France’s data protection commission has ordered Microsoft to “stop collecting excessive user data” and to stop tracking the web browsing of Windows 10 users without their consent. In a notice published on Wednesday, the CNIL said that Microsoft must also take steps to guarantee “the security and confidentiality” of its users’ personal information, after determining that the company was still transferring data to the US under the “Safe Harbor” agreement that an EU court invalidated in October. Microsoft has three months to comply with the orders, the CNIL said.
I was reminded of just how much stuff Microsoft tries to collect earlier today – I had to reinstall Windows on my workstation because my SSD had mysteriously died yesterday, and the number of things you have to turn off is just crazy.
This is partly why Windows 7 is the very last version of Windows I shall ever have. It’s also why record numbers of users have switched back to Windows 7.
Windows 7 and XP here. Even at work everything has stopped being updated beyond Windows 7.
Hmm, do you have stats to back that up?
I would have guessed the primary reason people are switching back to Windows 7 is because Windows 8+ forces them into a significantly different UI that people simply don’t like. At least, for the few downgrades I’ve performed for people, that was their primary reason.
As for the tracking – I actually use an enterprise version of Win10 on my desktop here (which allows turning off more tracking), I’ve disabled everything I could, and then I also blackholed all the tracking sites at my firewall.
This allows me to use it with some general feeling of safety.
At this point, all my personal portable devices run Linux or Android, and that trend will continue.
You should not have to block all those IP Addy’s that MS is sending (probably) every move you make on the PC to.
What if it was a laptop and you took it somewhere else? Suddenly MS gets all that lovely data on you.
With the constant updates I would expect that MS would keep changing where it sends the data just to avoid the firewall rules.
It is just far better to ‘Say No’ to Windows 10. After using Windows since V3.1 I have said, no more. MS is history as far as I’m concerned.
Oh, and then there is the inevitable change to a pay monthly subscription that will probably hit the streets early in 2017. What price your data then eh?
You can easily find those stats by google. The part about microsoft’s own claims of being run on 300 million devices is highly disappointing, meaning that linux as a whole or mac is now at par with windows.
Maybe you have better google-fu than I…
I used a few different search terms, but all I find are a billion articles on how to downgrade/uninstall Windows 10… and plenty of “reasons not to use Windows 10” – but none with actual statistics.
I understand that “privacy concerns” are definitely one reason for people to ditch Windows 10, but I’m not sure I believe it’s the primary reason.
Should user’s who think their machine is private and secure be forced to use the Enterprise version just to ensure their machine is private and secure?
Google up next (at least should be)
“I had to reinstall Windows on my workstation because my SSD had mysteriously died yesterday”
Don’t be like Thom. Backup regularly!
You need to have a backup of your data, sure.
But what good is a backup of an operating system? It will increase the size of your backup by an order of magnitude or more.
A full Linux system is around 4-10GB. A Windows install is ~25GB. Hardly an order of magnitude.
IMO reinstalling a system with all your favourite settings is a complete PITA
Win7>Win10 upgrade case: [familiar] Allowed me to dump most non-system content into the spinning rust. A lot more SSD space AFTER upgrade.
The order of magnitude comment was between just data and data + OS. I imagine it would depend on what you do – for example, I keep a bunch of Skyrim/Fallout mods on my drive in case I want to use one, and those can be pretty damn big! So the data part of data + OS is slanted towards data rather than OS in size. If you do video work, that could also be the case.
I couldn’t care less about the size. I can restore a full backup in minutes, but restoring all my applications and settings to what they were from a clean install will take me painful hours. I’ve got better things to do with my time.
> But what good is a backup of an operating system?
Windows in particular is weird and non-deterministic configuration, so you want full disk image backups where possible. With Linux you just need to back up /home, /etc, and a list of installed packages.
And /usr/local, /usr/etc, /usr/share/etc, /usr/share/$APPNAME. It’s not all roses like you paint it and there are some very badly-behaved apps out there. And that’s only if every app you use is packaged.
No, he’s right. I’ve never backed up /usr or /etc on my linux system. I only ever backup /home. Once you do a clean install of the OS, you just pop into Synaptic or PacMan or whatever your favorite software package manager is and click on all your favorite apps. BAM! You’re done. I’ve never seen a linux app that didn’t store their settings in the user home directory. I’m sure there are a few, I’ve just not run into one. When you back up /home, you’ve got all your settings (99.999%) right there.
Great, if I were only talking about settings. Perhaps you could enlighten me where vmWare is in Synaptic/yum/whatever? It’s applications like that I’m talking about. Even if the settings are in /home, that won’t give you back your application and/or registration. You have to do that all again. This makes a full os backup well worth the effort, even in Linux land. Setup can still take hours. It may be hours rather than days like it is with Windows, but it’s hours that an os backup would have saved.
You just use the packages at vmware: http://www.vmware.com/download/packages.html
It’s hardly brain surgery. I do agree that’s it’s much faster to have an OS backup, but very often, you need a CLEAN reinstall to clear all the cruft out of the system. NOTHING beats reinstalling from scratch. OS backups are for emergencies when you need it back up FAST and intend to do a PROPER reinstall later when it’s not as urgent. For me (as a contract programmer), nothing is that urgent.
Don’t be like Thom. Don’t use SSD’s or any type of flash memory as a hard drive.
Simples!
Sauron,
Haha, yea. On top of others who’ve come to me for help in the aftermath of a failure, I’ve personally experienced 3 flash/ssd failures in the past 5 years. Maybe it’s just been my luck, but what worries me is that the flash disks seem much more likely to fail catastrophically in an instant, whereas hard disks tend to fail more gradually (ie localized failures with the vast majority of sectors being recoverable).
My computer ssd is less concerning to me because I keep good backups of my important data, but I still feel vulnerable after having lost photos and videos off a camera we had at my daughter’s first birthday party. If only it failed during the party – we would have been able to take more pictures.
I feel compelled to out visiontek specifically for not standing behind their warranty when mine failed, which sucks because the 5 year warranty promise was exactly why I decided to give them a shot.
Bollocks. SSDs are more-or-less as reliable now as mechanical drives, but much faster and run cooler, Thom just got unlucky with his drive. I have had mechanical drives suddenly die on me, from seemingly perfectly-healthy to completely dead in a second, but do I go around saying that people should stop using mechanical drives because I got unlucky with one?
If you run dos, the write cucles are limited to app usage and the SSD will live almost forever. In linux there is a “moatime” “nodirtime” switches to reduce writes on a SSD. Windows 10 WILL write your SSD to death faster as it uses fixed area for swap.
Of course SSDs wear out eventually, but so do mechanical drives. It’s still going to take several years for the drive to become unwriteable. Both me and my boyfriend have SSDs as our OS-drives on our desktops and laptops and have had for several years now without a single issue; Windows 10 certainly hasn’t written the SSDs to death yet.
Modern SSDs don’t use a fixed area for anything. They use wear levelling algortithms. The MTBF is around 2 million hours or 228 years.
In other words you have a 0.44% chance of failure per year.
Given my own experience, it’s actually more like 10 years for moderately heavy usage with a decent fileswystem. I’ve got a pair of good Crucial SSD’s in my home server which see about 700MB of data written an hour on average, which is actually low utilization for many server systems, and based on current wear-out indicators, they’ll last for about 10 years from the point I started using them. The one in my laptop sees roughly the same volume proportionate to it’s size, and is showing similar indications of life expectancy. This is still about twice the average life expectancy I see for a traditional hard disk under the similar conditions though.
The MTBF reported by manufacturers on most SSD’s is based on an idealized usage pattern (significantly more reads than writes, filesystem itself helps with wear leveling, etc), which is in practice almost never seen, even with filesystems optimized for use with SSD’s. Windows is particularly hard on SSD’s because of a combination of it’s virtual memory implementation, the allocator algorithm used by NTFS, and the fact that they only do batch trim operations. Most of the traditional Linux filesystems (XFS, ext4, JFS, etc) are also not great for an SSD’s life expectancy either.
Thanks for the tip, ahferroin7. Which is the most gentle with spinning rust, at Linux?
With a traditional disk, you should be fine using just about anything. Media wear-out still happens even on magnetic media, but in a hard disk, it often takes much longer before this becomes an issue. I’ve not really seen any difference in the life expectancy of a regular hard disk based on what filesystems are used, so I’d just suggest picking something you’re familiar with that works well for your use case.
The bigger issue on Linux is that most consumer drives will try for multiple minutes to recover bad sectors, but the kernel will think the drive is hung and reset the link after only 30 seconds by default, so bad sectors never get properly fixed by the drive firmware, and build up over time. That setting can be changed easily, search for ‘scsi command timeout’ (yes, even if you’re using an IDE or SATA drive) on the web for info on how, the Red Hat page that comes up covers it well and applies to most Linux distributions. The longest I’ve seen a consumer HDD take to try to recover a bad sector was 3 minutes, so 200 seconds should cover anything with a little extra headroom.
Ooohhh! Someone got out the wrong side of bed this morning! Touchy aren’t we?
You want to use flash memory as a hard drive that’s your business, nothing to do with me.
As for “Bollocks”, yeah I’ve got two of em thanks. Is that supposed to make your argument more believable or something? It doesn’t work.
Don’t use all of SSD space. Their logic can make use of that in an emergency. Nowadays, SSD fall more catastrophically than spinning rust. SSD more sensitive to electrostatic and over voltages.
WereCatf,
Was it a seagate around 2008-2010 by any chance? If so you probably experienced a notorious firmware glitch that caused many of their drives to suddenly become ghosts. They fixed my disks for free and none of the data was lost.
I really do love the benefits of SSD as much as the next guy. In theory they should be even more reliable than hard disks, but I’m not confident we are there just yet and frankly I’d be very concerned to use one in areas prone to power failures without a UPS.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2613584/flash-storage/test-your-ss…
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/173887-ssd-stress-testing-find…
http://lkcl.net/reports/ssd_analysis.html
http://freek.ws/2014/11/12/how-to-fix-an-unbootable-intel-ssd-suffe…
This is just anecdotal, but 17% of respondents on a ZDNet survey said they had an SSD failure within 6 months, which is actually very close to what I see here (compared to about 5% for hard drives).
http://hexus.net/tech/news/storage/44937-new-reliability-poll-shows…
Hopefully someday soon more SSDs will pass these tests than fail, but until then I think Sauron’s point about elevated risk has some merit.
Edited 2016-07-22 10:00 UTC
All your links are from 2012-2014(January). While disturbing, it doesn’t prove that this problem still exists more than two years later.
Personally I take backups (the Linus Torvalds way
) and enjoy the beautiful silence of a SSD disk. Even if the failure rate was twice as high as spinning disks I’d still grab the SSD. Silence and high speed – can’t say no to that!
Don’t forget about price. For me I took the SSHD way (Seagate Desktop 1TB SSHD) and benefit from both worlds, the 8GB SSD providing enough speed improvement (booting goes from 4m40s to 2m30s) with the reliability of the mechanical HD as fallback, at a reasonable price (90^a'not).
Regarding how many files I already lost in USB keys, taht no one is able to certify the quality of memory modules, beside charts and graphs and promises (yet with many feedback about SSD controller failing) and that I’m not a switcher, until further proof, I’ll stick to SSHD.
Actually, an SSHD’s reliability is worse than either a plain SSD’s or plain mechanical drive’s as you have two devices crammed in one, and if either one fails they’ll both fail.
Not a problem on having the SSD mirrored to the HD. That’s up to the unit’ logic.
“…I took the SSHD way”
Desktop, and specially Windows seems to fit beautifully to that form. Would love MS promoting it as base hardware.
All my important data is backed up automatically. I’m not backing up Windows itself. A waste of time.
Was it realy waste od time? Or was the new install with all the settings waste of time?
Thom,
It is far from a waste of time, your complains already contradict it.
I find it to be very useful to have updated compressed images of important systems. It guarantee a fast “back to normal” deployment. And you can use differential updates to the images also.
Except, what if it’s your install causing the problems in the first place?
Safe, sorry, better, than.
You fix them or go for an older backup image.
Anyway no method can solve all the problems. But you experienced quite a common problem (failed HDD or SSD) that can be solved by a proper backup strategy.
What?
Before I get accused of trolling, let me explain. I’m no Microsoft fan, for starters. Let’s look at the practicalities however. Could France really do anything in three months if Microsoft doesn’t comply? What? Demand a special French edition of Windows? Ban Windows, and thus put every French business which relies on it under, as well as their own government that also run it? Realistically, Microsoft has the power here, not the French government. Should the French government do anything, the people will rise up against the action voluntarily because they believe they absolutely need Windows.
It sounds great in theory, and I wish I could cheer. But the threat is empty, and we all know it.
The is the same organisation that forced one of the largest and most powerful tech companies in the world to implement the “right to be forgotten” thing. Ignore them at your own peril.
Microsoft will 100% comply.
No, they supposedly implemented the right to be forgotten. We have no way, none whatsoever, to know if they have actually deleted data when requested. It’s easier to verify tracking than being forgotten, so there is that and they could at least make sure Microsoft is complying. Don’t mistake me, if they actually can pull this off, power to them and it’s about damned time! I guess, being from the US, I don’t have the same faith in government that most of you Europeans seem to have. In fact, let’s not mince words, I’m downright jaded and cynical about any government actions because they either result in absolutely no change or an even greater mess-up than we had originally. That’s not likely to change any time soon over here either, and I think I’d have to live somewhere in Europe for several years to even come close to believing that people with power give a damn about the rights of the rest.
Post-Snowden is my supposition that the can can’t be kicked down the road again. Nations, or Blocks of Nations could start a diaspora on IT technology.
World is as is. We Can agree in a path toward a progressively more decent Status Quo, or every Citizen of the World is going to end with the worst of the coming Perfect Storm.
“…We have no way, none whatsoever, to know if they have actually deleted data when requested…” More than ever before, this is a Civilization based on Trust.
At some critical moments [there has been some, at every point of the spectrum] based on Faith.
Deleted or not, being Law Walled, it can’t be used against You. [Could be sold in the black market, but cumulative cases would tell a history of deception, and end damaging every Actor].
See the good will at Apple recent anonymity effort. If done as said. Still, the math doesn’t subtract enough, considering how little is needed to make a positive ID.
Google doesn’t HOST the data, so they CAN’T delete. All they can do is block searches, which is what they do.
Repeat after me, boys and girls… Google is NOT the internet.
And what about all that data going into the Google AI?
What use is that AI without lots and lots and lots of data.
Google knows more about everyone on the planet than anyone else including Governments. It is all there ready to be indexed and presented to you when you ask for it.
for that reason alone, I don’t use any Google services. The less they know about me the better and the less they can sell to 3rd, 4th, 5th etc parties.
The recent post of Wikileaks of names, addresses, SSN’s and even passport numbers of people who had contributed at little as $5 to the Democrats should serve as a warning to everyone.
As the Desk Sgt used to say on ‘Hill St Blues’, ‘Be careful out there’.
Far too many people are far too free with their personal data.
Let me get this straight… Google doesn’t host Gmail and bares no responsibility for the data? Or those searches you have in your Google history? How about Google Docs? You’re telling me they bare zero responsibility for deleting their data if a person wishes to delete their Google account?
What kind of substance twisted your logic circuits?
Always been my speculation that Microsoft was the first global IT ‘Harvester’ [/euphemism]. Lots of Actors now. But also thought of MS as the lesser one -on the amount of individual harvest. Of late Google is [gratefully] more open about their [huge] harvest.
What I don’t get is why the heavy hand on MS.
I tend to install this privacy tool on close people having Win 10, but I dont^A'really now how much it really helps
Spybot Anti-Beacon Privacy-Protection Tool
has anyone used it or has any alternatives?
UKB
Edited 2016-07-22 15:45 UTC
Once into Win10, System Owners wishing to re-flash BIOS-es should download through a MS proxy, so MS can actually validate the BIOS image. And burn to CD/DVD [not Only God knows what they are, USB pens]. Before tumbling down the full house of cards. Resilience Issue. Critical.
“The introspection engine will be an open source, user-inspectable and field-verifiable module attached to an existing smart phone that makes no assumptions about the trustability of the phone’s operating system.”
Making no assumptions on trustability…
Plain Civilian Counter-Intelligence. Obviously, the answer would be strong encryption. And the race starts.
https://techxplore.com/news/2016-07-snowden-huang-case-owners-tracke…
Remember those chaperons assigned to any journalist traveling into Totalitarian States?
Totalitarian, that is the Smell. Those Harvesting Corps will put a chaperon in between them and your ‘Chaperon’, also. It will become a very procrastinating, sterile environment.
Still believing that The Internet is “An American Thing”
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/all-signs-point-to-russia-being-be…
On half-time low-level agents anymore. They just add the site to Pokemon Go
Social Engineering… Do They call it so, today?