| ▲ | majorchord 2 hours ago |
| Ah yes, the closed-source proprietary black box antispy tool. |
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| ▲ | jjordan 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Closed source doesn't mean not trustworthy. O&O has been making tools like these for a long time. |
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| ▲ | Toynbeeidea an hour ago | parent [-] | | >Closed source doesn't mean not trustworthy Yes, it does. >O&O has been making tools like these for a long time. Microsoft has made Windows for a long time. Longer, even. | | |
| ▲ | SV_BubbleTime an hour ago | parent [-] | | The “million eyes” argument has massive exceptions, among the top of my head is OpenSSL’s HeartBleed, a critical and extremely popular security suite that had a simple overflow issue for a decade or longer. People don’t read the source. And chief among them, statistically, is you. Open Source is ideal but not a deal breaker. | | |
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| ▲ | thenewnewguy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you care about software being closed source or proprietary you probably aren't running Windows. |
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| ▲ | DaSHacka 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Honestly, even as a Linux guy who doesn't use Windows (almost) at all anymore, I trust Microsoft to be generic and corporate in their spying. They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account. A random closed-source black-box "privacy" tool though? You have zero guarantees. | | |
| ▲ | notabotiswear 14 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > They'll spy on users usage habits, and likely backdoor their OS for the feds, but they won't individually exfil your browser cookies and steal money from your bank account. What’s the difference between backdooring for the US gov’t and directly robbing/bugging you (assuming for the sake of argument that they don’t already do at least the latter)? Used to be that you’d only ask that question if you were brown and/or write your name from right to left. Doesn’t matter much whether you were from Svalbard or Sanaa these days… |
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| ▲ | ryan_glass 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Any recommendations for a FOSS alternative? |
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| ▲ | voidfunc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Right? Im not touching that thing with a 10ft pole. |
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| ▲ | speed_spread 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I get the sentiment. But for the record, O&O has been around for a long time, they were known for their excellent defragmentation tool, which isn't so much required nowadays. Their business model was never close to Adware (to my knowledge). ShutUp has also been around for a while and always seemed to me like a O&O side project by someone who got really pissed at Windows taking the spyware tangent. The distribution model is still that of shareware / freeware (no source), because that's what O&O does. But as far as closed software goes, that's _probably_ as clean as it gets. | | |
| ▲ | encom an hour ago | parent [-] | | >defragmentation Windows has had built in defrag since at least WinXP. I can't remember if Win2000 had it - I think it did. It runs in the background and you don't have to worry about it. 3rd party defrag tools are snake oil, like registry cleaners and so on. | | |
| ▲ | keyringlight 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm pretty sure some versions of DOS had a defrag tool, or at least windows 9x had a DOS mode equivalent where you could see the block map getting moved around. | |
| ▲ | speed_spread 8 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | IIRC W2K didn't have one. Defragmentation can use different strategies which may impact the time it takes and additional perf gains if the right files are next to each other. The builtin defrag tool doesn't give any option. So "snake oil" I'm not so sure. Also, a watching a proper defragmenter run was an OCD soothing experience before we had stray kitten and powerwashing videos galore. I know I'm not alone with this experience. |
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