Windows 10 Security≠Privacy

There is more and more news coming out about Windows 10 Security… what they actually should be saying is; Windows 10 the No Privacy Edition. No doubt there are some problems. But, it isn’t as bad as many make it sound.

Security

Security

To get some information on privacy settings see: What Windows 10’s “Privacy Nightmare” Settings Actually Do. You’ll learn your phone, tablet, notebook, and Windows 8 are pretty much all doing the same things that Win 10 does. So, it is mostly nothing new.

For gamers there is another Win 10 consideration for anyone with a NVIDIA card older than the 600 series. Eliz926 (7/30) in the Adobe forum points out:

Previously NVIDIA said that its Fermi (400 and 500 series), Kepler (600 and 700 series) and the new Maxwell (750 and 900 series) GPUs would all support DirectX 12. However, an updated support document confirms that the older Fermi series (<600) are still using the WDDM 1.3 drivers, rather than the new WDDM 2.0 drivers needed to support DirectX 12. The article said that support will be offered “at a later date” for Fermi GPUs.

We can assume everything before the 400 series is NEVER going to support DirectX 12. (Reference

It is probably not that much of a problem for Second Life users as SL uses OpenGL, not DirectX. OpenGL is advancing too. See: Next-gen OpenGL Successor. (Feb 2015) But, we don’t know a lot about how the Lab will use the new OpenGL.

We know Vulkan is replacing glNext as the current iteration of OpenGL. See: Here comes Vulkan. There are big performance improvements being made in OpenGL. But, as of March 2015 one could not build with Vulkan as it was still in developement. So, it probably is not part of Sansar on the Windows side. The only answer we have from the Lab is:

Q. Will Linden Lab be using OpenGL or DirectX for Project Sansar?

A. Depends on the host platform!

So, we may see DirectX 12 in use on the Windows side of Sansar. Mac and Linux sides will likely use OpenGL. However all versions of SL will almost certainly stay with OpenGL as changing would be a BIG job.

2 thoughts on “Windows 10 Security≠Privacy

  1. Out of sheer curiosity, I installed Windows 10 over a Windows 7 virtual machine, here (using the upgrade procedure from a Win10 DVD image).

    It took a lot of time for me to get rid of all the privacy threatening ‘features’ (removal of the store as well as all the ‘apps’ that keep phoning to Microsoft servers, such as Cortana, removal of Windows Defender, etc etc), especially since Microsoft made it harder to remove registry keys (by changing their owner to \TrustedInstaller\ and/or removing the \total control\ normally granted to the users pertaining to Administrators group), but I managed to get the system down to something workable (and pretty similar to the original WIndows 7 setup).

    This said, in the end, I fail to see any advantage in running Windows 10 when compared to WIndows 7, especially since the latter boots 3 times faster (20 seconds for Win 7, against a full minute for Win 10, and that’s the trimmed down Win 10, because the original one took over 3 minutes to boot !), is also much snappier than Win 10, and does not have all the privacy threatening ‘features’ neither the forced, unconditional updates (even for stuff you don’t want installed on your system, such as Windows Defender and the new ‘apps’)…

    I personally don’t care the least, since I very rarely use Windows and only for short test sessions or for building Windows versions of my software (the Cool VL Viewer being only one of them), but if I were a Windows’ user/supporter, I’d definitely worry about the motivations of Microsoft and their future decisions about their OS which more and more resembles like the mix of a store and of a spying agency…

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