Windows 10 April Update

[SteamyTea]

Give yourself about 4 hours to download and install.

[ToughButterCup]

Switch on, download,  cook a meal, pop down the pub, comeback, restart. Put it in its place. 

 

Don't let it control you.

Nay borra, Jimmie.

[8ball]

My PC is still on Windows 7........AND ITS BRILLIANT?

 

My Laptop is on Windows 10 and I hate it?

 

We are all in such a rush to get the latest of everything but sometimes it does not mean its better, in my case I would say about 60% of the time.

 

Old kindle reader is brilliant, upgraded to new version and dont like it.

 

Old Amazon echo is brilliant, upgraded to new version and dont like it.

 

Old Samsung Tablet is brilliant, upgraded to a new Tab3 and well meh

 

I could go on but its really really boring....yawn

 

 

[newhome]

13 minutes ago, 8ball said:

My PC is still on Windows 7.

 

Mine too! Hubby’s laptop was Windows 10 and I hated it so haven’t ever bothered with the upgrade on mine. Work is always a million miles behind anyway. We’ve only just moved to Windows 7 from XP lol. 

 

 

[SteamyTea]

I was quite happy with DOS 5 and Windows 3.

But things move on and apparently I can now use Notepad to read and write LINUX and MAC scripts properly (MS did the correct newline and carriage return, the others did not).

 

OS's come in for a lot of stick, but it is usually the packages they are bundled with that is the problem, not the underlying system.

I had a MS Vista laptop for years, never gave any problems.

But then I tend to use portable apps rather than fully installed stuff, the exceptions mainly being MS Office, Adobe Photoshop and Turbocad.

Means when it all goes tit's up I just take my memory stick out and plug it in another PC.  Backups are dead easy too.

[Jeremy Harris]

My main concern with Windows 10 is loss of privacy and granting Microsoft the right to read and copy any file, email, bit of data or whatever that's stored on your machine, be it on the hard drive, USB stick or whatever.  Because it's written into the terms and conditions that you agree to when installing W10, even if you opt out of their "customer experience program" and try to turn off all the data gathering and telemetry, Microsoft will turn it all back on again with the next update.  Anyway, the user-accessible privacy options on W10 are a bit like the buttons on some traffic lights at pedestrian crossings, they give you a feeling that you've done something, but the reality is that you haven't.

 

For those who don't read all the dozens of pages of the terms and conditions before installing software, then this is just an excerpt from the Windows 10 Ts and Cs that might just give you pause for thought:

 

Quote

Personal Data We Collect
Name and contact data. We collect your first and last name, email address, postal address, phone number, and other similar contact data.
Credentials. We collect passwords, password hints, and similar security information used for authentication and account access.
Demographic data. We collect data about you such as your age, gender, country and preferred language.
Interests and favorites. We collect data about your interests and favorites, such as the teams you follow in a sports app, the stocks you track in a finance app, or the favorite cities you add to a weather app. In addition to those you explicitly provide, your interests and favorites may also be inferred or derived from other data we collect.
Payment data. We collect data necessary to process your payment if you make purchases, such as your payment instrument number (such as a credit card number), and the security code associated with your payment instrument.
Usage data. We collect data about how you interact with our services. This includes data, such as the features you use, the items you purchase, the web pages you visit, and the search terms you enter. This also includes data about your device, including IP address, device identifiers, regional and language settings, and data about the network, operating system, browser or other software you use to connect to the services. And it also includes data about the performance of the services and any problems you experience with them.
Contacts and relationships. We collect data about your contacts and relationships if you use a Microsoft service to manage contacts, or to communicate or interact with other people or organizations.
Location data. We collect data about your location, which can be either precise or imprecise. Precise location data can be Global Position System (GPS) data, as well as data identifying nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, we collect when you enable location-based services or features. Imprecise location data includes, for example, a location derived from your IP address or data that indicates where you are located with less precision, such as at a city or postal code level.
Content. We collect content of your files and communications when necessary to provide you with the services you use. This includes: the content of your documents, photos, music or video you upload to a Microsoft service such as OneDrive. It also includes the content of your communications sent or received using Microsoft services, such as the:

    subject line and body of an email,
    text or other content of an instant message,
    audio and video recording of a video message, and
    audio recording and transcript of a voice message you receive or a text message you dictate.

Additionally, when you contact us, such as for customer support, phone conversations or chat sessions with our representatives may be monitored and recorded. If you enter our retail stores, your image may be captured by our security cameras.

 

Microsoft are moving their business model from one where you pay for an operating system licence to one where they earn revenue from your data, much like Facebook does, and Google does, especially with Android (Android constantly streams data to Google servers all the time, I found, even with all the privacy settings set to turn off as much data sharing as you can).

 

Right now, Microsoft are adamant that they are not sharing the data they collect from you with anyone else, but it's very clear from the terms and conditions above that if you install and use W10 you have given them explicit consent to access any of your data they wish.  Personally I feel this is a bit OTT, not because I have anything that I want to hide, but just because I would rather that the content of letters I draft to my doctor, insurer, bank, etc remain private, and don't end up having data extracted from them that ends up in a big dataset about me that Microsoft (or whoever) use to generate revenue.

 

Although not a fan of Apple, by any stretch, they do seem to be probably the only big company in this sector that isn't (yet) exploiting user's personal data to generate revenue, and they seem to take personal privacy concerns a bit more seriously.  The only other alternatives are to go open source and run Linux, or, with very great care, stick with an older version of Windows.  Be aware that if you have updated Windows 7 regularly, then you will have added the update that has been rolled out several times over the past couple of years that includes data gathering and telemetry back to Microsoft.  Whilst this is not as great an intrusion into your personal privacy as installing W10, it still passes lots of data back to Microsoft servers.  The good news is that it's not too hard to remove all the updates that only send data back to Microsoft, although it is a bit tedious, as there are a lot of them and removing them is best done from the command line, with admin privileges.   I still run Win 7 and have removed all the "telemetry" updates, plus I've blocked all the Microsoft (and Google) related data gathering servers in my router (another tedious task). 

 

There are plenty of instructions on the net as to how to remove telemetry from Win 7, but this is not an option for personal users of W10.  If you can get hold of an enterprise version of W10, as released to companies and organisations that must have secure operating systems (although I'd question whether anything Microsoft produce is really ever secure) then it won't have any of the telemetry or data gathering capability activated, so won't keep "phoning home" to Microsoft all the time.  Sadly, I don't think there is any lawful way for most personal users to install and run the enterprise versions of W10.

 

For mobile devices, LineageOS is easily as good as Android, runs a fair bit faster and, as long as you don't do something daft, like install Google Play Services or the Google store, then it doesn't share any data at all with anyone unless you specifically give an app permission to do so.  The only real downside is that apps (that you trust!) have to be installed by side loading APKs, but that's not really a major issue.  I've been running LineageOS, and it's predecessor CyanogenMod, as the operating system on my Sony Xperia tablet for a fair time, and it's much faster than Android, uses a lot less data when I'm out and about using a mobile connection (presumably just because of the absence of all that "phoning home" to Google every few seconds, using up your bandwidth and data allowance) and best of all, the battery life improved by around 20%.  I'd be the first to say that it's a bit of a faff to root your device and load the new OS, but there are lots of useful tutorials on the net, and it only takes an hour or so to do.  Some of the open source apps are really very good indeed; I particularly like OpenStreetMap, as it doesn't need a data connection to work - you can opt to download chunks of map data for an area that has a poor mobile signal beforehand, and the data set seems to be as good, if not better, than Google Maps.  It's also faster, at least as far as my very limited comparison testing (before I got rid of Android) indicated.

[Guest Alphonsox]

The latest Meltdown, Spectre and Spectre-NG CPU hardware bugs make security a carefully crafted illusion on modern hardware. Microsoft snaffling your personal data is the least of your problems. Switch to a Raspberry Pi or similar if you need peace of mind.

[Pocster]

RiscOS forever !

[Jeremy Harris]

13 hours ago, Alphonsox said:

 Switch to a Raspberry Pi or similar if you need peace of mind.

 

Even that's far from ideal, it's not wholly open source, and relies on users trusting the element of closed source code that it uses.