[HN Gopher] Windows Copilot's is showing third-party Ads to Wind...
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Windows Copilot's is showing third-party Ads to Windows users
Author : goplayoutside
Score : 120 points
Date : 2023-10-05 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ghacks.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ghacks.net)
| mattigames wrote:
| I hope the European Union goes in full attack mode against this
| and force them to make it opt-in (not opt-out), and also demands
| some economic penalties for trying to use their OS monopoly to
| impose it.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Is this true for Windows Pro users? Sounds like it could be.
|
| I pay for Pro(multiple times) so I have access to Hyper-V and
| Bitlocker. With some config/opt-out I've enjoyed pretty much zero
| ads in Windows. Would be a shame if this changes..
| lionkor wrote:
| First fuck up your UI over about a decade, then claim AI is the
| fix (and not building less hostile UIs)
| dtx1 wrote:
| Windows is dying. Instead of offering this as a free service
| until it's actually useful enough to make people want to pay for
| it, they instantly turn to ads. That means that they see no more
| potential in windows, it's not worth investing into it anymore.
| temporallobe wrote:
| Which is a shame. I use Mac, Linux, and Windows pretty much
| daily, and I actually like the Windows UI/UX a lot, more than
| Mac in some ways. With WSL and tools like Bash, you can do a
| ton of things with Windows and make it more *nix-like than
| ever. Hell even Powershell is pretty damn good.
| kotaKat wrote:
| HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsCopilot
|
| DWORD TurnOffWindowsCopilot set to 1.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Until the next update.
| KMag wrote:
| Do any of you know if this just hides the UI, or actually
| prevents it and all of its components from using any resources
| other than disk space?
|
| Also, expect the registry key to change in a future release,
| "accidentally" re-enabling it and/or a pester widget to
| periodically ask you if you really meant to turn it off.
|
| It's rather annoying that Windows 10 still periodically pesters
| me to set up / link a Microsoft account. I expect no less from
| this AI widget. Thank goodness Win11 doesn't support my laptop
| (though, I seem to remember getting pestered a few times to
| upgrade to Win11).
| g232089 wrote:
| Of course it has ads. Running an AI in the cloud costs money.
| Teever wrote:
| When did advertisements become the universal currency?
| g232089 wrote:
| This wasn't invented by the internet either. Free newspapers
| or TV are examples of services funded by advertisements.
| xnx wrote:
| Attention is the currency:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
| akomtu wrote:
| Ads is theft (of our attention and of our data) and theft is
| committed without consent of the victim. It is for this
| reason ads can "pay" for things that money cannot. Similarly,
| if the law allowed extortion or blackmail, corporations that
| embrace it would outcompete those who don't.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Since 1999.
| 90-00-09 wrote:
| If I am not mistaken, when Marc Andreessen was building the
| Mosaic browser (1993-ish) he and his co-founders contemplated
| the monetization model for the web. Since micropayments were
| not possible, the only obvious choice was ads. In this sense,
| reliance on advertisement as the primary way to monetize
| online businesses is as old as www.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I think it goes further back than that. You can find early
| radio broadcasts where the story was brought to you buy
| some brand. They would even work the brands into the
| stories sometimes.
| landhar wrote:
| Indeed:
|
| > The term "soap opera" originated from radio dramas
| originally being sponsored by soap manufacturers.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera
| lelanthran wrote:
| Yeah. I believe that's where the term "soapies"
| originated.
|
| Shows originally brought to you by washing powder
| manufacturers.
| KMag wrote:
| G'day, mate? (I've never heard the term "soapies". Is it
| Australian slang? Having lived a decade in Hong Kong, I
| got exposure to a fair amount of Australian slang, and
| this fits the character.)
| lelanthran wrote:
| South African ...
|
| Although I was under the impression that soapies was an
| American word.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've never heard "soapies" in my part of the US. It's
| "Soaps" or "soap operas" here.
| KMag wrote:
| I've only ever heard "soap operas" or "soaps" in the
| Upper Midwest and East Coast.
|
| Let's blame Australia.
| jprete wrote:
| It's pretty close even if it's not actually an
| Americanism.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > micropayments were not possible, the only obvious choice
| was ads
|
| this is completely specious .. source: present at the time
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Early newspapers, even paid ones, often had an entire front
| page of only ads. And then more ads within.
| almatabata wrote:
| You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid product.
| If you charge for your product you will always have people
| who do not value your product at the price you need to
| charge.
|
| If you make it free you will always get more people to use
| your products. This helps a lot in getting funding in case of
| startups. Look at our user base if each user paid 1 dollar we
| would make billions. Of course you can never turn 100% of
| your user base into a paying customer.
|
| If you want to keep your massive user base you have to resort
| to ads. If you switch to a paid plan your user numbers will
| decline and investors will complain. If you do not show ads
| you will continue to bleed money and make no return on
| investment.
|
| At some point in time having a small paying customer base
| became unsexy to a lot of investors who wanted to chase after
| the next potential unicorn.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid
| product.
|
| That really depends on how we define "gigantic user base",
| but I think Adobe, Valve, and Autodesk all disprove it.
|
| > If you charge for your product you will always have
| people who do not value your product at the price you need
| to charge.
|
| It doesn't matter how many non-customers you get, only how
| many customers you get.
|
| In general, I think you do have something of a point in
| that it is easier to get more users with a nominal price of
| $0, and it might be a way to get enough users that the
| small $/user from ads works out. That doesn't mean that ads
| are always going to work or that other models can't work,
| though.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > You cannot have both a gigantic user base and a paid
| product
|
| The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself.
| Or... iOS?
| jjulius wrote:
| >The obvious counter example to this is Windows itself.
| Or... iOS?
|
| Or hardware, even. Just look at the iPhone...
| almatabata wrote:
| Even hardware can become victim to this look at Alexa:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-
| a-co... https://www.dallasnews.com/business/technology/20
| 23/08/20/ji...
| jjulius wrote:
| One example surrounded by many other pieces of hardware
| that don't do this doesn't do much to solidify your
| "cannot" absolute.
|
| Edit: Your second link makes it pretty clear that it's
| not Alexa's lack of profitability that seems to be the
| issue with regards to ads playing between songs. Apple
| Music has a free, ad-supported tier - meaning that on
| _whatever_ device you use it on, you 'll hear ads. If
| your Alexa is set to access your ad-supported Apple Music
| account, then of course you're going to hear ads.
| almatabata wrote:
| Both of these get bundled with the Hardware so people do
| not really consciously chose them.
|
| And for windows it seems the microsoft actually started
| to go the ads route by putting them in windows 10 and 11.
| And you do not have to pay for the OS anymore to use it
| as you do not have to activate the license.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Users pay indirectly for those, they don't see it as a
| standalone paid product.
| Teever wrote:
| Or coca-cola, or baby formula, or the myriad of
| construciton materials that we all consume but are
| produced by a few obscure, giant entities.
| hot_gril wrote:
| During the golden age of software piracy.
| techdragon wrote:
| It's completely impossible to get users to pay for it, the
| users that would pay can't possibly justify our investment in
| this amazing technology... /sarcasm
| Narrow2890 wrote:
| Windows is dead, there's no good reason for most people to use it
| as their primary OS anymore. Desktop Linux has proper fractional
| scaling support (or KDE plasma does anyway) AND doesn't catch
| fire every five minutes now, now's the time to make the switch.
| Rapzid wrote:
| I prefer Windows as my host OS and I've primarily worked in
| Linux professionally for 13 years.
|
| Prefer it to OSX and every Linux desktop environment. IMHO it's
| just a superior windowed desktop experience.. I prefer to
| _develop_ in Linux since my background is Linux systems
| engineering..
|
| So, hard disagree.
| wbkang wrote:
| This is the first time I hear Linux has better fractional
| scaling than Windows. Is this because of Wayland or something?
| Windows always had reasonably good fractional scaling story.
| Wanted to hear why you think Windoes fractional scaling is
| broken.
| Narrow2890 wrote:
| I don't, windows fractional scaling is very good, until very
| recently there was no good solution on Linux, but Plasma
| implemented a proper solution a while ago and it works about
| as well as Window's. This was one of the main things keeping
| me from making the permanent switch.
| oooyay wrote:
| I think they were remarking that fractional scaling on Linux
| is no longer a dumpster fire so you can ditch Windows for the
| reasons that make _it_ a dumpster fire.
| Narrow2890 wrote:
| Yeah this is what I meant, Linux on desktop is now stable
| enough and sufficiently usable to be an actual viable
| replacement for windows.
|
| Linux is slowly getting better with time, Windows is
| rapidly getting worse.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Mint Cinnamon had the best support I've seen in Linux. Maybe
| KDE is better, but I know for sure Windows is way better
| haha.
| jseutter wrote:
| I think you misunderstand. I don't think the parent is saying
| fractional scaling is better than Windows, just that it sucks
| less than it used to and is almost usable now.
|
| X and Wayland has had fractional scaling for a long time, but
| getting apps updated to pay attention to it is moving at the
| speed of Open Source.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| This reminds me of that satire post that went around right after
| ChatGPT release about the future of LLMs. The model basically
| always found a way to insert product placement or praise of the
| Chinese government into every other line.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Hey, that was me! Am I internet famous now?
|
| I still have a few pennies of OpenAI credits left if you want
| to try it: https://future.attejuvonen.fi
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Lol, thank you! I love this.
| SpacePortKnight wrote:
| Microsoft couldn't convience people to use Edge, so it is now
| converting Windows into a web browser.
| bhauer wrote:
| Welcome to Windows 98 and Active Desktop.
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(page generated 2023-10-05 23:01 UTC)