its only free until june
That doesn't explain why they're actually forcing upgrades onto people without their consent, especially considering that many people who don't upgrade are doing so for a reason.
yeah that's what i'm most confused about
why are they so eager to give away free software
Well, this is going to be a very long post, because it's a really complicated question and I have things I personally want to add to it. Sorry if you don't like that.
Let's think critically about it for a moment. Not just about why they're doing these forced upgrades, but why Win10 is free in the first place.
What normally drives a multibillion dollar company to do things? The answer to that isn't very complicated, of course it's money. It's why companies do anti-consumer bullcrap like put data caps on home internet to save single digit percentages of data usage and why they have certain pro-consumer things like customer support.
(Which to them is nothing more than an investment; you invest in customer service and you get returns off happier customers. If the investment isn't worth the money, they won't "invest" in customer support. Comcast is a prime example of this.)
So if we were to make the reasonable assumption that it's money that drives them to do these forced upgrades (Under the assumption that many people won't fight it), we can try to figure out what about a consumer having Windows 10 makes MS more money. Let's go through a few possibilities to try and cover all our bases and not jump to conclusions:
Windows 10 might have more software support than older versions, meaning that users have the capability to run and buy more software. However anything designed by MS is usually designed to work on Windows 7 and up, that's their sort of benchmark for compatibility now, and since Windows 7-8.1 are getting the upgrade opportunity, we can disregard that possibility.
It might be for the Windows 10 App Store, which does have some paid apps like games included. Maybe that's how they make their money? But there are so few people that even launch up the app store on even a semi-regular basis, let alone actually feel it worth it to pay money for a Windows 10 App, most of which are really just paid mobile games. It would make so little money that the potential losses from pissing off your customers with a forced upgrade would probably negate any profits made off of it. Even if I'm underestimating it slightly, it still would barely make MS any money and certainly wouldn't bring them into the black.
And it definitely can't be actually purchasing the OS, it's free, and they're forcing people to upgrade. So not only do they have to make up for the money from pissed off customers, but they have to make up for the millions of dollars lost for giving away the OS for free. So we need to find something which either makes a lot of money from a few users, or makes a little money from basically all of the users.
Now, there just so happens to be something of that second sort, and that's data mining. The basic premise of data mining is that you closely monitor what your users are doing, which is normally done by example Google, which uses Google brown townytics to try and figure out things about the user to give them targeted advertising. The more accurate and deep their information is, the more money they can get from advertisers and people who subscribe to paid Google brown townytics information.
But MS has something special: Full, unrestricted OS access, and the legal ability to look at all your network communications, emails, anything that they can reasonably automate. That means that they can paint an amazingly accurate portrait of who you are, what you like, what you don't, etc all from that information, all completely automated. They then sell this information to advertisers, which use it to target advertisements towards you. Obviously, if they advertise stuff you like rather than stuff you dislike they'll get more money, that's why they're willing to pay more for more accurate data. They don't make a ton of money off of individual people, but this is applied to every single person who uses Windows 10, and that's in the tens of millions already at the very least.
So this data mining practice can get them a ton of money, and it doesn't cost them a dime because as said before, so few people actually read privacy policies and understand them, and so few people seem to care about the implications of such things.
Even if people do find out about it, so few people are impacted by it that it still makes MS a massive amount of profit. Just goes to show, if the product's free, you're the product.
It's also a massive invasion of privacy, extremely dishonest and sketchy, but it's also very dangerous for the consumer which so few people seem to realize given the massive number of people using Windows 10. This level of access that they've stated in the privacy policy says that they have filesystem access, they have access to anything sent over your internet, they have access to any information on your computer. In order for that to work they'd need to have a backdoor inside the OS itself. And no self-respecting company would just leave this wide open; they'd hide it deep within the bowels of the OS and secure it somehow.
Now the way these kinds of things are normally secured is through something called
public-key cryptography. It involves a lot of math but a grossly simplified version is imagine you had a lock on a door. Usually, you have one key to both lock and unlock the door. But with public-key cryptography, you have two keys: One to lock the door, and one to unlock the door. The one that locks the door is public and can't unlock the door, and the one that unlocks the door is private. Microsoft can also use this private key to "sign" a message that they send, verifying to anyone with the public key that the person who sent the message to them was Microsoft. So if they wanted to access a file on your harddrive for example, they could send "RETRIEVE "C:/Users/ottosan/Documents/Dirty Secrets.txt" (Signed by Microsoft)" (Obviously oversimplified.) And then the computer would retrieve and send the file.
Now you might be thinking "Great! The backdoor is secure and I trust Microsoft!" but it isn't that simple. The private key that they use to sign those messages and unlock those doors has to be stored somewhere; it's really just a random bunch of 1s and 0s that only a computer could understand. And it has to be on a server connected to the internet because the process needs to be automated for them to make any money. That means that the key is now vulnerable to many different kinds of attacks. This is included but not limited to government entities which might want access to peoples files, (*ahem*NSA*ahem*) hackers, and even disgruntled employees! You might also be thinking "Well you can't hack Microsoft. They made the darn thing." but you'd be wrong.
Windows has had a ton of security flaws, all found by regular citizens, and thinking that their servers could be any different would be incredibly naive. Matter of fact is, that private key isn't so private, and anyone who gains access to that private key, that little string of 1s and 0s instantly gains complete, unrestricted access to every single computer running Windows 10, and Microsoft wouldn't even know that anyone had it.
Not only that, but this kind of thing sets a really bad precedent for digital privacy rights in general. Now that the government more than likely has complete unfettered access
and is giving everything they have to local police without any warrants, the door is wiiiide open for abuse and even more whittling down of our privacy rights. Your local police force can gather data on every single person they can if they wanted to, literally looking through your files one by one. It's only a matter of time before people get wrongfully prosecuted and data leaks happen from corrupt cops looking to make a quick buck, having their lives ruined along with hundreds of other law abiding innocent citizens. It's an absolutely massively abusable power and the fact that so few people care about it really sucks, because this is a serious issue.
And not only that but now that our government has access, how long is it going to be before other countries governments ask for access? What happens when countries like Russia and China, which care even less about peoples privacy and more about silencing political dissent get their hands on that private key? How many journalists and activists do you think are going to have to 'drink the koolaid' so to speak before this kind of stuff is actually cared about by the people?
So you can tell, I'm quite passionate about this kind of thing, and this is why every time I see someone say "Windows 10 is great!" or "Just upgraded, liking it so far" it makes me a little sad, because what's going on is really the exact opposite of great.
forget, I spent all night writing this when I should have been studying.
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