It would be one thing if it was all MSFT domains, but scorecardresearch.com is pretty terrifying from a data sovereignty perspective.

> which I'd suggest disabling either way.

This isn't alarming because of how it affects tech-savvy users, it's alarming because of how it affects average people.

Yes, it should be disabled by default, just like a lot of unacceptable practices on Windows 11. Just don't need to shoot a video with Wireshark running and talk through DNS lookups to get to that critique.

Or, you could do that. Why shouldn't that be done again?

I honestly don’t believe that an OS should go poking around the internet at all without doing something I specifically told it to.

I’m currently upset with fedora because I can’t figure out how to turn off the automatic update feature, honestly I haven’t tried too hard, and all that is doing is connecting to servers that I would do anyways just on my own timeframe.

If it started sending out every detail of my computing sessions, like TFA is claiming and you are defending, it would be off my computer as fast as I could download another distribution.

I deal with google’s shenanigans with using chrome but that’s my choice, I downloaded the repo data, approved the signing keys and installed it manually.

No edition of Windows is free. This is the very reasonable expectation that if you pay for a product, then you are not the product.

> Win 10 and 11

Windows is just Windows at this point. You are still using the Windows 8 license that your purchased. The version numbers are nothing more than a measurement of how brazen Microsoft is getting.

Show me where I can get a legal copy of Windows that is free to install on a pristine machine and I'll concede that it is free.

Microsoft have simply added a subscription fee to Windows, where you are the subscription fee.

Have been? You didn't have to have an already licensed Windows installation to upgrade? You _exchanged_ your older license for the newer one for free; you didn't get one extra for free.

When you purchase a complete, new computer, the windows license is included in price (OEM). If you build your computer from parts or when you spin a new VM, you have to get a new license. Windows 10/11 Home (OEM) is about 120 EUR + VAT, Pro (OEM) about 160 EUR + VAT. That's quite a far cry from free.

Those of us with longer teeth treat MS just the same as any org: We don't trust a single one of them.

Worshipping any vendor is quite frankly a bit sad.

I tend to avoid having to solve problems now. If I do it tends to go somewhere vendor neutral like python on whatever platform happens to be lying around and not annoying me at the time.

I absolutely hate Microsoft for what they've done to Windows and Office - both of these were fantastic products for desktop users 20 years ago but nowadays they're either a bloated mess (Office) or spyware.

We really need to see PC gaming move completely away from it.

So I'm miserable.

Javascript/PHP are broken compared to C#. Python, Java and Go are verbose and clunky in comparison (although I appreciate being able to write self-contained native code in Go for so little fuss compared to C).

My hate is Python being used for anything outside scripting. Package management is archaic and broken, the quality of libraries is mediocre and the language stewardship has been poor. Particularly the way the 2.x > 3.x migration was handled. I'm still bitter about that. It remains one of the few ecosystems where picking up a project older than 6 months is playing a game of Russian Roulette as to whether you get it working within a week of messing around with broken code and dependencies.

By extension there is a similar toxicity around Visual Studio, and MSSQL somewhat, too. Frequent "Why would you want to use ReSharper!?" or "Rider???? You need to get an employer that can afford Visual Studio." etc.

Unfortunately there is also the side you're talking about. There are a lot of people who are stuck in the mud, and also a lot of people who are just fed up with baseless religious hate from the Python/Javascript crowd and who have never bothered trying those languages (and thus know that it's just projection) and lash out.

The thing is - just look at the work MS do. For years JSON serialisation sucked so we all used NewtonSoft. Now the framework handles JSON properly. So there's hope yet for things such the Date API learning from Noda - and when it does it's miles ahead of any language where people are dumb enough to use an int32 linked to an arbitrary epoch (from one specific OS variant) to represent date/time.

You mean local time zone? Just use UTC everywhere, nothing else will ever work no matter how you design it. DateTimeOffset miiight work too, but you'll extract UTC from it to do anything meaningful anyway, so it may as well be UTC all the way down.

No can do, and frankly is a _very_ reductive stock response.

Anyone working with Date Times more than even months into the future will have pain. Politics will mess you up. You've made a reservation for 16:00 at that fancy pants restaurant with a 6 month waiting list. But now the government have decided that Daylight Savings are too much hassle, and suddenly your 16:00 reservation is off by an hour (or whatever the DS shift is for your region.)

Then there is industry specific scenarios - logistics for example. They know the plane is landing at 18:00, but we haven't confirmed the TZ yet. Not because the airport doesn't know what timezone it is, but because the carrier hasn't confirmed which airport they are landing at. They just know it's at 18:00. DateTime is utterly terrible with "unknown"

https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...

Coming from Java into a C# job, I'm used to mocking downstream dependencies, and even POJOs in some cases, that a class depends on. C# has stuff like Moq, but you _have to_ wrap everything with an interface to mock it since C# seals by default.

Meanwhile, in JVM land, you can use Kotlin, which still seals classes by default, but allows test compiles to open classes by default so you can still mock them.

Every C# thread I read suggests wrapping all concrete implementations with an interface like I'm coding in the 90's for the sake of decent tests, or they talk about how my code must be written poorly for me to be in this situation. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to get _some_ testing into this code I've inherited.

Also, C# doesn't seal anything by default. The methods are non-virtual by default, but that's a very different thing, and there's a good reason for it when it comes to libraries and versioning.

Of course back then they were already full into megalomaniac mode with their attempt at having MSN (Microsoft Network) replace the open internet. No it was not just a news service then. However we all laughed them away.

These days I'm more cynical. And I hate telemetry and spyware which really wasn't a thing in those days for lack of always-on connectivity.

So, is it just my age or are things really worse?

The walled-garden platform did offer some benefits, particularly when you've got an audience new to the medium. This was an era before ubiquitous search, so the fact everything was in a single navigable heirarchy was more valuable. (Remember, this is also back when Yahoo was valuable as a directory.)

Since there was a single gatekeeper, you could promise a safer, more accountable and family-friendly environment for the social channels. Again, appealing to new users.

There may also have been potential for more exclusive content; if the walled-garden clients offered richer media (or the services better kickback) than what can be provided by a normal 1995 HTML tag-soup site running through an early IE or Netscape, it would be worth partnering with them.

I'm actually surprised that the walled gardens went down without a fight. They could have stayed around presenting themselves as a "premium over-the-top channel" style offering-- you can get the same basic internet as everyone else, but for just $5 more, all this extra. I can recall my parents were willing to pay $25/month for AOL when generic dialup was in the $10-15 range to remain part of specific communities inside the walled garden. AOL did an incredibly poor job pivoting as people moved to broadband-- I can recall there was a package to use their propriatery offerings with an external ISP, but it was expensive, until one day it was free because they realized they needed to keep their portal/email audience from imploding totally.

No one is going to buy corporate Macs though because Windows and Office is the best corporate dystopia for the compliance check boxers.

I am an active independent user group member. This isn't just about startups and big tech who are actually fairly low on seat counts. There are huge numbers lots of us corporate dystopias using this stack. On Windows. And you'll have never heard of any of us.

I use .NET/VS/Windows/etc throughout. I recognize products like Azure and SQL Server are a potential trap. So, I use .NET6+ but with SQLite and minimal AspNetCore projects instead of SQL Server and IIS. I could deploy our product to Linux with a few tweaks (i.e. drop System.Drawing image conversion laziness).

At work, we are a Windows-only shop for the most part. My daily driver is still a Windows PC. I have an M1 mbp I use around the house, but I generally dont get emotionally invested in exactly who vended my OS/machine. I chase the UX. I have zero loyalties to trademarks either way. Other factors are give or take depending on moon phases. If the machine feels good and fast, I use it. I don't fight it anymore. There are bigger problems in my mind.

And here we are, back at ground zero.

So that means you're deploying Office. And if you're deploying Office, you're deploying Office 365, and so that means everyone's on Azure anyway, so there's your identity management and vendor lockin.

Yeah, Microsoft is not sexy in the eyes of devs. But they are the dominant platform in just about every industry that's not-tech.

     get https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts

(1) https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-h...

I'm also fairly certain even vanilla Android is a privacy nightmare, and when you add in the preinstalled vendor trash, it becomes 1000x worse.

The only option that exists right now afaik is Linux, and in my experience daily driving Linux on a production/development machine is a nightmare.

It's just, gross.

A better analogy would be this:

let's say I'm a politician at a restaurant. I just want to eat. But, without even opening the menu, the waiter needs to know that I'm there so they can bring the menu to me and greet me. They also bring water in case I am thirsty right now.

BY FAR (if not entirely) this is what Windows does. Do you need updates? Are you an Autopilot machine used in the enterprise? Do any of your installed applications need updates from the Windows Store?

These are all normal things, but people who don't understand how Windows handles these things consider them all spyware. None of them seem to be aware that you can install a telemetry viewer application and see everything sent to Microsoft from your PC if you're so concerned with what is being collected. You can also, from that application, delete the stuff Microsoft has collected about you from that machine. They go straight to "oh I can get views if I complain about Microsoft and sound very offended by it!" So, that's what they do.

It's just annoying.

I set up a VM and installed Windows 11 Home on it and captured all traffic after initial setup and a reboot. I saw nothing going to any non-microsoft domain.

when I boot up a Win11 Home VM and capture all traffic, I don't see any traffic to that host at all, so I can't tell you where that comes from.

However, your statement is not correct. It's true that most system diagnostics / telemetry flow through this application; however, that's only one part of the network requests going out of your system.

There are network requests being made every time you type a character in the start menu (whether or not you have web search enabled). That is not considered telemetry so it does not show up in the Diagnostic Data Viewer. It is also not possible to disable it (there were various group policy and registry settings that worked at some point in time, none of them do any more on latest versions of Windows 11).

Similarly, when the "recommended" container of the start menu refreshes itself, it does a lot of network traffic, none of which is recorded in DDV. And of course, any applications that come with the system but are not core OS (OneDrive, Office, Store, Xbox, Cortana, Explorer, etc.) will send their own telemetry (and other network requests) which do not go through DDV.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic...

might as well compare Win11 to MS-DOS if you're thinking along those lines.

edit: This is probably too glib; certainly more recent Windowses are superior for application developers, which end users benefit from indirectly. It's the user-facing parts of the OS that seemed to have gone in the other direction.

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? (Besides, they're just improvements on what we had before so they don't count).

Apart from the drivers, screen res, multiple monitors, virtual desktops, Windows Defender, updated DirectX, newer hardware support, hypervisor isolated secure password store, app store, WiFi, audio stack with per-program volume control, OCR engine, voice recognition engine, Cortana, online backup and file and settings sync, touch UI and the $8Bn/year Surface line it enabled, improved security, hypervisor backed WSL Ubuntu and Android engines, Windows Sandbox, SSD TRIM support, Bitlocker full disk encryption, ClearType and improved fonts for screen reading, GPU accelerated compositor, face recognition biometric login, QR codes on BSODs, all of...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#New_or_changed_f...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_11

... what have Microsoft added or changed in Windows since XP? btw I don't even use windows and I didn't want any of those things anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...

I feel like every time I "upgrade" Windows I hate it. And that hatred doesn't go away, it just gets normalized.

- “copy file path” in the context menu

- More Window tiling options

They took it away a long time ago, but i missed the option to arbitrarily arrange icons in folders (as you can on the desktop). It used to be very easy to sort through lots of files by moving them into piles of icons and then moving the piles into folders for example.

Also the ability to move items in the taskbar wherever you want. (for example, I want one of 8 open notepad documents moved to the end of the taskbar next to one of the 6 browser windows while all other notepad and browser windows are on the other side)

>At Microsoft, we make every effort to respond to customer feedback, so when we received this feedback from Blizzard and other developers, we decided to act on it. Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have ported the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. This unblocks developers who want to take full advantage of the latest improvements in D3D12 while still supporting customers on older operating systems

Are there? MS even released a fix quite recently for it.

On the other hand, I bet there are plenty more vulnerabilities in Windows 11 that still haven't been discovered yet.

There probably are, but I'd rather have a bunch of vulnerabilities that nobody knows about yet, and that will be patched once people do learn, than slightly fewer vulnerabilities that everyone is constantly trying to exploit and that will be there forever.

Don't be so certain --- the enthusiast community will fix them if they're important enough, even more so if they're ones that "everyone is constantly trying to exploit". Also, no one who knows what they're doing is going to be facing the Internet without a NAT or firewall that blocks incoming connections by default.

"Updates" for XP POS Edition and the like are mostly support filler and don't bring it up to the same security level as a modern OS. I.e.: There's still a bunch of logical vulnerabilities present.

It's pretty hilarious to see history repeat itself at every new Windows launch. Rinse and repeat.

"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!"

You could have an Active Directory domain full of Windows XP machines in 2001.

Considering how much work it took to get wrangle 10 LTSE into a usable Win environment I'd much prefer the simple OS that stayed out of my hair than one that "does so much more" I didn't ask for.

I hope someday software is regulated as tightly as other consumer goods. Abusing one's position as the issuer of security updates to force choices, undesired changes, and bloat down user's throats shouldn't be possible; users should have the option to separate the two.

I'm aware that that seems like a tall ask given the state of "modern" software development, but that's its own can of worms.

If the checking for updates for anything is happening without my consent, that's bad.

> None of them seem to be aware that you can install a telemetry viewer application

Or, more likely, they don't trust it.

because you will not update until forced in most situations.

you simply are not aware of every security fix or vulnerability found, and therefore can't know when you should update.

in the early 2000s there a few very large profile windows viruses that spread like crazy, despite patches being released months or years earlier. the viruses took out networks across the globe and caused considerable mayhem for days.

congress had hearings and several tech companies testified, including Microsoft. congress wanted to know why users weren't forced to update their computers, and Microsoft said that they can't control what their users do.

congress blamed Microsoft for users not patching their systems.

so this happened a few more times and Windows Update was improved continuously going forward.

now you're forced to update, because people who thought they knew all about security failed to update when they should have.

now, users blame Microsoft for forcing them to patch their systems.

It updates when I say it updates, and not a moment before. Congress and Microsoft can GFT if they don't like it.

If you choose to stop hiding icons in the notification area, windows will tell you days in advance of any forced reboot. It does for me, anyway. I don't know why the default is to hide icons down there, but it's probably because a lot of apps like to stay running for some reason and pollute the notification area.

If you unhide all icons there and occasionally glance down at it, you'll see when Windows wants you to reboot. It is only after days of you not interacting with that icon that the reboot is forced. That's how it's been for me, anyway.

You all just want to complain about Microsoft. None of you have anything of value to say. I wish you would all just admit that to yourselves.

That sounds made up. Happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt congress demanded to know why people aren't being forced to update Windows. It's too weirdly specific.

In the early 2000s, nobody was forced to do anything. Even for games, patches were uncommon because people bought the CD-ROM. If the game had bugs, the process of finding the patch, if it existed, was not accessible to most people.

"how did this happen?

> Bugs were found in windows systems which allowed this.

"why didn't you fix them?"

> We did, the patches have been available for months in the worst case.

"then why are computers running your operating system still affected?"

> Because users have not applied the patches.

"why not? are they not encouraged to do so?"

> We make them available but a user must choose to do it.

"Why do you not force this? This seems like an easy way to address the issue of unpatched operating systems."

> We cannot control what the users of our operating systems do.

"Not good enough. Clearly your current stance is not sufficient given the state of the Internet right now."

> Ok.

========

Very much paraphrased, but that's how I remember it going. I watched the thing live on C-SPAN and I don't know if it was blogged about anywhere. Even then the internet hated Microsoft even though most of its users ran Windows.

This is blatantly, flat out wrong. Even the implicit premise here is wrong.

It is not Microsoft’s prerogative to update my device. They don’t own my device. They don’t get to decide when I decide to install new software. That right exclusively belongs to me. Even congress doesn’t get to have a say in this. Users have private property rights. And this, what Microsoft is doing, is bordering illegality.

I can't be why windows updates are forced, because I haven't used windows since 7. I can update a system package, a library or even a kernel without losing a process.

Tell me again why windows needs to force the user to update?

It's more like the politician goes to a huge public event with livestreaming and everyone filming everything and then obviously everyone knows.

I am not defending Microsoft. I just don't get why people would use software they don't like or even trust.

In case you were curious, apparently the full widget removal is via group policy.

gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Widgets > Allow Widgets > {select Disabled} > {restart}

https://www.pdq.com/blog/how-to-remove-widgets-in-windows-11...

All setting Local Policies does is force them off and stops the user from re-enabling them in the Settings (which is likely a good default for organizations).

Now you need a Microsoft account to register even non-365 versions of Office.

Microsoft will update settings in an update at a PM's whim.

They may break registry key bindings due to code changes.

But they generally don't break gpo functionality, because this causes issues for $$$ enterprise customers.

Downside: Believe they cut group policy functionality in <Pro OS versions.

Do you really believe the geolocator and marketing pings you didn't ask for are just to say hello and immediately forgotten?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/manage-con...

https://itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-11-sucks.html

Excellent articles on Linux and other systems too, by the way, if you have the time.