Microsoft to Alter Software in Response to Privacy Concerns (1999) (nytimes.com)

A linux distro with sane defaults, robust wine scripts, and no personal information compromises, that is easy to install, could take over the world.

I vote KaOS as the base: http://kaosx.us

It will be impossible to know and/or verify what they're actually sending. Even if they told us exactly what the data contains, though, who will believe them?

Besides, we already know what they'll say: they'll use it for debugging and troubleshooting, to make the products better, and to enhance your user experience. In certain circumstances, they may share the data -- but only with their trusted partners, of course. In no way, however, will they use it for anything "evil".

Putting machines behind a firewall (or even a virtual firewall, as is possible with VMs) could help somewhat, both in determining what it's doing with the network and in blocking unwanted traffic.

Incidentally, one of the features Windows had in 2k and XP that was off by default in Vista, and lost completely in Win7, is a network status icon that shows when the OS is sending/receiving data. Very useful for troubleshooting and identifying unexpected network activity, but its removal makes it much easier for this sort of "phoning home" to go unnoticed... (I know they could've made it lie, but apparently removing it altogether was easier.)

Is there a checklist available on the settings people might perceive as privacy violation, their operational implication, and howto disable it?

Yes, I make sure to turn off that first thing when I run Ubuntu. :)

> They pioneered sending back all your search terms (to Amazon).

You don't have to use Unity to use Ubuntu. There is an abundant choice of WMs on Linux. And besides, even if you had this turned on, it's about nothing compared to what Microsoft does.

That's it! Thanks for the reminder.

Last time I checked you pay everything you get from Apple and keep the data locally without surveillance as a service.

Accurate but irrelevant. The point is not to adapt to the "new normal", but to reject it and demand a higher standard.

Windows is not really open, has never has been and never will be. In fact it is getting worse. There's always a black box at the bottom of every stack trace, a secret in every corner and a cost to every solution be it time or money.

Users, myself included, use it because we're stuck.

many of us have avoided (or selectively/safely used) the accessories of this era, because we value our liberties.

Seychelles/Iceland-based cloud storage providers, and rk3xxx-based mobile devices (with VoIP) keep us relevant and reasonably modern while preserving our rights.

There are more of us than you think.

Not trying to persuade you either way but if you do move and try Wine for those applications it'd be much appreciated if you would update the Wine Application Database.

https://appdb.winehq.org/

There was a higher bar to access back then. Today devices are made for and used by almost everyone. People haven't become less concerned in total, it's just that there are more people that never cared in the first place using technology.

The truth is that for most users, a locked down device is simply more secure. By controlling the environment tightly, the manufacturer can be sure to exclude malicious software. For example, how easy is it to install a keylogger on an iPhone?

Allowing users to bypass security mechanisms will ensure they get bypassed. Wasn't it Facebook that was having users compromised by attackers tricking users into running code in the console? If iPhones shipped with a special security bypass button or something, it wouldn't be long before people became accustomed to using it and we'd be back to user devices being rooted left and right. This seems like a difficult problem to work around, if we want users to have a "worry free" experience.

I find it disgusting and unfortunate, but I recognize that my desires are not representative of the general market.

But there's a bit more to it than that. The marketplace has apparently decided privacy is not worth paying for. Microsoft is conceding this point. Perhaps what the market values can be adjusted by creeping people out on a personal level by demonstrating just how much information they are giving away?

Or perhaps the market is revealing that privacy in general has very little value?

(Same issue with open computing vs. closed devices)

I do agree. And I'll be sticking with Windows 7.

I am indeed mostly happy with LibreOffice Calc, or even Gnumeric. But I'm aware of no other spreadsheet app that calculates on multiple CPU cores. Or gracefully handles spreadsheets well north of 50MB. Windows overall may be revolting, but Excel is a beautiful thing.

I always wonder why people think using Google Docs is more secure and private than Excel and being on Windows. I mean, lets just imagine you're hoping no one is stealing all your data and monitoring you. On one hand, you have Windows and Excel which are closed source and could be sending all that information. On the other hand you have Google Docs hosted on a cloud infrastructure by a company which specializes in searching, indexing, and extracting information from documents. Thanks to technical limitations from it's feature set it records every movement, change, and action forever in the document.

So you run something 10 times worse on a Free OS? You pretty much now only have the option of Libre Office. And to be fair, if Libre Office was good enough you wouldn't have mentioned Google Docs. It works, but it's not Google Docs or Excel.

I have witnessed two different trials of Google Apps for "regular" office workers. In my experience, the number of Excel users satisfied with Google's offering is a lot closer to 0% than 99%.

There's also Chinese WPS Office.[0] But last I checked its spreadsheet, it was still missing key features.

[0] http://wps.com/

Setup your own WSUS server (or another update server).