Only problem is, the act of 'rolling back' to your original O/S only LOOKS like it worked. In reality, there is a buncha buncha stuff in the background that gets broken. (like EVERYTHING in task scheduler) Once you 'upgrade' to Win10, the only really effective way of rolling back is to backup your data, and do a clean install of the original O/S.

That's why it's best to make a back up image of the Win 7 (or 8/8.1) installation with Acronis or Macrium Reflect first. I did a clean install with a downloaded iso.

Basically how I see it. Unless you plan on going dark, there is basically no stopping it. Might as well accept your commercial overlords because that's how most of the info is used anyway in trying to sell you something. Doubt they're actually looking at what every individual is doing unless it's something illegal.

But what is and isn′t illegal might change very fast and then we could suddenly find ourselves the targets of investigation even if we′ve not done anyone any harm. Remember, just questioning things could be enough.

Don't see the problem myself, I just use the ad blocker to prevent all the annoying ads and pop ups. Unless you're a serial killer or a pedophile it really shouldn't matter to you.

Oh man, being a married man for over 25 years, I can tell you that questioning anything is a recipe for trouble!

That's how I feel. I don't do anything on the comp that is questionable. Microsoft can follow me as much as they want. If they want to be bored out their minds, more power to them.

Edit: I did not realize I double posted. Sorry mods, I'll fall on my virtual sword in disgrace!

i suppose it would depend on where you live..



there are laws that say they can't retroactively charge you, because at the time you did said crime it was still considered illegal.. they can't really pass a law and then say "okay, anyone who did that in the past 3 years now has to be charged", because at the time in question where the individual did it they were aware no law was currently being broken..


it would be like having a talk with a police officer in a bar over a beer on a friday night, and then 2 months later that cop shows up at your door and say "last night they passed a law yesterday where you can't drink more than 2 beers a night, and i saw you drink 3 of em 2 months ago so your under arrest".. the charges just wouldn't be able to stick


and if they did try to retroactively charge people, any criminal defense lawyer worth their degree would have the charges dropped within a few days..

I think what he meant was if a law changed really fast and you weren't fast enough with the times to realize that what you're currently doing is now illegal. My city job is like that at times. Good thing we have a union for when they pull that nonsense.

Every time I read the title of this thread, I just think of the lyrics to Judas priest's Tyrant. https://youtu.be/X_ZsERw4pWo


Every man shall faaaaaaallll!!


As for the op, I turned updates off of my windows because I didn't want the crap windows 10 for free (nothing is free) and my other computer I just converted to Linux because screw windows.

Yep, could easily pass a law that is very broad and hard to defend against (sedition, for example, could be defined in a vague way, and sounds like the sort of thing a patriot should support), which would make it possible to jail (or even execute, in jurisdictions where capital punishment is still a thing) just abut any dissident.

Not to mention that in places like the USA, no-one actually know how many crimes are in the books, let alone what they all are. So it would be entirely possible to take something a great many people are guilty of and 'update' the punishment. I mean, littering clearly deserves harsher punishment -- fifty years of hard labour sounds about right, hey.

And that's without straight up resorting to trumped up charges; the Soviet Union had no political prisoners, but there were an awful lot of people who were found to be committing crimes like fraud right around the time they said things they weren't supposed it (complete coincidence, I'm sure), or found to be suffering from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia'.

If you don't think any of that could happen in your country, bear in mind that South America used to be on par with Europe -with some nations even exceeding them in things like average income or living standards- around a century ago. The mighty can fall.

Actually this isnt as much of a joke as people seem to make it out to be, last decade Microsoft was investigated by the federal government for using a third party company to gather information on users, and this was information beyond information that it would normally acquire, plus they were storing the data on their users and selling it on to other companies to use, they taken to court and found guilty, it was a list of court cases Microsoft had fronted up, through the 90, and first decade of the 2000,s and lost, so people may wish to point how paranoid some people are, its mostly because, but the evidence is in their favour.

Abusive megacorporations are little different from abusive big government. Windows 10 is Microsoft abusing its near-monopoly.


I'm surprised there haven't been more people demanding regulations to stop spyware and other computerized corporate abuse against the end-user. Western nations in particular need to have a "first-world end-user's digital bill of rights" including:

-a complete prohibition against client-side spyware bundling with any software product: with "spyware" being legally defined as "any functionality that sends more data from the end-user's machine to the server than strictly required for the product's operation without the end-user's specific permission, including data that may be used in any way against the end-user's interests."

-require all software with client-side data collection features to opt the user out of data collection by default, including "tracking cookies" on the Web.

-universal "right to be forgotten" online

-require express permission from the end-user to send collected data to a third party.

-data collection functionality that records and/or sends end-user's private information (mainly keystrokes or confidential files) would be prosecuted through the criminal justice system (rather than merely incurring civil penalties).

-Companies in violation of these regulations would be fined, and severe or repeat offenses could result in them losing their IP rights to the software in question.

----------------------

Unfortunately a large amount of the government in America is owned by Silicon Valley corporate interests - an "end-users' digital bill of rights" isn't going to happen in the home of the Bill of Rights (irony much???). Realistically, the only place where a push for a "digital bill of rights" would likely succeed is the Eurozone (where people actually value their privacy and there's a lot of distrust against U.S. tech companies over NSA and corporate e-snooping/data collection). Almost every year, the Eurozone (or a member nation) takes up a new legal action against a U.S. tech company for privacy violations or monopolization.


The future of desktop/laptop operating systems keeps getting bleaker:

-Windows: Microsoft wants everyone to use Windows 10 as a means of snooping on everyone and eliminating competing digital distribution services (such as Steam)

-Mac OS: A good option if you can afford it. The downsides: Macs also limit the hardware you can use, and they aren't compatible with Windows applications by default (although you could use Wine or something similar)

-Linux: Free UNIX, has its own set of issues and problems. Updates may break your computer. Ubuntu Linux was also bundling semi-spyware from Amazon in a build a few years back - other Linux flavors might do something similar. Another problem with the different Linux flavors: a lot of Linux software gets distributed in source code only, and there might be incompatibilities. Linux isn't viable for people who aren't "advanced" computer users. You get what you pay for.

-Steam OS: A UNIX-based operating system designed to be user-friendly and gamer-friendly. I heard a lot of buzz about it when it first launched and then almost never hear about it now.

-ReactOS: A unique operating system that mixes a Win32-compatible platform with some UNIX design principles. Unfortunately it seems to be stuck in open alpha.


If I knew this mess was the future of computing, I would have majored in mechanical engineering instead of computer science.

Does DOSBox still work with Win10? Getting a laptop soon which has Win10 on it..

I really only use Windows to run games, so I took the free license "upgrades" for the Win7 licenses I owned. From what I've read, Windows 7 and 8 will be getting a lot of the features that require/activate the telemetry stuff via future updates anyway. We'll see if it actually happens.

I have little doubt that the way that Microsoft is using telemetry data is mostly benign. Cloud-based services for voice recognition, typing recognition, search caching, pattern recognition (things like Shazam), etc. are nothing new. They're just somewhat new to the desktop world...they've been commonplace in mobile platforms for years. Windows 10 isn't doing anything that most smartphones don't already do, and I actually believe that the primary purpose of these service is to provide a certain kind of user experience (I hesitate to say "better," as that's going to depend on personal preference...more "mobile-like," maybe, which people seem to largely enjoy I guess). As others have mentioned, it's way too much data for anyone to be using to spy on an individual unless they decide to target someone in particular.

The issue, IMO (and as 1Samildanach mentioned), lies in how much of the data they retain. If they retain the data (and they do...some of it, at least), then the data exists. If the data exists, then there's a pretty strong temptation on someone's part to abuse it. Example: let's say that someone at Microsoft with access to the data wants to stalk an ex...self-explanatory.

A more frightening example: let's say the NSA wants to use this data to root out terrorists, and they're able to convince MS that they should be allowed to do that. They could create a daemon that periodically mines this data...searching for certain kinds of patterns defined by an algorithm they've created to recognize terrorist activity...somehow. When this software identifies a computer matching this set of patterns, it forwards this information to an intelligence anolyst and puts this person or persons on a "watch list." At this point these targets are being watched and monitored. What if this algorithm is flawed and generates false positives (it would/will/is)? This could be a big problem for the person(s) being watched. This can negatively affect someone's ability to travel, their ability to get jobs, their credit, etc., and they might not even know it's happening. This is in addition to the principle violation of privacy, which is, IMO, not a good thing for a government/society to find acceptable...even when it's done in the name of safety.

Anyway, privacy should be a concern for all of us, even those of us with "nothing to hide." It's a door that - once opened - is very difficult to close again, but easy to open wider. People should resist giving up privacy whenever possible to avoid setting bad precedents that could grow into real problems.

I personally use Linux Mint and Debian for most things except gaming. Even then, I've managed to find some good information online for blocking telemetry data from Windows, Ubuntu, Android, and the Chrome browser using my firewall. It seems to work pretty well. I have a DIY router that I put together using a cheap Intel Atom board from eBay and the pfSense "security appliance" OS. It's pretty easy. From there, you can install several packages that can block traffic based on filters, many of which you can subscribe to and automatically get updates as threats change. Some you have to set up yourself, and that's not quite as easy. I wouldn't recommend it to a non-techie unless you know someone that can help get it set up. It would be nice if consumer routers had some of that functionality built in.

tldr;

Is Microsoft spying on you? No, probably not. Is the industry-wide uptick in data collection cause for concern? Yes, especially if the data is being retained. Is the sky falling? No, but buy an umbrella anyway.

I did not know that.

This is a good option. I use EaseUS ToDo Backup (free).

Though I just reinstalled W7, W10, 3 times, each, and SteamOS once. (SteamOS broke my bootloader the first time and nothing I did would fix it, thus, the multiple reinstalls.....minus SteamOS. Looking to put Zorin/Linux on instead, at some point.)

Dammit. I typed up a big post addressing this point... then accidentally closed the tab and lost it all (not using the fancy editor, 'cause it's annoying).

But the core of it is that if we assume this hypothetical algorithm is 99% accurate and being applied to a population of a hundred million with a 'terrorist' population of 1% (1M):

100M*1% = 1M false positives (i.e. wrongly identified as terrorists)
1M*99% = 0.99M true positives (correctly identified as terrorists)
1M*1% = 10,000 terrorists not identified as such

In a country like the USA, that works out as ~3M being wrongly accused by this computer, ~3M actual terrorists accused, and ~30,000 terrorists going unnoticed. It is worth noting that the US military has about 1.43M active personnel -a figure which, I'm pretty sure, includes everyone wearing a uniform, from special forces to drivers- and a reserve of ~1.1M (I think that includes National Guard), coming to a combined total of around 2.5M. So to break even in terms of wrongly and rightly identified threats, the nation with the second most numerous military in the world (China has ~2.3M active personnel) would need to have substantially more terrorists than soldiers.

EDIT: And to head off anyone who'll point out that intelligence/police agencies would check the names that were spat out, rather than dragging them all straight to some dark hole, if we assume that humans get it right 99% of the time, we still end up with about ten thousand wrongly imprisoned people out of our original 100M (though I admit that works out as 0.0001% of the total population, I'll note that this is basically a best-case scenario, and it would really svck to be one of those people, with or without 'enhanced interrogation' being permitted).

And I think that in reality even the NSA wouldn't trust such an algorithm enough to automatically haul that many people off to a federal compound. That said, imprisonment isn't the only potential negative effect of being flagged. At best, it's likely that you'd be monitored (i.e., actually spied-on) by the NSA. At worst, you could be imprisoned, but even having your name flagged as a potential terrorist can have negative effects. Anything that shows up on a background check can put you out of the running for a job, and the prospective employer isn't required to tell you that's why they wouldn't hire you. I've also read about several cases of people having their identities conflated with those of people that were flagged as possible terrorists or drug traffickers by credit reporting agencies, and didn't find out until they were denied a home or auto loan and did their own digging to find out why (again, the prospective creditor isn't obligated to tell you why, and in many cases is not informed as to why for privacy reasons).

I meant to add to my last post:

If you're running Windows 10 and you want to block some or all of the telemetry and tracking data being sent, https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/. There are other tools out there that were made for this purpose, but I tend to favor that one mostly because it's made by a known trustworthy developer. A lot of the filters I use on my firewall were created by watching what that software does to block sending of the data. https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 also seems to be popular, and allows you to selectively turn features on and off, but I'm not familiar with the developer.

I used ShutUp10 originally but just tried SB Anti-Beacon. It seems to block more than SU10 did. (Under 'Optional'.) All but one of the options (Telemetry Hosts) was already blocked when I ran it on the 'Protection' (main) page.

I think I like SB's version better now.