4 ms·

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.

by Fartag 11y ago

jevgeni 11y ago
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.
- Fartag 11y ago
  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!"
  - jevgeni 11y ago
    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.

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.

by Fartag 11y ago

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.

jevgeni 11y ago

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.

Fartag 11y ago
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!"
- jevgeni 11y ago
  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.