Microsoft's Software Is Malware

On one hand, I&#x27;ve been one of Microsoft&#x27;s biggest fans. I&#x27;ve been using Windows since it first came out, then NT, then 95, then 2000, and so on. I&#x27;ve been using Visual Studio since 2003. They used to be my favorite products.<p>And yet I hate what they&#x27;re doing now. I turned off automatic updates, or so I thought, and returned to my machine one day last week to find it had restarted anyway. I&#x27;d spent a fair amount of preparing a commit and most of my work had vanished. Another time I returned to an unwelcome restart and I had actually lost a fair amount of work. Sure, I retyped it, but really?<p>On the same machine, I have another account on the same machine that I use for testing. Every single time I sign in to that account, I have to start Task Manager as an administrator and then kill Windows Compatibility Telemetry, even though I have allegedly(?) disabled it several times. Otherwise it consumes so much CPU that I can&#x27;t get my work done.<p>Also, Visual Studio is a hot mess. Why do I have to wait when I drag and drop an int into the watch window? Why does my machine slow to a crawl when I&#x27;m running debug builds? Why are there so many bugs with breakpoints? A lot of the time, I have to use page up&#x2F;page down to see the breakpoint appear even though I hit F9. Why is it agonizingly slow to type things when I&#x27;m debugging? Why do I fantasize about finding a new job that doesn&#x27;t require me to use Visual Studio? Visual Studio has become my least favorite piece of software. There are days when I just write code in Notepad++ and only use Visual Studio to build.<p>It&#x27;s frustrating. The seeming inability to exert developer-level control over Windows makes me feel like my devices aren&#x27;t mine. For fuck&#x27;s sake, I had to tell Windows that my internet connection was metered in order to get them to stop with the updates.<p>Yes, the article might be hyperbolic, but the whole jail argument is starting to line up pretty well with reality. Dear Microsoft, please stop fucking with everything.

&gt;Nonfree software is controlled by its developers, which puts them in a position of power over the users...<p>The implication is that FOSS developers have no control over their users. Sure, you COULD fork your favorite tool&#x27;s repository and spend many hours trying to figure out how to make it do &#x27;what you want instead of what the developers wanted&#x27;; but very few people are really willing and&#x2F;or able to do that.<p>Nearly all software (open source or proprietary) except trivial programs, are controlled by the developers who build it and maintain it. They are given that power by the mere fact that most programs are sufficiently complex that few others can and will assume control instead. If someone does (and that someone isn&#x27;t you) then the new boss is same as the old boss (to quote a line from a song by The Who).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;distros&#x2F;common-distros.en.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;distros&#x2F;common-distros.en.html</a><p>Arch is a swing and a miss<p>&gt; Arch has no policy against distributing nonfree software through their normal channels, and nonfree blobs are shipped with their kernel, Linux.<p>Debian is a no go<p>&gt; Debian also maintains a repository of nonfree software. According to the project, this software is “not part of the Debian system,” but the repository is hosted on many of the project&#x27;s main servers, and people can readily find these nonfree packages by browsing Debian&#x27;s online package database and its wiki.<p>Sorry Gentoo<p>&gt; Gentoo includes installation recipes for a number of nonfree programs in its primary package system.<p>BSD<p>&gt; FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all include instructions for obtaining nonfree programs in their ports system. In addition, their kernels include nonfree firmware blobs.

I&#x27;ve been doing IT for quite a while now. About 25ish years ago a bloke called Ben Greer sent me some patches to get 802.1Q VLANs running on Linux which sorted a snag for me on a rather large network with no Windows domain and a lot of workgroups. I whipped up a lot of Samba daemons - one per network per workgroup and combined their browse lists. There was something like 100 of them running on an old Compaq cream coloured tower thing.<p>A few weeks ago I filed a couple of bugs a few days before buggering off on hols. Both were fixed within a couple of days. One was for a pretty esoteric snag on Arch Linux relating to Python, Kerberos and WinRM. Ansible now works again. I can&#x27;t remember what the other one was but it was to do with Graylog - again fixed with alacrity.<p>I&#x27;ve done time on the Gentoo and Arch and many other forums and sometimes actually fixed stuff 8) and of course had stuff fixed for me. I have also been called a wanker and may have had some fairly heated discussions - that is the way of the internet. I have also apologised for being a knobend a few times and that gets a good response.<p>My experience with Windows is not the same as my Linux experience and I started off with Windows 2. OK I actually started off with a ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum and I still have a C-64 (with USB nowadays).<p>When you search for a Linux snag these days you get an awful lot of blogs that are at least nicely formatted copies of canonical sources. I use uBlacklist to get rid of the worst. Search for a Windows snag and you generally fall into a whole world of hurt. sfc &#x2F;scannow or reinstall your OS is a common answer. I&#x27;ll drop here that sfc has never fixed a snag for me (I worry about roughly thousands of Windows boxes) but someone a third my age will still insist it is the dog&#x27;s nadgers.<p>Windows isn&#x27;t malware, it&#x27;s just lost the plot. There is a lot to love still in there somewhere but the copy n paste icons are an absolute aberration and W11 is just plain odd in places.<p>You cannot use telemetry to work out what is going on in someone&#x27;s mind. My wife uses Arch Linux with KDE as a WM and has no idea what that even means. I divorced her from Windows at Win7 and never looked back.

Is there anybody who&#x27;s actually been convinced to switch to the 100% pure and ethical GNU&#x2F;RMS lifestyle by these articles or is it just preaching to the choir?

Why would ANYONE use windows. 40 years of bs crap. Why can’t they just keep windows classic with all the legacy code and build a new light system with no legacy? Has ms had any innovation ever!!!

I&#x27;m all for calling out large corporations and bad actors on their misconduct, but this article seems bigoted against Microsoft and their products, and hypocritical at times.<p>For example, (referencing the &quot;Jails&quot; section here), the author says, &quot;Jails are systems that impose censorship on application programs.&quot; Not sure if I&#x27;m interpreting this next quote from the GNU.org site (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;distros&#x2F;free-distros.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;distros&#x2F;free-distros.html</a>) correctly, but it seems like this is exactly their definition of a &quot;Free GNU&#x2F;Linux distribution&quot; is meant to do: &quot;They will reject nonfree applications, nonfree programming platforms, nonfree drivers, nonfree firmware &quot;blobs,&quot; nonfree games, and any other nonfree software, as well as nonfree manuals or documentation.&quot;<p>&quot;They will reject&quot; seems an awful like &quot;won&#x27;t run on my distribution&quot;, and not because it&#x27;s not compatible because of runtime or kernel differences, but because of its &#x27;being nonfree&#x27;.<p>From Merriam &amp; Webster:<p>BIGOT: a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices.<p>I love free software. I don&#x27;t have to pay for it, I can share, customize, and use it as I want without the author of the software ever needing to know or care, because he did it out of either love for software or because he had a need to fulfill and was nice enough to release it to the world.<p>I also use paid software and software containing &quot;nonfree&quot; software blobs. I have an Android because it works for me. I use Spotify on all my devices, and pay for Premium, because I find it convenient, the same reason I use GNOME and VS Code and drive a used Chevy.<p>I value my time and quality of life too much to be extreme &quot;beCaUSE iT wASN&#x27;t FreEEE&quot;.<p>Just my 2 cents. I&#x27;ll have that with a side of Kale please.

So is Apple&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;proprietary&#x2F;malware-apple.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;proprietary&#x2F;malware-apple.html</a>

I don&#x27;t think we talk enough about how U.S. taxpayers are footing the bill for Microsoft&#x27;s technical debt.<p>It&#x27;s shocking to spend time with Federal Workers and see how much of their days are wasted waiting for anti-virus and other bad closed source software, and then to realize we all are paying taxes to support this! Same goes for Oracle. BG and LarryE got the country to fund their yachts and stuck us with the bill.<p>I&#x27;m gonna run for Congress under a platform of banning any Federal money from being spent on closed source, non public domain software.

A pretty sobering list. Some of the language is charged according to some folks, but saw no errors per se. None of it is news if you&#x27;ve been paying attention for a few years.<p>I no longer need to worry about Windows, but now wondering what to do about UEFI. I&#x27;ve heard about things like coreboot, but doesn&#x27;t seem to be offered by mainstream manufacturers. Not sure I wanna risk bricking my machine. Has there been any recent progress here?

Sure, but it also provides a good deal of inspiration for free and open source software.<p>And it&#x27;s good enough for many purposes.

Trillions of dollars are managed in Microsoft Excel which is probably the most end user empowering software ever released in the history of computing.<p>Calling Microsoft software malware is so over the top that it turns off normal users and is only appreciated by people who are already committed to free software.

Oh lord: the newspeak conflating &quot;malware&quot; of &quot;they don&#x27;t give me all of the source and all of their tools&quot; with &quot;ransomware encrypted all pictures of deceased grandma&quot;. I don&#x27;t have a horse in this cockfight between religions because there are strengths and suck in each.<p>Windows annoys me because of prevalent active app stuttering and lag that has never been resolved with more soft-realtime IO and context schedulers to what the user is focused on. Debugging tools have somewhat improved but you have to be a nuclear engineer to locate what is impacting performance.

Try as you might no setting you set in windows seems to stick anymore, that or they actively try to get you to reset it. I have seemingly un-installed so many stub apps, disabled onedrive countless times, mucked with group policy etc. etc. etc.<p>You can&#x27;t modify the system enough, it&#x27;s not designed to be modified, its too complicated to be tested in any state but their defaults.<p>I&#x27;ve finally fully embraced Linux. Microsoft made it happen.

No offense, but has this guy used Google? Because it&#x27;s much worse. Microsoft is not innocent, but Google makes them look like child&#x27;s play. There are 3 tech companies (in reality) that are juggernauts. Apple, Microsoft, and Google. Apple at least pretends to care about privacy (I don&#x27;t believe them) Microsoft somewhat pretends (I don&#x27;t believe them) and Google doesn&#x27;t even pretend (I actually believe them.) Pick your poison.

This is just a list of compromises where Microsoft is prioritizing something other than what this author wants. It turns out a lot of users want to have a secure system, not lose all of their files when they forget a password, can work with legacy systems, etc.<p>Calling software malicous because it prioritized security over freedom just reads to me as being ignorant.

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34911811" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34911811</a>

Ugh.. not this again. It can&#x27;t be malware if there is no malicious intent behind it. Not greed, not carelessness, not incompetence not apathy but malice, as in MS must desire to cause harm to its users.<p>Let&#x27;s tally up every RCE in GNU software and call it a backdoor if we&#x27;re misrepresenting other&#x27;s intentions.<p>Shame on GNU, the quality of the foundation&#x27;s work speaks for itself without this drivel.

So what is a solution if you need this malware to host another malware from Adobe for work?

The article doesn&#x27;t have a specific author listed. Is it safe to assume RMS?

This article is a bit dramatic. If Microsoft really turns out to be a bad actor, we can switch to Linux or any alternative rather quickly.

Sadly there is no other better option. Most foss don&#x27;t user friendly enough and Apple just aims to against humanity.

LOL. I read the headline, and shook my head, figuring that there was only one site where that might have been published.<p>I was right.

always has been

What an interesting comment thread.<p>One of the more interesting additions to the article linked in the OP refers to this site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techspot.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;97535-windows-11-spyware-machine-out-users-control.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techspot.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;97535-windows-11-spyware-machi...</a> - I&#x27;m not sure if I would consider techspot is good journaling. That&#x27;s all I&#x27;ll say about that.<p>&gt; Microsoft is imposing its surveillance on the game of Minecraft by requiring every player to open an account on Microsoft&#x27;s network.<p>It&#x27;s ok when it was Mojang, but it&#x27;s &quot;surveillance&quot; when Microsoft does it? I mean - Mojang required a login account for the longest time, also. I considered it a good approach simplifying accounts so people can play together across iOS and PC.<p>Anyways... onto commenting the comments below;<p>I see people complaining about Office being slow, and taking very long to load. Office apps are one of the fastest applications on my system, often taking a second to load. Yes, Excel loads in a ~second. It&#x27;s so fast, that it puts LibreOffice to shame taking at least 30 seconds to load for me. And Excel is one damn polished of software. I wouldn&#x27;t trade it for Calc, or Apple&#x27;s Numbers.<p>VS being a terrible dev environment; yet I don&#x27;t see anyone suggesting something better. It takes 15 seconds to load cold and is pretty quick to load after. Doing dev in Notepad++ and then building in VS afterwards is just.. what?<p>&gt; Free software makes it possible for me (my business, etc) to pay someone other than the original developer to make the software do what I want. No proprietary license gets me that.<p>Why not pay the original developers if they&#x27;re doing such a good job?<p>&gt; Nonfree software is controlled by its developers, which puts them in a position of power over the users<p>Yet most users cannot modify software because they do not have the technical know-how. The developers are still in control, and even if you are an experienced developer yourself - there&#x27;s a good chance you aren&#x27;t familiar or comfortable enough with the target language to make such changes yourself.<p>I do acknowledge that FOSS has an important place in our society and our future. I&#x27;ve been a UNIX&#x2F;Linux sysadmin for a very long time, yet treating it as something of a religion and taking a &quot;cult-like&quot; approach isn&#x27;t really the best way to make progress. GNU is being held back by this, because there is tons and tons of non-free software built by sole developers who don&#x27;t want their work and time stolen from them (which the GPL purports to prevent- but this is not true in practice). Yet by the FSF definitions, that makes sole developers evil- and pushes many of them away from the free software platform.<p>Re; forced software updates...<p>Anyways, forced software updates is the results of years and years of people not wanting to update their software through their own obstinance, getting viruses and malware as a result and blaming Microsoft and leaving them on the hook for damages. Yes, you can disable the updates with Windows Server - I have NO IDEA how some of you guys are complaining about that. I&#x27;m only a middling Linux admin but even I know how to manage Windows boxes at a basic level.<p>&gt; A lot of malware comes from piracy, not from vulns.<p>My sweet summer child. A lot of malware and&#x2F;or viruses do not come from piracy. They come from people who click random web links and&#x2F;or e-mail and run software that pops up on there. While piracy obviously exists and the web has made it much easier to do so, the vast majority of malware and viruses come from &quot;stupid&quot; users that don&#x27;t understand what it is they&#x27;re doing.<p>Anyways, that&#x27;s all the energy I have for today. I&#x27;m not under any illusion about Microsoft either but being evangelistic about this matter isn&#x27;t going to help anyone.

&gt; malware (designed to mistreat the user)<p>Anything can be &quot;malware&quot; if you get to make up your own definition for the word.<p>I&#x27;ve checked the normal places for definitions of malware, and none of them are as broad and simplistic as this.

Even if one believes that zero Microsoft software is malware, it seems indisputable that Microsoft software is the single greatest attractant for desktop&#x2F;laptop malware, from any source. (Perhaps Android is an even greater malware magnet, but not on desktops and laptops.^1) The goal is popularity and profit, not user control (cf. non-commercial options).<p>The ideal user to Microsoft appears to be an uninformed one, not interested in control and apprently willing to reliquinsh it. Not <i>all</i> Microsoft users are uninformed or disinterested in control. There are profound exceptions. Some of those exceptions will read this comment and respond accordingly. But hundreds of millions of non-exceptions will remain uninformed and disinterested, to the benefit and delight of Redmond.<p>Obviously, malware can thrive under the auspices of uninformed, oblivious users, Microsoft&#x27;s ideal customers. Microsoft will purportedly protect them, when it wants to and assuming it can; of course, it won&#x27;t protect them from Microsoft itself. For those Microsoft employees and users not reading, commenting and&#x2F;or voting on HN, enjoy the ads injected into Windows. Microsoft is happy with the result.<p>1. Worth noting perhaps, Microsoft was making an estimated $2B annually from patent royalties on Android. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;microsoft-may-relinquishing-billions-android-patent-royalties-141047213.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.yahoo.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;microsoft-may-relinquishing-b...</a><p>(The point that commenters&#x2F;voters appear to be missing is that it is the nature of the customer&#x2F;user that creates the attractant for malware as much if not more than the software itself or the size of the user base. GNU regardless of what one thinks of them is AFAICT advocating for <i>user control</i> in this communication. That implies users who care about control, not the average Microsoft user. Users who are paying attention and who do not blindly trust companies like Microsoft. One can argue it is the &quot;insecurity&quot; of the software or the number of users that creates the attractant, and there is certainly some truth there, but it makes no sense if, e.g., the user base is a large number of paranoid users who read HN. They are going to avoid&#x2F;prevent&#x2F;detect malware better than a random sample of Microsoft users. User behaviour is relevant. If 9 out of 10 users who run program X on operating system Y are careless, then program X and&#x2F;or operating system Y is arguably an excellent target for malware.)