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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I look at this list and I think of my grandmother, who would never do this, never even think to do it.

"The windows" is her friend, and she's relatively tech savvy for a person of her generation.

Heck, people my mothers generation would not think to do this.

Heck, even my brother would not think to do this, or to look for this. If it's not a single place, if you have to open the command line (on windows) then the ability for a reasonable user to gain privacy is nonexistant.

the option might as well be a toggle switch in the middle of Tanzia, it will be noticed all the same.

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Frankly your "grandmother" is better off not doing this anyway.

She needs the anti-phishing filter, the anti-malicious app & URL filter, and will want useful features like Cortana, predictive search, page compatibility modes, allowing websites/apps to ask for her location (e.g. Google Maps), and her files to be backed up when her computer fails.

You can argue if certain things help your "grandmother" (e.g. telemetry, advertiser IDs, etc) but this seems like to throws the baby out with the bathwater.

PS - Windows 10's defaults could be better. But this takes it to the other extreme, disabling legitimately useful functionality (in particular security focused functionality).

>will want useful features like Cortana, predictive search, page compatibility modes, allowing websites/apps to ask for her location (e.g. Google Maps), and her files to be backed up when her computer fails.

Have you ever had a grandma? My grandma literally plays solitaire and checks her email, that's it. She wants nothing to do with cortana.

I set my grandma up with Ubuntu and set the homepage of firefox to her email. I've never had a problem.

My grandma also mostly plays games and checks her email/Facebook, but she also occasionally has to search the web and has used Siri on her iPad, I don't think Cortana would be that big of a stretch to get her into (e.g. I've seen her use Siri semi-regularly to check the local weather).

To be frank, she would likely be better off with a Chromebook. But unfortunately she has a few games she plays which are Windows binaries (e.g. those $5 CDs containing "2500 card games").

Cortana is no more or no less accessible than Siri.

The problem with Cortona and Siri is that they process everything on remote servers while it could easily be done on a local machine. They do this to be able to save all that data (and take away your privacy).

Apple saves Siri's audio for 2 years for example... not sure what Microsoft's policy is on this...

Are there any existing products comparable in quality and speed to Cortana/Siri that do all of the processing locally?

if they would open source them, then maybe....

> The problem with Cortona and Siri is that they process everything on remote servers while it could easily be done on a local machine.

Please enlighten the HN crowd and provide a reference for this claim.

sorry I was thinking mostly about voice recognition... which would already be a big plus if it was done locally.

... could easily be done on a local machine.

I think you're going to need to provide some evidence to support that. It is not intuitively obvious in the slightest, especially given how frequently Cortana/Siri/GoogleNow trip up even with a data center backing them.

Seriously, if processing locally was so easy but they still wanted to steal all your data, they would crunch it locally & give results, and silently ship off the recording to an archive in parallel. Local processing is cheaper for them (bandwidth, compute) and faster for you.

What are the tangible downsides your grandmother will experience as a result of not following these steps?

I wonder if instead of fixing the OS directly, it'd be better to make the firewall changes in an Internet router and just send them the new one. You'd probably want to keep the existing router as well to avoid the need to login to find ISP settings (or avoid calling the ISP), but as long as the new router can be setup as a bridge to the existing one I see no reason why it couldn't work.

The added advantage of doing this is that you can block all traffic associated with Microsoft's user tracking servers, which should work (as long as Microsoft don't switch the server name in use).

Either that or recommend avoiding the Windows 10 upgrade. Windows 7 in particular should be sticking around for quite a while yet.

Of course not, you're turning off most of the features of the Operating System.

Normal people don't want to disable their OS.

"Features" that never existed on previous Windows versions anyway, so they could care less.

They could? That seems suprising

http://i.stack.imgur.com/3vP2z.png

I'm saving this link. Thanks.

"[X] could care less" is idiomatic English, not a mistake. It may have been an identifiable Yiddishism at one time, but it's a naturalized citizen at this point, and has been for decades. If you are looking for a living language in natural, everyday use to conform to some sort of formal logic, you have a lifetime of disappointment ahead of you.

Idiomatic _American_ English, perhaps, but even otherwise, it's still a grammatical error. Just one that's become ubiquitous to the point that speakers in one place don't care or don't notice.

> Idiomatic _American_ English, perhaps, but even otherwise, it's still a grammatical error.

Its not a grammatical error (grammatically, its basically identical to the "could not" form, since "could" and "could not" are usable in the exact same grammatical positions.) There is a semantic mismatch between the individual terms taken in isolation and the idiomatic meaning of the phrase, but this is not uncommon in idiomatic phrases (one can view it as something like "[x] could (in theory, though it is unlikely in practice) care less.")

If it's ubiquitous, how is it an error? Where do you think the grammar of a living language comes from?

Do you have a citation for this? I have always heard people get corrected for saying "... could care less."

Progress must be stopped.

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