Who is surprised?
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I agree but technology hasn’t really been “ours” for a long time. Rooting, jailbreaking, and open source is the only way to take back a modicum of control.
Because they make it easy and do a few cool things.
“Do you want a mic in your home that can record everything you say and do and send that data off to wherever the company chooses?”
“No of course not.”
“What about of it will also turn your lights on and off and play despacito on demand?”
“You son of a bitch, sign me up”.
This is also the reason why typing on the TV is so bad and the remote has a huge microphone button on it.
Do you tolerate the TPM/fTPM in your computer? Can you deactivate it? Can you query it? Can you tell it to do something?
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At this point, I think they are actively trying to drive us away.
The Elon Musk Maneuver.
They will certainly succeed at driving some people away. I was a lifetime Windows user and I currently don’t have it installed on any of my machines now. I think the average Joe is blissfully unaware other than the occasional dialog about a new feature coming their way.
I think they are going to lose more of the hardcore tech community with decisions like these, but I don’t know that they care.
They don’t care and you really don’t matter in the big scope of things.
This is where we say switch to Linux, right?
Yeah but I think most of us have already… We are not many enough to matter though. Microsoft and Google will continue to do what they want with 99% of users.
Eh, I switched. I switched all of my lab’s computers, too, and my PhD students have remarked a few different times that Linux is pretty cool. It might snowball.
The problem is like that xkcd comic about experts underestimating the common person’s knowledge in their field. Linux is still not user friendly enough for the vast majority of people. Linux users just don’t seem to understand that most people are in the “wtf is a distro?” level of knowledge and would absolutely panic at the mere sight of a terminal.
They don’t need to know what a distro is, the same way they don’t know the difference between Windows Enterprise, Professional, LTSC, etc.
If it’s not OEM, people like us are going to be the ones installing it for them anyway.
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I’ve used Linux for 20 years and don’t even know what MPV is without looking it up.
Pretty sure that’s not an issue for any average user.deleted by creator
Why would anyone need a replacement for VLC?
Also, Gnome, KDE, Xfce, LXQt all come with a video player out of the box that’s much better suited for newbies.
If you’re installing MPV, you’re looking for it and probably know why you want it.
Didn’t they say the same thing about Internet Explorer, it was part of the OS and can’t be uninstalled or disabled…
Then, antitrust legal action against Microsoft and it turns out they can enable it being removable. Whoops!
They are doing a lot better about baking stuff in these days. If you uninstall edge on windows you unironically break a lot of systems, can’t even play Minecraft or use teams lol
Webview2 is the edge component that is assumed to be installed on all Windows computers. Unlike runtimes which a launcher could detect is missing and install, Webview2 doesn’t have a silent installed that can be bundled. The user must, by hand, go to a website, select their CPU architecture, and install it.
Anyways it’s clear that, at least within the Windows org, Microsoft is the new Oracle and teams are pointing guns at each other. Hopefully it dies quick to avoid this slow decay.
I always wonder where the line is for the majority of people, maybe there isn’t one and they know it. You’ve got to hand it to Microsoft nearly 30 years and they still have the majority.
This is the same false analogy people make as to why Americans drive giant trucks to shift blame… it’s not the manufacturers who are pushing these cars to circumvent taxes, it is the users for demanding it.
Very few people actually like these invasive shit Microsoft pulls, but the vast majority either do not know about them, understand them or feel they have another choice. For example, I hate MS, I understand what dog shit this Recall feature is, yet my job will provide a Windows machine with it and I have no choice but to use it.
I am a nerd so at home I do have everything running on Linux. But for the majority of people that would be a unknown option or just an unobtainable one
I agree, I don’t think they have any limit. Look at how invasive platforms like Facebook are, and yet they’re still massively popular. Mobile operating systems are several times worse than Windows is for privacy and data harvesting, and people clearly don’t care at all. They’ll even happily consent to ever more levels of it - there’s no evidence to suggest that they’ll ever stop.
One of the biggest “mistakes” Microsoft made was not realizing how lucrative data collection could be. Back in the quaint old days of early PC computing, spyware was actually considered a bad thing. When Google came along, that philosophy was flipped on its head. Over the past 15 years, Microsoft has seeing what these spyware vendors are doing and salivating because they know that they are still the kings of computing - they still have total control the PC market and there’s a good chance that it’s not really going anywhere because most people hate change - even though Linux is starting to make inroads in quite a few places.
It would not be surprising if, in a few years, a Windows OS looks like a Google search page, or a cable television channel.
There is no such thing as a line, it seems to be a long gradient and its about how fast you move on the gradient. If you ever so slightly introduce more and more crap slowly enough, people don’t care as they forget how good they had it much earlier.
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And yet - should you have to actively work against the design goals of OS installed on your hardware? It’s great that some folks have found a way to successfully disable it, but that doesn’t give MS a pass.
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Fair!
I never said otherwise.
Sorry for my assumption regarding your point in posting what you did. 🙂
Even if you can’t cleanly remove it, you can probably delete a few system files and break it. It’s not like the whole thing will be baked into kernel32.dll.
False. The hard drive where Windows lives will soon find itself exiting my window
Nah, loot it for the magnets at least. Frisbee the platters, save the chassis for the scrap bucket (it’s solid aluminum).
Ah the ol’ defenestration uninstallation.
Dewindowed
Off is the direction in which I would like Microsoft to fuck if they think I’m gonna have a deep learning AI spy on my computer activity.
This just makes me want to switch to Linux.
Stop threatening. Commit. Take the leap. A lot of us here are already on the other side and we’ll help you find your footing.
And it is not scary. A simple distro like Mint, figure out where the software repositories live, how to use thr off8xe suite, and you’re done. Life is "great*.
Free software with no ads, and things that are built for purpose over profit. Going back to Windows is jarring when I use it now.
I hope enough companies realize the inherent danger to their IP this feature brings. Or that the government realizes the inherent danger to CUI data and forces there to be an admin level lock of the feature so normal users can’t just turn it on.
I and many others can’t just switch to Linux because we are required to use company laptops/desktops that are admin locked.
shouldn’t be doing personal stuff on work computer. let the company deal with recall if they don’t want their shit leaked.
They didn’t mention personal stuff
then he/she can let the organization decide about recall, it’s not up to him at this point unless he’s the owner. maybe the organization wants recall to further spy on employees and that’s a different reason to not work for them at that point.
I did it! I did it over the long weekend. Been using Windows since 3.1 (albeit only switched fully from MSDOS when Windows 2000 came out).
I did a test run on my laptop during time away from home/desktop over the summer, using Linux Mint, to see if I can do work and school on an unfamiliar system exclusively. On Mint I never had to open the terminal and everything worked right out of the box. Cinnamon is very similar to Win10 too. Heck, I can’t even remember the installation procedure, it was so hands off and easy.
After two failed attempts of Arch on the same laptop, I’ve managed to install it with help of archinstaller on my main desktop. No idea what I’m doing, but I got it up and running to a state where I can do both work and school.
FUCK Windows and the constant nag it does everywhere. Good riddance.
Good choice on Mint.
I have been using Linux exclusively (personal) since 2008, distro hopped for a few years then settled on Ubuntu, until they shot themselves in the foot with 22.04 and the snap debacle; moved to Mint (after trying Pop, MX and a few others).
I have to say a big well done to the Mint devs, it is better than Ubuntu ever was; part of this is newer drivers etc…but it is very polished and it gets out of my way and lets me do my work.
Been working with the various flavors of Windows in a work capacity over the same stretch, in my opinion windows peaked with XP, 7 was ok, and 10 is also ok. But it really has been down hill since XP was retired.
Yeah, XP was pretty good.
I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.
That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:
- NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
- Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I’d call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
- NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
- 8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
- 10 (8 but with refinement; I’m cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
- Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)
Anchoring the bottom
- 98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
- 1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
- 95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
- NT4 (it wasn’t bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
- CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn’t implement persistent storage!)
- 11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)
A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.
Ok, has anyone got DCS World on VR working on Linux? I really want to ditch my Windows gaming machine, I already don’t use it for anything serious, but this is getting ridiculous.
If you have dual GPUs or an iGPU plus a GPU, you can use passthrough and play your games with near native performance in an isolated Windows virtual machine under Linux.
Ok, but what happens when you shut down the virtual machine and start it back up? Do you have to reinstall the game?
Also do I have to have 2 expansion slot GPUs or will the MB built in GPU that is not being used, work for this purpose?
To answer the first part, when you shutdown the VM, your stuff will persist, so no you will not have to reinstalled all your stuff on the VM every time.
For the second part of your question, (to my knowledge, please correct me if I’m wrong) no Mobo has a built in GPU, some CPUs have integrated graphics and I believe you can get that to work on the VM as well. Otherwise you could use integrated on the Linux host OS and use your GPU for the VM exclusively, but your overall performance may take a hit when not using the VM
Who else has ever invented such a powerful spyware?
Serious question. Because usually Microsoft are not the first ones with anything, it is very likely that there is a predecessor.
Now I am quite disturbed because I don’t know how and where we are being spied on already in such an infamous manner!
There is a Mac app called Rewind that came out a couple of years ago that does the same thing. There was also an open source thing for Windows. Everyone is desperate to show that they are hip and can do AI. It looks like someone at Microsoft saw a demo of one of those apps and thought that putting it into Windows would let them brag about how much AI Windows can do. They clearly tried to rush it out in time for their Copilot PC marketing push.
The idea is that you can use local LLM models and image scanning to talk to your computer. You could ask it to summarize your day, ask what you were working on last week, or find those articles you vaguely remember reading last year and can’t find anymore. I can almost see the merit, but the security risk is so high.
I wonder if people will eventually stop caring about the security risk of features like this. Those AI girlfriends some people dream about will have access to so much private information. Give this thing a voice and you can market it as a companion who learns the things you like and can talk with you about the things you are reading. Hackers might be able to see literally everything you’ve done on the computer for the last few years, but you’ll get to feel like Iron Man with your own personal Jarvis.
China?
Tell me more?
