26 ms·

It’s crazy. I used Edge when it first switched to Chromium because it was a nice, clean Chrome alternative with working sync. Today it’s obvious Microsoft can

It’s crazy. I used Edge when it first switched to Chromium because it was a nice, clean Chrome alternative with working sync. Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background.

Melting_Harps 3y ago
> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. Today? Where were you when it's 'free' OS' was 'phoning home' or during it's behemoth days in the 90s-2000s when it forced the most pro-business Government (US) to essentially break it up when it was using it's monoploitic practices too far for even them? I have to use Teams and just logically assume all of what was said or talked about exists on some server somewhere for the employer, LEO or intelengence agencies to retrieve; if Snowden has taught us anything is that M$ is the darling child of the Intelligence agencies in the US for a reason. Using M$ outside of a (forced) work environment is literately like asking to be tracked, monitored of your own accord. Nothing they do should be presumed to be secure until proven a length to be otherwise. It's very likely why it's so bloated and runs terribly, they are optimizing no for UX but for it's real business model: spying. Sadly, and with only a slight tinge of despondence: I've given up on preaching about FOSS to the masses, but with stuff like this it's like asking why people sign up for death cults, it alwasy ends in: Humans just being Humans.
- johnnykree 3y ago
  Please don’t give up praying about FOSS to the masses. It was a post like this that convinced me to try Linux Arch. I will never look back. I didn’t boot into my Windows drive for more than a month now. I just keep a bare installation for online games that don’t run on Linux. For now.
  - intelVISA 3y ago
    It's a noble cause, congrats on freedom. If you feel adventurous you can eventually transcend dual boot to a VFIO setup that helps to keep your bare metal protected from Windows entirely.
  - highwaylights 3y ago
    It’s unfortunate, but there’s not really a FOSS alternative for a general purpose personal-use OS that comes close to Windows. It completely owns that market. There’s macOS and iOS I guess, but they’re not generally available to install on third party equipment. Linux, sadly, is just not at all a consumer OS and never became one. The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years).
    - belter 3y ago
      > The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years) Surely you are talking about Windows... :-)
      - vorticalbox 3y ago
        Linux isn't any better. Take any Debian based os download a .deb and double click it. It's executable by default, opens up in something like Eddie and just asks for a password. Nothing about Linux is really more secure than windows other than the fact it is a small target.
        SR2Z 3y ago
        Knowing the root password for a machine is meant to grant you full control over that machine... You literally just described an .exe or .msi.
        belter 3y ago
        You are aware that users are not privileged by default in Linux? While historically in Windows...at least until UAC and Windows 2008... Not sure what the example proves. The simple fact you can compile your kernel, have a strong model with Linux SE, it's just another ballpark. Besides the fundamental aspect that Microsoft are telemetry kleptomaniacs, one OS assumes the user machine does not belong to the user, and Microsoft knows better. Linux assumes it's your machine and nobody else. You can have your own hardened and lighter Linux kernel, with less surface exposure, while with Windows you start with whatever version version of Cortana Microsoft would like to push that week on it's users...Plus all the other unnecessary components that create an almost infinite opportunity of attack vectors. Naturally for Linux, the open source code, makes for a more transparent process, even if I don't subscribe to the idea that more eyes on the code, correlates directly to higher safety.
- silverbax88 3y ago
  I've been railing about all the spying Microsoft Teams is doing across corporate networks for the last year or so, to nothing but shrugs, 'I'm sure Microsoft isn't using our business data' or similar responses. People never learn.
  - pxc 3y ago
    We use Teams at work. We also use almost everything else Microsoft sells, which is probably the only reason we use Teams. I suspect that the kind of company that uses Teams is just not very interested in critically evaluating Microsoft or competitors (relative to companies that are evaluating specific Microsoft products as one-offs). They're already bought into an ecosystem whose main strength as a collection of mediocre (or worse) software is that it is integrated with all the other mediocre software in the collection. If they don't 'trust Microsoft', where does that leave them? So they 'trust Microsoft', and that's the end of that.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    Never mind teams, imagine what kind of data Office gives them. Every email, every word doc, and every excel document created by nearly every company on the globe is theirs to pick through! It must provide insane levels of insight into what most companies (even those that compete with MS) are doing.
    - silverbax88 3y ago
      Teams takes all that data, plus all the conversations about it, including audio, IMs, web browsing, etc and creates reports tying it all together. Teams is the 'one ring to rule them all' that allows it to all be coordinated in context. It takes all of data that Microsoft can gather from other apps and weaponizes it into a competitive advantage against its own customers. For example, if Bob at ABC Company is working on an MS Word doc, yes, Microsoft can steal that data. But it's worse when Teams is on a corporate network, because maybe Bob has a Teams meeting, pulls up the Word doc, discusses it with coworkers Sarah and Bill, and now Teams tracks the doc, the conversation, who was in the conversation and what the conversation was about. It tracks the email conversation that follows. All of this is proprietary information. Teams has handed Microsoft the internal working projects, context, thoughts and strategy of ABC Company.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  > is that M$ https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m 21 years ago: "It is difficult enough already to engage Gabriel in a discussion of security or Digital Rights Management, and spelling Microsoft M-dollar sign is probably the best way I can think of to get your mail deleted. He might even have a rule that does it now, I haven't asked. When Ross Anderson penned his now famous Palladium FAQ, which reads somewhere between a toaster manual and grim speculative fiction, you will note that he never deploys the dollar sign, because he would like to be taken seriously."
  - account42 3y ago
    People can come up with whatever reasons to ignore others that they want. That doesn't make those reasons reasonable, it just makes those people ignorant.
unethical_ban 3y ago
Vivaldi is my browser of choice due to sync, and because Firefox as much as I love it does not perform well when scrolling on mobile. Of course, Firefox has sync as well.
- johnnykree 3y ago
  Firefox is my favorite browser. Not because I like it more than other browsers. But I think it is very important that there is not just a single browser engine on the market. Chromium has too much market share. And although it is open source google dictated what features get in. We shouldn’t trust one company with that much power.
  - basq 3y ago
    I've been using FF more lately because it has a functioning ad block. Mobile web has become borderline unusable with the amount of ads that get shoved in your face. It's not enough to take up 90% of the screen, it has to pop up autoplay videos with audio over that last 10%.
    - dmvdoug 3y ago
      Preach. Using my iPhone, I clicked on an HN link to Tom’s Hardware earlier today. Readable text occupied less than 1/4 of the screen. Everything else was taken by various banners, modals, etc. I tried to scroll down a little. It jumped back to the top of the page every time I tried, then started reloading itself. So, in sum, I read one(ish?) paragraph of a post before giving up.
- kbenson 3y ago
  I don't have problems scrolling in Firefox mobile that I've noticed, and I don't run flagship phones (I'm running a few years old Galaxy A51). I do run uBlock on Firefox Mobile though, which I'm sure helps immensely, so maybe that's the main difference.
  - dhimes 3y ago
IgorPartola 3y ago
Reminder that MS owns GitHub, LinkedIn, and Mojang.
- scrollaway 3y ago
  LinkedIn could never be trusted anyway :) But I think all these different divisions just act radically different within microsoft. What is absolutely certain is that the Windows team cannot be trusted, as they have shown repeatedly. GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet. I'm sure one day it'll happen; statistically it's more likely than not. But what's the point in pre-empting it, exactly?
  - arcanemachiner 3y ago
    > But what's the point in pre-empting it, exactly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yep, LinkedIn was always bad. But I don't trust GitHub or Mojang to any greater degree. They're all Microsoft, and will burn you sooner or later. > GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet. I abandoned GitHub as soon as MS bought it, but I think my choice was a good one. If I hadn't, then I would have felt betrayed by the copilot stuff.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  >Mojang The real danger. (almost unironically though) I can switch OS, Office is almost obsolete with google + free stuff, their browser/software is terrible and never used, Github(yikes, well, git works..), LinkedIn(and nothing of value was lost). So we really are at the whim of M$ when it comes to Github and Minecraft. Scary. But hey, I used to be obsessed with Nintendo games, and now people have Zelda clones so I don't need to pay games that are graded on the Nintendo Curve.
  - mikae1 3y ago
    Could you name some Zelda clones?
worrycue 3y ago
I just had the Edge Desktop Search Bar show up on my desktop. It just appeared from nowhere. Didn't even know when it was "installed". MS is getting really pushy. They probably see the GPT stuff as their ticket to beating Google in search so they are pushing it as hard as they can to get as many users as they can. I just click "turn off". I don't trust LLMs - all their knowledge is learned from the unreliable internet then you add hallucinations on top of that.
- burnte 3y ago
  I got a laptop in from a user the other day, that shocked the hell out of me, that floating search bar thing. MS is downright creepy the way they slip things in.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - netsharc 3y ago
    With remote work it always fascinates me to see how many people leave the weather (& news) bar displayed next to the tray on the taskbar, this is something that came with a Windows 10 update. People really don't change defaults... I was wondering if I could make a fake one, just add an appropriate icon and change its label to say something like 6000°C Nuclear Holocaust
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      > I was wondering if I could make a fake one, just add an appropriate icon and change its label to say something like 6000°C Nuclear Holocaust Dude, if you ever make this, post it to HN. I'd install that on my computer in a heartbeat.
      - 20after4 3y ago
        And this is why windows is plagued with malware.
mihaaly 3y ago
Above the privacy concerns that MS captures your data that they can have their hands on quick and loose and the way they please their terrible record of ruining long living basic functions is a second reson not to go for laptops with Windows, not trusting it for reliabile functionality and handling any private data of mine. Having a completely isolated separate computer for company data on Windows that belongs to the company - they seem to feel easy about handing over all confidential data to them to store and manage, so I do not need to worry there.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  Lol, explain this to the average European/global business. They pay for "the service" to upload their trade secrets and literally everything to Microsft / the USA. OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, etc etc. And then boast about their high level of "security". The naivity is unbelievable.
  - tester756 3y ago
    Is this naivety if they *trust* MS?
  - dizhn 3y ago
    But but they have a privacy policy. (Same people lose it when you even mention a similar service from Russia or China)
nottorp 3y ago
> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. You weren't around when they were threatening linux with patents and forcing OEMs to not deliver PCs without a Microsoft operating system preinstalled then?
- r00fus 3y ago
  See that’s on-brand with the cutthroat ruthless billG company. So not ideal, but not surprising either. This is anti-customer and needlessly fraught with legal implications. Of course it seems aligned with their hallucinations-enabled OpenAI investment. How much of this is just attempts to feed GPT4?
  - zokier 3y ago
    > See that’s on-brand with the cutthroat ruthless billG company Tangential, but this made me reflect on how "good"/"nice" Ballmer, and Ballmer-era MS, was in a very relative sense. This is slightly startling considering how my mental image of either Ballmer or MS is not great. But now looking back it does feel like relentless anti-competitiveness lessened a bit during that era, and lot of good stuff happened then. Windows 7 probably will go down in history as the pinnacle of traditional desktop Windows, MS giving up on IE gave room for Firefox and (unfortunately also) Chrome, lot of previously proprietary stuff got documented and published (SMB and Office formats comes to mind), and there were some nice product developments. In contrast Gates era Microsoft was very much characterized by strong-arm tactics and throwing their weight around. And now Nadella era feels very aggressive again, pushing the company forwards no matter what; in some ways maybe less vindictive and direct than Gates, but still definitely not nice.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Ballmer was as bad as Gates (and seemed completely unhinged at times to boot), Nadella only looks good next to Ballmer but has done plenty of stuff that should have never ever happened. All of them were present at MS when they pulled their 'millions of lines of code' bullshit in an attempt to kill Linux and harm FOSS.
belter 3y ago
Install Office, use an App that tracks bandwidth use, uploads and downloads, PER app, and be amazed with how many MB/s of data Office sends to Microsoft.
- dunham 3y ago
  Yeah, I switched to the web version of outlook when I noticed (via little snitch) that the desktop app was sending 100's of MB upstream. No idea why it'd need to send much of anything in that direction.
  - trelane 3y ago
    > switched to the web version of outlook I don't understand what you believe this gained you.
    - dizhn 3y ago
      It would decrease their bandwidth use, especially uploads. Much more efficient.
    - dunham 3y ago
      I think I was mainly upset that it was using a bunch of upstream bandwidth (if I remember right, it kept going while idle), possibly also didn't like the disk space that it was using for caching. Nothing important. Arguably a web application is more secure, since it can't read my disk, but that wasn't my concern. At this point, I prefer the UI of the web app (I tried switching back), and since it is a PWA, it behaves like a normal application.
    - RoyGBivCap 3y ago
      A web app can only do what the browser can do. A native app? All bets are off.
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
Rather naive to ignore Embrace/Extend/Extinguish, the dark patterns used to push Win10, the online account hassles, the practically buying-up of OpenAI...
zelifcam 3y ago
> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. Umm. Should someone tell them?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fknorangesite 3y ago
> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. > This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background. Today? We've had almost forty years of being taught that Microsoft can't be trusted about what they're doing in the background.
zeruch 3y ago
"Microsoft can’t be trusted." Never could be.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. I trust Microsoft far more than I trust Google.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I trust them both to exactly the same degree.
pkulak 3y ago
What's crazy is that people are still surprised every. single. time. Microsoft does something like this. It's been 30 years, folks.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  More like 40 years now! I have said ti for a very long time, Microsoft didn't innovate in technology, it innovated in sleazy business practices disguised as technology. It is difficult to find some of the more awful practices nowadays but I was always amazed at just how far they would go, and a little impressed by the thinking, to undermine all opposition. Microsoft is like an Alpaca, if they start getting friendly towards you, it means they are about to attack!
TowerTall 3y ago
I was also an edge user until a few month ago. I have Lenovo X1 Yoga that has had severe overheating problems since I bought it a year ago. Lenovo has been very helpful but unable to resolve the issue. They have changed the mainboard twice. Then I switch to brave instead of edge and now I don't have overheating issue anymore. When I start edge it won't take many minutes before the laptop gets burning hot. I guess the bloat has exceeded what the highest spec'd, top of the line, Lenovo laptop can handle.

Melting_Harps 3y ago

> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. Today? Where were you when it's 'free' OS' was 'phoning home' or during it's behemoth days in the 90s-2000s when it forced the most pro-business Government (US) to essentially break it up when it was using it's monoploitic practices too far for even them? I have to use Teams and just logically assume all of what was said or talked about exists on some server somewhere for the employer, LEO or intelengence agencies to retrieve; if Snowden has taught us anything is that M$ is the darling child of the Intelligence agencies in the US for a reason. Using M$ outside of a (forced) work environment is literately like asking to be tracked, monitored of your own accord. Nothing they do should be presumed to be secure until proven a length to be otherwise. It's very likely why it's so bloated and runs terribly, they are optimizing no for UX but for it's real business model: spying. Sadly, and with only a slight tinge of despondence: I've given up on preaching about FOSS to the masses, but with stuff like this it's like asking why people sign up for death cults, it alwasy ends in: Humans just being Humans.

johnnykree 3y ago
Please don’t give up praying about FOSS to the masses. It was a post like this that convinced me to try Linux Arch. I will never look back. I didn’t boot into my Windows drive for more than a month now. I just keep a bare installation for online games that don’t run on Linux. For now.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  It's a noble cause, congrats on freedom. If you feel adventurous you can eventually transcend dual boot to a VFIO setup that helps to keep your bare metal protected from Windows entirely.
- highwaylights 3y ago
  It’s unfortunate, but there’s not really a FOSS alternative for a general purpose personal-use OS that comes close to Windows. It completely owns that market. There’s macOS and iOS I guess, but they’re not generally available to install on third party equipment. Linux, sadly, is just not at all a consumer OS and never became one. The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years).
  - belter 3y ago
    > The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years) Surely you are talking about Windows... :-)
    - vorticalbox 3y ago
      Linux isn't any better. Take any Debian based os download a .deb and double click it. It's executable by default, opens up in something like Eddie and just asks for a password. Nothing about Linux is really more secure than windows other than the fact it is a small target.
      - SR2Z 3y ago
        Knowing the root password for a machine is meant to grant you full control over that machine... You literally just described an .exe or .msi.
      - belter 3y ago
        You are aware that users are not privileged by default in Linux? While historically in Windows...at least until UAC and Windows 2008... Not sure what the example proves. The simple fact you can compile your kernel, have a strong model with Linux SE, it's just another ballpark. Besides the fundamental aspect that Microsoft are telemetry kleptomaniacs, one OS assumes the user machine does not belong to the user, and Microsoft knows better. Linux assumes it's your machine and nobody else. You can have your own hardened and lighter Linux kernel, with less surface exposure, while with Windows you start with whatever version version of Cortana Microsoft would like to push that week on it's users...Plus all the other unnecessary components that create an almost infinite opportunity of attack vectors. Naturally for Linux, the open source code, makes for a more transparent process, even if I don't subscribe to the idea that more eyes on the code, correlates directly to higher safety.
silverbax88 3y ago
I've been railing about all the spying Microsoft Teams is doing across corporate networks for the last year or so, to nothing but shrugs, 'I'm sure Microsoft isn't using our business data' or similar responses. People never learn.
- pxc 3y ago
  We use Teams at work. We also use almost everything else Microsoft sells, which is probably the only reason we use Teams. I suspect that the kind of company that uses Teams is just not very interested in critically evaluating Microsoft or competitors (relative to companies that are evaluating specific Microsoft products as one-offs). They're already bought into an ecosystem whose main strength as a collection of mediocre (or worse) software is that it is integrated with all the other mediocre software in the collection. If they don't 'trust Microsoft', where does that leave them? So they 'trust Microsoft', and that's the end of that.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Never mind teams, imagine what kind of data Office gives them. Every email, every word doc, and every excel document created by nearly every company on the globe is theirs to pick through! It must provide insane levels of insight into what most companies (even those that compete with MS) are doing.
  - silverbax88 3y ago
    Teams takes all that data, plus all the conversations about it, including audio, IMs, web browsing, etc and creates reports tying it all together. Teams is the 'one ring to rule them all' that allows it to all be coordinated in context. It takes all of data that Microsoft can gather from other apps and weaponizes it into a competitive advantage against its own customers. For example, if Bob at ABC Company is working on an MS Word doc, yes, Microsoft can steal that data. But it's worse when Teams is on a corporate network, because maybe Bob has a Teams meeting, pulls up the Word doc, discusses it with coworkers Sarah and Bill, and now Teams tracks the doc, the conversation, who was in the conversation and what the conversation was about. It tracks the email conversation that follows. All of this is proprietary information. Teams has handed Microsoft the internal working projects, context, thoughts and strategy of ABC Company.
jodrellblank 3y ago
> is that M$ https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m 21 years ago: "It is difficult enough already to engage Gabriel in a discussion of security or Digital Rights Management, and spelling Microsoft M-dollar sign is probably the best way I can think of to get your mail deleted. He might even have a rule that does it now, I haven't asked. When Ross Anderson penned his now famous Palladium FAQ, which reads somewhere between a toaster manual and grim speculative fiction, you will note that he never deploys the dollar sign, because he would like to be taken seriously."
- account42 3y ago
  People can come up with whatever reasons to ignore others that they want. That doesn't make those reasons reasonable, it just makes those people ignorant.

unethical_ban 3y ago

Vivaldi is my browser of choice due to sync, and because Firefox as much as I love it does not perform well when scrolling on mobile. Of course, Firefox has sync as well.

johnnykree 3y ago
Firefox is my favorite browser. Not because I like it more than other browsers. But I think it is very important that there is not just a single browser engine on the market. Chromium has too much market share. And although it is open source google dictated what features get in. We shouldn’t trust one company with that much power.
- basq 3y ago
  I've been using FF more lately because it has a functioning ad block. Mobile web has become borderline unusable with the amount of ads that get shoved in your face. It's not enough to take up 90% of the screen, it has to pop up autoplay videos with audio over that last 10%.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    Preach. Using my iPhone, I clicked on an HN link to Tom’s Hardware earlier today. Readable text occupied less than 1/4 of the screen. Everything else was taken by various banners, modals, etc. I tried to scroll down a little. It jumped back to the top of the page every time I tried, then started reloading itself. So, in sum, I read one(ish?) paragraph of a post before giving up.
kbenson 3y ago
I don't have problems scrolling in Firefox mobile that I've noticed, and I don't run flagship phones (I'm running a few years old Galaxy A51). I do run uBlock on Firefox Mobile though, which I'm sure helps immensely, so maybe that's the main difference.
- dhimes 3y ago

IgorPartola 3y ago

Reminder that MS owns GitHub, LinkedIn, and Mojang.

scrollaway 3y ago
LinkedIn could never be trusted anyway :) But I think all these different divisions just act radically different within microsoft. What is absolutely certain is that the Windows team cannot be trusted, as they have shown repeatedly. GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet. I'm sure one day it'll happen; statistically it's more likely than not. But what's the point in pre-empting it, exactly?
- arcanemachiner 3y ago
  > But what's the point in pre-empting it, exactly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Yep, LinkedIn was always bad. But I don't trust GitHub or Mojang to any greater degree. They're all Microsoft, and will burn you sooner or later. > GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet. I abandoned GitHub as soon as MS bought it, but I think my choice was a good one. If I hadn't, then I would have felt betrayed by the copilot stuff.
hospitalJail 3y ago
>Mojang The real danger. (almost unironically though) I can switch OS, Office is almost obsolete with google + free stuff, their browser/software is terrible and never used, Github(yikes, well, git works..), LinkedIn(and nothing of value was lost). So we really are at the whim of M$ when it comes to Github and Minecraft. Scary. But hey, I used to be obsessed with Nintendo games, and now people have Zelda clones so I don't need to pay games that are graded on the Nintendo Curve.
- mikae1 3y ago
  Could you name some Zelda clones?

worrycue 3y ago

I just had the Edge Desktop Search Bar show up on my desktop. It just appeared from nowhere. Didn't even know when it was "installed". MS is getting really pushy. They probably see the GPT stuff as their ticket to beating Google in search so they are pushing it as hard as they can to get as many users as they can. I just click "turn off". I don't trust LLMs - all their knowledge is learned from the unreliable internet then you add hallucinations on top of that.

burnte 3y ago
I got a laptop in from a user the other day, that shocked the hell out of me, that floating search bar thing. MS is downright creepy the way they slip things in.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- netsharc 3y ago
  With remote work it always fascinates me to see how many people leave the weather (& news) bar displayed next to the tray on the taskbar, this is something that came with a Windows 10 update. People really don't change defaults... I was wondering if I could make a fake one, just add an appropriate icon and change its label to say something like 6000°C Nuclear Holocaust
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    > I was wondering if I could make a fake one, just add an appropriate icon and change its label to say something like 6000°C Nuclear Holocaust Dude, if you ever make this, post it to HN. I'd install that on my computer in a heartbeat.
    - 20after4 3y ago
      And this is why windows is plagued with malware.

mihaaly 3y ago

Above the privacy concerns that MS captures your data that they can have their hands on quick and loose and the way they please their terrible record of ruining long living basic functions is a second reson not to go for laptops with Windows, not trusting it for reliabile functionality and handling any private data of mine. Having a completely isolated separate computer for company data on Windows that belongs to the company - they seem to feel easy about handing over all confidential data to them to store and manage, so I do not need to worry there.

bboygravity 3y ago
Lol, explain this to the average European/global business. They pay for "the service" to upload their trade secrets and literally everything to Microsft / the USA. OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, etc etc. And then boast about their high level of "security". The naivity is unbelievable.
- tester756 3y ago
  Is this naivety if they *trust* MS?
- dizhn 3y ago
  But but they have a privacy policy. (Same people lose it when you even mention a similar service from Russia or China)

nottorp 3y ago

> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. You weren't around when they were threatening linux with patents and forcing OEMs to not deliver PCs without a Microsoft operating system preinstalled then?

r00fus 3y ago
See that’s on-brand with the cutthroat ruthless billG company. So not ideal, but not surprising either. This is anti-customer and needlessly fraught with legal implications. Of course it seems aligned with their hallucinations-enabled OpenAI investment. How much of this is just attempts to feed GPT4?
- zokier 3y ago
  > See that’s on-brand with the cutthroat ruthless billG company Tangential, but this made me reflect on how "good"/"nice" Ballmer, and Ballmer-era MS, was in a very relative sense. This is slightly startling considering how my mental image of either Ballmer or MS is not great. But now looking back it does feel like relentless anti-competitiveness lessened a bit during that era, and lot of good stuff happened then. Windows 7 probably will go down in history as the pinnacle of traditional desktop Windows, MS giving up on IE gave room for Firefox and (unfortunately also) Chrome, lot of previously proprietary stuff got documented and published (SMB and Office formats comes to mind), and there were some nice product developments. In contrast Gates era Microsoft was very much characterized by strong-arm tactics and throwing their weight around. And now Nadella era feels very aggressive again, pushing the company forwards no matter what; in some ways maybe less vindictive and direct than Gates, but still definitely not nice.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Ballmer was as bad as Gates (and seemed completely unhinged at times to boot), Nadella only looks good next to Ballmer but has done plenty of stuff that should have never ever happened. All of them were present at MS when they pulled their 'millions of lines of code' bullshit in an attempt to kill Linux and harm FOSS.

belter 3y ago

Install Office, use an App that tracks bandwidth use, uploads and downloads, PER app, and be amazed with how many MB/s of data Office sends to Microsoft.

dunham 3y ago
Yeah, I switched to the web version of outlook when I noticed (via little snitch) that the desktop app was sending 100's of MB upstream. No idea why it'd need to send much of anything in that direction.
- trelane 3y ago
  > switched to the web version of outlook I don't understand what you believe this gained you.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    It would decrease their bandwidth use, especially uploads. Much more efficient.
  - dunham 3y ago
    I think I was mainly upset that it was using a bunch of upstream bandwidth (if I remember right, it kept going while idle), possibly also didn't like the disk space that it was using for caching. Nothing important. Arguably a web application is more secure, since it can't read my disk, but that wasn't my concern. At this point, I prefer the UI of the web app (I tried switching back), and since it is a PWA, it behaves like a normal application.
  - RoyGBivCap 3y ago
    A web app can only do what the browser can do. A native app? All bets are off.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

Rather naive to ignore Embrace/Extend/Extinguish, the dark patterns used to push Win10, the online account hassles, the practically buying-up of OpenAI...

zelifcam 3y ago

> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. Umm. Should someone tell them?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

fknorangesite 3y ago

> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. > This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background. Today? We've had almost forty years of being taught that Microsoft can't be trusted about what they're doing in the background.

zeruch 3y ago

"Microsoft can’t be trusted." Never could be.

Dalewyn 3y ago

>Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted. I trust Microsoft far more than I trust Google.

JohnFen 3y ago
I trust them both to exactly the same degree.

pkulak 3y ago

What's crazy is that people are still surprised every. single. time. Microsoft does something like this. It's been 30 years, folks.

NovaDudely 3y ago
More like 40 years now! I have said ti for a very long time, Microsoft didn't innovate in technology, it innovated in sleazy business practices disguised as technology. It is difficult to find some of the more awful practices nowadays but I was always amazed at just how far they would go, and a little impressed by the thinking, to undermine all opposition. Microsoft is like an Alpaca, if they start getting friendly towards you, it means they are about to attack!

TowerTall 3y ago

I was also an edge user until a few month ago. I have Lenovo X1 Yoga that has had severe overheating problems since I bought it a year ago. Lenovo has been very helpful but unable to resolve the issue. They have changed the mainboard twice. Then I switch to brave instead of edge and now I don't have overheating issue anymore. When I start edge it won't take many minutes before the laptop gets burning hot. I guess the bloat has exceeded what the highest spec'd, top of the line, Lenovo laptop can handle.