12 ms·

The base version of Windows 10, their flagship product (if not in terms of revenue, then mindshare) is stuffed full of adverts and defaults on about 6+ options

The base version of Windows 10, their flagship product (if not in terms of revenue, then mindshare) is stuffed full of adverts and defaults on about 6+ options related to telemetry the last time I installed a VM. I think it would benefit large companies like Microsoft to realise that this sort of behaviour has knock-on effects. Every MS product is tainted by this because it ultimately has effects on trust. If it's not making them, or can't be linked to, significant amounts of revenue, it would surely be beneficial in terms of customer numbers to stop doing this. Why? I don't understand, or believe, that they're making significant amounts from this. It feels like bean-counter style decision making that doesn't take in to account the wider picture. Anyone from MS willing to chime in?

bilbo0s 8y ago
>Anyone from MS willing to chime in?... If MS is making money from this, the last thing anyone involved in it will do is tell you how much.
- swiftcoder 8y ago
  And since there's seems to be a GDPR violation in here, the only thing a microsoft employee would be authorised to do is refer you to the official press release.
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  The entire tech sector is being funded with advertising money. Monetization of personal data is the elephant in the room that nobody in the industry wants to talk about ever.
saiya-jin 8y ago
Maybe they want to be more like google, ad-driven - when you compare revenues and overall state of the companies, I can understand why some top managers decided for this. Also testing how much users will allow, which is a threshold constantly moving towards more apathy. Its dumb, dangerous to users and I hope they will get a massive slap on the wrists. But Win10 is out for long time and nothing is happening.
zelon88 8y ago
I run Pi-Hole DNS and Windows 10 is extremely noisy. I'd say half of my top 'blocked domains' are Microsoft owned, and there's only one part-time Windows machine on my network.
- cptskippy 8y ago
  I guess it depends on what's on your network. Here's my top blocked devices (https://i.imgur.com/TQxvnmi.png https://i.imgur.com/TQxvnmi.png) Roku devices are far and away the noisiest devices on my network. Android seems pretty awful too, the higher the version number the more noisy it gets. All of my Windows machines are running with the lowest level of telemetry that Microsoft permits you to set, I don't use any of those reg hacks hosted on github. Interestingly a Windows 7 laptop is much noisier than a Windows 10 laptop. Surprisingly Windows Server 2012r2 makes the shit list too. What's strange though is an always on Windows 10 desktop isn't even on the list. Interestingly Amazon Echo and Google Nest DNS traffic is rarely blocked despite them being the top clients (behind Roku) by a fair margin.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    I mean, yeah, everything is kind of crappy. The DNS logs for my home network are full of proprietary stuff. All of my actual work systems do queries when I use them and that's it. Extremely rarely there'll be a hit out to NTP. It's quite amusing, because by percentage, the systems I use 8 hours a day are barely even represented in the logs (contrast with my Android phone attempting to hit Google DNS and being prevented by the firewall, over and over, _forever_.)
  - jammygit 8y ago
    I used to have a s8 with a firewall. Every 2 minutes it blocked a connection attempt to google 24/7...
macNchz 8y ago
>I think it would benefit large companies like Microsoft to realise that this sort of behaviour has knock-on effects. Every MS product is tainted by this because it ultimately has effects on trust. Those kinds of effects are hard to measure and quantify even if they are critically important to the long term success of a company, whereas the revenue from whatever they're doing with this data is directly reflected in their quarterly earnings report.
eternalny1 8y ago
I'm not supporting the Windows-10 style telemetry (I have it turned off) but I don't think this is about money. Let's take a hypothetical example of where you assign a given user a random ID, based on something (machine ID). You then track what this user is doing, in general, in the operating system. You can find data points such as what % of users discover/use X feature, how many pin applications to the taskbar, use X app with Y app, have night mode enabled, etc. This allows you to expend resources where they are actually needed, to improve the features that the majority of people would find benefit in. And at the end of the day, none of the above features require knowing anything about WHO that person is. Sure, they can be classified into groups based on how they use the software, such as "business user", "power user", or "gamer" ... but not "John Doe at 123 Main Street, Hollywood, California". This is likely all for product improvement and not for $$$. Why do they subject end-users and not opt-in testers for this? To get real world data at scale.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  >but not "John Doe at 123 Main Street, Hollywood, California". How can you be so sure? Between IP addresses and what wireless networks are available you can get a decently precise location for the majority of users. And this is assuming you don't just capture the address and name when they type it in. Okay, so maybe they aren't using it for evil yet. How many times has a large corporation been able to indefinitely resist the pull of an alternative revenue stream where the majority of the cost has already been paid?
  - davidhyde 8y ago
    > How many times has a large corporation been able to indefinitely resist the pull of an alternative revenue stream where the majority of the cost has already been paid? Agreed. They are mining and storing a mineral (our data) that they may enrich and sell (or lose via theft) one day in the future. This is the worrying part. This is a direct violation of GDPR which states that if you don't need the private data for an explicit purpose for the user (not your company) then you are not allowed to keep it.
Forge36 8y ago
The Enterprise version was full of adverts. After running through latest updates, I had to uninstall store apps again. I'm getting a new PC in a week, I fully expect to spend time tracking down a Powershell script to uninstall a bunch of crap (thinking about it: that script was for visual studio to uninstall crap add-ons).
- drewmol 8y ago
  https://github.com/madbomb122/BlackViperScript https://github.com/madbomb122/BlackViperScript I was made aware of this from blackviper.com, a great place for windows service configuration information and reccomendations.
- subraizada3 8y ago
  This may help you with the new PC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156955
ukyrgf 8y ago
Wouldn't they be saving tons by not having to hire QA or do user experience testing? They can just push stuff into the wild and see how users tolerate it.
morpheuskafka 8y ago
This. If they’re convinced that it’s a good path for home users, it needs to be an automatic off for Enterprise editions not an ever changing list of Group Policy and MDM rules.

bilbo0s 8y ago

>Anyone from MS willing to chime in?... If MS is making money from this, the last thing anyone involved in it will do is tell you how much.

swiftcoder 8y ago
And since there's seems to be a GDPR violation in here, the only thing a microsoft employee would be authorised to do is refer you to the official press release.
Tsubasachan 8y ago
The entire tech sector is being funded with advertising money. Monetization of personal data is the elephant in the room that nobody in the industry wants to talk about ever.

saiya-jin 8y ago

Maybe they want to be more like google, ad-driven - when you compare revenues and overall state of the companies, I can understand why some top managers decided for this. Also testing how much users will allow, which is a threshold constantly moving towards more apathy. Its dumb, dangerous to users and I hope they will get a massive slap on the wrists. But Win10 is out for long time and nothing is happening.

zelon88 8y ago

I run Pi-Hole DNS and Windows 10 is extremely noisy. I'd say half of my top 'blocked domains' are Microsoft owned, and there's only one part-time Windows machine on my network.

cptskippy 8y ago
I guess it depends on what's on your network. Here's my top blocked devices (https://i.imgur.com/TQxvnmi.png https://i.imgur.com/TQxvnmi.png) Roku devices are far and away the noisiest devices on my network. Android seems pretty awful too, the higher the version number the more noisy it gets. All of my Windows machines are running with the lowest level of telemetry that Microsoft permits you to set, I don't use any of those reg hacks hosted on github. Interestingly a Windows 7 laptop is much noisier than a Windows 10 laptop. Surprisingly Windows Server 2012r2 makes the shit list too. What's strange though is an always on Windows 10 desktop isn't even on the list. Interestingly Amazon Echo and Google Nest DNS traffic is rarely blocked despite them being the top clients (behind Roku) by a fair margin.
- esotericn 8y ago
  I mean, yeah, everything is kind of crappy. The DNS logs for my home network are full of proprietary stuff. All of my actual work systems do queries when I use them and that's it. Extremely rarely there'll be a hit out to NTP. It's quite amusing, because by percentage, the systems I use 8 hours a day are barely even represented in the logs (contrast with my Android phone attempting to hit Google DNS and being prevented by the firewall, over and over, _forever_.)
- jammygit 8y ago
  I used to have a s8 with a firewall. Every 2 minutes it blocked a connection attempt to google 24/7...

macNchz 8y ago

>I think it would benefit large companies like Microsoft to realise that this sort of behaviour has knock-on effects. Every MS product is tainted by this because it ultimately has effects on trust. Those kinds of effects are hard to measure and quantify even if they are critically important to the long term success of a company, whereas the revenue from whatever they're doing with this data is directly reflected in their quarterly earnings report.

eternalny1 8y ago

I'm not supporting the Windows-10 style telemetry (I have it turned off) but I don't think this is about money. Let's take a hypothetical example of where you assign a given user a random ID, based on something (machine ID). You then track what this user is doing, in general, in the operating system. You can find data points such as what % of users discover/use X feature, how many pin applications to the taskbar, use X app with Y app, have night mode enabled, etc. This allows you to expend resources where they are actually needed, to improve the features that the majority of people would find benefit in. And at the end of the day, none of the above features require knowing anything about WHO that person is. Sure, they can be classified into groups based on how they use the software, such as "business user", "power user", or "gamer" ... but not "John Doe at 123 Main Street, Hollywood, California". This is likely all for product improvement and not for $$$. Why do they subject end-users and not opt-in testers for this? To get real world data at scale.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
>but not "John Doe at 123 Main Street, Hollywood, California". How can you be so sure? Between IP addresses and what wireless networks are available you can get a decently precise location for the majority of users. And this is assuming you don't just capture the address and name when they type it in. Okay, so maybe they aren't using it for evil yet. How many times has a large corporation been able to indefinitely resist the pull of an alternative revenue stream where the majority of the cost has already been paid?
- davidhyde 8y ago
  > How many times has a large corporation been able to indefinitely resist the pull of an alternative revenue stream where the majority of the cost has already been paid? Agreed. They are mining and storing a mineral (our data) that they may enrich and sell (or lose via theft) one day in the future. This is the worrying part. This is a direct violation of GDPR which states that if you don't need the private data for an explicit purpose for the user (not your company) then you are not allowed to keep it.

Forge36 8y ago

The Enterprise version was full of adverts. After running through latest updates, I had to uninstall store apps again. I'm getting a new PC in a week, I fully expect to spend time tracking down a Powershell script to uninstall a bunch of crap (thinking about it: that script was for visual studio to uninstall crap add-ons).

drewmol 8y ago
https://github.com/madbomb122/BlackViperScript https://github.com/madbomb122/BlackViperScript I was made aware of this from blackviper.com, a great place for windows service configuration information and reccomendations.
subraizada3 8y ago
This may help you with the new PC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18156955

ukyrgf 8y ago

Wouldn't they be saving tons by not having to hire QA or do user experience testing? They can just push stuff into the wild and see how users tolerate it.

morpheuskafka 8y ago

This. If they’re convinced that it’s a good path for home users, it needs to be an automatic off for Enterprise editions not an ever changing list of Group Policy and MDM rules.