Thursday, December 3, 2015

Microsoft asks me: "How do you like Windows 10?"......

So do I tell them the truth, or a whole bunch of damned lies? Just for the record, I'm 13 months into testing Windows 10, and it's been a turbulent 13 months, of installing, re-installing, uninstalling, re-installing, and adding into it various other third-party programs both old and new, to find out how or if it can run them. Do I have a Number One Complaint? Yes! I do!


Please look at the top entry and the bottom two entries on this list of scan logs. Those are my Number One Complaint! There are simply too many tracking cookies being planted in Windows 10, not just occasionally, but regularly.

I haven't got the time nor the patience to contact every one of these to tell them to stop bugging me, and that wouldn't help anyway, because they wouldn't listen to me. They are only interested in collecting information, supposedly to help them improve the system. I'm all in favor of improvement. It's who has my data, and what they do with it, and who else gets some, that worries me. I've read the George Orwell book, "Nineteen Eighty Four" and this cookie problem is too much like something "Big Brother" would do to keep tabs on his unwashed masses. I don't like it. I don't like it even a little bit.

If it is going to be a regular feature of Windows from now on, I think I'll just say "Bye-Bye, Satya - I can't go on loving my Windows unless you clean out the Spyware, including but not limited to "Cortana" and OneDrive." The contents of my computer are there for myself, not for every crafty bastard who thinks that I'm too stupid to figure out how to discover their implants and remove them. And I'm not planning on spending a significant part of my computing day looking for hidden spyware and disabling it. I have better things to do with my time - things that are a lot more fun. And I do know how to use Linux. I have it on my other computer now. It doesn't have this problem. It knows better. And so, my friend, should you.

2 comments:

  1. Ray, this certainly is one reason why I have NOT updated yet. I don't like it and I never will. Even without the cookie issue, just turning, ET phone home, stuff off is a pain in the neck. We as consumers should not need to deal with this crap. Privacy is such a nice word.

    Of course, I'm sure that "Big Brother" is counting on the fact that the vast majority of people 1) Don't care or 2) are too ignorant to figure this out.

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  2. Yes, Tommy, I agree that Microsoft is assuming we're all too stupid or too gullible
    to question their motives, methods, and manipulations.

    And that's going to contribute to the decline and fall of Mighty Microsoft.

    As another critic pointed out recently, "There's no free lunch! If something seems
    too good to be true, it usually is."

    And just because we are being told that we can trust these people to respect our data
    and keep it as secure as we would like it to be doesn't mean a damned thing!
    There isn't a crook in the world who would say anything else. Every two-faced
    lying bastard that ever lived wanted us to believe he was as honest as the day is long,
    as solid as the rock of Gibraltar, and as dependable as tomorrow's sunrise.
    And once he got us where he wanted us, it was "game over" and guardian angels, prayers,
    or Almighty God himself couldn't save us from disaster.

    So: should we trust someone's magical "personal assistant" with our secrets,
    or trust someone's distant and unverified "cloud storage" with our valued records,
    just because they say we can? And we've never even met these people, or had the
    opportunity to check them out for their integrity, reliability, or truthfulness,
    and we wouldn't recognize them on the street if we stumbled into them today,
    but we should jump at the chance to use their "free storage" because they say so?

    I don't have to ask "What's wrong with that picture?" because the smell test warns
    us while we're still far away. And we should heed that warning.

    Enjoy your day!

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