What is SWAY?

[JBW]

You're talking about the ease of use. I'm talking about my privacy. And they conflict.

George

George a while back i took a course about on-line security. The first thing they had us do was access a page and deny the request to see where we were then approve the request. It worked the same in both scenarios.

If you use the web you have no security and damn little privacy. You can get more apparent privacy by using a different OS but anyone that wants your data can get it quite easily and legally.

When I use Google Analytics it is absolutely amazing what I can find out about anyone that visits my blog.

You have a simple decision to make. If you need privacy then go off grid. If you object to what W10 puts in your computer go with another OS.

Or you can accept that anyone can access your data and be on the web no matter what OS you use.

Brian

[rpcrowe]

The cloud is a way for big data to make money - and find out just what you have.

If you need cloud a suitable device connected to the web gives you full control over what what is accessable by you over the web, and whats not, and all unseen by hosting companies.

However airplane mode is useful - if you don't need to access the web - and all those notifications of updates and so on whilst you just want to get on with image editing - airplane is a switch that turns off wi fi, simple

If I don't use wifi speakers or headphones, why should I need to switch it off.

Additionally, with the Sway program... I resent that they invade my space and try and collect my images to place them in an album that I don't need or want in the first place.

I have my images set up exactly the way I want them. I wouldn't mind if Sway said.. Would you like us to set up a photo album. But to have a fait accompli, with an album set up for me is certainly not the way I want to play the ball game...

[rpcrowe]

Brian asked: "if you don't like what W 10 offers don't use it."

How does one NOT USE Win 10? It is virtually impossible in this day and age to get a computer that is not set up with Win 10. I don't have the faintest idea how to work with Linux.

I do have Win-10 working behind a shell which makes it look and perform in many ways like Win7.

[Mike Buckley]

Brian asked: "if you don't like what W 10 offers don't use it."

I took his comment to mean that if you don't like a particular capability that W 10 offers, don't use that capability. If that's what he meant, I agree.

[xpatUSA]

Brian asked: "if you don't like what W 10 offers don't use it."

How does one NOT USE Win 10? It is virtually impossible in this day and age to get a computer that is not set up with Win 10.

Earlier this year, I bought a new old stock 4-core Dell i5 . . . because it came with Win 7 Pro

[dennybeall]

Interesting - I have Windows 10 and wondered about SWAY so I brought it up and it didn't do anything automatically. I just turned it off. No harm - no foul..

[tao2]

George a while back i took a course about on-line security. The first thing they had us do was access a page and deny the request to see where we were then approve the request. It worked the same in both scenarios.

If you use the web you have no security and damn little privacy. You can get more apparent privacy by using a different OS but anyone that wants your data can get it quite easily and legally.

When I use Google Analytics it is absolutely amazing what I can find out about anyone that visits my blog.

You have a simple decision to make. If you need privacy then go off grid. If you object to what W10 puts in your computer go with another OS.

Or you can accept that anyone can access your data and be on the web no matter what OS you use.

Brian

Ah'm confused Brian,

access a page and deny the request to see where we were

Do ye mean that ye denied the request but the page showed ye where ye were anyway? How did it do that?

then approve the request. It worked the same in both scenarios.

Ye approved the request and it showed ...what?... yer home ? yer home address? yer area?, yer country? It'll only do that if ye allow it .

If you use the web you have no security and damn little privacy

...

Ermm... yes, ye do...













Ah'd recommend, as a good read, Steve Gibson's site, much of the stuff is old now but still usable. There's a wealth of info tae be gleaned from his pages though...

[JBW]

Brian asked: "if you don't like what W 10 offers don't use it."

How does one NOT USE Win 10? It is virtually impossible in this day and age to get a computer that is not set up with Win 10. I don't have the faintest idea how to work with Linux.

I do have Win-10 working behind a shell which makes it look and perform in many ways like Win7.

You can dl Ubuntu if like me you can take your computer to a store and have them switch it over.

[JBW]

Here's the videos for the course I took. I mean that unless you use wi-fi they can pretty much find your door.

The terrible truth is that if anyone is web connected your web life is an open book. Yes you can keep casual hackers at bay but serious hackers, governments or law agencies are going to get your stuff if they want it

[george013]

@Tao2,
I remember the Steve Gibson progs. Especial the Click of Death.

I don't know if I express myself well, but "old" programs are event driven. The user must invoke an action by pressing a key. The user knows what to expect, he hopes. With app driven programs the correlation between the event, starting something, and the result isn't obvious. Apps can call different apps. I'm using this link for it's showing what's going on with Office. http://www.pcworld.com/article/29164...n-smarter.html. If you like this development, well go ahead. I don't.

Buying a new pc without a os is nearly impossible. All brands have a deal with ms to sell there pc with win installed on it. If you don't want it, you have to build your own pc or uninstall the os for which you paid.

About my Flickr account. That was created several years ago. For some reason it succeeded now. Home it was from a pc, now from a laptop.

George.

[Didace]

Apple or Google do something and the whole world marvels at how clever and advanced their technology is. Microsoft does the same thing and people complain. I'll never understand it.

[Manfred M]

Here's the videos for the course I took. I mean that unless you use wi-fi they can pretty much find your door.

The terrible truth is that if anyone is web connected your web life is an open book. Yes you can keep casual hackers at bay but serious hackers, governments or law agencies are going to get your stuff if they want it

I have watched a number of modules of the course you are referring to and it really seems to deal very much with government related monitoring. Many of the people speaking appear to be law professors and deal with the legal implications of what is happening within the country. Bruce Schneier, who is a cryptographer by profession, is really the only one who seems to briefly look at the issues we seem to be discussing on this thread, which is corporate collection of data (rather than the government collecting massive amounts of data).

The real issue that we all seem to have with regards to Microsoft collects and sends data back to its servers. The problem we seem to have is we don't like this because MS is not open about what it collects and what it does with the data. We don't trust them when they say something along the lines of "all we do in collect anonymized data that we will use to to ensure we find and fix bugs and keep your computer running more smoothly". As they don't, we assume that they are using the data for nefarious purposes.

Somehow we seem trust Google (through the Android OS) and Apple more, even though they do exactly the same thing. Our cell phones track us and the apps on those devices send data back to the telco, yet no one seems to complain. We know that they do things that are similar to what MS does, yet no one seems as concerned. I'm frankly more concerned with both of these companies than MS as they have tightly integrated into our portable devices as well as our desktops.

As for Richard's comments about not using some of the features on Win 10, frankly I have never used all of the features of any Windows release, and I have been using since it was a DOS overlay (i.e. Windows 1.0). I don't use all of the features that my cell phone has. I have never used all of the features my washing machine or dish washer offer either.

I do use Win 10 on one of my computers, and it is reasonably crippled. My desktop does not have a webcam nor does it have a microphone, so all the wonderful voice activated Cortana features are of no use to me. I have my Win 10, Google, Facebook and Android privacy features tuned, so I assume less data is being collected than for default settings. I need these tools for my day to day work, but give away as little as I can get away with.

[ajohnw]

JBW is basically correct what ever people might think. Initially all we had was badly used cookies because people who use them didn't know how to get the best out of them. That soon changed even to the extent of gaining what is usually referred to as being persistent. That then lead to browsers actually having the ability to keep persistent data. Most of this is simply used to see what some people may want to buy but it can be used to gain other information purely from browsing habits. Location information has been around for a long time it even goes as far down that now as the towns people live in maybe zip / post codes too. There are also some what are probably illegal activities such as hijacking peoples dns server setting in their router. Few bother to set them manually and leave the auto detect set. Some leave remote management active. Getting into them isn't rocket science.

Things like GRC com and shields up look great and have done a lot to improve firewalls but only really in terms of blind ip address scanning. The usual way of using that was to scan particular ports to see if some service was active. If it was then there is a machine there. Firewalls take no notice. Once some one connects to some site that site has the ip address so is well aware that there is a machine there. Proxies can be used to obscure that but only if they hide the chain of ip addresses that may have lead to them. Hacking mostly consists of knowing that certain pieces of software on a machine has some security flaw in it or guessing user names and passwords etc. There may be several different pieces of software on a machine that has flaws so they just try all that they know about in case one of them is installed.

Some years ago I had no problems at all seeing how many other houses around me were connected to the internet. I just tried it out of curiosity. I have no idea how easy that is to do now. Some years ago a mobile phone manufacturer demonstrated that it's possible for the phones to use any wift network that was nearby who ever was paying for it. Not really a security risk but...........

Personally I think the whole thing is a bit like the dot com bubble in as much as people are paying for information and lots of it will be useless to them. Take a current add I am seeing a lot now. I have bought a lens so it's shown all over the place. Once I decided to buy I went for the cheapest source. I just checked many others before and then for the first time went to the site I bought it from. I used pay by Amazon to save filling in details. More info for some one.

I did come across another rather surprising instance of information gathering. Periodically I sell old un used or replaced toys on ebay. I use one of the web shipping sites that offer several carriers to send them. I noticed that I seemed to get an increase in irritating phone calls when ever I did this so started miss typing the phone number on purpose. I've tried correct and incorrect phone numbers which they insist on having so often now that I am 100% sure my phone number is being passed on. Maybe the services server is being hacked. Maybe they sell them. I've no idea.

Google had me agree to their terms of service again today. It's offered a remind me later every time I used it for the last few days. Today it insisted that I had to agree in order to use it.

Ok it's all about what in real terms are browsing and buying habits and in my view pretty stupid really but it is current flavour of the period we are in but I doubt if in real terms it has much impact on sales. It can also be abused and they are finding ways of collecting more and more. Go somewhere now and they will probably know that I have been on here and what other browser pages I currently have open plus a lot more. Some things can be turned off but it's surprising what can be done with cookies. It just uses up their disk space rather than ours.

John
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[GrahamS]

Just a BTW - my son tried the beta version of Apple's OS-X update called Sierra. It uplifted all of his docs, photos, music et al and deposited everything in the "cloud!!" It did not leave anything behind on his Apple Mac laptop. He had to do a complete restore to get his data back on his HDD, where he prefers to have it. Yesterday, an automatic notification popped up on my iMac screen to the effect that the new OS, Sierra had been downloaded and was ready to install. When I went to the Ap Store and looked at the details, this new OS does things and changes things in a way that is totally inappropriate for a PC that is used primarily for photo editing and storage, using multi-tetrabyte USB drives. I am now terrified that it will install itself without my permission or knowledge, despite being assured that I have to initiate the install myself. What arrogance!!

[Black Pearl]

Just a BTW - my son tried the beta version of Apple's OS-X update called Sierra. It uplifted all of his docs, photos, music et al and deposited everything in the "cloud!!" It did not leave anything behind on his Apple Mac laptop. He had to do a complete restore to get his data back on his HDD, where he prefers to have it. Yesterday, an automatic notification popped up on my iMac screen to the effect that the new OS, Sierra had been downloaded and was ready to install. When I went to the Ap Store and looked at the details, this new OS does things and changes things in a way that is totally inappropriate for a PC that is used primarily for photo editing and storage, using multi-tetrabyte USB drives. I am now terrified that it will install itself without my permission or knowledge, despite being assured that I have to initiate the install myself. What arrogance!!

I'm running macOS Sierra and it does not upload everything to your iCloud account. You can go into the Settings then into the iCloud settings and manually activate the back-up - even then you have control over what it uploads and each setting needs to be user activated - and even then it will only automatically upload older/unused documents when space is becoming an issue on your main drive.

If the App Store on your Mac has downloaded the latest OS it means you have it set to do so - go into the preferences on the app where you can switch on/off auto downloads. It won't install a major update without you allowing it so if you don't want macOS just ignore the update - however it has some excellent features and runs faster/smoother so personally I would recommend you install it.

[GrahamS]

Thanks Robin. It's good to have your input on this. Will it leave my image files alone or will it load them all into iPhoto albums?

[Black Pearl]

Thanks Robin. It's good to have your input on this. Will it leave my image files alone or will it load them all into iPhoto albums?

Photos will automatically import images from your iCloud if you have photo sharing on any iOS devices activated and you sign in on your Mac but it will leave folders on your computer alone....in fact it won't even see them unless you point it at them. I have my iPhone setup so as I take shots they back-up to the iCloud and are ready on my iMac as I need them but otherwise never go near Photos.

[GrahamS]

Thanks for the info, Robin.

[Black Pearl]

I was determined not to use Siri on my iMac but have found myself replying to texts in the same way I do while driving and it is annoyingly good at finding documents/pictures and even more irritatingly good at dragging basic info from the net.

[Saorsa]

The cloud is a way for big data to make money - and find out just what you have.

If you need cloud a suitable device connected to the web gives you full control over what what is accessable by you over the web, and whats not, and all unseen by hosting companies.

The only other option is more local storage. People demand small, lightweight and memory hungry apps and storage for lots of music and pictures. The cloud is a way to shift this off the device.

I began drawing clouds on whiteboards in the 80s when we called things distributed computing and then net-centric computing. Everybody wanted to worry about physical connections. The ISO seven layer model preceded that and rather than drawing stacks we used a cloud to indicate that lower level layers were independent of the upper layers.