. With games, a VM is usually not an option due to the need to virtualize video hardware; WINE allowed me to play Source-engine games in Linux for hundreds of hours over the years before native ports came out. I wish they would get DX11 support out some day so I can play recent games, though. WINE can make a lot of really cool stuff happen. I suggest you take another look. Disclaimer: I contributed a patchset to WINE 4 years ago.
    - alimbada 11y ago
      They're solving it for the future, sure. According to SteamDB I currently have 269 products in my Steam account of which only 78 are compatible with Linux; I doubt the majority of the rest will ever be ported to run on SteamOS/Linux. Also, not every developer/publisher has - or is willing to commit - the resources to release their games on Linux/SteamOS. It's difficult enough to release a game for Windows that runs reliably on the multitude of hardware configurations out there. Duplicating that effort to release on another OS is a massive undertaking for some.
  - smt88 11y ago
    Dual boot?
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      I dual boot for games. In practice, I start Windows like twice a year. If the game isn't native and doesn't run in WINE, it simply never gets played. Just have too much stuff going on in main OS to stop it all for a few hours while I reboot and play.
      - slazaro 11y ago
        How about sleeping instead of straight rebooting, and then booting to windows, so that when you restart and boot back into Linux you have everything the same way? If you have an SSD it's pretty fast to reboot to a different OS.
        cookiecaper 11y ago
        That's possible, but the problem isn't so much in my session being lost as it is in my services and processes not running anymore. I host a Plex server on my machine that serves the whole family, I rely on it for remote SSH if I need to get into the network from the road, I share files to clients from it, and so forth. Really it's too important to take down very often. I've considered buying a separate box for Windows. I run Windows applications in either WINE or VirtualBox, but with games that don't support WINE, that doesn't work unless you have specific, hard-to-find hardware and an extra GPU. Since games are the only thing I'm missing out on, more and more games are getting Linux native versions, and I don't have much time for games anyway, I haven't actually pulled the trigger on the separate Windows machine yet, but one day I will.
    - rplnt 11y ago
      I never (all right, not never, but at least in the last five years) understood dualboot. Why not just run one OS as a master and then a VM in it?
      - 11y ago
  - dagw 11y ago
    Lots of words: Countless niche, industry or company specific, but incredibly important, pieces of software most people have probably never heard of.
- mindcrash 11y ago
  It doesn't block access to windowsupdate.com, it only blocks access to telemetry ingestion points, and seems to hide the updates which patches the code required to access them into windows 7/8 so they will never get installed (and uninstall them if they are)
  - creshal 11y ago
    So they don't trust Microsoft enough to let them collect core dumps, but they trust Microsoft enough to let them run arbitrary code on their machine…?
    - cnvogel 11y ago
      Maybe people fear that personal data might show up in the collected minidumps? Doesn't sound unreasonable.
      - creshal 11y ago
        Sure. But you still allow Microsoft to dump your entire RAM to an unrelated web server by letting them install random updates.
        cnvogel 11y ago
        ...which requires active malice on part of Microsoft. Whereas automatic upload of core-dumps even under normal non-attack operating conditions might even be forbidden by law when, for example, working with sensitive personal or otherwise classified data.
- aexaey 11y ago
  > why not switch to OS X or Linux To non-Canonical Linux or FreeBSD/OpenBSD please. OSX and Ubuntu spy and expose you too, although Windows is by far the biggest offender here.
  - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
    Here are two real-world (not hypothetical; a (self-employed) person I know actually has these) problems: * The person needs to exchange forms in Word Documents with other people (agencies and public authorities) on a daily basis, and the exact formatting matters, so LibreOffice doesn't cut it. * There is trade specific software for which there is no alternative (open source or paid), which the person couldn't replace with an alternative if there was one (because it's effectively agency mandated), and which only runs on Windows. (And to give you a sense of how special-purpose this is: it has it's own hardware VPN box which you have to put between your computer and the internet.) So it's sad, but the requirement is not "at least as good as Windows" but "Windows".
    - arm 11y ago
      Yeah, that’s probably a major advantage of OS X over Linux; access to native versions of what the general populace would consider 'major' applications. Edit: Well, the edit just done to the parent comment makes my comment mostly useless now. :P At the very least, speaking to the specific example of Word documents, I’m not aware of any features that current Windows Word has that Mac Word doesn’t (that would result formatting not carrying over perfectly).
      - vetinari 11y ago
        Mac Office is not the same as Windows Office. It lacks the extended functionality (i.e. in Excel: PowerQuery/Pivot/Map, Inquiry) or for some reason doesn't work (Mac Excel does not work with psqlODBC - Windows Excel does).
      - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
        Not in the world I'm living in. Windows-only software is far, far more common than Windows+Mac software. (The software I'm talking about is Windows-only. I know you might mean Mac Office.) PS: And because writing portable software, deploying and maintaining it is apparently hard, companies are now switching to web-based solutions. Yay :(
- sz4kerto 11y ago
  Maybe this is suprising to the HN crowd, but there are many people who would never want to move to OSX from Windows (or Linux). I had to use OSX for two years, the only compelling part of it is the proper *nix shell, other than that, it was very unconvenient (and slow) for me (on a top-end MBP).
  - ago 11y ago
    Same here, I only use it because I have to make my applications work on OS-X and to me it is the worst operating system that I've ever had the opportunity to try. I took my time to learn how to do things the OS-X way, but I prefer Linux or Windows a lot. There are things like about it though, like the self-contained application packages, although you can have them on Linux as well, just not as unified.
  - alimbada 11y ago
    Agreed. I've used Windows since 3.1 (MS-DOS before that) and I bought a Macbook a few years ago to learn iOS development. I dabbled with Linux as a desktop OS for a few years too (but that's another story for another time...). As a generally keyboard-centric user I've found OS X to be awful. Inconsistent behaviour when using Cmd+Tab (which switches to most recently used app) versus Cmd+` (which cycles through app windows instead) is frustrating to say the least. Finder is vastly inferior to Windows Explorer and I find myself dropping into the shell way too much just to do simple file management tasks (cut and paste anyone?). Being unable to tile, snap or maximise windows is also rather frustrating; yes, you can fullscreen an app and yes, you can drag and drop another window onto a fullscreen app [in El Capitan] to tile them side by side but that's so clunky it's almost a joke when on Windows I can hold down the Win key and use the arrow keys to snap windows to the screen edges. I could go on, but I'll stop there...
  - smt88 11y ago
    I like Windows, too. I've been using it exclusively for a few months after being on Linux and OS X for years. I hated OS X, but that seems like a personal preference (I rarely come across people who hate it). I was asking because disabling Windows Update (which someone has corrected me, this tool does not do) seems more extreme than switching to a different OS.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  > so why not switch to OS X or Linux For me : Autodesk Software, Silverlight video streams, Microsoft Office & Atmel Studio
  - alessioalex 11y ago
    Microsoft Office is available on OS X.
    - dagw 11y ago
      True, but it's lacking some functionality compared to the Windows version. Also if you depend on third party extensions to Office you probably won't be able to use the OS X version.
    - SixSigma 11y ago
      Aw, bless. If you read the Excel team AMA [1] you'll see the most repeated question is "when will Excel be as good on OSX as it is on Windows". [1] https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_microsoft_excel_team_ask_us_anything/ https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_microso...
- errozero 11y ago
  I use a music production program called FL Studio, which is Windows only, I've used it for over 12 years and am really productive with it. Switching to OSX would also mean switching to different production software with a completely different workflow and losing the fact that I can almost use my current program with my eyes closed. Linux is not a viable option at all for music production.
  - samsaga2 11y ago
    Wine works very very well
- valdiorn 11y ago
  > so why not switch to OS X or Linux? Did you ever consider that some of us actually like Windows?
  - ifdefdebug 11y ago
    Well I think the commentator did consider that. By the way they put the question I think they want to make us feel stupid for liking windows.
    - smt88 11y ago
      By the way I put the question, it was a neutral question. I was mistaken about this, but I thought the tool from the link would disable Windows Update. If someone is that concerned about spying, to cripple Windows and make it unsafe (again, a mistaken impression my part) it seemed more logical to switch operating systems. (I recently switched back to Windows from OS X and Ubuntu because I hate OS X and Ubuntu is too buggy.)
akerro 11y ago
Does it install Linux?
- aexaey 11y ago
  That would be next version of this.
mariusmg 11y ago
Don't block Windows updates. Don't be retarded.
alimbada 11y ago
"M$"? Is the author 12?
- aexaey 11y ago
  Impossible. "M$" spelling is an artefact of at least 10-15 years ago. And author should have been at least 12 back then to pick this up. Regardless, author does have a valid point here, despite somewhat puerile literary style.
mattkrea 11y ago
Just stop using Windows. If you don't play PC games there is little reason to still be using it.
- errozero 11y ago
  There is lots of Windows only software that people rely on other than games.
  - mattkrea 11y ago
    I'm more referring to the people that might look at this and say, "Oh, this looks great. Let me run this." If you have that much of a problem with Windows (as I do) just don't run it--not just a general comment on Windows.
dogma1138 11y ago
Hmm lets see... Autochk\Proxy (acproxy.dll) - Proxy Auto Config, also provides uPNP services for NAT traversal, could cause issues if you have a system proxy configured, some applications (mainly games) might also experience NAT traversal issues, IIRC Steamworks games like CS:GO/CS:S use it for NAT traversal. Disables quite a few Media Center services including services that are needed if you are using your PC for HTPC or consuming some services Netflix's Silverlight player used to use ehDRMInit not sure if this is still the case. It uninstalls several performance and compatibility updates, as well as updates to Windows Update itself which might actually prevent you from receiving updates properly. Host block, well blocks MSN, bing, Skype and some other services which probably have nothing to do with Windows Telemetry, and worse has a script that actually modifies the routes on your machine which are going to be horrible to debug, not to mention outright stupid. echo block www.microsoft.com route -p add 184.31.194.59/32 127.0.0.1 Seriously?

32 points by chopin 11y ago

smt88 11y ago

It seems incredibly risky to block Microsoft hosts and stop updating Windows. I'd rather Microsoft abused my machine than an attacker. I'm also curious: if someone has the privileges to run something like this, they're probably not under the thumb of an IT department, so why not switch to OS X or Linux?

tmikaeld 11y ago
"...why not switch to OS X or Linux" One word: Games.
- mindcrash 11y ago
  A problem which Valve is currently solving.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    WINE has been solving it much longer ;)
    - creshal 11y ago
      If by "solving" you mean "adding even more problems". It's a crutch at best and a nightmare at worst. Why would you ever prefer WinE over a native version?
      - pmden 11y ago
        >It's a crutch at best And sometimes it is a crutch that Microsoft doesn't provide. I recall Windows Vista causing some pain for old games - such as requiring the Screen/Resolution window open otherwise Starcraft would run with corrupt colours. Wine isn't perfect, and I expect it never will be. But short of a full virtualised Windows XP, it is one of the best ways to run those old games that aren't getting treatment from the likes of GOG.
      - cookiecaper 11y ago
        WINE is an amazing piece of software, one of the most impressive out there. I prefer it because it lets me do what I need to do without disrupting everything else I have going on. I do usually have to use a VM since the programs I need most struggle on WINE, but to the extent that I can run something in WINE, I really appreciate it. It's definitely better than having to lose 10GB+ of RAM and 100GB+ of disk to a VM. With games, a VM is usually not an option due to the need to virtualize video hardware; WINE allowed me to play Source-engine games in Linux for hundreds of hours over the years before native ports came out. I wish they would get DX11 support out some day so I can play recent games, though. WINE can make a lot of really cool stuff happen. I suggest you take another look. Disclaimer: I contributed a patchset to WINE 4 years ago.
  - alimbada 11y ago
    They're solving it for the future, sure. According to SteamDB I currently have 269 products in my Steam account of which only 78 are compatible with Linux; I doubt the majority of the rest will ever be ported to run on SteamOS/Linux. Also, not every developer/publisher has - or is willing to commit - the resources to release their games on Linux/SteamOS. It's difficult enough to release a game for Windows that runs reliably on the multitude of hardware configurations out there. Duplicating that effort to release on another OS is a massive undertaking for some.
- smt88 11y ago
  Dual boot?
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    I dual boot for games. In practice, I start Windows like twice a year. If the game isn't native and doesn't run in WINE, it simply never gets played. Just have too much stuff going on in main OS to stop it all for a few hours while I reboot and play.
    - slazaro 11y ago
      How about sleeping instead of straight rebooting, and then booting to windows, so that when you restart and boot back into Linux you have everything the same way? If you have an SSD it's pretty fast to reboot to a different OS.
      - cookiecaper 11y ago
        That's possible, but the problem isn't so much in my session being lost as it is in my services and processes not running anymore. I host a Plex server on my machine that serves the whole family, I rely on it for remote SSH if I need to get into the network from the road, I share files to clients from it, and so forth. Really it's too important to take down very often. I've considered buying a separate box for Windows. I run Windows applications in either WINE or VirtualBox, but with games that don't support WINE, that doesn't work unless you have specific, hard-to-find hardware and an extra GPU. Since games are the only thing I'm missing out on, more and more games are getting Linux native versions, and I don't have much time for games anyway, I haven't actually pulled the trigger on the separate Windows machine yet, but one day I will.
  - rplnt 11y ago
    I never (all right, not never, but at least in the last five years) understood dualboot. Why not just run one OS as a master and then a VM in it?
    - 11y ago
- dagw 11y ago
  Lots of words: Countless niche, industry or company specific, but incredibly important, pieces of software most people have probably never heard of.
mindcrash 11y ago
It doesn't block access to windowsupdate.com, it only blocks access to telemetry ingestion points, and seems to hide the updates which patches the code required to access them into windows 7/8 so they will never get installed (and uninstall them if they are)
- creshal 11y ago
  So they don't trust Microsoft enough to let them collect core dumps, but they trust Microsoft enough to let them run arbitrary code on their machine…?
  - cnvogel 11y ago
    Maybe people fear that personal data might show up in the collected minidumps? Doesn't sound unreasonable.
    - creshal 11y ago
      Sure. But you still allow Microsoft to dump your entire RAM to an unrelated web server by letting them install random updates.
      - cnvogel 11y ago
        ...which requires active malice on part of Microsoft. Whereas automatic upload of core-dumps even under normal non-attack operating conditions might even be forbidden by law when, for example, working with sensitive personal or otherwise classified data.
aexaey 11y ago
> why not switch to OS X or Linux To non-Canonical Linux or FreeBSD/OpenBSD please. OSX and Ubuntu spy and expose you too, although Windows is by far the biggest offender here.
- Ao7bei3s 11y ago
  Here are two real-world (not hypothetical; a (self-employed) person I know actually has these) problems: * The person needs to exchange forms in Word Documents with other people (agencies and public authorities) on a daily basis, and the exact formatting matters, so LibreOffice doesn't cut it. * There is trade specific software for which there is no alternative (open source or paid), which the person couldn't replace with an alternative if there was one (because it's effectively agency mandated), and which only runs on Windows. (And to give you a sense of how special-purpose this is: it has it's own hardware VPN box which you have to put between your computer and the internet.) So it's sad, but the requirement is not "at least as good as Windows" but "Windows".
  - arm 11y ago
    Yeah, that’s probably a major advantage of OS X over Linux; access to native versions of what the general populace would consider 'major' applications. Edit: Well, the edit just done to the parent comment makes my comment mostly useless now. :P At the very least, speaking to the specific example of Word documents, I’m not aware of any features that current Windows Word has that Mac Word doesn’t (that would result formatting not carrying over perfectly).
    - vetinari 11y ago
      Mac Office is not the same as Windows Office. It lacks the extended functionality (i.e. in Excel: PowerQuery/Pivot/Map, Inquiry) or for some reason doesn't work (Mac Excel does not work with psqlODBC - Windows Excel does).
    - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
      Not in the world I'm living in. Windows-only software is far, far more common than Windows+Mac software. (The software I'm talking about is Windows-only. I know you might mean Mac Office.) PS: And because writing portable software, deploying and maintaining it is apparently hard, companies are now switching to web-based solutions. Yay :(
sz4kerto 11y ago
Maybe this is suprising to the HN crowd, but there are many people who would never want to move to OSX from Windows (or Linux). I had to use OSX for two years, the only compelling part of it is the proper *nix shell, other than that, it was very unconvenient (and slow) for me (on a top-end MBP).
- ago 11y ago
  Same here, I only use it because I have to make my applications work on OS-X and to me it is the worst operating system that I've ever had the opportunity to try. I took my time to learn how to do things the OS-X way, but I prefer Linux or Windows a lot. There are things like about it though, like the self-contained application packages, although you can have them on Linux as well, just not as unified.
- alimbada 11y ago
  Agreed. I've used Windows since 3.1 (MS-DOS before that) and I bought a Macbook a few years ago to learn iOS development. I dabbled with Linux as a desktop OS for a few years too (but that's another story for another time...). As a generally keyboard-centric user I've found OS X to be awful. Inconsistent behaviour when using Cmd+Tab (which switches to most recently used app) versus Cmd+` (which cycles through app windows instead) is frustrating to say the least. Finder is vastly inferior to Windows Explorer and I find myself dropping into the shell way too much just to do simple file management tasks (cut and paste anyone?). Being unable to tile, snap or maximise windows is also rather frustrating; yes, you can fullscreen an app and yes, you can drag and drop another window onto a fullscreen app [in El Capitan] to tile them side by side but that's so clunky it's almost a joke when on Windows I can hold down the Win key and use the arrow keys to snap windows to the screen edges. I could go on, but I'll stop there...
- smt88 11y ago
  I like Windows, too. I've been using it exclusively for a few months after being on Linux and OS X for years. I hated OS X, but that seems like a personal preference (I rarely come across people who hate it). I was asking because disabling Windows Update (which someone has corrected me, this tool does not do) seems more extreme than switching to a different OS.
SixSigma 11y ago
> so why not switch to OS X or Linux For me : Autodesk Software, Silverlight video streams, Microsoft Office & Atmel Studio
- alessioalex 11y ago
  Microsoft Office is available on OS X.
  - dagw 11y ago
    True, but it's lacking some functionality compared to the Windows version. Also if you depend on third party extensions to Office you probably won't be able to use the OS X version.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    Aw, bless. If you read the Excel team AMA [1] you'll see the most repeated question is "when will Excel be as good on OSX as it is on Windows". [1] https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_microsoft_excel_team_ask_us_anything/ https://reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3rid26/we_are_the_microso...
errozero 11y ago
I use a music production program called FL Studio, which is Windows only, I've used it for over 12 years and am really productive with it. Switching to OSX would also mean switching to different production software with a completely different workflow and losing the fact that I can almost use my current program with my eyes closed. Linux is not a viable option at all for music production.
- samsaga2 11y ago
  Wine works very very well
valdiorn 11y ago
> so why not switch to OS X or Linux? Did you ever consider that some of us actually like Windows?
- ifdefdebug 11y ago
  Well I think the commentator did consider that. By the way they put the question I think they want to make us feel stupid for liking windows.
  - smt88 11y ago
    By the way I put the question, it was a neutral question. I was mistaken about this, but I thought the tool from the link would disable Windows Update. If someone is that concerned about spying, to cripple Windows and make it unsafe (again, a mistaken impression my part) it seemed more logical to switch operating systems. (I recently switched back to Windows from OS X and Ubuntu because I hate OS X and Ubuntu is too buggy.)

akerro 11y ago

Does it install Linux?

aexaey 11y ago
That would be next version of this.

mariusmg 11y ago

Don't block Windows updates. Don't be retarded.

alimbada 11y ago

"M$"? Is the author 12?

aexaey 11y ago
Impossible. "M$" spelling is an artefact of at least 10-15 years ago. And author should have been at least 12 back then to pick this up. Regardless, author does have a valid point here, despite somewhat puerile literary style.

mattkrea 11y ago

Just stop using Windows. If you don't play PC games there is little reason to still be using it.

errozero 11y ago
There is lots of Windows only software that people rely on other than games.
- mattkrea 11y ago
  I'm more referring to the people that might look at this and say, "Oh, this looks great. Let me run this." If you have that much of a problem with Windows (as I do) just don't run it--not just a general comment on Windows.

dogma1138 11y ago

Hmm lets see... Autochk\Proxy (acproxy.dll) - Proxy Auto Config, also provides uPNP services for NAT traversal, could cause issues if you have a system proxy configured, some applications (mainly games) might also experience NAT traversal issues, IIRC Steamworks games like CS:GO/CS:S use it for NAT traversal. Disables quite a few Media Center services including services that are needed if you are using your PC for HTPC or consuming some services Netflix's Silverlight player used to use ehDRMInit not sure if this is still the case. It uninstalls several performance and compatibility updates, as well as updates to Windows Update itself which might actually prevent you from receiving updates properly. Host block, well blocks MSN, bing, Skype and some other services which probably have nothing to do with Windows Telemetry, and worse has a script that actually modifies the routes on your machine which are going to be horrible to debug, not to mention outright stupid. echo block www.microsoft.com route -p add 184.31.194.59/32 127.0.0.1 Seriously?