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Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Edition Will Have Some Group Policy Settings Removed
For their forthcoming Anniversary update, Microsoft have decided to remove some Group Policy settings from all editions of the operating system except for Windows 10 Enterprise. These Policies affect your ability to control "Cloud Content", "Personalization", and "Windows Store".
The corresponding Registry keys for these policies will also be removed. Manually adding those keys back into non-Enterprise editions of Win10 will have no effect.
Looking at the list of Policies to be removed, many home/power users of this operating system will almost certainly be up in arms and annoyed at this move, but it seems they are just innocent bystanders in a bigger game/pressure-tactic Microsoft is playing out with the corporate and business world.
Unfortunately for home/power users, purchasing a license to use the Windows 10 Enterprise edition is all but impossible. Divorcing from the MS Windows ecosystem may end up being the only palatable option for many such users.
Here is the list of Policies to be removed:
- Cloud Content > "Turn off Microsoft consumer experiences" -- personalized recommendations from Microsoft ...notifications about your Microsoft account.
- Cloud Content > "Do not show Windows tips" -- may see contextual popups ...Microsoft uses diagnostic, telemetry and usage data to determine which tips to show.
- Personalization > "Force a specific default lock screen and logon image"
- Personalization > "Prevent changing lock screen and logon image"
- Personalization > "Do not display the lock screen" -- before signing in, users will see their selected tile and must dismiss the lock screen using touch, keyboard or mouse drag.
- Store > "Disable all apps from Windows Store" -- turns off launch of all apps from Windows Store that came pre-installed or were downloaded; also will turn off Windows Store.
[Continues...]
Microsoft faces two new lawsuits over aggressive Windows 10 upgrade tactics
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Microsoft is facing two more lawsuits over the company's questionable Windows 10 upgrade tactics. Both suits are seeking class-action status.
The first suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Florida. It alleges that Microsoft's Windows 10 upgrade prompts "violated laws governing unsolicited electronic advertisements," as reported by The Seattle Times . The suit also says Microsoft's tactics are against the Federal Trade Commission's rules on deceptive and unfair practices. The second suit was filed in June in Haifa, Israel alleging that Microsoft installed Windows 10 on users' computers without consent. Microsoft already paid out a $10,000 award in a previous U.S. suit over similar circumstances.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @10:46PM
...any power use that for whatever reason was compelled to migrate to that wretched OS will have but one choice to use it sanely:
Download an ISO of Win10 Enterprise and use a KMS emulator.
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Sunday July 31 2016, @10:57PM
In case I wasn't the only one ignorant of what KMS is:
--https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee939272.aspx [microsoft.com]
--https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=25095 [microsoft.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @11:17PM
Thanks for that, I was thinking of KMS in the context of DRM (the other kind). Confusion like that just screams to me the need to move away from TLAs.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Monday August 01 2016, @12:22AM
I wonder why AWFLs (acronyms with four letters) haven't caught on as well.
(Score: 3, Funny) by HiThere on Monday August 01 2016, @12:54AM
Well, there are more of them, but...
The First Unitarian Church in Kensington decided to claim it was in Berkeley.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Monday August 01 2016, @02:05AM
Seems they started in Berkeley and kept the name when they were forced out, later changing it to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley...still funny.
http://uucb.org/about-us/history/ [uucb.org]
http://www.berkeleyheritage.com/berkeley_landmarks/1unitarian.html [berkeleyheritage.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2016, @01:02AM
The "A" in "TLA" stands for "abbreviation".
If you have to spell out something, that something isn't an acronym. [soylentnews.org]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by butthurt on Monday August 01 2016, @01:46AM
You can't pronounce AWFL? Whoosh.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2016, @02:54AM
Heh, yeah. That's kinda like SCSI.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 01 2016, @06:30AM
"AWFLs (acronyms with four letters)"
You mean ETLAs (Extended Three-Letter Acronyms)?
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Sunday July 31 2016, @10:57PM
The first two search results claimed that was Ad-ware :P
I was like: "why would you want to avoid MS ad-ware by installing your own?
Then I found this reddit thread [reddit.com] which made things more clear.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 31 2016, @11:46PM
Interesting. However, screw the emulator, and run a rogue KMS server on whole networks.. Run it on a dedicated VM to serve the entire network by redirecting everything to those networks to it via the router. It's easy to do with BSD and you can fake entire networks as being owned and operated by your equipment. On the client machines you don't even need hostfiles or anything as it's completely transparent and operating system agnostic.
It has another side effect in that it will completely break anything that requires working telemetry and MS servers, which I can only see as a good thing myself. You can run pure unadulterated copies of Windows 10 and other KMS enabled products without ever installing anything on them to effect licensed states. You control what the Internet actually "looks like", and you can replace any other network owned by anybody. So why not take advantage of that and reroute Microsoft's entire digital empire away to your /dev/null?
More and more I'm doing this so that I can be sure these networks are wholly unreachable by all equipment, including guest equipment that attaches to the network. If the outbound traffic isn't white-listed in someway or moderated, it doesn't go out.
Of course with all that being said, I'm still running Windows 10 which is just slightly more preferable than my nutsack having a date with a ball peen hammer. Looking it up KMS might work with Windows 7 Pro/Enterprise installations. Still, I would rather spend my time working with ReactOS and other similar *complete* replacements for Microsoft while I migrate to using different tools.