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Advertising Windows Microsoft Operating Systems Software Technology

Microsoft Is Spamming Windows 10 File Explorer With Ads For OneDrive Storage (digitaltrends.com) 281

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: While Microsoft is addressing some other complaints about Windows 10 in the upcoming Creators Update -- such as privacy concerns over the data that's being transmitted and issues regarding how the operating system updates itself -- the company seems intent on retaining Windows 10's advertising functionality. In fact, it has apparently been adding OneDrive commercials to File Explorer, ExtremeTech reports. Basically, you might start seeing a new promotion for OneDrive when you're perusing your file structure in Windows 10. OneDrive is baked into Windows 10 and can't easily be uninstalled, and Microsoft wants to make sure you know that the 5GB of free OneDrive storage can be easily upgraded to significantly more space. Turning off the OneDrive advertising isn't without consequences. You can go to the View menu in File Explorer, then Options, and select "Change folder and search options." In the next window, select the View menu, then scroll down to and uncheck the "Show sync provider notifications" option. Note that while this should disable the OneDrive ads, it will also stop you from seeing potentially important notifications from OneDrive. The report notes that, while these OneDrive ads aren't new, "they seem to be showing up more often for more people."
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Microsoft Is Spamming Windows 10 File Explorer With Ads For OneDrive Storage

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  • Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:04AM (#54005687)

    The Facebook of operating systems!

    • Re:Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Big Hairy Ian ( 1155547 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:54AM (#54005961)
      Clearly no one else wants to advertise on W10
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • You need to read more /. Microsoft had a Facebook equivalent that no one used, so they just shut it down.
      • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        Microsoft will soon buy Facebook.

      • by Blig ( 1167531 )

        Don't laugh. Soon there will be the equivalent of an MS "Facebook" baked into Windows 10 too.

        Can just imagine it now - you're working on some code, a document, or playing that awesome game when all of a sudden a window pops over your active one and shows you all the food and kid pictures of other Windows 10 users around the world with the request that you "Like" them.

      • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

        Not seeing a big difference with the Microsoft Account they try and shove down everyone's throats since Windows 8. They already have buddy lists in the form of the Contacts section. A instant messaging/VoIP platform, Profile pages, a news portal with MSN... All they need is a front-end site that is more social-focused and they would be there.

    • Re:Windows 10 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09, 2017 @09:24AM (#54006107)

      Its NOT a operating system, its a operating SERVICE.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Oh, but it's only 'suggested' apps in the Start Menu", they said.
      "Microsoft will NEVER put ads in the rest of the OS", they said.

      Windows fanboys LIED.
    • An OS should not be an Ad platform!!!
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:05AM (#54005691)

    So my friends, which one of these should i look up, and suggest me Linux distros.
    I'm gonna VM them to try them out and completely purge Windows 10 from my life.

    • by enrique556 ( 4461637 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:53AM (#54005953)

      I downgraded my win7 to 10 just before the cutoff date for free upgrade, so I had the option of 7 or 10 later on. After trying out 10 for a while, I just decided that it was a joke, and that it was becoming more of a joke as time went on, and started dual-booting to linux mint cinnamon. ~6 months later and I don't ever boot into my windows partition even to play games. If you want a windows 7 replacement, Linux Mint Cinnamon is your best bet.

      • I downgraded my win7 to 10 just before the cutoff date for free upgrade, so I had the option of 7 or 10 later on. After trying out 10 for a while, I just decided that it was a joke, and that it was becoming more of a joke as time went on, and started dual-booting to linux mint cinnamon. ~6 months later and I don't ever boot into my windows partition even to play games. If you want a windows 7 replacement, Linux Mint Cinnamon is your best bet.

        Cinnamon is great, My wife loves it after refusing to use W8 after a month. Works well with touch screens too. I've been using Ubuntu Mate recently, since I can run it on my regular computers as well as a RP3 I've been playing with. On either one, the regular user can get used to it in minutes. For the OP - many of these Linux Distros use "Live CD's" or Thumb drives, so you can boot off them to see if you like the interface. As well, have a internet connection going on the computer you install on.

        Note

      • I put most of my cousins on Win10, tweaked to look like XP and with all the nonsense removed. I check everyone routinely with TeamViewer, and the only disasters I've had to fix have been on the NON-Win10 machines. Of course I added Mint, but no-one uses that because they like to see the screens they're used to. Their only complaint is 'Office' getting chargeable, which is when LibreOffice mysteriously appears.
    • BSD FTW! Probably PC-BSD as an easy start...

      http://web.pcbsd.org/ [pcbsd.org]

      As for shill above wanking on about "losing your windows skills"...don't worry, if you're a normal human being I'm sure you can learn new things while still retaining your old knowledge, especially if - like many - you regularly work with both.

      So - duh - you actually become MORE valuable on the job market!
      Being working well for me for over 30 years now...

      Try Apple also, based on BSD so under the hood it's not too unfamiliar. Used Macbook Pro

    • THAT is the BEST thing you could do for yourself.. Run Virtualbox on your Windows system and try different Linux distros till you find one you like, personally I like Kubuntu, KDE and Ubuntu, but your tastes may vary.. Once you're happy with it and are somewhat familiar with it, yank that Windows bandage off.... back up your data, install that Linux distro to the machine and just blow away Windows.. I did that nearly 7 years ago and now I sit back and laugh my ass off at all of the stories I see on the inte

  • by i_ate_god ( 899684 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:06AM (#54005697)

    with win10 home edition, is it even possible to stop this from happening at all? Some obscure registry hack somewhere?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:11AM (#54005721)

      Windows 7.

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Uninstall OneDrive.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • OOSU10 is good, so long as its developers keep up with the "whack-a-mole" changes that MS keeps throwing in.. Something that you or OOSU10 turns off today can very likely be turned back on tommorrow, ESPECIALLY if its one of the spyware aspects of 10.. ANYbody who places ANY trust in Microsoft has seriously misplaced their trust... I used/supported MS products for 20 years as a sysadmin and when I retired I decided I was DONE with anything MS...

    • RTFA and change the settings. I've never seen a single advert in Windows 10. Sure the defaults are annoying but all of them respect the settings to disable "Occasionally show suggestions in Start", and when you remove that get Office program that shipped with every version of windows since XP then you don't get those adverts anymore either (it was funny watching the outrage in Windows 10 as if this is something new).

      Problem with this setting here is it's a push advert from the OneDrive server. If you disabl

      • by gfxguy ( 98788 )
        Either I haven't been paying attention or I'm not getting these ads. I did do a bunch of registry hacks and other things to turn all the crap off, it's true - but then I have to do a lot with a fresh Ubuntu install, also (turn off telemetry and ads). I don't like that I have to opt out of stuff I didn't opt in to, but it's par for course no matter who you're buying from these days. I've been using Windows 10 for some time now, and I actually really like it compared to older versions of Windows. It's not
  • Since all of Microsoft's cloud services are intrinsically backdoored by the Three Letter Agencies, you might as well just email all your documents directly to them.
    • by chrish ( 4714 )

      I don't understand why the TLAs don't just sponsor a free cloud backup system; it could even be encrypted, using one of the possibly back-doored encryption standards. People would love it.

      • The local cache could be encrypted in place, but use their cloud to decrypt!

        I jest, but in seriousness I trust them a lot more than I trust MS. They gave us SE-Linux and things like that in the past. I guess it all depends which team they assign to the project, if you get something that helps you or the other guy. That's better odds than MS gives!

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:19AM (#54005749)

    "Note that while this should disable the OneDrive ads, it will also stop you from seeing potentially important notifications from OneDrive."

    Who the hell uses OneDrive and why should anyone care about "potentially important notifications" from a spammer?

  • Is this a free OS where the user is the product, or is it a "Pro" product where users pay nearly £200/$200, yet is exploited for additional revenue. Microsoft don't seem to know. Given the price of the product I don't want any commercial stuff in the core Windows shell. Promoted apps on the launcher, popups telling me Edge is faster than Chrome, and this, are not acceptable. The only place it's acceptable is in the Store.
    • Microsoft don't seem to know.

      Au contraire. Microsoft knows full well. It's an expensive Sadism & Masochism platform where you pay to be abused.

      You will bend over, get anal-raped with a spintered stick, and beg profusely for a larger bat. That has always been the mindset of Microsoft customers. But for some reason, they think that a gaping huge butt hole is somehow normal, and that a normal sized sphincter is a sign of a crazy person who hates Microsoft for being "successful". They think that if they just give Microsoft the ben

    • Given the history of MS, it won't matter if you paid for 10 or not, you're getting ads. Just like it didn't matter if you paid for 10 or not, you can't tell it when to update or not.
  • Apple (Score:2, Insightful)

    by countach ( 534280 )

    Say what you want about Apple, but they would never do shit like this.

    • Re:Apple (Score:5, Informative)

      by geek ( 5680 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @09:25AM (#54006115)

      Say what you want about Apple, but they would never do shit like this.

      You mean like Apple Music constantly asking me to subscribe when I just want to play a local music file on my phone? Or the constant nagging to enable icloud services?

      When you're given an OS or OS update for free, expect upselling.

      • For the Apple Music thing, I had the same thing happen - I suspect it was reenabled as part of an iOS update.

        Go into Settings - > Music -> Show Apple Music. That should fix it.

    • For all the "but Google!" BS, on Android I've never been spammed on my home screen or in apps that are a part of basic phone functionality. Any of the ad-supported apps I've installed are upfront about it.

      The more I read about Windows 10's bullshit, the more I'm glad I dodged that bullet. When Windows 7 dies, my last Windows partitions will get nuked or else isolated from the net. I already run Ubuntu+Cinnamon on my important desktops.

    • Say what you want about Apple, but they would never do shit like this.

      Back when QuickTime was a required plugin for the Internet, before you knew it on your Windows PC, they had shoveled Safari and iTunes into what was supposed to be a "security update".

  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @08:35AM (#54005839)

    Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?
    Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky, and in Facebook and Windows 10 File Explorer. But not in dreams, no siree.

  • If I turn off sync notifications, onedrive, which I don't use, will stop bugging me completely?

  • Just use another cloud provider or NextCloud. Then you can disable notifications with 0 drawbacks.
  • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @09:35AM (#54006181)

    "...Note that while this should disable the OneDrive ads, it will also stop you from seeing potentially important notifications from OneDrive.

    Er, important notifications?

    If I don't intend to use OneDrive at all, I'd love to know what the true impact is of disabling yet another advertising "feature".

    With the amount of shit going on with this OS, I can already see a market for a dedicated corporate firewall appliance that updates its anti-telemetry ruleset about as often as an A/V signatures.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09, 2017 @09:38AM (#54006193)

    I had to uninstall one drive for multiple clients yesterday because every time they tried to open a local file they received 'the file is corrupt' due to issues with microsoft's cloud.

    Just exiting wasn't a good enough solution to the problem.

    When the addons break LOCAL functionality when there are issues with the cloud - that's just ridiculous.

  • It all depends on being able to connect to Bing. And if one blocks bing at the physical level oh well.
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @10:13AM (#54006437)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Mozai ( 3547 )
      Is it possible to use Windows 10 without the taskbar? When I had to use company-issued windows workstations, I'd get slowed down by the explorer.exe crashes that would demolish not just the file manager but also the desktop shell, so I replaced the shell with something else like Litestep or Blackbox (bb4win or bblean). I think the registry key to change was SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell ?
    • ...but they've also been spamming the damned taskbar with ads for Edge lately.

      A feature that obeys the setting you set to not show ads on the start menu. Seriously just fix your damn settings. There is no spamming to people who don't want to be spammed. No need for a registry hack, some obscure right clickery, just click the window thingy, click the gear thingy, click personalisation, click start, and turn off the setting to show suggestions.

      It really isn't very difficult.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Nope, I'm saying it's your fault for not doing basic research about something that is "pissing you off" and you need to "close it to make it go away".

          There's another way to prevent it from even occurring. Not figuring this out is your fault, doubly so since it was covered on Slashdot.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "Windows 10, the most advanced advertising system, errr, I mean "operating system" we've ever released!"

  • by thomn8r ( 635504 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @12:07PM (#54007253)
    I just bought a Samsung tablet, which had Orifice bloatware pre-installed on it - it keeps spamming me about OneDrive as well
    • 2007: Linux is a far better OS. You buy Windows and it doesn't even come with Office.
      2017: My Samsung tablet came with Office. OMG THE BLOAT!

  • "OneDrive is baked into Windows 10 and can't easily be uninstalled"
    Actually it's under programs and features now and can be uninstalled in seconds.
    • by qubezz ( 520511 )
      OneDrive no longer can be uninstalled. It takes admin powershell commands to evict it. There is a new "connect" feature added that can neither be removed with dism or powershell, though. There are several new services, redundant services protecting themselves with randomized names. If you had any customizations, they are toast every time Windows 10 updates, because Microsoft broke the diff updater and now reinstall the whole 4GB OS and "copy" your profile when you update, losing every customization you may
  • I'm at the point where I'm now just exhausted from seeing news like this, which is probably what they've been trying to accomplish in the first place.

    Our choices are:

    Use Google's os and get fucked over for privacy. The lackluster choices for decent desktop applications means that Chromebooks continue to be nothing more than glorified physical web browsers that are useless without always-on internet, for the foreseeable future.

    Use Microsoft's OS and get even more fucked over by privacy, cause they can sipho

    • They seem to think a $4000 computer is a disposable appliance like a toaster, and if you don't like it... well......

      This is true, and well said.

      Use Linux, and have complete control of the OS, but the level of maintenance and knowledge required (even today in 2017), is still several levels beyond any other OS, with no guarantees that even basic functionality that you take for granted in other systems will work. While improving, general driver support is still dubious, and you may as well forget about using the latest shiny if it uses a new chipset. Desktop software ubiquitous in other OSes flat out don't exist, and the OSS equivalents are... lets be honest here... crap. Even 'flagship' software like Evolution is inexplicably lacking so much polish, that you start to wonder why you bothered to install Linux in the first place.

      So yeah... having seen computer history unfold over the last few decades, it honestly seems like things are getting worse, without any sign of that trend changing.

      This is not true. I have been running Linux for years now (mostly Debian and derivatives) and there is virtually no maintenance involved. Knowledge? I have one of my co-workers running an Ubuntu laptop from System76 and he does everything he needs with no problems. I have my sister and niece on a laptop running Debian with LXDE and they have no trouble. Both of these people called me last week asking "How do I hook up my printer on this Linux thing?" I said, plug it in and o

      • That's the thing though... It's at a point now where it works just fine for basic use cases like that, but as soon as you try to get slightly more complicated, then boom. Taking so much as a single step outside the average distro's simple use cases is almost guaranteed to require you to start editing config files, or doing all sorts of other esoteric contortions.

        I have a Linux box at home that I am using as a Kodi box. One distro, come hell or high water, wouldn't let me configure 5.1 sound through the SP

    • Strange. I've used Ubuntu for quite a few years, and found it excellent for someone who wants a Unixy environment and doesn't want to put in system admin work. I've found the desktop software available to fully suit my needs.

      YMMV, of course, and the fact that I've been using Ubuntu doesn't mean other distros aren't just as good or better. (As I implied earlier, I'm kinda lazy, and haven't tried others).

  • GOOD! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday March 09, 2017 @02:46PM (#54008623)

    If you are still using Windows 10 after all the terrible shit that's already come, you have earned this.

    • In general, the games I want to play are not available on other OSes, and I have to run Visual Studio at work, so I'd rather have the matching software at home. (They give us an MSDN license, so it doesn't cost me anything extra.) My old W7 laptop kinda died, and what they had to replace it with was W10.

  • I often wonder if Microsoft is really just running an experiment to discover how much garbage users will actually tolerate.
    "Let's say a mobile OS is a desktop OS!"
    "Let's remove the start menu!"
    "Let's make UAC do ridiculous things!"
    "Let's force updates and reboots whenever we want!"
    "Let's dump advertisements in weird places!"

    As an aside, I could probably make a killing by writing an ad-blocker for the OS...

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