Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[JorgeA]

The number of Websites to steer clear of is set to grow by leaps and bounds:

Facebook Tests Software to Track Your Cursor on Screen

The social network may start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content, such as how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin said Tuesday during an interview.

[...]

Facebook isn’t the first company to contemplate recording such activity. Shutterstock Inc., a marketplace for digital images, records literally everything that its users do on the site. Shutterstock uses the open-source Hadoop distributed file system to analyze data such as where visitors to the site place their cursors and how long they hover over an image before they make a purchase. “Today, we are looking at every move a user makes, in order to optimize the Shutterstock experience….All these new technologies can process that,” Shutterstock founder and CEO Jon Oringer told the Wall Street Journal in March.

Guess who makes Hadoop.

One of the classical arguments against being concerned about surveillance is that you could mask your real sympathies by making a show of paying equal attention to sources from the side that you dislike. For example (and this argument has been made to me) you could buy equal numbers of Marxist and free-market books on Amazon, and it would be difficult to tell which ones you're actually reading.

But with this emerging technology, it gets harder by an order of magnitude to mask your real beliefs: since the NSA (Coming Soon: and other major countries' spy agencies) has the capability to collect and sift through your Web travels, as a dissident now you'd not only have to open equivalent numbers of ideologically opposite websites, but you'd also have to spend the same time on each and scroll and mouse around on all of them in similar fashion. Talk about a chilling effect -- just watch animal videos on YouTube and keep up with the entertainment news like you're supposed to, and leave the thinking to Us.

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Can I bring forward another question?

Anyone has any idea on how "working" are ads (and "piloted" ads)?

I mean everyday's life (needed preamble being that I never, and when I say never, I do mean never, clicked on an ad on google results):

• I search on google for a given product/service/firm/whatever
• I do not click on the "sponsored" results, but rather look at the "plain" results
• I look a few related pages, then go about doing some actual work
• later I go to the usual "places", MSFN, 911CD reboot.pro
• very often the ads on MSFN and reboot.pro are for products that were on the SAME page(s) I have already been to

Now, if those ads had been for some other, different, similar product it would have made some (litlle) sense to me, re-pushing over and over the SAME products I have already seen is not (at least for me) particularly "productive".

What do you think?

Well, needless to say, I'm the same as you concerning those ads you mention. The benign cases are tolerable as they exist but having been around a long time we know that clicking on something that could easily be labeled "click me" is an unacceptable risk. I suspect we have developed instinctive self-defense brain function that surveys the field in front of us and overlays a warning label ( mine looks like a Terminator HUD interface ) over clickables and we pay attention to it. It would seem that the younger evolved/mutated species specimens may not have any such early warning system, at least judging by the excuses I have to listen to almost every day from computer owners.

Those benign ads are at the bottom of the risk ladder because in a place like this ( or those other great sites you mention ) the population is mostly well-armed, or at least street-wise. ( O/T, but does anyone remember when advertising and commercialization became allowed on USENET? I remember a lot more controversy in the early 1990's than I can find in results from Google searches. )

What are less benign are the ones you mention in search engines like sponsored ads. Those users that are not equipped for self-defense have a perfect trap just waiting for them to walk in, and Windows happily obliges! This was my first pet peeve with the post Windows XP disaster ...

That's an actual screenshot of what happens if you click on an unassociated filetype in the highly praised but severely dumbed down Windows 6.x family, in this case Thumbs.db sitting in the user desktop because some other evolved program like a simple picture viewer that comes with Windows itself left it as a trap I mean, gift.

Naturally this wonderful operating system leads straight to a new infection vector from here when you hit ENTER ...

... whereupon the ever-vigilant MSIE is launched with a portal to the outside world ( instead of the operating system itself! ), a Microsoft hosted page with sponsored results ( WTF? ) and the only visual segregation is some CSS code that changes the background from #ffffff to #e9e9e9. Now that's what I call evolved. Not that it really matters anyway because if you look in the non-sponsored official Microsoft section there is no solution anyway! So the hapless sheep then will most likely click on Instantly Fix and Open/Run .DB ... and be treated to a program that hardly helps at all and either installs a service or simply takes over the UNKNOWN filetype for future encounters. Or, it does something even worse.

There is so much wrong here, including the MSIE toolbar there that displays some spammed links to game websites that came in when this particular user installed something in the past, allowing further opportunity to FUBAR the system, which BTW was not even infected at all at this point ( the UNKNOWN filetype is not a crisis and the OS logic is working properly at this stage, it's the next step which was changed that now kicks the user online rather than utilizing a local dialog that existed from Win95 to WinXP, and I believe maybe even Win3x. There are really no words adequate to describe the level of stoopid that Microsoft OS developers allowed into the Vista+ product. We're gonna need a new dictionary. It begs the question of why Microsoft or Google should even be trusted to vet those "Sponsored Results" in the first place. I mean they have constantly reoccurring problems with all manner of things from Windows Update to Firmware to Server Hardware. Why on Earth should anyone believe they have the ability to perfectly scrutinize things at this level of detail? Are we to believe they download all the files from all the sponsored results, adequately test them and then and only then, greenlight them? They cannot even test their own OS adequately as we have seen every day!

But back to advertising as a concept ... Even if we could somehow make all the ads safe ( and that's asking a lot! ) we are still left with the parasitic traits built-in. In almost every instance advertising is an invisible slush fund, a widely accepted value-added tax that promises free or low-cost services which are very far from free. In short, ads are among the most insidious affliction that an allegedly free society allows in its midst. And it all began when we accepted government regulation of broadcasting which became a licensing authority for monopolies, handing out cash printing presses to a handful of favored entities who get to charge whatever they want to air a spot.

Nothing is free. When the sheeple stand slack-jawed in the aisle of the grocery store wondering why their laundry detergent or loaf of bread has jumped 3 cents since last month or several dollars since last decade they should only blame themselves. Because, when they go home and watch a ballgame or Oprah it never occurs to them that they are fully approving of this inflation engine even as they see an ad for Tide or Nissan or baby food which that company just shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to air, which the broadcaster just pocketed, and which the sheeple gets to pay at the supermarket cash register. It's a brave new world indeed.

It would be great if all the companies that produce goods would agree to a advertising strike for a month or two, buy no ads whatsoever and help to shake out the parasites in this grand Ponzi scheme. But that fantasy is as likely as Microsoft growing a brain.

[jaclaz]

Sure, very interesting report/opinions/whatever about the senselessness of the "Use the web search to find the associated program", but at least, in their perverted minds they are actually trying (stupidly and badly) to help the user.

But my question was about something else.

You remember the other thread about electronic waste?

I did also a couple local (on the internet but local to Italy) searches because the very same day I was asked to deal with the demolition of a building which had beforehand to be cleared from some electronic waste (broken Tv's, etc.). Coincidence.

Of course you cannot really "limit" your searches (unless you want to NOT find ), so I got a few results from people/firms doing this job in other places, particularly one doing these near Rome (i.e. about 300 Km from here), but I had a look at their site to understand something about "standard" arrangements, etc.

Now, this is a "local" service (and all I had to do was to get rid of some 20 - twenty - old 14" crt Tv's a few telephones, a Fax machine), I have no need whatsoever for someone doing this work somewhere else.

For several days afterwards, I found ads from this firm on the Forums.

Now, I am pretty sure that I won't have soon any need to get rid of electronic waste in the Rome area, but I am even more sure that should it ever happen, I won't use the services of someone so §@ç#ing stupid as to actually pay money to deliver "targeted ads" to a NON-target!

So what I was asking was whether - no matter if one later decides to buy (success for the ad) or to NOT buy (failure for the ad) a given product/service/whatever - in the opinion of members these "targeted" ads are actually hitting the target or missing it completely.

jaclaz

[TELVM]

... Anyone has any idea on how "working" are ads (and "piloted" ads)? ...

Man it was so long ago that I can't remember ads .

. . ................ . .

[JorgeA]

So what I was asking was whether - no matter if one later decides to buy (success for the ad) or to NOT buy (failure for the ad) a given product/service/whatever - in the opinion of members these "targeted" ads are actually hitting the target or missing it completely.

I understand what you're saying. It does seem silly. But having been in the advertising business, I can say that it's possible that the provider of the service in Rome actually paid to have their ad shown to you in your city. Sometimes it's cheaper (or just as cheap) to cast a wider net (buy a wider area) than a more limited area.

Or maybe the advertiser had money to burn.

A third possibility is that some obscure government regulation or union requirement may have forced them to pointlessly buy more widely. A few years ago there was a case in a major U.S. city where new buildings were required to install plumbing inside the walls for urinals in men's rooms, even if they ONLY had regular toilets installed. It was a way to make extra work for the local plumbers' union, and the politicians signed on because it meant more votes for them.

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

I did also a couple local (on the internet but local to Italy) searches because the very same day I was asked to deal with the demolition of a building which had beforehand to be cleared from some electronic waste (broken Tv's, etc.). Coincidence.

[...]

For several days afterwards, I found ads from this firm on the Forums.

Now, I am pretty sure that I won't have soon any need to get rid of electronic waste in the Rome area, but I am even more sure that should it ever happen, I won't use the services of someone so §@ç#ing stupid as to actually pay money to deliver "targeted ads" to a NON-target!

So what I was asking was whether - no matter if one later decides to buy (success for the ad) or to NOT buy (failure for the ad) a given product/service/whatever - in the opinion of members these "targeted" ads are actually hitting the target or missing it completely.

Clearly you got tracked. It reminds me of Minority Report where he goes into a store wearing someone else's eyes and the smart advertising system serves up stuff appropriate for the other guy.

( Image Source )

I see interesting tracking results when fixing computers using Nirsoft stuff to wander through the caches to locate the malware point of entry. I'm pretty convinced that the bulk of what I see in there was custom tailored for their benefit because they seem to match the personality pretty well ( ladies shoes, cowboy hats, music stuff, etc ). Are they effective? God I hope not. Mathematically it makes no sense to me. Why would I expect that out of the thousands of possible places I could by a certain widget, that the one that squeaked through the system and appeared in a Google sidebar is the best match? Those are like lottery odds. More likely is that the one that squeaked through had the most money to spend, or has a sweetheart deal with Google/Microsoft/Yahoo, or just got lucky. I don't anticipate Google/Microsoft/Yahoo refining their algorithm to sort possible ad insertions by best deal or location, or lowest tax, or cheapest shipping or anything else of actual consideration.

And this is going to only get worse as Microsoft embeds Bing like a tick deeper into their Playskool operating system. As there was little to no discernible outcry, why would they not continue? Same with Google obviously.

As bad as advertising is right now for modern society ( I mean as an invisible inflationary engine ), it is only going to get worse going forward. Microsoft and Google and associated advertising agencies will spend great effort convincing the general product makers that this new computerized advertising thing ( rapidly becoming a pull model ) is even better than the already expensive broadcasting push model - because it pulls rather than pushes - hence, the ads are targeted and better, and now pay us please. Expect prices of goods to ... wait for it ... rise!

So you can obviously put me down in the "miss" category with respect to the question. That's a "miss" with a side order of anti-Orwellian alarm, disgust and anger.

( Image Source )

[Formfiller]

Another C9 adventure:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/Is-Windows-Update-for-XP-sabotaged

edit: fixed link.

Edited November 4, 2013 by Formfiller

[G8YMW]

Just been there. Not found

Just had a root about to "Forums", "Coffeehouse" Found it

Edited November 4, 2013 by G8YMW

[Aero7x64]

Microsoft's design director Steve Kaneko, have you heard about him before?He sound embracing flat ugly interface just like Ballmer and Larson-Green. He need go out along with Ballmer, Larson-Green and others who are responsible for current mess in Windows 8. And he is design director, meaning he could be one who is maybe responsible for removing Aero and maybe he is responsible removing start menu as well .

http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/16/2640634/steve-kaneko-microsoft-design-metro-office-interview

Edited November 4, 2013 by Aero7x64

[Formfiller]

More C9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/Windows-Desktop

Desktop stinks with touch, touch will be on every new PC within a year or two, Metro rocks on touch. I'd start moving apps to it now if Windows 8 is something you'll need to support.

No it won't, because this:

is stupid.

Although the guy I quoted always seemed to like W8, he was a tad more critical in the past:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/What-will-the-next-and-BEST-Windows-be-called--Windows-9/2d05f487293e4933b4bda23400ef4551

Yeah really. It's kind of depressing. All of this computing power available cheaply and in a tiny form factor, and we use it to play stupid games and re-post cat pictures on Facebook.

Interesting - I haven't posted on Channel9 for a while now, and that lack of critical voice really seems to have an effect. When I posted my W8 rants there, they were a bit more critical as a whole (towards MS).

Edited November 4, 2013 by Formfiller

[JorgeA]

Interesting - I haven't posted on Channel9 for a while now, and that lack of critical voice really seems to have an effect. When I posted my W8 rants there, they were a bit more critical as a whole (towards MS).

It's amazing how much difference even a single voice can make.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.

A remarkably evenhanded article. Some of these overseas bad guys you DO want to find out what they're up to. But the danger, and the source of most of the outrage, is well put in this paragraph near the end:

Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil’s president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does,” he said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public.

“I think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

One more on the NSA:

The Google File System makes NSA’s hack blatantly illegal and it knows it

The major point being missed, I think, by the general press is how the Google File System and Yahoo’s Hadoop Distributed File System play into this story. Both of these Big Data file systems are functionally similar. Google refers to its data as being in chunks while Hadoop refers to blocks of data, but they are really similar -- large flat databases that are replicated and continuously updated in many locations across the application and across the globe so the exact same data can be searched more or less locally from anywhere on Earth, maintaining at all costs what’s called data coherency.

Data replication, which is there for reasons of both performance and fault tolerance, means that when the GCHQ in London is accessing the Google data center there, they have access to all Google data, not just Google’s UK data or Google’s European data. All Google data for all users no matter where they are is reachable through any Google data center anywhere, thanks to the Google File System.

This knocks a huge hole in the legal safe harbor the NSA has been relying on in its use of data acquired overseas, which assumes that overseas data primarily concerns non-US citizens who aren’t protected by US privacy laws or the FISA Court. The artifice is that by GCHQ grabbing data for the NSA and the NSA presumably grabbing data for GCHQ, both agencies can comply with domestic laws and technically aren’t spying on their own citizens when in fact that’s exactly what they have been doing.

[emphasis in original]

--JorgeA

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

I did also a couple local (on the internet but local to Italy) searches because the very same day I was asked to deal with the demolition of a building which had beforehand to be cleared from some electronic waste (broken Tv's, etc.). Coincidence.

Jaclaz, I forgot to mention something. If you are using Opera 12 rather than 11, I believe ( but haven't had time to prove ) there is something different between them. Research this ... optimizely.com

I noticed this in the cookies immediately after moving from 11 to 12. I never had it appear in 11. Optimizely is another cross-site advertising facilitator and while I have yet to notice and tailored ads myself ( haven't really been looking ), it does spawn cookies for every site that uses their code.

I only looked briefly at it so far, noting the cookie set times and comparing to browser history page loads. I have rough lists of sites that use the code, set the cookie and then presumably plan to launch ads. One of them is The Guardian ( from reading the spy articles ). I cannot yet rule out some difference in the content block blacklist or anything else. So it may be an Opera 12 thing or not. I haven't even checked Opera forums yet.

This Optimizely cookie thing has per-site blocking ...

//www.optimizely.com/opt_out

Where you are supposed to do it for every site ...

//www.example.com/?optimizely_opt_out=true

... which I think is ridiculous. Some day if I get time I will try to just add them right to the content block blacklist and some other tricks.

Just an FYI, it may or may not have anything to do with that experience of yours.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Newegg taking pre-orders for Windows 8.1 back-up disc; on sale Nov. 15th for $14.99 ( NeoWin 2013-11-05 )

Officially, Microsoft is not offering an ISO file for Windows 8.1, although there is at least one unofficial way users can create such an image. Now there's word that a major online retailer, Newegg, is taking pre-orders for what it calls a Windows 8.1 back-up media disc, but it's unclear if this is an official product from Microsoft.

What a clown circus! Even bricked tablets from bad live updates cannot get Microsoft to realize that digital distribution is fine for some things, but not for the ( use Dr. Evil voice ) frickin' operating system. Enter NewEgg, who probably ( but not stated in the report ) are in the perfect position to notice these problems. Operating on razor-thin profit margins will do that to you because all it takes is a bunch of returns or support incidents to wipe out everything you have accomplished. Microsoft cleverly insulated itself from such customer interaction long ago by using the OEMs and retailers as effective shields while they cower behind them and rake in the money.

RetroUI Pro Start menu app adds Windows 8.1 support ( NeoWin 2013-11-04 )

For Jorge and your Start Menu thread. Don't bother reading the comments though. There are two phrases that send the Pavlovian fandogs into a barking mad frenzy ... Start Menu ... Windows XP.

Windows Phone now more popular than iOS in Italy ( NeoWin 2013-11-04 )

Oh great, now we're gonna hear even more Italian jokes. What's going on over there Jaclaz?

In all seriousness, they are short on details here. Neither NeoWin or the source article even gives the numbers that I can see. For example, just how can you tell usage from a country level. Ah well, I'm no statistician. But I am very suspicious when things like this are just tossed out there without nuance. One commenter might be onto something though, saying that it is brand loyalty to Nokia over anything else.

Windows 8 loses market share for the first time... sort of ( TechSpot 2013-11-04 )

The month of October was an interesting one for Microsoft as Windows 8 lost market share for the first time since launching a year ago technically speaking. The decline came as a result of users upgrading to Windows 8.1 in addition to customers purchasing new PCs according to the latest report from Net Applications.

Hey, that's what I've been saying ( glad they're noticing though ). Microsoft decided to play tricks this time around and are getting rewarded They chose to use point upgrades rather than Service Pack terminology for an update which is clearly nothing more than Windows XP SP2 or Windows 98SE at best. The most inexplicable thing is bumping the kernel up to Windows 6.3 though, because nothing in there merits such an increment. So to Microsoft I say, please get to work on 8.2 immediately! OS fragmentation is the only excuse you can truthfully put forth to explain the magnitude of this epic fail.