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Windows Copilot's is showing third-party Ads to Windows users
- g232089 3y agoOf course it has ads. Running an AI in the cloud costs money.
- techdragon 3y agoIt’s completely impossible to get users to pay for it, the users that would pay can’t possibly justify our investment in this amazing technology… /sarcasm
- Teever 3y agoWhen did advertisements become the universal currency?
- doublerabbit 3y agoSince 1999.
- almatabata 3y agoYou cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product. If you charge for your product you will always have people who do not value your product at the price you need to charge. If you make it free you will always get more people to use your products. This helps a lot in getting funding in case of startups. Look at our user base if each user paid 1 dollar we would make billions. Of course you can never turn 100% of your user base into a paying customer. If you want to keep your massive user base you have to resort to ads. If you switch to a paid plan your user numbers will decline and investors will complain. If you do not show ads you will continue to bleed money and make no return on investment. At some point in time having a small paying customer base became unsexy to a lot of investors who wanted to chase after the next potential unicorn.
- anonymousab 3y ago> You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself. Or... iOS?
- tredre3 3y agoUsers pay indirectly for those, they don't see it as a standalone paid product.
- almatabata 3y agoBoth of these get bundled with the Hardware so people do not really consciously chose them. And for windows it seems the microsoft actually started to go the ads route by putting them in windows 10 and 11. And you do not have to pay for the OS anymore to use it as you do not have to activate the license.
- jjulius 3y ago>The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself. Or... iOS? Or hardware, even. Just look at the iPhone...
- almatabata 3y agoEven hardware can become victim to this look at Alexa: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-colossal-failure-on-pace-to-lose-10-billion-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co... https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2023/08/20/jim-rossman-why-is-alexa-suddenly-playing-ads-between-songs/ https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/2023/08/20/ji...
- jjulius 3y agoOne example surrounded by many other pieces of hardware that don't do this doesn't do much to solidify your "cannot" absolute. Edit: Your second link makes it pretty clear that it's not Alexa's lack of profitability that seems to be the issue with regards to ads playing between songs. Apple Music has a free, ad-supported tier - meaning that on whatever device you use it on, you'll hear ads. If your Alexa is set to access your ad-supported Apple Music account, then of course you're going to hear ads.
- g232089 3y agoThis wasn't invented by the internet either. Free newspapers or TV are examples of services funded by advertisements.
- akomtu 3y agoAds is theft (of our attention and of our data) and theft is committed without consent of the victim. It is for this reason ads can "pay" for things that money cannot. Similarly, if the law allowed extortion or blackmail, corporations that embrace it would outcompete those who don't.
- 90-00-09 3y agoIf I am not mistaken, when Marc Andreessen was building the Mosaic browser (1993-ish) he and his co-founders contemplated the monetization model for the web. Since micropayments were not possible, the only obvious choice was ads. In this sense, reliance on advertisement as the primary way to monetize online businesses is as old as www.
- sumtechguy 3y agoI think it goes further back than that. You can find early radio broadcasts where the story was brought to you buy some brand. They would even work the brands into the stories sometimes.
- landhar 3y agoIndeed: > The term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas originally being sponsored by soap manufacturers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera
- lelanthran 3y agoYeah. I believe that's where the term "soapies" originated. Shows originally brought to you by washing powder manufacturers.
- KMag 3y agoG'day, mate? (I've never heard the term "soapies". Is it Australian slang? Having lived a decade in Hong Kong, I got exposure to a fair amount of Australian slang, and this fits the character.)
- lelanthran 3y agoSouth African ... Although I was under the impression that soapies was an American word.
- 3y ago
- xnx 3y agoAttention is the currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
- hot_gril 3y agoDuring the golden age of software piracy.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoEarly newspapers, even paid ones, often had an entire front page of only ads. And then more ads within.
- vkou 3y agoThey aren't a universal currency, they are just something that you can always add to a product that already makes $X, to make $X + $Y, instead. Most firms seem to prefer to make $X + $Y, over making $X.
- kotaKat 3y agoHKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot DWORD TurnOffWindowsCopilot set to 1.
- KMag 3y agoDo any of you know if this just hides the UI, or actually prevents it and all of its components from using any resources other than disk space? Also, expect the registry key to change in a future release, "accidentally" re-enabling it and/or a pester widget to periodically ask you if you really meant to turn it off. It's rather annoying that Windows 10 still periodically pesters me to set up / link a Microsoft account. I expect no less from this AI widget. Thank goodness Win11 doesn't support my laptop (though, I seem to remember getting pestered a few times to upgrade to Win11).
- gigel82 3y agoI don't know about Copilot specifically, but for Widgets, no matter where you disable them (Settings app, registry, group policy) that only hides the UI entry point, while Widgets.exe and WidgetsService.exe happily continue running in the background, taking up RAM, CPU and -of course- doing network activity.
- mycall 3y agoDoes renaming Widgets.exe or WidgetsService.exe disable them completely?
- SoftTalker 3y agoMissed opportunity for MS, they couuld promote Win11 to users who have old laptops, and show them ads for new compatible laptops.
- the_gipsy 3y agoUntil the next update.
- 3y ago
- SpacePortKnight 3y agoMicrosoft couldn't convience people to use Edge, so it is now converting Windows into a web browser.
- bhauer 3y agoWelcome to Windows 98 and Active Desktop.
- HappyDaoDude 3y ago"Sorry start menu is not work. Please install Active X" To quote Richard Stallman. It is time to defenestrate your computer. Either throw windows out of the computer or throw the computer out the window.
- Condition1952 3y agoSadly, the other alternatives are very expensive both in time or money
- themoonisachees 3y agoUsing Linux for doing exclusively what windows allows you to do isn't really time-expensive. When you get into the weeds and try to go outside of that, sure, but before then Linux is a very capable OS with modern browser support, enabling use of 90% of modern workflows.
- mattigames 3y agoI hope the European Union goes in full attack mode against this and force them to make it opt-in (not opt-out), and also demands some economic penalties for trying to use their OS monopoly to impose it.
- gigel82 3y agoThey didn't do it for widgets (news&weather&slimy ads), why would they do it now...
- dtx1 3y agoWindows is dying. Instead of offering this as a free service until it's actually useful enough to make people want to pay for it, they instantly turn to ads. That means that they see no more potential in windows, it's not worth investing into it anymore.
- temporallobe 3y agoWhich is a shame. I use Mac, Linux, and Windows pretty much daily, and I actually like the Windows UI/UX a lot, more than Mac in some ways. With WSL and tools like Bash, you can do a ton of things with Windows and make it more *nix-like than ever. Hell even Powershell is pretty damn good.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoThe one thing Powershell has going for it is, that does treat output as objects or output of commands can be objects, so that there is no need to re-parse everything in the next command.
- k12sosse 3y agoThat and it runs on linux
- jjgreen 3y agoNetcraft confirms it ...
- SoftTalker 3y agoPeople have always paid for it. OEs famously were forced to buy a Windows license for every PC they sold, whether the buyer wanted it or not. The problem today is it doesn't generate recurring payments, which is apparently the way software is supposed to work now.
- gorbypark 3y agoOperating systems were the original subscription service, in a way! If I recall correctly, up until Mavericks and Windows 8, both macOS and Windows were paid updates.
- Narrow2890 3y agoWindows is dead, there's no good reason for most people to use it as their primary OS anymore. Desktop Linux has proper fractional scaling support (or KDE plasma does anyway) AND doesn't catch fire every five minutes now, now's the time to make the switch.
- wbkang 3y agoThis is the first time I hear Linux has better fractional scaling than Windows. Is this because of Wayland or something? Windows always had reasonably good fractional scaling story. Wanted to hear why you think Windoes fractional scaling is broken.
- Narrow2890 3y agoI don't, windows fractional scaling is very good, until very recently there was no good solution on Linux, but Plasma implemented a proper solution a while ago and it works about as well as Window's. This was one of the main things keeping me from making the permanent switch.
- spartanatreyu 3y agoThe only issue is the shitty support for nvidia cards courtesy of nvidia. At least AMD cards themselves are really good now, I just wish there were more of them.
- jwells89 3y agoThere are still some kinks in KDE fractional scaling on Wayland unfortunately, like Aurora window decoration themes not drawing elements correctly. If you want to use something other than Breeze your only choices are a handful of C++ window decoration themes (usually forked from Breeze).
- oooyay 3y agoI think they were remarking that fractional scaling on Linux is no longer a dumpster fire so you can ditch Windows for the reasons that make it a dumpster fire.
- Rapzid 3y agoIs this true for Windows Pro users? Sounds like it could be. I pay for Pro(multiple times) so I have access to Hyper-V and Bitlocker. With some config/opt-out I've enjoyed pretty much zero ads in Windows. Would be a shame if this changes..
- gabereiser 3y agoYes. I can confirm it’s regardless of SKU
- worksonmine 3y agoJesus, I can't imagine paying for something and still getting ads shoved down my throat.
- dagw 3y agoMost people who watch TV are very used it.
- worksonmine 3y agoIn $current_year? Sure some cheap Android TVs are probably littered with suggestions to offset the price, but wouldn't it be strange to pay for Netflix and still have to watch ads?
- dagw 3y agoI meant 'TV' as in TV channels provided by a cable provider, not 'TV' as in a large monitor hanging on your wall.
- worksonmine 3y agoI got that, hence "in $current_year". I don't know of anyone who has a cable subscription and my country even shut down the analog signals. I understand many people are paying for and using products subsidized by ads and personal data, but they usually don't know any better and don't realize they're doing it. If one is infected by a virus collecting every keystroke sold on the black market there is reason to worry. But when it's part of a product sold by a multibillion dollar company and collected on a global scale it's just monetization. Don't forget we're speaking about the PRO version here. I will never understand the people who knowingly don't care.
- lionkor 3y agoFirst fuck up your UI over about a decade, then claim AI is the fix (and not building less hostile UIs)
- yoyohello13 3y agoThis reminds me of that satire post that went around right after ChatGPT release about the future of LLMs. The model basically always found a way to insert product placement or praise of the Chinese government into every other line.
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoHey, that was me! Am I internet famous now? I still have a few pennies of OpenAI credits left if you want to try it: https://future.attejuvonen.fi https://future.attejuvonen.fi
- yoyohello13 3y agoLol, thank you! I love this.
- HappyDaoDude 3y agoEveryone I have shown this too over the last two days absolutely loves it! Hopefully doesn't get hugged to death.
- baobabKoodaa 3y agoThanks! Out of OpenAI credits now. The fallback prerecorded queries are static content so they are free and can be delivered via CDN.
- layoric 3y agoThat's gold, well done and thanks for sharing!
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt's something easy to experience yourself. Just ask ChatGPT (especially GPT-4) to write you some thing, and tell it to also insert sneaky references to a specific product, and/or make it an explicit sales pitch for that product, etc. Press "Send", and watch in horror.
- chrjxnandns 3y ago[dead]
- layoric 3y agoI can't seem to find what the original prompt was in the article? I'd hate injected ads, but if the prompt was literally "What are the best gaming laptops of 2023, how much do they cost and where do I buy them?" I don't think the screenshot response is that bad.
- tracker1 3y agoAnd when I saw add in the start menu search on insiders a couple years ago is why I changed my default not to my Linux drive and started driving it daily.
- ulfw 3y agoWhat is it with Microsoft's infatuation with ads in software?
- simplyinfinity 3y agoWhat's the difference between this and Google showing you ads in search? What's the difference between this and Facebook showing you ads? What's the difference between this and YouTube showing you ads?
- cwales95 3y agoYour OS is meant to be neutral ground. Injecting ads into Windows is just unwelcome. I use macOS and if Apple ever did something similar I’d be jumping ship.
- bmacho 3y agoWhy is Microsoft doing ads? Does that make any sense, or are they just really stupid?
- butz 3y agoSounds like some sort of deranged experiment to see how much abuse Windows users can take.