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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday August 26 2017, @06:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the unpleasant-aftertaste dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Microsoft sparked fury when it aggressively pushed its Windows 10 operating system onto people's PCs – from unexpected downloads to surprise installations.

Now a consumer rights group has forced Redmond to promise it will never do it again, in Germany at least.

In 2015, Microsoft offered existing Windows 7 and 8 users a free upgrade to its new cloud-friendly OS, and rapidly become increasingly ambitious about getting it onto machines. After bundling the upgrade alongside its monthly security patches and resorting to tricky tactics, loads of users found they were downloading gigabytes of unwanted Redmond code.

This riled a lot of folks, but Germany – one of the few countries that takes consumer rights seriously – actually took action. The Consumer Center in Baden-Württemberg filed a cease-and-desist complaint against Redmond regarding the practice, and the software giant has unexpectedly caved and promised never to do it again.

"We would have wished for an earlier introduction, but the levy is a success for more consumer rights in the digital world," said Cornelia Tausch, CEO of the Center.

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/23/microsoft_windows_10_updates_germany/


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @11:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @11:14AM (#559403)

    El Reg's translation is just utter shite, bruv. Disclaimer: I'm no teacher, just a native speaker. Gonna try to explain the fuckup as best as I can.

    In German the action undertaken by Microsoft as per the headline in the primary source (Verbraucherzentrale) is "eine Unterlassungserklärung abgeben"[1], which in a very literal translation (like letting the Google Translate app on your mobile do it) might come out as "to hand over a declaration of discontinuance". At this point, the meaning should have been clear to whoever hacked together the article. However...

    Later in the text, "abgeben" is nominalized to "Abgabe"[2], which as a noun has a few alternative meanings - such as " levy". None of these make any sense in the context though.

    So the author's "translation" has the predicate ("Abgabe") confused for the object ("einer Unterlassungserklärung").

    The Unterlassungserkärung is (probably same as a declaration of discontinuance but IANAL) a legally binding contract, usually with a penalty clause. So this is an actual victory for consumer rights, just a little too late =/

    [1] "Microsoft gibt Unterlassungserklärung ab"; "gibt ... ab" being 3rd person singular form of "abgeben"
    [2] "Microsoft hat sich mit der Abgabe einer Unterlassungserklärung..."

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