Epic v. Apple, round one: A split decision, sort of

I guess that it's time to talk about Epic's war-of-choice against Apple.

For those who haven't been paying attention, here's the Coles Notes version. Epic Games, developers of Fortnite, deliberately breached the terms of the agreements with Apple and Google which allowed them to have Fortnite on both the iOS App Store and Google Play. Apple and Google both acted in accordance with the rules of said agreements, and removed Fortnite from both the App Store and Google Play.

This is when Epic, who very clearly wanted exactly this outcome, launched a well-prepared PR campaign against, primarily, Apple. They clearly intended to mobilize Apple-using Fortnite fans against the Cupertino company, intending to litigate their dissatisfaction with Apple's Apple Store payment terms in the court of public opinion, even as they also filed a lawsuit against Apple seeking an injunction to force their own desired payment terms on them "temporarily," clearly hoping that having those payment terms in place for the years it would take to resolve the lawsuit would essentially make it impossible for Apple to ever go back, whether Epic actually prevailed in court or not.

Apple, naturally, are having none of this. They make billions of US dollars every single year from their 30% cut of App Store transactions, and every incentive to "go to the mattresses" in defense of one of their main sources of revenue. And, as it turned out, banning Fortnite from the App Store was only one way they could express their displeasure with Epic's antics: they revoked Epic's developer license, effectively banning their Unreal Engine, and all games based on that engine, from the App Store as well.

Epic, clearly panicked by this drastic and rapid escalation of a fight that they'd clearly thought would be waged entirely on Epic's terms, filed for another injunction, asking the court to block Apple from killing the Unreal Engine dead. And at the end of yesterday, a federal court judge ruled on both injunctions. The result? Basically, it's a draw. The reasoning behind that draw, however, is quite interesting.

Facebook's very bad year gets even worse

It turns out that Facebook couldn't even make it through one more day before getting hit with more bad news. This time, though, it's not news of their incompetence, or their outright malice, that's wrecking their week; rather, it's news of actual consequences for Facebook. Finally.

As reported by The Washington Post:

Nine months after a whistleblower revealed Facebook had allowed outsiders to improperly access personal information about millions of its users, the social media giant faced its first major rebuke from regulators in the United States -- a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of the District of Columbia.

The lawsuit from Karl Racine on Wednesday targeted Facebook mainly for its entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that harvested names, “likes” and other data from the social site without users’ permission. The incident, which affected more than 87 million users beginning in 2014, came to light this March, sparking investigations around the world.

The opening salvo from the D.C. attorney general ended a protracted silence on the part of many U.S. regulators, who have faced immense pressure -- from members of Congress and average web users -- to discipline Facebook for what many see as a reckless disregard for online privacy. Some of Silicon Valley’s toughest critics have urged the government to slap Facebook with severe fines and other penalties that might force it to rethink a business model that monetizes the most intimate details of consumers’ lives.

“It’s about time,” said Christopher Wylie, who exposed the Cambridge Analytica controversy through reports in several news organizations.

[...]

The D.C. case threatens to develop into an even worse headache for Facebook. Racine told reporters that his office has “had discussions with a number of other states that are similarly interested in protecting the data and personal information of their consumers,” though he cautioned there is no formal agreement for them to proceed jointly. And the attorney general’s aides said they could add additional charges to their lawsuit as other details about Facebook’s privacy lapses become public.

Hello, again, Christopher Wylie! I'd honestly forgotten that he even existed. But I digress...

Today, in Facebook class-action lawsuits

Taking a break from their security- and privacy-related legal woes, Facebook is taking some time to relax, unwind, and be sued for basically fraud instead. Mazel tov!

From The Mercury News:

Not only did Facebook inflate ad-watching metrics by up to 900 percent, it knew for more than a year that its average-viewership estimates were wrong and kept quiet about it, a new legal filing claims.

A group of small advertisers suing the Menlo Park social media titan alleged in the filing that Facebook “induced” advertisers to buy video ads on its platform because advertisers believed Facebook users were watching video ads for longer than they actually were.

That “unethical, unscrupulous” behavior by Facebook constituted fraud because it was “likely to deceive” advertisers, the filing alleged.

The latest allegations arose out of a lawsuit that the advertisers filed against Mark Zuckerberg-led Facebook in federal court in 2016 over alleged inflation of ad-watching metrics.

Facebook's watch-time shenanigans were something that I'd actually heard about before; among other things, YouTubers have been complaining that Facebook does nothing to prevent videos from being ripped from YouTube and uploaded to Facebook, fully monetized, by parties other than the original creators; that Facebook counts as playtime videos that have automatically started, and been playing silently off to the side, from the moment the page can load them, whether you've paid any attention to them or not; and so on. This isn't #lyingwithstatisics; this is just plain lying.

I hadn't paid much attention to the issue until now, but it seems that others have finally taken notice. And not just YouTube creators, either, who have been relatively powerless until now to do anything which would influence Facebook's behaviour; the two platforms are rivals, after all, and FB have proven pretty conclusively that they don't care at all how much harm they do, as long as they prosper in the process. Even Google hadn't been able to do much to curb FB 's obvious bad-faith "efforts" to address the issue, which basically amounted to them saying that they'd look into it, and the doing not much of anything to actually address the problems.

Facebook announced Oculus Quest, and it's already obsolete... according to its designers!

Remember when Facebook won (and lost) a lawsuit partly waged over the way they poached John Carmack away from Zenimax/ID? I wonder if they're re-thinking that acquisition after Carmack compared their next-generation "all-in-one" Oculus device to last-generation gaming consoles?

For the record, here is how Facebook/Oculus described their new device during the actual announcement, as reported by Gizmodo yesterday:

“This is it,” Mark Zuckerberg said to a crowd of developers and press at Facebook’s annual VR developers conference, Oculus Connect. “This is the all-in-one VR experience that we have been waiting for. It’s wireless, its got hand presence, 6 degrees of freedom, and it runs Rift-quality experiences.”

And here is how Oculus' CTO described the Quest at the same conference, as reported by arstechnica:

In a wide-ranging and occasionally rambling unscripted talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, CTO John Carmack suggested the Oculus Quest headset was "in the neighborhood of power of an Xbox 360 or PS3."

That doesn't mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280x1280 images per frame at 72fps. That's 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well.

"It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR," Carmack said.

So... it's wireless, but needs a four-camera room-scale setup to work, and it aims to provide a Rift-quality experience, but can't because it just doesn't pack enough processing power. Also, count on it, Quest will cost significantly more than the Go, if only because of those cameras... and Oculus Go isn't exactly flying off shelves. Why does this exist, again?

The "real" Facebook scandal starts to gain traction

It turns out that Facebook's "shadow profiles," wide-ranging data sets about users and non-users alike, might finally be getting the attention they deserve, rather than all of the attention being on the Cambridge Analytica angle... overseas, anyway. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

San Francisco: Concern about Facebook's respect for data privacy is widening to include the information it collects about non-users, after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the world's largest social network tracks people whether they have accounts or not.

[...]

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday under questioning by US Representative Ben Lujan that, for security reasons, Facebook also collects "data of people who have not signed up for Facebook."

Lawmakers and privacy advocates immediately protested the practice, with many saying Facebook needed to develop a way for non-users to find out what the company knows about them.

[...]

Facebook gets some data on non-users from people on its network, such as when a user uploads email addresses of friends. Other information comes from "cookies," small files stored via a browser and used by Facebook and others to track people on the internet, sometimes to target them with ads.

"This kind of data collection is fundamental to how the internet works," Facebook said in a statement.

Asked if people could opt out, Facebook added, "There are basic things you can do to limit the use of this information for advertising, like using browser or device settings to delete cookies. This would apply to other services beyond Facebook because, as mentioned, it is standard to how the internet works."

Facebook often installs cookies on non-users' browsers if they visit sites with Facebook "like" and "share" buttons, whether or not a person pushes a button. Facebook said it uses browsing data to create analytics reports, including about traffic to a site.

If you were wondering why one of FB's fourteen class action lawsuits was filed by a plaintiff who “does not have, and has never had, a Facebook account,” then wonder no longer, because this is why. Creepy AF... and possibly illegal, since people without FB accounts have never consented to having Facebook build a data profile of them. There's nothing obviously security-related about the practice, either; Facebook appear to have no legitimate need for this data, they just want it.

Facebook admits that its tools were miused on a massive global scale

From The Washington Post:

Facebook said Wednesday that “malicious actors” took advantage of search tools on its platform, making it possible for them to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide.

The revelation came amid rising acknowledgement by Facebook about its struggles to control the data it gathers on users. Among the announcements Wednesday was that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy hired by President Trump and other Republicans, had improperly gathered detailed Facebook information on 87 million people, of whom 71 million were Americans.

But the abuse of Facebook’s search tools -- now disabled -- happened far more broadly and over the course of several years, with few Facebook users likely escaping the scam, company officials acknowledged.

The scam started when malicious hackers harvested email addresses and phone numbers on the so-called “Dark Web,” where criminals post information stolen from data breaches over the years. Then the hackers used automated computer programs to feed the numbers and addresses into Facebook’s “search” box, allowing them to discover the full names of people affiliated with the phone numbers or addresses, along with whatever Facebook profile information they chose to make public, often including their profile photos and hometown.

[...]

Facebook said in a blog post Wednesday, “Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped.”

Yes... they're talking about doxxing and identity theft on a massive scale.

This "very useful" search functionality was, naturally, enabled by default and deliberately difficult to disable -- after all, how else were you going to find people on Facebook to expand your network of data nodes? Facebook would also have been aware of the body of research which "has consistently shown that users of online platforms rarely adjust default privacy settings and often fail to understand what information they are sharing," facts which expect to feature prominently in several of the fourteen (and counting) class action lawsuits that have already been filed here.

Still, there's really no way around the simple realities here: 1) Facebook cannot and will not effectively police themselves; and 2) Facebook are unlikely to face new regulations in the U.S. anytime soon, unless Democrats manage to win veto-proof majorities in both the House and the Senate. That makes the question of whether Facebook will broadly implement privacy protections like those found in the GDPR, into an even more pressing one. It also means that meaningful change will have to come from outside the U.S.

Thankfully, that second thing seems to be happening.

Today in Facebook

As we come up on the two week mark of Facebook's fiasco, there are finally signs that Facebook might actually be taking the matter of users' privacy seriously enough to do something, this time.

First, from Ars Technica:

Facebook will (soon) yank third-party ad data in the name of privacy

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and rising public pressure against Facebook, the social media giant announced on Wednesday evening that it will restrict how much data advertisers can have access to.

Facebook will soon stop allowing advertisers access to data about individuals held by companies like Experian and Acxiom.

Prior to this change, Facebook allowed advertisers to target groups of people based on an amalgamation of both datasets.

Baby steps, I guess. Ars is also reporting that Facebook is also going to make it easier for users to find and change their accounts' privacy settings. "If that sounds familiar, it's because Facebook has made that exact kind of announcement many times over."

Facebook are also blocking new apps from joining the platform, as reported by The Verge:

Facebook paused its app review process last week to “implement new changes,” the company quietly announced yesterday. Facebook’s move to momentarily prevent new apps and chatbots onto its platform comes after the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal that’s unfolded over the last two weeks. The ongoing situation has embroiled the company in an existential crisis of unprecedented magnitude after up to 50 million Facebook users profiles’ were compromised by a third-party app. Last week, Facebook said it will further limit developers’ access to user data.

[...]

One co-founder of a digital agency took to Facebook to complain about the sudden pause, as spotted by Mashable. “Imagine hundreds of hours of work, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment capital, and dozens of clients disappearing at any given moment at the whim of a few lines of code,” Troy Osinoff wrote, as he set his status to “thinking about the meaning of life.”

Yes, the Facebook Effect is now expanding to cause harm to companies that have done nothing wrong... except to get into business with Facebook. Expect more lawsuits, in addition to the fourteen class actions that have already been filed.

So serious is Facebook's situation that market analysts, who were predicting that Facebook would ride out this storm just fine, are now predicting much more gloom ahead, not only for Facebook, but for tech giants in general.

Today in Facebook...

I have a feeling that this will be a regular thing for a while.

To start with, I'd like to draw your attention to this great piece from Engadget:

Let’s stop pretending Facebook cares

[...]

The really great thing to come out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that Facebook will now start doing that thing we were previously assured at every turn they were doing all along. And all it took was everyone finding out about the harvesting and sale of everyone's data to right-wing zealots like Steve Bannon for political power. Not Facebook finding out, because they already knew. For years. In fact, Facebook knew it so well, the company legally threatened Observer and NYT to prevent their reporting on it; to keep everyone else from finding out.

[...]

When the The Guardian's 2015 article came out, Facebook pretended to care."And then," former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie told The Observer, "all they did was write a letter."

"But literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it," says Wylie. "Facebook made zero effort to get the data back."

[...]

It wasn't until the NYT and The Observer prepared to publish their articles last Friday that Facebook decided to suspend Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie from the platform -- in a weak attempt to get ahead of the story. Even then, it was after Facebook made legal threats on both NYT and The Observer in an effort to silence both publications.

[...]

It almost goes without saying that this whole sickening affair is more proof we didn't need that Facebook only cares when it is forced to. When the company decides it has a reputation problem. Which is the only problem they actually care about fixing. Other than that, it's all about creating more data dealer WMD's, like Facebook's impending patent to determine social class, which we can all assume will be abused until press who can afford to stand up to Facebook write an article about it.

Yes, Cambridge Analytica have definitely done bad things, but Facebook is the problem. It's heartening to see that the media is increasingly seeing past the Cambridge Analytica trees to the out-of-control Facebook forest fire. Some of them have also started paying attention to Facebook's corrosive social and psychological effects, too.

Engadget is also keeping tabs on the class action lawsuit situion (up to four), #deleteFacebook picked up steam todayt when Elon Musk deleted Tesla's and SpaceX's Facebook pages, and Facebook's share price is down 13% for the week - although, if you've got nerves of steel, now is either a great time to take a short position on Facebook, or to pick up some FB stock cheap, in the hope that they can ride this shitstorm out... and good luck with that.

The Verge has a very detailed guide up to deleting Facebook, step-by-step (#deleteFacebook), and LifeHacker has a detailed guide to finding out everything that Facebook knows about you (spoiler alert: it's really, really not easy). GQ has just posted an article about how consumers can kill Facebook. Oh, and the notoriously feckless and ineffectual U.S. Congress has apparently smelled the cross-spectrum, bi-partisan outrage, and summoned Zuckerberg to the Hill so that he can lie to them again.

I've probably missed quite a bit. This story is now so big, and so hot, that a dozen new articles are being posted about it hourly. Make no mistake about it, folks; Facebook are in some real trouble, here.

Facebook is the problem

I don't think my previous post quite made this clear, but there's a very simple reason why I've been posting about the of the Cambridge Analytica story here, on my tech blog, rather than over there, at my political blog. It's because the political angle of this never struck me as being the most important part of the story; because the problem here really isn't Cambridge Analytica, per se.

Yes, Steven Bannon was (and probably still is) a real piece of work, and the company to which he was attached did do some very bad things, but Cambridge Analytica didn't do anything that Facebook didn't allow them to do, at the time. Yes, CA scraped waaayyy more data from FB than Zuckerberg's crew expected, and clearly abused it, and then behaved in almost cartoonishly villainous ways, but the real problem is that FB had the data available to sell in the first place.

To get a real idea of how big, and bad, the problem is, consider the following hypothetical scenario:

1. You "friend" or "follow" your doctor on Facebook. This is useful; it allows you to book appointments more easily, and keeps your doctor's contact info readily available if you need it...
2. ... and you do need it, because you've just been diagnosed with something that's chronic, serious, and both difficult and expensive to treat. Your doctor mentions a few different medications that he might want you to try, and tells you who makes them, so you...
3. ... follow those pharmaceutical companies online. After all, they make medications that you're now intensely interested in.
4. Meanwhile, your doctor has reached out to some of their colleagues via a professional FB group. Your name is never mentioned, of course, just the basic fact that they have "a patient" with a difficult and unusual diagnosis, and they'd appreciate some advice.
5. Facebook now know (a) your name, (b) your doctor's name, and (c) your interest in companies that make medications to treat (d) the condition that your doctor now also wants advice about, because it's a rare diagnosis and they're never seen an actual case before.
6. ( a + b + c + d ) = details of your medical history, which you never divulged to anyone, but which Facebook now has in their database, access to which they now sell to...
7. (e) anyone who might have a financial interest in knowing about the sudden increase in medical bills that you're about to incur. Have you applied for a mortgage recently? Or a job? Or extended medical insurance coverage? Would any or all of those companies maybe appreciate a solid cost-saving heads-up about your circumstance?

This may sound like a far-fetched hypothetical, but it's not. The data that Cambridge Analytica scraped from Facebook's database was of exactly this kind, and you'd better believe that they weren't the only firm to buy access to the data profile that Facebook has built of you, with neither your knowledge nor informed consent, and then sold to God knows who.

This is a problem because data, once sold, can't be un-sold; once Cambridge Analytica had scraped FB's data trove onto their own servers, there was nothing FB could do about it anymore. Do you know how many criminal organizations might have gained access to personal information about Facebook's users, and then re-sold it on the darknet? Because I don't, and neither do Facebook. The fact that they've just recently stopped/are about to stop doing these evil things doesn't begin to un-do all the previous evil they've already done... the effects of which their products users (i.e. you) will now be living with for years to come, at the very least.

Meltdown and Spectre - much less sexy than the James Bond movies they sound like.

Yesterday, The Reg reported that Intel CPUs going back ten years had a fundamental design flaw which compromised the security of users. At the time, it looked like only Intel chips were affected, but Intel has been quick to claim that AMD and ARM chips have the flaw, too.

Here's the thing about that, funny story.. it's actually not true. Not Pants On Fire, mind you, but still Mostly False, or at best Half True, according to this report from Gizmodo:

Originally, the Register reported, only Intel processors (which dominate the U.S. market) were believed to be subject to the flaw. But it’s become clear that a wide range of processor types could be affected, with Google writing that AMD, ARM, and other devices were also vulnerable—though only partially and with less performance impact following a fix than Intel-based devices.

In a statement to Gizmodo, AMD said that of the three attack variants, one was easily resolved with “negligible performance impact,” while the others have “near zero risk” or “zero risk” due to “architecture differences.”

ARM told Gizmodo that it has been working “together with Intel and AMD to address a side-channel analysis method which exploits speculative execution techniques used in certain high-end processors, including some of our Cortex-A processors. This is not an architectural flaw; this method only works if a certain type of malicious code is already running on a device and could at worst result in small pieces of data being accessed from privileged memory.”

I don't believe Intel's spin on this one; there is currently no evidence that AMD and ARM have anywhere near the same kind of fundamental design issues that Intel have with this, and users of AMD and ARM products will not see the same kind of slowdown post-patch as Core i5 users. Sure, AMD (and ARM) are also engaged in a little PR over this development, but right now, I'm inclined to trust them a lot more than I trust Intel, for whom this is the second such wide-reaching security problem that comes built right in to their Core i5 product line. 

Right now, it looks like AMD and ARM are acting from an abundance of caution, here (better safe than sorry, right?), and not trying to "work the refs" in advance of the inevitable flood of class action lawsuits by which Intel will shortly be besieged. So, yeah... I'm still glad to be an AMD man, at least for one more day.

Did I ever mention how glad I am to be an AMD man?

Because right now, I really, really am, thanks to stories like this one, from The Reg:

A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features – such as PCID – to reduce the performance hit. Your milage may vary.

Similar operating systems, such as Apple's 64-bit macOS, will also need to be updated – the flaw is in the Intel x86 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can't address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder.

[Emphasis added.]

Yikes.

With a 5% slowdown as the best case, and 30% as the worst, I'm thinking that the modest performance hit that I took by getting an AMD FX-6300 at half the price of an Intel Core i5 is looking like a better and better deal all the time.

Details of the exact nature of this new flaw are naturally embargoed, given that it's a hardware-level security issue affecting everyone who bought an Intel CPU in the last decade, although The Reg's report includes those details of the flaw that have surfaced, if you're interested in what details are available. The fact that this is being described as a "fundamental design flaw," though, the second such flaw to surface in the last few months, seems especially egregious. Intel had been beating AMD in performance benchmarks for years, but it now seems like they were cutting some serious corners along the way.

Cue the class action lawsuits in five.... four... three...

Microsoft gutting Windows 10's Pro version to make their Advanced User version

Remember that "advanced user" version of Windows 10, that was first rumoured back in June and finally confirmed earlier this month? The one that people were calling a cynical cash grab, because it just didn't include enough extra functionality to justify its separate SKU, or its higher price point? Well, it would appear that Microsoft heard those criticisms, and took them to heart, because they're now cutting functionality from Windows 10's less-expensive Pro version in order to create a clearer distinction between Pro and Pro for Workstations.

It looks like Brad Sams at Petri.com was the first to report on this revoltin' development:

Tell me if you have heard this one before, Microsoft is cutting features from Windows 10 Pro to push you towards a higher-priced version of Windows 10. As of August 17th, Microsoft has quietly updated the list of features that are being removed or deprecated in the Fall Creators update and this will impact Pro users.

On August 17th, Microsoft added to its technical document that details what features will be removed or deprecated with the Fall Creators Update to include that the creation of ReFS drives is no longer supported in Windows 10 Pro. To get this feature, you must be on Enterprise or Windows 10 Pro Advanced Workstations; both SKUs are more expensive than Pro.

[...]

Using this type of feature is for advanced users and likely won’t impact too many users of Pro but it’s the fact that Microsoft has no problems cutting features from this SKU that is more alarming. Microsoft has already trimmed down Pro to force more users to Enterprise in the past and with this removal, they are once again trying to force users into higher priced iterations of the OS.

[...]

The question becomes how much further is Microsoft going to cut back on Pro to force users to the Enterprise SKU? It is well-known that Microsoft wants every business to be running Enterprise iteration of Windows 10 but that some have managed to use Windows 10 Pro to save a few dollars. With cuts like this and the few that were made last year, Microsoft is slowly tightening down on premium grade business features in its lower priced OS.

This, my friends, truly is some bullshit. Not that Darth Microsoft altering the deal is anything new, but even for them, this is a whole new level.

Remember, Microsoft has been pushing Windows 10 Pro from the very beginning, and many fairly advanced users have already paid for the older, now-lesser, "semi-Pro" version, in some cases because it included ReFS. While I'm sure those users' existing installations and and already-formatted volumes will be unaffected, the fact that Microsoft is now demanding extra from them in order to continue using a feature that they already fucking paid for is beyond the pale... and yet, it's also totally Microsoft.

(Oh, about those existing installations? How would you rate the odds of an advanced user wanting to do a clean install of the OS every once in a while? My guess is those are some damned good odds. ♫Bye-bye♫, existing installation...)

Cutting features from a product service package that people have been buying since 2015 in order to sell those same people another, more expensive package containing exactly the same shit, is just.... well, shit, and every customer that Microsoft is screwing over this way should receive a full refund, from Microsoft, no questions asked. In fact, Microsoft should do away with the low-rent "semi-Pro" (and yes, I'm going to call it that for the rest of time, now) licence entirely, and just upgrade Home users to the (now reduced) Pro functionality for free... especially since they're doing exactly that free version upgrade for people who actually buy systems with Windows 10 S installed.

Expect yet another cluster of class action to emerge from the market in response to Microsoft's latest anti-consumer fuckery. Seriously, who in Redmond thought that this was good idea?

How can we miss you, if you won't go away?

[Update to this blog entry.]

So, those early comments by TADE (and no, I'm still not going to feed his ego by naming him on this blog) that he was examining all his legal options? You can ignore them. He is, 100% for certain, not suing Google or anybody else.

The first thing that any competent lawyer will tell you, once they agree to represent you on any matter, is to stop talking; your lawyers do all the necessary talking for you. This is partly because they get to bill you hundreds of dollars for every hour in which they do any work at all on your case, including media appearances, but it's also because judges, one of whom will preside over your lawsuit, tend to take a dim view of attempts by a complainant to try their case in the court of public opinion, rather than trying their case in, you know, an actual courtroom.

The fact that TADE still talking publicly (to the Wall Street Journal, on Reddit, and presumably to anyone else who'll listen, while he's still infamous enough make for an effective clickbait headline) is all the evidence you need that he has not yet secured legal representation. Which means either (a) that his talk of doing so was just talk, because he lacks the necessary resources to retain a lawyer, or (b) he tried to hire a lawyer, only to be turned away because his case is not winnable.

So, what's TADE trying to accomplish, with his "charm" offensive? I have no idea. I can't imagine he's making himself look any more attractive to future potential employers, though, almost all of whom would also have fired him for the level of insubordination that he displayed towards his last employer, and none of whom will be wanting to take someone onboard who's simultaneously unwilling to adhere to company policies, and highly likely to try to burn the place down behind him, when he leaves.

Oh, and Julian Assange's noises about offering him a job at Wikileaks? You can ignore that, too.

My thoughts on the topic of freedom of speech

For some time now, I've been assiduously avoiding posting about the politics of the day on this blog.

It's not because I'm not interested in politics. The members of my family are almost all political junkies; I've never failed to vote in any election where I was eligible to do so, and I check the day's political news, in both Canada and the U.S., several times each day, including Sundays and holidays. It's not because I don't have opinions on the topics of the day, either; if you've read any significant part of this blog, you know that I have plenty of opinions, and that I'm not terribly shy about sharing them. That is, after all, why I started a blog in the first place: to share my opinions on various topics of interest to me.

The reason that I've been avoiding posts about politics is twofold. One, political discussions on the internet tend to turn to shit very quickly, with toxic comment sections, personal attacks, gratuitous doxxing, and death threats, and who the fuck needs that in their lives? No, thank-you; I'll stick to bashing big corporations, which (a) provides plenty of material to write about, and (b) generally involves less of the typical internet unpleasantness.

The second reason, though, is both simpler and less selfish: I prefer not to post on topics where I have little, if anything, to add to the discussion. Whenever possible, I restrict myself to posts on topics where (a) I have something to say, that (b) I'm not seeing expressed elsewhere. More than once, I've deleted a partially-drafted post because I realized partway through that I wasn't saying anything of worth.

Yes, I've been guilty of the odd "+1" post that's little more than a link to an article that I liked and a comment that I agreed with it, but I try to keep that to a minimum. I'm basically a dilettante, well-read on a wide range of topics, with interests that are broad but shallow. I feel comfortable bringing together tidbits about statistics, public relations, history, and technology, synthesizing them into what I hope is a coherent world-view that minimizes the effect of hype culture on my behaviour and my life.

Politics feels different, though. It so often gets really personal, really quickly, with people mistaking arguments about identity for arguments about policy (and vice versa) in a way that makes them resistant to facts that contradict their worldviews, and unwilling to listen to people from the "other side." I like to think that I'm reasonably well-informed about politics and current events, but I'm not usually not an expert in either the issues involved, or the details of the relevant political processes; I'm certainly not likely to be recognized as an expert by either side of a political debate.

Every once in a while, though, I feel compelled to step out of my comfort zone. And the blowup around Google's firing of the "anti-diversity" engineer (a.k.a. TADE) feels like one of those times... in part because the discussion around the event seems to be revealing a fundamental misunderstanding about what free speech is and isn't, why democratic societies have and need it, and why and when it's perfectly acceptable to limit it... limitations that are already enshrined in law, and not particularly controversial.

First, let's start with what free speech is, and why democracies need it.

Chrome now boasts better battery life than Edge. Your move, Microsoft...

Back in April, when Microsoft was  (yet again) trying to woo users of Google's Chrome browser over to Edge by boasting about Edge's battery performance, I predicted that it would only be a matter of months before Google improved Chrome's battery performance to be every bit as good as, if not better than, Edge's. Having previously confessed my unseemly love of saying, "I told you so," I will now take this opportunity to point out that Google have done precisely that.

From Mihăiță Bamburic at betanews:

Ask Microsoft which browser offers the best battery life on Windows 10 and it will not hesitate to tell you that Microsoft Edge is the best. And it has the test results to prove it: on a Surface Book, for instance, Microsoft Edge lasts a couple of hours longer than Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, which is remarkable.

But, and there is a but, an independent test disputes Microsoft's claim. YouTuber Linus Tech Tips has pitted Microsoft Edge against Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera and discovered that it does not deliver as strong a performance as Microsoft claims.

Linus Tech Tips took four Dell Inspiron laptops, with the same specs, and found that Microsoft Edge trails Chrome and Opera in battery life tests. It would seem that it still beats Firefox, after all. However, the results are much, much closer than what Microsoft's own tests indicate.

Linus Tech Tips' video is worth a watch:

 
Yet another Microsoft product claim debunked? That hasn't happened since Friday.

This is how Microsoft's month has been trending. After managing to go weeks with nary a negative headline in sight, they've now managed to fumble their response to WannaCry twice, are scrambling to do damage control after a source code leak, and had both their Windows 10 S security claims and their Edge browser battery life claims debunked, by experimentation, in the last week. I don't know why they thought that PC consumers would simply accept their PR releases as fact without independent benchmarking, given that independent tests have only been part of the PC culture for a few decades now, but Microsoft seem to have done exactly that. Winning!

So, in the face of all these headwinds, what is Microsoft's current focus? Apparently, mobile. Yes, again.Yes, really. From ZDNet:

The PC is Windows' stronghold, and, despite predictions of its demise, the PC seems to be holding its own, thanks in part to some nice hardware designs coming out of Microsoft recently.

But a few projects that Microsoft has been working on recently also show how it wants a life for Windows beyond the classic PC.

One of these is the effort to get Windows 10 running on ARM. Running Windows on ARM chips - the same chips used to run smartphones - means that Windows could start appearing on small, lighter, always-on devices. The first hardware is expected later this year.

Another project that could still show promise is Continuum, which allows a Window Phone device like the Elite X3 to dock with a keyboard and monitor and perform like a PC.

And finally there is Windows 10 S - a locked-down version of Windows 10 that aims to compete with Chromebooks on ease of use.

All these projects are looking at slightly different things, but they are all linked in their goal to take Windows beyond its traditional PC - that is, desktop and laptop - territory.

[...]

The bigger question is whether Microsoft can make a real breakthrough with any of these new categories. The desktop is Microsoft's home territory but when it comes to mobile it's an outsider at best. Android and iOS are firmly in control and as Microsoft found last time around, dislodging them is going to be incredibly hard.

However, it seems that Microsoft could be finally getting over the technical issues that have held back its ambitions beyond the desktop. The next question is to persuade consumers why they should make the switch.

Did I mention that Microsoft and Qualcomm are being threatened by Intel with possible patent infringement litigation for that Windows 10 on ARM project? Because that also happened last week. It's almost as if Intel realized how many of Microsoft's future plans were depending on Windows 10 on ARM to be their linchpin, and pounced.

Did I mention, too, that Microsoft themselves now can't be bothered to develop natively for UWP, essentially signalling the beginning of the end for a platform which is critical to their mobile efforts? Or that Microsoft have other lawsuit troubles, with their defence against Kaspersky Lab's antitrust complaint not exactly getting off to a strong start? Added to all of that, it's nearly month end, putting us just days away from learning just how stagnant Windows 10's growth has been over the last 30 days.

Honestly, Microsoft have so many issues, on so many fronts, that it's becoming difficult to keep track of them all. Their efforts seem to be focused on everything, which sounds impressive until you think about it for a second, and realize that "Microsoft is focused on everything" is just another way of saying that Microsoft lacks focus. The strain has been showing for a while now, but the cracks in the facade are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, and it's hard to say what benefits, if any, are being realized through this seeming lack of strategic focus. I know that Microsoft want Windows 10 to somehow make them everything to everybody, on every device, in every circumstance, all the time, but somehow that seeming less and less like a realistic plan, and more and more like the Underpants Gnomes.

It's Microsoft's move, but with the situation becoming less tractable with each passing month, I'm not sure how many more chances they'll have to make "fetch" happen. Especially since their competitors in all these various tech-driven spaces aren't exactly standing still, waiting for Microsoft to catch them and pass them. How many more moves will Microsoft get, before it's effectively game over? Rich as they are, how many more missteps and outright failures can even Microsoft afford?

Well.... I guess that's one way to approach the problem...

When Kaspersky Lab filed its antitrust complaint with the EU earlier this month, Microsoft's response was basically boilerplate corporate legalese. "Microsoft's primary objective is to keep customers protected and we are confident that the security features of Windows 10 comply with competition laws," they said, adding that they'd reached out directly to Kaspersky a number of months ago offering to meet directly at an executive level to better understand their concerns," but without success (quotes from The Inquirer).

But that was then, and this is now, and their current strategy for fighting this antitrust complaint, is... novel, let's say. Yes, let's go with novel.

From The Reg:

Redmond is currently being sued by security house Kaspersky Lab in the EU, Germany and Russia over alleged anti-competitive behaviour because it bundles the Windows Defender security suite into its latest operating system. Kaspersky (and others) claim Microsoft is up to its Internet Explorer shenanigans again, but that’s not so, said the operating system giant.

“Microsoft’s application compatibility teams found that roughly 95 per cent of Windows 10 PCs had an antivirus application installed that was already compatible with Windows 10 Creators Update,” said Rob Lefferts, director of security in the Windows and Devices group.

“For the small number of applications that still needed updating, we built a feature just for AV apps that would prompt the customer to install a new version of their AV app right after the update completed. To do this, we first temporarily disabled some parts of the AV software when the update began.”

Basically, Kaspersky are complaining about Microsoft abusing their control of the Windows platform to disable competitors' software, violating EU rules about such things, and Microsoft's defense is that they do exactly this, but that it's OK, because security. Presenting their actions as a consumer protection move is pretty baller; it's also bullshit, because there's plenty of evidence just floating around that Microsoft can, and do, disable competing AV software for reasons other than compatibility issues.

If you're wondering what it looks that like, then wonder no longer! It looks like this:

So, Microsoft can use their control of Windows to (a) know when your AV subscription is due to expire, and (b) "helpfully" remind you a day or so ahead of time.... that they have a free AV solution already installed on your machine, which they'll just be switching you to, automatically, if you should be, I dunno, too busy, or something, to renew that. Because they have your back (wink, wink). Somehow, according to Microsoft, this is about software compatibility, even though compatibility issues with the 3rd part software are never once mentioned.

This genius legal strategy is the work of the same team who are defending against multiple class-action lawsuits using basically the same argument that cost Microsoft US$10,000 in small claims court. Redmond's anticonsumer, monopolistic practices seem so blatant here that I'm finding it hard to imagine the EU doing anything except ruling in Kaspersky's favour. There's a reason why Microsoft already have a not-dissimilar, €497 million antitrust ruling on record.

All of this comes even as Microsoft's data privacy practices still being assessed by EU regulators - most of their recent improvements in that area were done in response to regulatory pressure, and regulators were not sounding convinced that Redmond's concessions in that area went far enough. To be facing antitrust action, again, with the data privacy stuff still not resolved, and multiple class action lawsuits grinding their way to apparently inevitable losses... well, I'm not an expert, but it sure looks to me like Microsoft's leadership have been on the receiving end of some seriously awful legal advice.

Microsoft are now perpetually operating in a mode of trying to minimize eventual penalties, while doing as little as possible about their bad practices in the meantime, all while knowing that their arguments in defense of those practices are basically insufficient to win any case on its merits. And, as a yuge corporation with plenty of cash in reserve, they can probably afford to wage these legal battles of attrition for quite a while yet. Whether they can afford the long-term damage that they're doing to their reputation in the meantime, or the momentum gains they're missing while spending years mired in legal trouble, remains to be seen.

Microsoft's class action woes aren't over yet.

Class action lawsuits take a long time to really get going, so we can probably expect to see more of these trickling out of courts all over the place for years to come. Because some other folks out there also aren't intending to let Microsoft reap rewards for bad behaviour.

From The Reg:

Three people in Illinois have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming that its Windows 10 update destroyed their data and damaged their computers.

The complaint [PDF], filed in Chicago's US District Court on Thursday, charges that Microsoft Windows 10 is a defective product and that its maker failed to provide adequate warning about the potential risks posed by Windows 10 installation – specifically system stability and data loss.

Microsoft "failed to exercise reasonable care in designing, formulating, and manufacturing the Windows 10 upgrade and placing it into the stream of commerce," the complaint claims. "As a result of its failure to exercise reasonable care, [the company] distributed an operating system that was liable to cause loss of data or damage to hardware."

The attorneys representing the trio are seeking to have the case certified as a class action that includes every person in the US who upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and suffered data loss or damage to software or hardware within 30 days of installation. They claim there are hundreds or thousands of affected individuals.

Microsoft have, of course, bundled some changes into the upcoming Creators Update which will allow users to delay restarting after an update, but that doesn't undo the damage they've already done, or make them any less legally liable for it. They're also banging the "Windows 10 was optional" drum as loudly as they can, even though they'd done everything they could to remove all choice from the update process, in ways that even they admitted went too far, an argument that has cost them at least one decision already. 

Yeah.... good luck with that, Microsoft.

It's not like nobody saw this coming, either, and there's probably more of the same on the way, thanks to yet another recent bad decision: auto-downloading updates over metered connections, regardless of what that might cost the user at the other end. As Gordon Kelly at Forbes put it, "if a user finds they face a larger Internet bill because Windows 10 decided their ethernet card driver (or graphics card driver which can be several hundred megabytes) was essential to update on the last day of the month, I expect Microsoft will face a flurry of complaints. Or even a class action lawsuit. And the costs could be dangerously expensive if you’re using your computer abroad on a roaming network."

The Oculus v. ZeniMax drama ain't over yet

When Oculus dodged the big legal bullet earlier this week (i.e. a civil finding of basically industrial espionage), I figured that all the big drama was over with this one. Yes, Facebook would pay a steep price for failing to do their due diligence before buying Oculus, but $500M is chump change for a corporation with tens of billions in their cash reserve, and the jury declined to find that the Rift was based on tech that Oculus had outright stolen -- which should have meant the business of VR could go on without any further litigation drama.

Facebook and ZeniMax somehow both turned out to be horrible losers, though, with Facebook planning to appeal the damages that were awarded, Carmack openly talking smack about ZeniMax's case (something that I'd think Facebook's legal counsel would have recommended against, but whatevs), and ZeniMax escalating things by talking about seeking an injunction to stop sales of the Rift.

Since the decision specifically found that the Rift wasn't built using stolen tech, it was unclear to me what ZeniMax's reasoning would be for seeking such an injunction, or why any sane judge would grant it, so I was a little surprised to see so many tech journalists basically salivating over the possibility that the injunction might actually be granted. But litigation in the U.S. is bananas, and it looks like there may actually be a chance that ZeniMax can still cause some trouble for Oculus/Facebook, after all.

From Brian Crecente at Polygon:

It might seem unusual that a company can be found not guilty of stealing a trade secret, but guilty of copyright and that that decision could scuttle a product already on the market.

Joe Ahmad, a founding partner at Houston law firm Ahmad, Zavitsanos, Anaipakos, Alavi & Mensing P.C., said that’s because it’s much easier to prove the copyright infringement. And in this case, the thing copyrighted is some of the code used to run the Oculus Rift headset.

“I would think the injunction is potentially much more important than the damages award, especially to a company as large as Facebook,” Ahmad said. “What ZeniMax would have to show is that it will see imminent harm and an irreparable injury without the injunction, and harm for which there would be no adequate remedy by an award of monetary damages. With respect to the last factor, typically, the plaintiff would argue that it would be difficult if not impossible to measure the amount of monetary damages stemming from the harm, an injunction is necessary to prevent the harm.

“One typical injunction could be to prevent the sale of the offending product, the Rift, but there are other possibilities as well. The prospect of such an injunction often prompts settlement discussions. One common arrangement would be a licensing agreement between the parties.”

For the record, I still think that ZeniMax are going to lose this one. Even if they find a really sympathetic judge willing to grant an injunction, Facebook can (and will) simply appeal it... and appeal again if that appeal isn't granted, and so on, and so on. Facebook is planning to lose money on Oculus for the next decade; an injunction that stops them from selling the Rift for a few months doesn't seem likely to force them to settle with ZeniMax for a share of Oculus' eventual profits. Especially since they're appealing that copyright-infringement part of the decision, anyway.

Also, Oculus is already losing the fight for VR market share, so there's no particular reason to think that an injunction against the Rift would change the state of play in VR:

Now, I didn't think that ZeniMax were going to be able to make any more legal trouble for Facebook at all, so maybe I'm wrong here, too, and maybe Facebook will try to settle out of court to avoid any possibility of losing any more VR market share at a time when the VR market still barely exists and isn't growing all that rapidly, anyway. I seriously doubt it, but what do I know? It is clear, though, that ZeniMax are planning to make this is difficult as they can for Facebook, apparently heedless of the cost to themselves, so the drama will continue for a while yet.

Make some popcorn, I guess, and watch the show.

What to do when you hate Windows 10

I'm seeing more and more stories like this one lately, from PC World:

I usually start this column with “so and so needed something done to their PC,” but if I were to include the names of all the people who have written me about how unhappy they are with their Windows 10 “upgrade” the file would be so large the server that hosts this page would need a new hard drive. I’ve been inundated with unhappy Windows 10 users for the past two months, and my heart goes out to these folks. A lot of them were upgraded unsuspectingly, and Microsoft deserves a ton of scorn for its malware-like Windows 10 upgrade tactics. That said, now that you have Windows 10 on your PC and you’re not happy, here’s what you can do about it.

Their list of things you can do pretty short: 1) keep it but make changes, 2) nuke it and install a different OS, and 3) restore from factory OS partition (for PCs from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.). #4 on their list is literally something you can't do:

4. Isn’t there an easier way to go back to my old OS?

Not anymore, there isn’t. There was a period during the “free upgrade” era when Microsoft allowed people to try Windows 10 for 31 days and go back if they were unhappy, but that window has closed. So for now you’re stuck with it.

Profoundly unhelpful. It took only two comments for one of their readers to chime in with some (potentially) more useful advice:

max999
"Microsoft deserves a ton of scorn for its malware-like Windows 10 upgrade tactics"

You left out:
5. Look into joining the huge lawsuit coming against Microsoft for these forced upgrades to Windows 10.

This isn't an outlier, of course. The headlines have been slowly but surely filling up with variations on this theme for a while now.

The EFF investigated Microsoft's GWX tactics after all... and were not not amused

I'd stopped thinking that the Change.org petition of a couple of months back would ever come to anything, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation was apparently just taking their time:

Microsoft had an ambitious goal with the launch of Windows 10: a billion devices running the software by the end of 2018. In its quest to reach that goal, the company aggressively pushed Windows 10 on its users and went so far as to offer free upgrades for a whole year. However, the company’s strategy for user adoption has trampled on essential aspects of modern computing: user choice and privacy. We think that’s wrong.

You don’t need to search long to come across stories of people who are horrified and amazed at just how far Microsoft has gone in order to increase Windows 10’s install base. Sure, there is some misinformation and hyperbole, but there are also some real concerns that current and future users of Windows 10 should be aware of. As the company is currently rolling out its “Anniversary Update” to Windows 10, we think it’s an appropriate time to focus on and examine the company’s strategy behind deploying Windows 10.

The EFF goes on to take Microsoft to task for disregarding user choice:

Time after time, with each update, Microsoft chose to employ questionable tactics to cause users to download a piece of software that many didn’t want. What users actually wanted didn’t seem to matter. In an extreme case, members of a wildlife conservation group in the African jungle felt that the automatic download of Windows 10 on a limited bandwidth connection could have endangered their lives if a forced upgrade had begun during a mission.

And also for disregarding users' privacy:

The trouble with Windows 10 doesn’t end with forcing users to download the operating system. By default, Windows 10 sends an unprecedented amount of usage data back to Microsoft, and the company claims most of it is to “personalize” the software by feeding it to the OS assistant called Cortana. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of data sent back: location data, text input, voice input, touch input, webpages you visit, and telemetry data regarding your general usage of your computer, including which programs you run and for how long.

While we understand that many users find features like Cortana useful, and that such features would be difficult (though not necessarily impossible) to implement in a way that doesn’t send data back to the cloud, the fact remains that many users would much prefer to opt out of these features in exchange for maintaining their privacy.

And while users can opt-out of some of these settings, it is not a guarantee that your computer will stop talking to Microsoft’s servers. A significant issue is the telemetry data the company receives. While Microsoft insists that it aggregates and anonymizes this data, it hasn’t explained just how it does so. Microsoft also won’t say how long this data is retained, instead providing only general timeframes. Worse yet, unless you’re an enterprise user, no matter what, you have to share at least some of this telemetry data with Microsoft and there’s no way to opt-out of it.

So far, so good, and pretty much in line with every criticism I've seen of Microsoft's behaviour, both during the GWX campaign and continuing with the Anniversary Update -- and, presumably, beyond.

The EFF doesn't stop with criticism, though -- they also have to recommendations for Microsoft, as to how they can repair some of the damage:

Microsoft should come clean with its user community. The company needs to acknowledge its missteps and offer real, meaningful opt-outs to the users who want them, preferably in a single unified screen. It also needs to be straightforward in separating security updates from operating system upgrades going forward, and not try to bypass user choice and privacy expectations.

Otherwise it will face backlash in the form of individual lawsuits, state attorney general investigations, and government investigations.

We at EFF have heard from many users who have asked us to take action, and we urge Microsoft to listen to these concerns and incorporate this feedback into the next release of its operating system. Otherwise, Microsoft may find that it has inadvertently discovered just how far it can push its users before they abandon a once-trusted company for a better, more privacy-protective solution.

Did I mention that Linux's market share has been rising slowly but steadily since April? I think some of those users have already decided to abandon Redmond's ship. It just remains to be seen how much their arrogance costs them -- both in terms of regulatory action and lawsuits, and also in negative publicity. So far, only WinBeta have picked up this story, at least that I've seen; it'll be interesting to see if anyone else still thinks that this is worth reporting.

UPDATE:
It appears that this story definitely does have some legs, with coverage on Trusted Reviews, Telepresence Options, ZDNet, Redmond Magazine, Windows IT Pro, MS Power User, techradar, and Digital Trends. Yes. the GWX PR damage continues. Good job Microsoft. Well done, you.