The impudence of Microsoft has reached new (criminal?) heights

[Monkeh]

[...]

And then why a preinstalled, but non-essential app can't be uninstalled is fricking annoying. It may not be an MS issue per se (but as for MS, I still warn people about this app.)
The fact it was drawing a lot of power with also abnormal data consumption, although I have no proof of what it does, doesn't look good.

I have noticed the same thing with Android -  a whole class of applications that cannot be uninstalled?   

Sadly, this seems to just be part of the "conspiracy" to force telemetry and tracking down everyone's throats - can you think of any other plausible reason?

Uh, yes, the system partition is quite intentionally read-only.

[Mr. Scram]

Just like Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari...
You can also disable most of the telemetry. I don't care what the browser does out-of-the-box. As long as I can configure it, it won't influence my choice.

I was talking about Chrome and Chrome based Edge. Firefox isn't nearly as bad. I don't think all of it is configurable either and many actually take steps to obfuscate their behaviour or circumvent your wishes. It very obvious many parties won't take no for an answer.

[Mr. Scram]

There's one thing to do with such unwanted "telemetry": feed it fake data to show them how much you don't like it. And don't give it any real data so they would have nothing to gain.

Go ahead. Show us how you do it.

[Mr. Scram]

All browsers and the companies behind them are not the same.

Google is in a league of their own when it comes to telemetry and tracking user activities. Microsoft is doing the best they can to catch up. Avoid those two and the real problem becomes where you are connecting to, not what you use to connect with.

Even if you're able to keep full control of your own system, a lot of the world is now run on Azure, AWS or Google's platform. Many services, companies and governments use these so not shipping your data to them really is an uphill battle.

[NiHaoMike]

The ultimate solution is probably to disconnect any "serious" computer from the Internet,  and have a separate machine just for browsing the Internet....   either that, or a separate firewall product that can completely block all communications with the surveillance capitalist mother ships.

Throwing in noise is one way to discourage such data collection in the first place, especially if it's hard to distinguish from real data.

Another thing that helps a lot is using adblocking. In fact, many users don't like how targeted advertising seems to be "stalking" them and start using adblockers for that reason. (Although if you're using noise injection, checking ads is a good way to see how effective it is - if they're no longer relevant, it's probably working.)

Go ahead. Show us how you do it.

It's just a matter of generating noise and presenting it to the telemetry. If you don't do anything that gives telemetry real data, then what it's collecting would be all fake.

[SilverSolder]

[...]

And then why a preinstalled, but non-essential app can't be uninstalled is fricking annoying. It may not be an MS issue per se (but as for MS, I still warn people about this app.)
The fact it was drawing a lot of power with also abnormal data consumption, although I have no proof of what it does, doesn't look good.

I have noticed the same thing with Android -  a whole class of applications that cannot be uninstalled?   

Sadly, this seems to just be part of the "conspiracy" to force telemetry and tracking down everyone's throats - can you think of any other plausible reason?

Uh, yes, the system partition is quite intentionally read-only.

...Why place an application in system space?

[Monkeh]

[...]

And then why a preinstalled, but non-essential app can't be uninstalled is fricking annoying. It may not be an MS issue per se (but as for MS, I still warn people about this app.)
The fact it was drawing a lot of power with also abnormal data consumption, although I have no proof of what it does, doesn't look good.

I have noticed the same thing with Android -  a whole class of applications that cannot be uninstalled?   

Sadly, this seems to just be part of the "conspiracy" to force telemetry and tracking down everyone's throats - can you think of any other plausible reason?

Uh, yes, the system partition is quite intentionally read-only.

...Why place an application in system space?

.. because it's shipped with the system image?

[SilverSolder]

[...]

And then why a preinstalled, but non-essential app can't be uninstalled is fricking annoying. It may not be an MS issue per se (but as for MS, I still warn people about this app.)
The fact it was drawing a lot of power with also abnormal data consumption, although I have no proof of what it does, doesn't look good.

I have noticed the same thing with Android -  a whole class of applications that cannot be uninstalled?   

Sadly, this seems to just be part of the "conspiracy" to force telemetry and tracking down everyone's throats - can you think of any other plausible reason?

Uh, yes, the system partition is quite intentionally read-only.

...Why place an application in system space?

.. because it's shipped with the system image?

So it is beyond the wit of man to eject it into user space during / after a system installation?

Putting user level applications into system space is just bad...  wouldn't pass muster in most other situations, can't believe Google et al don't already know this.

[Monkeh]

So it is beyond the wit of man to eject it into user space during / after a system installation?

Which part of it being part of the read-only system image confuses?

Putting user level applications into system space is just bad...  wouldn't pass muster in most other situations, can't believe Google et al don't already know this.

Your app store is a user level app. Your keyboard is a user level app. Your launcher is a user level app. The entire interactive element of the device is a user level app.

[VK3DRB]

Ubuntu GUI looks and behaves a lot like Windows to the user. No innovation there. The MS Office alternatives look and behave very much like MS Office. Ho hum, nothing new under the sun  .

[james_s]

Operating system GUIs and office productivity software are problems that were solved decades ago. What sort of innovation are you expecting? The Windows UI severely regressed with 8 and further with 10. The only thing keeping me on Windows at this point is that the Win7 UI is still more polished than any of the Linux window managers I've tried. Office hasn't added anything compelling since the late 90s, I went with Libre Office last time I set up a PC because I couldn't be bothered to go dig out my MS Office installation disc.

[NiHaoMike]

The only thing keeping me on Windows at this point is that the Win7 UI is still more polished than any of the Linux window managers I've tried.

Strangely, "polished" apparently does not include having the small but very useful feature called the always on top button, something Linux has had for well over 20 years. Nview can add it if the PC has a Nvidia GPU.

[Mr. Scram]

Throwing in noise is one way to discourage such data collection in the first place, especially if it's hard to distinguish from real data.

Another thing that helps a lot is using adblocking. In fact, many users don't like how targeted advertising seems to be "stalking" them and start using adblockers for that reason. (Although if you're using noise injection, checking ads is a good way to see how effective it is - if they're no longer relevant, it's probably working.)

It's just a matter of generating noise and presenting it to the telemetry. If you don't do anything that gives telemetry real data, then what it's collecting would be all fake.

Again, show us how you do it.

[SilverSolder]

So it is beyond the wit of man to eject it into user space during / after a system installation?

Which part of it being part of the read-only system image confuses?

It is perfectly clear that some applications are being distributed as part of the system image - thank you for emphasizing.

The actual question is,  why can't the non-essential applications be uninstalled?  Does it really matter how they were distributed?

[Kleinstein]

It helps the programming of apps if the systems look all similar. So there is some sense in having some functions on all systems, even if most users don't use them of don't want them. If is one of the weak points of linux that there are so many variations. Already now MS has quite some problems checking there updates, that they don't break too many systems.

Chances are the phone companies get money for having some software pre-installed one the phones.

With the phones there is the additional difficulty that some of the system tasks should not be open to the user. So they have a good reason not to allow root access to the owners / users.

I also got the unwanted Brower update with only accept button. At least under Win 8.2 the install shield did block the update (at least stopped any further dialog).

[NiHaoMike]

Again, show us how you do it.

Easy, no setup required way to protest Google:
http://makeinternetnoise.com/index.html

Customizable add ons that work great for a separate browser:
https://noiszy.com/
https://adnauseam.io/

All of these are open source so the community can improve it.

I no longer use Google for real searches (switched to DuckDuckGo), therefore all the searches they get from me are fake.

I have Noiszy and Adnauseam running together in a separate browser whose only purpose is to generate noise. On my "real" browser, I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to minimize the amount of real data that trackers get.

[Mr. Scram]

Easy, no setup required way to protest Google:
http://makeinternetnoise.com/index.html

Customizable add ons that work great for a separate browser:
https://noiszy.com/
https://adnauseam.io/

All of these are open source so the community can improve it.

I no longer use Google for real searches (switched to DuckDuckGo), therefore all the searches they get from me are fake.

I have Noiszy and Adnauseam running together in a separate browser whose only purpose is to generate noise. On my "real" browser, I use uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to minimize the amount of real data that trackers get.

Neither of those inject fake telemetry, they just create additional traffic. It would also be naive to think traffic of a rather different nature isn't easily distinguished. Anyone who makes that mistake is severely underestimating the sophistication of modern data harvesting. Other than the browser blatantly reporting the traffic comes from a plugin, that is.

[NiHaoMike]

Neither of those inject fake telemetry, they just create additional traffic. It would also be naive to think traffic of a rather different nature isn't easily distinguished. Anyone who makes that mistake is severely underestimating the sophistication of modern data harvesting. Other than the browser blatantly reporting the traffic comes from a plugin, that is.

What if the fake traffic outnumbers real traffic by a wide margin, say 100 to 1 or even more?

[Siwastaja]

Neither of those inject fake telemetry, they just create additional traffic. It would also be naive to think traffic of a rather different nature isn't easily distinguished. Anyone who makes that mistake is severely underestimating the sophistication of modern data harvesting. Other than the browser blatantly reporting the traffic comes from a plugin, that is.

What if the fake traffic outnumbers real traffic by a wide margin, say 100 to 1 or even more?

It won't - web browsing is slow enough as it is, both for communication bandwidth and browser CPU/memory resources, you don't afford generating realistic-looking fake internet use at 100x rate unless you have a 10GB/s fiber optic connection and a massively powerful 32-core machine with 64GB of RAM. Even then, I doubt realistic 100:1 would be possible.

If you only load lightweight pages, then it's different from "normal" usage patterns and is likely easy to filter. So the only way of generating realistic traffic incurs similar hardware requirements as the real traffic.

Note that normal internet usage is far from noise; it's a very specific "signal", depending on who's using it. And detecting a signal on top of noise is easy-peasy. The key would be not to generate truly random noise, but noise that seems similar to that signal.

[dave j]

Ubuntu GUI looks and behaves a lot like Windows to the user. No innovation there. The MS Office alternatives look and behave very much like MS Office. Ho hum, nothing new under the sun  .

That's an eternal, unwinnable, problem for open source GUIs. Innovate and people complain it's too different to Windows. Make it work like Windows and people complain you just copy stuff.

[NiHaoMike]

It won't - web browsing is slow enough as it is, both for communication bandwidth and browser CPU/memory resources, you don't afford generating realistic-looking fake internet use at 100x rate unless you have a 10GB/s fiber optic connection and a massively powerful 32-core machine with 64GB of RAM. Even then, I doubt realistic 100:1 would be possible.

It takes very little bandwidth and client resources to do a Web search. And how often do you use the search anyways? Generating 100x as many searches per day as you normally do is not hard at all.

Now if you want to generate 100x fake video streaming sessions, that would indeed be harder. Even then, as long as you're not looking for full HD on every stream, it's quite possible to do 100 streams in less than a gigabit. Skip the rendering and you'll save a lot on compute power. But there's a much better way to make fake Youtube views that are indistinguishable from your real ones - use youtube-dl to download videos to a temp directory, keep the ones you're really interested in, and discard the rest.

Note that normal internet usage is far from noise; it's a very specific "signal", depending on who's using it. And detecting a signal on top of noise is easy-peasy. The key would be not to generate truly random noise, but noise that seems similar to that signal.

So then make the "noise" a bit less random. Or indeed, base it on real traffic. For example, if I make a lot of fake searches similar to a real search about topic A, it would appear that I'm a lot more interested in topic A than topic B.

[Mr. Scram]

What if the fake traffic outnumbers real traffic by a wide margin, say 100 to 1 or even more?

If I'm completely honest, asking these questions is admitting you don't understand the subject matter well enough. People in general seem surprisingly naive what data collection and the subsequent processing entails. This is a wonderful quality, but also means companies can collect with impunity. This is an industry built on deducing marketable conclusions from huge amounts of raw and noisy data. It's far beyond some guy or basic algorithm looking at your browsing and going "you looked at a backpack, you must want a backpack". That happens too, but is a incredibly crude and clunky approach compared to the profiles built of people and their behaviour.

What's done is preferably collecting large amounts of data and matching patterns to other know patterns. Facebook can say with an uncomfortable degree of accuracy whether you're about to engage in or end a relationship. They don't do this by looking at the content of your messages, but at the metadata like how much messages you send when and similar patterns. Note that Facebook also collects large amounts of data about non members. This is also why large scale data collection is a dangerous game as you can make accurate predictions about things people aren't even aware of themselves. This includes illnesses, pregnancies and all kinds of medical data but also political matters. Remember Cambridge Analytica? It's industrialized manipulation. Other than on the micro level people are ridiculously predictable.

To create meaningful noise means creating an adversarial model. "The other side" not only has a massive headstart but is also ridiculously well funded as it's literally an industry worth many billions of dollars, so there's not really a chance of even putting up a fight. Note that I'm simplifying a couple of things here as it's a massive, sprawling and quickly evolving industry.

[NiHaoMike]

So in the end, the first thing to do to fight back is to use adblocking to cut down on the source of revenue?

The noise generation, even if not effective at obscuring the real data, still makes good protest that increases their costs. If the end goal is to discourage data collection, I wonder if generating a ridiculous number of ad "views" (using AdNauseam) in the hopes that the views will be marked as invalid (and won't give them any revenue) would actually be a good idea. Or just use a regular adblocker and take away the revenue.

If you're not actually using the service you're feeding fake data to, the question of whether the noise is effective at obscuring real data is irrelevant when there is no real data to find. Would there be a chance that when presented with 100% noise (especially if not completely random), the algorithms would find a false pattern?

[SilverSolder]

What if the fake traffic outnumbers real traffic by a wide margin, say 100 to 1 or even more?

If I'm completely honest, asking these questions is admitting you don't understand the subject matter well enough. People in general seem surprisingly naive what data collection and the subsequent processing entails. This is a wonderful quality, but also means companies can collect with impunity. This is an industry built on deducing marketable conclusions from huge amounts of raw and noisy data. It's far beyond some guy or basic algorithm looking at your browsing and going "you looked at a backpack, you must want a backpack". That happens too, but is a incredibly crude and clunky approach compared to the profiles built of people and their behaviour.

What's done is preferably collecting large amounts of data and matching patterns to other know patterns. Facebook can say with an uncomfortable degree of accuracy whether you're about to engage in or end a relationship. They don't do this by looking at the content of your messages, but at the metadata like how much messages you send when and similar patterns. Note that Facebook also collects large amounts of data about non members. This is also why large scale data collection is a dangerous game as you can make accurate predictions about things people aren't even aware of themselves. This includes illnesses, pregnancies and all kinds of medical data but also political matters. Remember Cambridge Analytica? It's industrialized manipulation. Other than on the micro level people are ridiculously predictable.

To create meaningful noise means creating an adversarial model. "The other side" not only has a massive headstart but is also ridiculously well funded as it's literally an industry worth many billions of dollars, so there's not really a chance of even putting up a fight. Note that I'm simplifying a couple of things here as it's a massive, sprawling and quickly evolving industry.

So...   What can we do, if we intensely dislike the way the Internet has ended up?   ... At least ad blocking means we don't have to look at the intrusion, even if it is still there...

[Mr. Scram]

So...   What can we do, if we intensely dislike the way the Internet has ended up?   ... At least ad blocking means we don't have to look at the intrusion, even if it is still there...

You roll up your sleeves and do what you can. Proper ad blocking doesn't just hide the ads and is an important first step. Reduce your fingerprint. In the case of telemetry you'll want an independent firewall or PiHole type deal. It's definitely an uphill battle, but I consider not doing anything at least as unattractive.