The Black Underbelly of Windows 8.1 'Blue'

[PingSpike]

http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/look-the-black-underbelly-of-windows-81-blue-222175

I'm not a fan of Windows 8 to begin with but are these changes true? The required Microsoft account is annoying enough, but local file searches are now used to send you targeted ads from the web? Good god. It can be turned off but the very idea that by default your local searches of your own hard drive will be data mined at all frankly opens a door that lets me know there is no point at which it will stop. Everything terrible about the Xbox is coming soon to your favorite OS, and more!

 

[darkewaffle]

Holy crap that's some seriously god awful journalism.

I get that people might not like local searches being tapped for advertising (though I feel like search terms for file names are going to going to be almost useless). But Win8 was trying to sell users on MS accounts from day 1, the WEI has been a running joke for years, and changes to the Photos app included in Blue are clearly beta. Not to mention the pretentious conspiracy theorizing and lamentations, unbearable.

 

[IamDavid]

Lol, I could barely follow that garbage.. People spend way to much time worrying about this stuff.

 

[Steltek]

Lol, I could barely follow that garbage.. People spend way to much time worrying about this stuff.

Exactly. The people that hate Windows 8 will continue to hate Windows 8.1. The people who are in ecstasy over it will continue in their trancelike love state with 8.1. And, the vast majority of us who were pretty much ignoring Windows 8 before will continue to ignore Windows 8.1 now.

Pretty much status quo.

 

[Scooby Doo]

Good thing for firewalls... block this junk.

 

[ViRGE]

Holy crap that's some seriously god awful journalism.

I get that people might not like local searches being tapped for advertising (though I feel like search terms for file names are going to going to be almost useless). But Win8 was trying to sell users on MS accounts from day 1, the WEI has been a running joke for years, and changes to the Photos app included in Blue are clearly beta. Not to mention the pretentious conspiracy theorizing and lamentations, unbearable.

Agreed on most counts.

Microsoft accounts: the 8.1 Preview release notes clearly state that local accounts will be back in the final version.

Advertising: This isn't a good thing. But it's consistent with what Android does, which is notable because MS is going after the same tablet space. MS needs to be able to deliver targeted advertising to make the free app model work here. Make of that what you will.

WEI: Completely and utterly worthless. I do not know of any reason it should be missed.

Photos app: Like the man says, it's clearly still in beta. So I'm not sure I'd read too much into it right now, especially since apps updates are delivered separately from OS updates.

The article is clearly clickbait, or at best negligent in its research. There are good reasons to dislike Win8/8.1; what's presented in the article is not one of them.

 

[colonelciller]

what is this forum full of??? microsoft shills that would defend microsoft no matter what they do?

microsoft spying on what users do on their computers is un f'ing acceptable.
people defending that kind of BS are frankly full of it

 

[Maximilian]

what is this forum full of??? microsoft shills that would defend microsoft no matter what they do?

microsoft spying on what users do on their computers is un f'ing acceptable.
people defending that kind of BS are frankly full of it

This tbh...

 

[Mushkins]

what is this forum full of??? microsoft shills that would defend microsoft no matter what they do?

microsoft spying on what users do on their computers is un f'ing acceptable.
people defending that kind of BS are frankly full of it

Uh... what are you even talking about?

Not a single person in this thread defended that. Whether or not MS is spying on its users for ads has nothing at all to do with the fact that this article is clickbait crap, very poorly written, and full of inaccuracies.

 

[dagamer34]

Regardless, the OS doesn't have ads, the apps do. Don't like the apps? Uninstall them. Don't like Bing-powered search? Turn it off.

The amount of complaining people do in the Internet age is simply unprecedented.

 

[hclarkjr]

most of the apps i have used have option to donate\pay $1 or so to turn them off, no big deal to me. i like windows 8 and will be upgrading to 8.1 as soon as it is released to the now dead technet.

 

[el-Capitan]

Holy crap that's some seriously god awful journalism.

Accusing others to follow an agenda, when doing so is clearly on his.

From the author's bio

A self-described "Windows victim," Woody specializes in telling the truth about Windows in a way that won't put you to sleep.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

The ads only show up when you are doing a web based search. This is no different from web based searches today using a browser.

 

[Topweasel]

The ads only show up when you are doing a web based search. This is no different from web based searches today using a browser.

I think this is the part missing. Now the Bing is in charge of all search functions on the computer. It will show local and web based results and will offer up advertised options based on your search criteria not based on everything stored in your system. If you restrict it to system only, boom no advertising.

Honestly if there was a real issue with this people would have stopped using Webmail decades ago. Because honestly I would be more worried about Gmail sifting through my email to give me advertisements than I would be of advertising from key words in a search, or the contents of my drives. The really sensitive stuff is 90% in emails.

 

[showb1z]

what is this forum full of??? microsoft shills that would defend microsoft no matter what they do?

microsoft spying on what users do on their computers is un f'ing acceptable.
people defending that kind of BS are frankly full of it

Heh, so people who are critical of random garbage articles on the internet are shills.
What does that make the people who just lap up any anti-MS/EA/etc. propaganda without a second thought?

 

[Ichinisan]

Holy crap that's some seriously god awful journalism.

I get that people might not like local searches being tapped for advertising (though I feel like search terms for file names are going to going to be almost useless). But Win8 was trying to sell users on MS accounts from day 1, the WEI has been a running joke for years, and changes to the Photos app included in Blue are clearly beta. Not to mention the pretentious conspiracy theorizing and lamentations, unbearable.

...and I believe it has been said the Microsoft Account requirement is only for the beta.

 

[Ichinisan]

Good thing for firewalls... block this junk.

wut

 

[ranakor]

As a 8.1 user i really don't get all the (either way!) fuss about 8.1, it sounds like a very minor version change really, add a button that does nothing more than the window key & uh, well that's about all.
There's 1 change i noticed that's marked as an upgrade and that i actually ABSOLUTELY HATE, it's the new search, it was blazing fast in windows 8 & gave me what i needed, now it's utterly slow. Also it keeps the regular metro desktop in view & puts the search results in it's own bar!
So before : had 20+ results instantaneously when hitting text, in full screen
Now : takes a while to get those same results, need to scroll
Sounds like a hell of a downgrade to me, if they want to aggregate more results that's fine but 1) they should've kept the result view in main window (not in right area bellow the search) and 2) results should come instantly, not be aggregated then come, it seems it tries to find everything before it displays anything, it's "at least" in the 10-100X as slow as before depending on what i type (yes 100, sometimes as low as 10 but often 100, it used to be something like 200ms, now sometimes i wait up to 20 sec!)

 

[jaqie]

...and I believe it has been said the Microsoft Account requirement is only for the beta.

Wait, what? a microsoft account huh?

I had my network card unplugged when installing 8.1 beta and had no wifi in the pc, and it just went right through with the install just fine, and everything worked on the other end.

Until I tried bringing up the start menu.

I fought with it a while, but never really bothered too much once I found out the start menu was still gone.

I never saw an internet is required notice, even after I plugged it in after the install was done and the system was up and running.

test system: core 2 duo @3.33ghz, 4gb ram.

P.S. I tried the beta of 8 and was fuming it required a live account... so yeah, just didn't see that this time, with no network connectivity for the machine in question during install.

 

[RU482]

Microsoft accounts: the 8.1 Preview release notes clearly state that local accounts will be back in the final version.

If you don't connect to the internet during setup, you get the option to create a local account with 8.1 preview

 

[Ichinisan]

P.S. I tried the beta of 8 and was fuming it required a live account... so yeah, just didn't see that this time, with no network connectivity for the machine in question during install.

The beta didn't require it either. The option to create a local account was there, just deliberately de-emphasized.

 

[Tom]

ok, I read through the article..and all of you harping about it being bad journalism have no point that I see ?

 

[ViRGE]

Try post #6. There are fundamental assumptions the author is making that are known to be incorrect, particularly the bit about local accounts. Never mind the fact that this is a MS beta, which is to say it's feature incomplete (and as such should not necessarily be used to extrapolate the final state of the OS).

 

[Tom]

Try post #6. There are fundamental assumptions the author is making that are known to be incorrect, particularly the bit about local accounts. Never mind the fact that this is a MS beta, which is to say it's feature incomplete (and as such should not necessarily be used to extrapolate the final state of the OS).

His article says there are ways to use the beta with a local account and that the final release will not require a web account, but it isn't known exactly how that will be implemented.

So what part is incorrect ?

As far as Wei, he gives an example of its use that makes sense and agrees with you that its not all that important, but Microsoft thought it was important enough to create it, what's the reason for not keeping it ?

Disagreeing with an author's point doesn't mean the article is trash, does it ?

 

[Doomer]

The sheep are being led to the slaughter, lol.

It's true, people are too stupid to continue being free.