On 03/10/14 10:10, Roderick Stewart wrote:
On Fri, 03 Oct 2014 08:48:57 +0100, Joe User wrote:

The whole platform is now effectively becoming spyware. There's a subtle
(or perhaps not so subtle) change in the internetworking bioverse (that
is the sub-set of humanity that uses 'the internet' for 'Slimer and
...winston et al). It now seems that it is the rule that you need to
identify yourself in some way before accessing anything and the
aforesaid bioverse is now becoming so used to this that it doesn't seem
unusual or unreasonable. It's called social engineering and the
corporations are getting better at it all the time.

Indeedy. I installed the preview version of Windows 10 on a spare
machine yesterday, having had to create a Microsoft Account in order
to get to the webpage to download it, and found that it wanted me to
login with said account in order to install it too. From recollection,
this is the same as Windows 8, where there's a page during
installation that only offers two options - login with an existing
account or create a new one. A lot of people will be caught by this,
but once you know about it, the thing to do is choose to login with an
existing account, and on the *next* page, you finally get the option
to install without logging in to anything.

Then you try to use some of the supplied applications, and again it
wants you to login, just to use something ordinary like a calendar, so
you give up with all this nonsense and use your own.

Quite. This morning I had a lady who came in quite upset that she
couldn't access her ebay account on her new laptop.
Every time she clicked the ebay 'app' she was required to provide all
sorts of information *again*, she just wanted to get to ebay.

So I suggested she ditched the app crap and installed Firefox.
Once we had Firefox up and running we went to ebay and logged in with
her existing credentials. I then showed her how to use Firefox to access
her web mail and her favorite news sites all in one instance with
multiple tabs. She was happy again.

I couldn't really explain why she just couldn't login via the app crap
with her existing credentials. I can take a guess but then I would
probably be accused of paranoia

Another annoyance is that it doesn't seem to be identifiable as an
operating system to a Linux installation program, which no longer
offers the option to install automatically alongside it, as it used to
with Windows 8 or any other system on the same machine.

Quite frankly I've given up now. I just sandbox the crapware in a
virtual machine while I take it to bits. I'm pretty sure I'll never buy
anything from Micro$oft ever again.


--
Not confused, just ... bewildered