Tag: #ThoseMotherFuckers

A Tale of Two OS Updates

This morning, I woke up to find my phone had an OS update pending. So I installed it. My android update:

  • Took about 45 minutes from start to finish.
  • Didn’t delete any of my data.
  • Didn’t result in any of my apps breaking.
  • Didn’t result in any of my settings being reset back to defaults.
  • Didn’t result in my being logged out of anything I had been logged into before the update.
  • Didn’t result in my apps even losing their state. Even my open browser tabs were still there after rebooting. (Granted, maybe if I’d had some form filled out, but not submitted yet, I wouldn’t expect the data to be retained there, but otherwise, everything is exactly as it was before the update.)
  • Was done with my consent.

And, after the upgrade, everything pretty much works same as it did before, ALBEIT FASTER. The phone feels snappy again.

I didn’t have to learn anything to pick up where I left off.

The only thing new that I have noticed? My icons have rounder edges. That’s it. Frankly, I don’t really even care for that, but it’s pretty acceptable, and if it’s useful in quickly identifying Android 6 from 5 at a glance, ok. I’ll take it. This is as it should be for a mature UI. No paradigm shift, reinventing, or pointless reorganization. And it doesn’t feel sluggish and laggy anymore, like it had been lately.

All in all, thank you Google and the Android team.

Microsoft Windows, take note.

I’m running Windows 7 on my home PCs, and at work. We both didn’t want Windows 8, not even after the release of 8.1.

Now that Windows 10 is out, I have been receiving all kinds of news about how Windows 10 is spyware, that it reports all sorts of information back to Microsoft, more than it ever has in the past, and that it even moves your own files to their servers. Microsoft also plan on making Windows 10 a subscription-based service, instead of something you pay for once and own a perpetual license for, along with entitlement to free updates for the life of the product. I’m not interested in this, and I hope to make Windows 7 the last version of Microsoft’s operating system I ever run.

Apparently most Windows users agree with me, because despite making the Windows 10 upgrade available to users of Windows 7 and 8 for free for almost a year, they’ve only seen about 300 million users of Windows 10, after predicting 3 billion. Microsoft is desperate to hit the goal they promised, and so has taken to some decidedly underhanded tactics to force the upgrade on unsuspecting users. I’ve had to repeatedly remove Windows Updates for Win7 that would nag me to upgrade to Win10 for free. Even after removing and then hiding the update so that it should not have been re-downloaded, I’ve had it come back several times on various Win7 systems that I maintain. I’ve even taken to using a 3rd party blocker app called GWX Control Panel to monitor my systems to ensure that the blocking configuration I’ve set up isn’t being overridden by Microsoft.

Since then, I haven’t personally experience further problems, but I’m now reading about a new nag window that would treat closing the window as consent to install.

Since Microsoft doesn’t seem to respect the fact that its users are people with agency who own the computer they are running Windows on, and thus must grant consent to install software or updates, I’ve taken to calling this behavior “Windows Update Rape”. It’s an ugly word, but such strong language seems to be warranted as Microsoft continue to pretend that they are acting in user’s best interest and with their consent.

To be clear, this sort of behavior *should* be considered illegal, and by my understanding of the law, it is. My computer is my property, and if I don’t want to take an update that is freely offered for whatever reason, I should not be compelled to, nor should I be repeatedly harassed to take the upgrade, nor should the vendor resort to trickery or usurp control over my computer outright. No license terms should be able to change this.

Microsoft deserves to be sued by billions of users for hundreds of billions of dollars, and I would love to see the antitrust actions taken by the US Federal government against the company during the Windows 95/browser wars era resumed. These abuses are unacceptable and have completely ruined any trust that I may have put in Microsoft.

Microsoft should not be allowed to get away with this. Customers should be up in arms, storming the offices in Redmond, taking justice into their own hands, stringing up executives, writing a message of warning with their entrails to other companies that might dare to think they can get away with these abuses.

I’m not kidding.

Microsoft is a malware and spyware vendor, and needs to be stopped.