News Microsoft locks Cortana to Edge and Bing

Edge is superior to Chrome in GPU support on lower powered hardware. On my HP stream 11 I can play 1080p 60fps youtube in Edge no issues, but chrome will choke no matter what on anything past 720p :/

 

what about same test with Firefox out of interest.

 

Yes, simply don't activate it, I have Win10 (fresh installs) on two laptops and use Cortana on none.
I also have it on tho phones and never activated it.
It asks for an initial setup at first use. If you don't go through the initial setup, it does nothing.
It's THERE though, just not activated.
If I'd want to remove it the following is probably true:

 

Just wondering, if you look at task manager is it running?

 

Good point since there is a difference between having an MS account linked to cortana and to actually not have it running (and not sending 'anonymized' info to MS)

Personally if it could run locally and not have it send info to MS and I could disable it from accessing the microphone I might not have any issue with it, it's that 'helpful' spying that horrifies me. I just feel like I'm in some sort of prison (or is it asylum?) with that kind of thing.

And I don't fully understand people who are so happy with that stuff, who spend hundreds on things like an always on amazon listening device in their home, what's with these people? It's bad enough if they try to sneak it in normal things but people actually go for devices who do nothing but listen in. Takes all kinds I guess. I just wish the big companies didn't dismiss 'my' kind as being unacceptable in their horrible world.

 

Good question, I'll check when I get home.
On the phone you can turn it off in "energy saving" (where it showed as <1% before)

 

I think the word you're looking for is panopticon.

 

So, win10 states that if you turn Cortana off, it's off, but services called cortana will still pop up in your taskmanager.

I'd paste the message here, but it's in German as my system runs on German.

 

The beauty of a desktop pc, no mic unless plug one in.

(on a laptop just disable integrated webcam and mic from it in device manager)

 

I do not use Windows 8 nor Windows 10 (yet at least) but had only heard about the term "Cortana" through discussions about Xbox One. Admittedly I had completely no idea what it was until I read this thread explaining that it acts like Google Suggest or saved cookies. I stupidly thought it was a function that is new to the Kinect

On Wikipedia they call it an "Intelligent Personal Assistant" but raise privacy concerns about Cortana storing and indexing user information either through the web but ALSO the local computer. Does this mean that it does not matter if you use a browser other than Bing and Firefox, Cortana will still be able to find info stored locally on your computer?

After googling further I discovered a guide that suggests some good alternatives to Google, where it suggests Bing and Yahoo among others.
https://www.1and1.com/digitalguide/online-marketing/search-engine-marketing/alternatives-to-google/

However, the same guide also lists browsers that I had never heard of before and some of you mention them in your posts. Eg. DuckDuckGo, Startpage and Oscobo.

They all seem to have one thing in common, which is that they do not store user information and claim to refrain from using targeted advertising. However, since Cortana will still be able to search information locally on your computer rather than needing browser interaction, does this mean that features of DuckDuckGo etc. loses its purpose?

In other words, will Cortana circumvent alternative browser use?