Windows: Insecure by design I've been pointing out Windows security bugs since Windows for Workgroups showed up in 1992 and I showed how you could steal data from your coworker's spreadsheets using Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). You'd think Microsoft would have figured security out by now. But no. It's only gotten worse – much worse. In June 2023, …
Work will be interesting. Not my problem, I'm a user, I can only use what they provide me with, and work around some of the most annoying things. Thankfully our goup's main admin is a long term Windows admin (and a long term Linux developer), so I do have both a shoulder to cry on and somebody to roll out internal solutions that actually work for developers...
Being the only engineer I appear to be ignored and they listen to the MSP more. They appear to ignore the fact the MSP, being an MS partner, get kick backs for anything we put in Azure. Despite me having told them for months that it would be more expensive in meetings, the MSP kept flat our lying "Actually no, moving you to the cloud will be cheaper" finance kissed their ring and smiled with glee and looked at me with that side eye.
I eventually gave up protesting. Now they've seen the bill and the MSP have finally confessed it will be more expensive. I felt smug but said nothing. Really I should move on and find a place where they actually listen but I really don't want to be stuck working for an MSP which is all that appears to be available.
Fuck IT now.
None at Redmond's hands. Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna' be fooled again!☆
At home? Linux user for decades.
Not too unlikely as from 2000 is more than two decades.
I had Redhat 4.0 (1996) and 4.2 - the first from an APC magazine cover cdrom, the second purchased from a bookshop.
These aren't the earliest distros as I already had a cdrom with Slackware source code amongst Unix and X11 sources.
In 1996 I started managing (sysadmin etc etc) Unix boxen and had a single Linux PC with a multiport serial adaptor and a collection of v34b dialup modems so Linux was already being used in anger. ;)
My next Linux box was building a screening bridge* (ebtables+ipchains? or iptables?) to protect rather sensitive material running on... you guessed it: Windows boxes... but no prizes.
My good fortune was that I didn't do windows - I haven't a head for heights and am allergic to Windex.® I even get vertigo from looking at a ladder or from seeing a squeegee.
☆ Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men 2003.
* Sometimes you can't change the IP addresses or routes. The Linux distros of that era could be stripped to virtually nothing and the bridge didn't have an IP address just console access.
You must be my other twin. I also started my journey with Slackware in the early 1990s, and had a DEC Workstation as the day job. With a big, fancy CRT screen pilfered from a colleague who was leaving. Didn't work. Everyone laughed. Took a while to find the RGB parameter to pass on the boot line to make it hardware sync to the green channel. Then they were all envious of my 30 something inches, yeah baby!
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Also a Linux user at home, since 1993 or so, when I discovered it on comp.os.linux (at Data General, on a Sun workstation).
Just loaded Slackware on a VIA mini-PC, for use as a tftp server. Worked just fine.
I have to use Windows on my work PC, but IMHO it seems to be on a long downward slide towards chaos. Seemingly constant changes to the UI leave me unsure how to do things I don't do frequently. Teams is a hot mess of mysterious icons. I'm on Mint at home, and quite happy with it.
I think that S.J.V-N is preaching to the converted here.
From all the comments I have read over the years on this site it seems as if most people here have heard of Linux even if they don't use it themselves.
Many, I suspect, use Windows as part of their day job and short of convincing the powers that be to move away from MS, and that's hard, I know as I have tried. They are stuck.
MS will rely on lock-in and inertia to maintain their grip on the market.
Most here know of the flaws in Windows, many including myself have made a good living running around patching up the shambles caused by their deficiencies.
It does cause me to wonder how far MS can push this but so far they seem to be succeeding in pushing their luck.
I have been using Linux since, um, 1994 I think it was. Certainly 1995, as I set up a whole company using it that year (after compiling from source and fixing the bugs in the 3Com network drivers). Within arm-reach of me now are more Linux machines than any other OS.
On my desktops and laptops? Windows all the way. The Microsoft ecosystem Just Works(tm), and allows me ultimate freedom in which devices I choose to use on any given day. Do I trust Microsoft? No, no more than I trust any other corporation, which includes Apple and a whole bunch of contributors to, and distributors of, Linux, too. Are Microsoft being constantly and minutely examined under a microscope so that every little flaw comes to light in seconds? Yup. That'll do for me.
Downvote away. It's your own time you're wasting.
GJC
Done.
And, no, Microsoft are not constantly being examined under a microscope, if they were, all of the bugs would have been fixed in 2004. I haven't seen the source code for Windows since NT in 1993, and I'm probably still under NDA, but at that job we weren't looking for bugs in their O/S, we were looking for Intel's little tricks to speed up our code...you'd be amazed at what Intel provided to Microsoft and no-one else.
I'm always amused that an OS initially created as a home project by a graduate student, and now used by millions (free of charge) is more reliable and secure than a commercial product, developed decades ago and under constant development with no expense spared.
Okay then, a kernel and a userspace created as collaborative online project by volunteers and now used by millions (free of charge) are more reliable and secure than a commercial product, developed decades ago and under constant development with no expense spared.
It does cause me to wonder how far MS can push this but so far they seem to be succeeding in pushing their luck.
It seems that they've (probably) gone too far this time with their hardware demands for Windoze 11 - TCM? Madness. I'd be surprised if as many as 1% of corporate desktop machines are recent enough to have a TCM. That - and their usurous charges for ongoing support - will ensure that corporate users will eventually seek other OSs that aren't as demanding of hardware.
...And the world will be a better place for it!
There's a huge gap between corporates and home users. It's filled by SMBs who like to - no, have to - sweat their assets. Does your local bar/restaurant change its PCs, including those running PoS, so often? Your local garage? Your doctor, dentist or optician? Corner shop? Any other local business you use?
Unfortunately ... for many SMBs which are franchisees of some large chain, the legal agreements they make with the chain owners REQUIRE them to accept the technology stack specified by and/or provided by the chain's owners.
This includes point-of-sale systems, control systems ("beep-beep-beep" == "chips are done"), back-office systems, and IoT-based dispensing machines. Sometimes the agreements prohibit the franchisee's workers from fixing (or trying to fix) tech problems, but instead, rely on the chain's specified repair service.
I've seen a convenience store locked-up in the middle of the day with a scrawled note taped up in the door window: "CLOSED, COMPUTER DOWN. SORRY. --Mgt." I've seen a row of three IoT-based Slushie dispensers in a convenience store with taped-up signs on them reading, "Broke", presumably due to some sort of local Internet failure.
Those SMBs are losing a lot of money when these things happen, but they don't have the option of replacing their Windows- and/or IoT- based systems.
Not in the least keen on (in?)voluntary self-abuse. Linux user ever since Win 8 screwed with my horribly expensive peripherals (High end Minolta film scanner, and a large format Canon printer). Both continued to work perfectly under Ubuntu, and their current generation replacements still continue to do so under Linux Mint.
Remind me someone - what was Microsoft?
Same here: Linux (Redhat (6.2 IIRC) since 1998 and using online install & upgrades since the first appearance of their Fedora spin.
Before that I was using OS/9 68K for a few years, admittedly with an early Windows for mail and word processing since around 1985.
My households gaming pcs are the only ones stuck with Windows at home, partially due to software and partially due to the hdmi org licensing racket.
While Linux gaming has had a huge leap forward, it’s still not there for the games I play but hopefully it will reach a point where it is a “just works” situation.
The other expensive change is a new graphics card for VRR and 4K/120 support. With the HDMI org making the hdmi 2.x spec closed license (got to keep their money coming in somehow now they have run out of features to add) and refusing to allow Amd’s open source driver with 2.x support the only solution I can realistically see is an expensive graphics card replacement. Displayport isn’t a workable option for me as the AV world uses hdmi only, so there is no AV receiver with VRR & surround sound or large screen display using displayport to buy, nevermind be affordable.
Aside from seeming to live in a different reality to end users, the Microsoft divisions seem to be in their own different worlds. I find it unlikely the Xbox/Gaming division who provide and supply the Windows PC gaming market and Windows on handhelds would want either OneDrive or Recall on by default if ever.
My Legion Go is running very well with Bazzite, the only downside is Lenovo haven’t added the firmware to the Linux firmware repository and release it as a Windows only install.
Work is just whatever. Regulated industry, external auditors, centrally machine management, so that’s a Windows/Macos environment. Almost all of the development/engineering side of the business would have an easier life on Linux given our toolchains, workflows and target environments, but the large scale device management tools and external auditors understand/target windows and macOS.
I find that extremely unlikely that you were given free reign to blank the machine and install whatever you wanted in every job you've had. Apart from anything else that sounds like more of a security nightmare for the company than using Windows, and that's saying something.
If you tried that on my network you wouldn't have the job much longer.
If you've got to lock down your network that hard to prevent the peons from doing their job in ways you dislike, I suppose you have to. Some people won't work for companies like that. This means I'll probably never work for the banking sector, and similar other places...
However, "total control" isn't the only working IT paradigm.
Decades?! I've been trying Linux desktop distros for decades but aside from Corel Linux I could never find one that worked for me. Until I found Linux Mint about a decade ago and never looked back.
I still use Windows frequently, but only because clueless people pay me handsomely to write software for it.
Don't want your company to use recall ?
Don't talk to the boss about hackers getting in & stealing data
Talk to the boss about everything they ever typed, everything they ever looked at, everything anyone else using their machine ever typed or looked at
Even if they cleaned it all up & deleted it
Talk to them about that being marked as "Exhibit A" in any & every future court case
Talk to them about someone turning up with a warrant & walking off with everything they've ever done on that machine on a thumb drive
All it takes is one disgruntled client, one employee with a grudge, one embittered spouse & their entire life will be on line for everyone to see
See if they still want recall rolled out to the company
Windows is a cancer to my IT life that I will excise once and for all when I retire in less than a decade now.
Until then, as a freelance programming consultant, I unfortunately must have the same platform my customers use and, for some strange reason, none of them are on Linux.
Remark, if only one of them were, I'd be in a pickle. I guess I'd have to have a second work laptop. And no, I'm not going to VM Linux into my Windows or vice-versa. I'm not a systems administrator.
That is why I have scheduled my Linux conversion to when I'll have the time to deal with it.
Until then, well, I roll with the punches, I guess.
"That is why I have scheduled my Linux conversion to when I'll have the time to deal with it."
Unlike John Lumic's Cybus Industries' upgrade offering your Linux conversion will be an illuminating step on the road to Damascus. ;)
Having looked at application coding and systems programming under Windows at various times I don't envy you. Like most BOFHs the only practical use I have for windows is for the defenestrating of irritating items (people, printers.)
I guess I'd have to have a second work laptop. And no, I'm not going to VM Linux into my Windows or vice-versa. I'm not a systems administrator.
Dual boot?
Really running in a VM is easy provided you don't need any specialised hardware support or fancy graphics acceleration. These days I run Linux as my desktop and spin up one of a handful of Windows VM for specific software as needed.
Linux is not totally trouble free, but the more I see the decline of windows post-XP onwards (with 7 as brief respite) the happier I am not to have much to do with it.
I keep my computer set for dual-booting but it led to some interesting work experiences - Windows and Linux can't agree on what the time should be set to on the BIOS clock and even with Windows configured to update automatically it sometimes forgets. It turns out that your clock being an hour different to the network does some really weird things to ActiveDirectory permissions.
I stopped using Linux as my main home OS after an automated update to Grub blitzed my boot sector and left my computer unusable until I had reinstalled both operating systems, after a couple of days (unpaid because I couldn't work) trying to salvage them through less extreme means.
I think it's changing now, but when I pivoted to Windows the big advantage was that it was compatible with way more stuff - I could buy software synths and be confident they would work! I could play games that had come out in the last few years! It felt great to have all that software able to run on my PC again. I think with Steam moving towards Linux that's going to change, but for any user who wants to be able to run more than Vim and a browser, don't underestimate the value of "it just works!" Even when some of the values of "works" are quite limited.
It's another of those ill-thought-out defaults: system clock is set to what it thinks is local time. The sensible thing thing, especially if making provision for travel between time zones, is to keep the system clock at UTC and show local time by applying the current local time zone's offset. Linux adopts the sensible option.
I'm aware of "all the stuff" for Windows so when I run Windows its on its own machine, one I don't run important stuff on. Computers are so cheap that its better to use two physically separate systems than try to make Windows secure (and secure everything else from it), especially as the more modern the system the more locked down yet at the same time globally insecure it is.
Its not just Microsoft, unfortunately. I had a glimpse of our future recently when I read an article talking about needing to be a "Vehicle Security Professional" -- with appropriate certification, bonding/insurance and ongoing subscription -- in order to get into -- repair -- some subsystems on modern cars. I can see the same logic being extended to everything else, including computers and networked systems, first by industry initiative and then by government mandate.
That is already a thing. For example. Volvo charges a lot for its diagnostic software. $500 for the official computer to car adapter and $4800-7500 usd annually for a subscription package that includes repair documentation and diagnostic software. So what would you do if you're a car owner or small shop and wants to work on a Volvo.
The pre-2015 Volvos can be worked on with an older version of the software which is free because it was leaked and hacked. But the 2015 and newer Volvos require up to date diagnostic software.
And you also need to pay for each car software update using the diagnostic tool. So even for the much older Volvos, before you could customize behavior like locking headlights, etc. through the car itself, you have to pay and apply a software update to enable automatic door locking while driving. Or to make the horn chirp when locking, make lights flash a different way, turn on automatic puddle lamps, enable the fog lights (cars that were not equipped with fog lights still have working connectors and button, but they're disabled without a software update).
(Eventually Volvo did make automatic door locking added by holding the lock button to enable it)
At least on older Toyotas there's still a manual method to make the "beep when seatbelts aren't fastened" shut up. We've got a private driveway, with a gate to be opened, so the seatbelt warning is just an annoyance for the first 2-3 minutes.
For most cars, the alternative is AllData, along with more expensive code readers that can write back. They exist and aren't quite as expensive as "pay Volvo enough to fix a broken arm".
"run more than Vim and a browser"
Youre deluded... games is not the be end and all of an os
Want to know what most M$ user's use cases are?
... office and browsing (un)social media oh and games
My gues is pottering and the wsl are an attempt to keep windows relevent with regard to azure..
.net, mono shims etc stuff that..
Try flying thousands of wee drones in a formation af a dragon or a kiss in windows ...please i think the comedy value alone would be worth it,
Try flyining and landing an aircraft on another planet .
Most win apps can be emulated in linux ....and thoose that can't there are replacments that exist or under active development, that are using modern nodestructive node based workflows (Gemel) without a whole tonne of legecy dept.
So don't come here all AC saying things you have no idea about ....
Dual boot or VM, neither is difficult. Dual booting with SCO did take some sysadmin skills once upon a time but these days checking you've enough free space is available and not ticking the "Use all the disk" box is about all all the admin knowledge needed to set up a dual boot Linux to try out.
It is indeed ridiculously easy to set up a Windows/Linux dual boot system these days (as long as Windows is installed first), but keeping it long term will almost certainly involve some headaches at some point, especially if both OS are on a single drive, as Windows doesn't like to share. An update to Windows or to GRUB2, etc. will break the bootloader and you will either learn more than you wanted to about the boot process while trying to fix it, and/or you will wind up having to reinstall at least one, and quite likely both, of the operating systems. For me, it's worth it, but I also enjoy tournament poker, so I'm obviously a masochist.
Oh yes - converting to Linux is soooo hard. NOT. Bootable USB stick with the latest Mint iso, and about 30 minutes should do it.
I have "converted" more than half a dozen Windows victims in the last couple of years, on initially being asked if I could help solve a "computer problem" for them. The "problem(s)" was always something to do with Windows.xx, the fix being Mint.xx. Installed as dual boot in the first instance, for the Snoopy "security blanket" effect. Mostly all they really needed was a word processor and a spreadsheet. Check boot logs after about a month or so to see how often they were actually booting into Win today - mostly zero - and then clean up the whole system to release all that wasted space. It is the phenomenally fast and solid update process that strikes them first, then the fact that stuff just WORKS. Plus all the other goodies. Takes a bit of getting used to....
PS. I am over 80 and self taught - If I can do this stuff, ANYONE can.
Your experience regarding "fixing" other people's machines is just the same as mine. It got to the point that I was burning installation DVDs of (usually) Mint almost daily!
My aged Father (now sadly gone) made the move to Linux in the early years of this century, when he was in his late 70s. He had few problems (and me "on call" if there were any) and within a few months, he'd installed dozens of systems for the oldsters in his community. He never bothered to proseletyze, but would show prospective users just how fast a machine could be, and how easy it was to use.
He set up a group of volunteers to procure cheap ex-corporate machines, overhaul them and install (usually) Mint. These were then donated to Old Folks' Homes in his area and to other deserving organisations.
problem is hardware drivers - like those for synaptics fingerprint readers. Now, can you work with that? sure. But it's a nuisance. And that is only one of the many things that pop up when I replace windows 10 with Ubuntu on my laptop. It is painful. I get it, proprietary drivers bla bla I'd intall Linux not for the 'OpenSource' stuff but simply because it is better. I'm not convinced that Open Source is such a great deal, unless you endeavour to audit ALL the open source packages / libs that you include in your stuff. And make sure those that are critical actually get paid a living wage. But I'm rambling.
Sure, you can install Ubuntu on that laptop and make it 'work' but it's never going to be 100% and it's painful for those missing items. So it will take a really good reason. Losing support for windows 10 in october 2025 will be such a reason, because the 2017 Swift 7 is still a damn good laptop.
> Win XP and its successors want to phone home.
Win XP does not complain a bit if the network is cut off. We have two XP machines in the house. One has not been online for much of a decade (I tore the WiFi out). I got the other 2 years ago (fully working and used once!) and just didn't. The clocks drift is all. Both are Dell laptops, one very cheap, one very hi-end, neither drifts much (not like an IBM 5150 PC).
There will always be companies which will try to lock you in with proprietary software, hardware, and closed standards/specifications. Sometimes these companies make exclusivity agreements with other companies ("Runs only on Windows," "Runs only on MacOS," "Only on Xbox," etc.)
The price of freedom is not dealing with those companies and their products. If you feel you MUST use such products, recognize that using MS-Windows, or whatever, will be part of the ongoing price you will pay. I have some old MS-Windows-only peripherals whose manufacturers don't support them (no drivers) on Windows version > Win98, so don't pretend that using MS-Windows will be trouble-free.
Some previously MS-Windows-only companies are releasing specs to allow people running MacOS, Linux, etc. to at least talk to their equipment.
Fingerprint readers? Bah. The concept of biometric authentication is flawed in multiple ways.
I've been running Linux and OpenBSD for decades. I've had a few problems where something, usually sound, did not work out-of-the-box, but I was always able to fix those problems via a boot-time command line, or a config file change. YMMV.
> I was always able to fix those problems via a boot-time command line, or a config file change. YMMV.
>
It's easy for you, it's easy for me. But that is NOT the definition of "just works".
Just one grub flag is too much askance from a civilian who needs the computer to solve other problems, not computer problems. You have to sacrifice half your CPU to virus scanners, re-install every other year. Yet, Joe Average can do *that*. But fiddling with systemd and friends? No.
I think you missed the point.
I am not going to convert my customers to Linux. I have to live with that.
Yes, I have a Linux Mint PC on the other side of the desk right now. I love it. I can't use it for business.
You're 80 years old. I'm glad you're self-taught, but I never said I didn't understand Linux, I said I can't use it yet.
Converting to Linux IS easy if you have the incentive. I think Microsoft is just enhancing the incentive these days. I moved over aged 74 at the start of the Pandemic in 2020. I needed a "lock-down project"! If "BobChip" at over 80, and I can do it, so can you. There have got to be plenty of us of this sort of age that have switched. Most of the reasons for not switching have got to be "corporate" reasons or you having to use the abomination software such as Adobe.
I moved my non-techie brother to Linux about 10 years ago, when I got tired of calls telling me that "Windows isn't working". I started him on Ubuntu, moved him to Mint after the "Unity" change. Last time I went over, it was because his HDD had died, and that was several years ago. He's on auto-update and it's a 10 year old PC, just keeps on trucking with very little effort on my part.
I unfortunately must have the same platform my customers use and, for some strange reason, none of them are on Linux.
Yep, been there done that, the major reason was none of the software the clients needed to use would run successfully under linux (or apple either). And we are talking about major ERP systems and the like.
Linux will only become useful if it is able to a proper job! To be an easy fully functional drop in replacement for windows. At the moment it is not even close to that.
The ERP systems I worked with ran on servers under varieties of Unix. Linux has largely replaced Unix for running servers. If you have such an ERP system today surely you're running - or could run - on a Linux server platform. Aren't you simply accessing the server with a web-browser? If so, why can't the web-browser run on Linux unless it has to be some ancient version of IE?
Aren't you simply accessing the server with a web-browser? If so, why can't the web-browser run on Linux unless it has to be some ancient version of IE
well no, with one the client was a high charisma UX that under windows. The servers were HP-UX and the database was Oracle. It was considered that linux was unable to provide the industrial level scaling required.
The other was again a windows client and the server was a Z-series IBM mainframe.
Interesting I've only just retried and over the years I worked in the industry I've never seen linux used in any mission critical positions. And I've never seen it used for any form of UX!
In fact I don't think I've never seen linux used in the commercial world. And I'm talking about banking, insurance, state/federal government and multiple different retailing solutions that I've worked on.
And seriously, using a web browser as the UX!
Consider one of the projects I have worked on for a major retailer. Each Point of Sale terminal ran Windows they had a touch screen, mirrored disks, on board DB2 database replicated to mirrored back of store UNIX servers (P Series I think). Till drawer, Receipt print, mag stripe reader, bar code reader, EFTPOS shoe, wired ethernet with wireless backup. The whole POS terminal was setup to be able to run standalone.
LibreOffice..."isn't there yet". It's perfectly good for the basics, but def. not *fully* compatible with the latest MSOffice.
That's not to say I'm not perfectly happy using it. And in many cases, I can swap files with Office. But some of Office's fancy features aren't supported, and my coworkers love to use them. So, I keep a Win7 VM with a fairly recent version of Office on my home system for those cases. I like to keep home and work systems separate, but there are times when handling work files on the home system saves time or effort (like when the Win10->Win11 in-place upgrade work tried to do...failed miserably, and I had to use my personal system until it got reimaged).
"Until then, as a freelance programming consultant, I unfortunately must have the same platform my customers use and, for some strange reason, none of them are on Linux."
Been there, done that, feel sorry for you. Delphi on NT/2K. I couldn't believe the hoops it had to jump through just to run an external process.
"none of them are on Linux"
Not a Tim Cook fan, but there is MacOS and it can be made into a pretty solid office work environment. With `brew.sh` it does most of the things you can do on Linux. For my own home machines I do use Linux, and I do dislike swapping to different keybindings when I switch to the work-supplied Mac, but at least it's not Windows ! I can do most things that I need on it, and it is not actively trying to hack my files - that counts for something.
Masses of political donations on Capitol Hill is what business. Which means the Microsoft $product is used everywhere, including the DOD, DOS, DHS, DoD, FBI, HHS, IRS, NASA and the VA. With it now being stuffed with AI and hosted in the “Cloud”, it doesn't look like its going to get any safer anytime soon.
Yes, this. It would be nice to see congress losing it's shit about MS the way they do about DJI or others not on their shores.
And then doing something to ensure they meet required standards before dumping their not well planned products onto the market.
Europe banning it on security grounds would be a good start.
Europe banning it on security grounds would be a good start
If only.
But so much of government and business uses it, it's the classic catch-22. Because it's all intertwined with opaque proprietary interfaces, it's virtually impossible to make a replacement for one component, and making a replacement for all the bits governments and business require would be too big a task - hence it's not been done. And that's not by accident - it's taken MS decades of dodgy (and prven illegal) activities to get them to where they are and they won't give up easily (c.f. how Office non- Open XML became an ISO standard despite standards bodies around the world declaring it a pile of faeces not worthy of being a standard but it being passed by the expedient of a load of paid shills infiltrating them when governments starting including a "uses open standard formats" clause in procurement contracts).
But the UK government has had a requirement to use "open standards" since 2012 and yet still some government organisations publish .doc.
I did have a link to a very clear explanation with examples, basically saying standard HTML for online content, PDF for read-only documents, ODT / ODS etc. for editable documents and CSV for data exchange. This is the best I can find right now which seems to leave a bit more wiggle room.
M.
While ".doc" is not an open standard, ".docx" is.
The Office Open XML standard is an ISO standard - thanks to MS blatantly filling national standards bodies with people to vote it through. It's a "poor" standard technically, badly written, badly structured, uses it's own standards for things like country codes and date formats rather than reference existing standards for those (because MS would rather use it's own mess than something standard it doesn't control), and AFAIK there is no independent validation tool. In fact, AFAIK it would not be possible to write an independent validation tools since some elements of the standard are actually not open - e.g. "blob containing data in Word 97 format".
It must have cost MS a lot, and it's cost standards bodies dearly in lost reputation. It also cost standards bodies in terms of lack of ability - IIRC the BSI had a bit of a moan that after the OOXML vote, none of the new members ever appeared again, left the committee short of a quorum, and hence unable to perform it's regular functions until such time as a few names could be dropped.
It's a Trojan horse. The unthinking masses will think it's cool to be able to find something easily from last month. Meanwhile cloud originated requests will be asking the AI if the user has a copy of any CSAM, terrorist material, competitors' industrial secrets, politically unacceptable material, kompromat, etc, etc, etc.
>>>The unthinking masses will think it's cool to be able to find something easily<<<
It is not only the thinking masses who think it is cool. If you listen to Paul Thurrott on Windows Weekly, you'd think it's going to be the panacea for all your problems. I know he criticises MSFT at times, but I think Recall has the capacity to be the vector for total security/privacy negation. This especially with the other flaws in Windows that the "kids and interns" from the CEO down don't seem to care about, nor have the guts to sort out. Just stop with the new features FFS, and concentrate on either fixing it, or starting over from a decent base, such as Windows 7. They could start by wresting control back from Marketing to Engineering and Testing/Quality Control.
Me? I'm glad I'm retired now and can use Linux. I'm now allowed to just shake my head at the problems you poor users, workers, and enterprises have to deal with. Sad times.
The point I've made previously is that I have no control over someone with whom I have to deal - finance, government, whatever - using this imbecilic software without my knowledge or permission, and therefore exposing my secrets to potential third parties (even ignoring the likelihood of miscreants seeking out such repositories).
How does that tie in with Euro privacy rules?
I have a person at home who, the possible cross training would be a nightmare
OneDrive for all its hates works for me with all our laptops, different phone os's and a remote nas (not sure which owncloud or fork works well on the phones and a Synology nas)
I do use sky sports quite a bit in the evening ( I guess it work in a VM)
Owncloud/nextcloud is the most important thing. OneDrive is seamless at backing up the all important selfies^h^h pictures
How did you get iOS devices to accept your Nextcloud? My attempt worked fine with Android and Linux, but SWMBO uses an iPad which cried endlessly about lack of a cert. I started to self-certify, but worried about possible unintended consequences and stopped.
You can get a legitimate cert quite cheaply (I use SSLMate), or even free (e.g. Let's Encrypt), these days. It's far easier than messing around trying to persuade ever more paranoid software to accept a locally generated one.
For the life of me I still don't understand why people use non-E2EE file storage services like DropBox and OneDrive. Microsoft and DropBox can see all your files and their contents. And don't for a second believe that they don't take a peek at them every once in a while. And some rogue employee could harvest them for all sorts of nefarious purposes (and this has occurred, mind you). You have a file called "Bitcoin Wallet" in your OneDrive? Don't be surprised if your stash has suddenly been transferred to another BTC account.
I use Mega, which is free (up to 5GB) and end-to-end encrypted. No one but me can see its contents, which is what I want and expect.
Because I need to backup pictures, and the agro of getting pictures off an iPhone on windows is not worth it, and OneDrive, for all its faults does just work.
Shit, one of the people who uses the family license struggles to get into their windows laptop (glad the Synology does also download)
All our laptops sync and download all files which is also a useful when laptops are not on a network
"What other business could get away with having products that are so bad that every month ... we have a ... Patch Tuesday,"
These days elReg Patch Tuesday reports seem to list other vendors as well. But Windows seems to have started a tradition the others have followed which is possibly worse than being the only one.
Incidentally today I learned about https://0patch.zendesk.com/ which some may find useful.
Microsoft probably don't care for this sort of commentary (which I heartily agree with by the way) because the people writing or reading it aren't their main customers.
The number of people who care (and know) about what windows is doing in the background are a small proportion of total users. Most users just want to browse the web, their photos, do some email etc. If windows allows them to do that without all that snooping stuff getting in the way then they won't even know to care about it. And that's all Microsoft need to do, make windows work well enough for the majority of users to not know about all the data scraping and they will still sell plenty of copies to satisfy their shareholders.
As for Recall, Microsoft have said that all the screen grabs will be encrypted and will stay on the local machine, never going to the cloud or shared even with other users. That should be fine, but all the fuss about Recall just shows how little Microsoft are trusted on their word. If I was Microsoft I'd be most worried about that, except that I wouldn't need to care about truly IT savvy people and what they think, there are billions more ignorant users out there who are my true marks. Just make windows look glitzy and keep telling them everything is for their own good.
Microsoft have said that all the screen grabs will be encrypted and will stay on the local machine, never going to the cloud or shared even with other users. That should be fine, but all the fuss about Recall just shows how little Microsoft are trusted on their word.
The encryption was BitLocker (no defence against malware), it was possible for other users to access the data, and finally telemetry could easily upload the data in the future.
So the first two statements were found to be lies and the last one shows lack of trust. I said lies because Big Tech don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
One can take the vendor's word that it applies secure encryption to sensitive information, or not.
Without imputing malfeasant intent to Microsoft or any other vendor of operating systems, good sense dictates having every aspect of storage encryption under one's own control: the nature of the open source algorithm, and the desired level of security, this last traded against computational cost.
For many users, the default encryption mechanism may be adequate. However, the OS vendor should provide a hook enabling substitution of an alternative algorithm.
I think it would be tough for Linux to beat Windows in the home market unless Linux is included preconfigured with new computers, has a similar user experience to Windows (UI, file system, etc.), and the programs home users want.
For Linux to succeed, hardware manufacturers must be forced to make good drivers, which they would presumably do if oems like Dell and HP push to sell computers with Linux, and popularize Linux enough that manufacturers need to write Linux drivers to sell their devices.
I had a TP-Link USB Wi-Fi card 10 years ago, and its Linux driver was a pain to install. They gave me a strange file and no instructions. I never figured it out.
So I don't think the average home user would want to deal with Linux unless computer works perfectly along with USB accessories.
Unless hardware manufacturers start doing a good job of Linux support, or industry forces them, Linux is a hard sell for home users. Dell even used to sell Ubuntu, which backfired on home users bad with tech. A college student bought one and couldn't run Microsoft office for school, not knowing how to use Libre office
Linux must also have an easy familiar user interface. Some Linux distros are a bit arcane to use. When a user needs to "sudo" to install something, on Windows it just asks "do you want to allow this program to change your computer, yes or no." On some Linux distros, you have to type a username and password every time.
And programs the users want are necessary. Drivers must be created for Linux just like software. For example photographers want Lightroom, but does Linux have that?
Their college runs office 365, can Linux do the same?
They need to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with classmates, is that available?
Zoom call. Lab software etc. I am familiar with college computer requirements, so that's why I'm focusing on that example.
And if a user needs just a browser, then Linux would certainly fit the bill. But wouldn't a user rather get a Chromebox or Chromebook which is mainly a web browser? Chrome os has its own annoyances and oversights. And Linux can be seen as more private than Google or Microsoft products, but users are unaware and don't think the tradeoff in accessibility and compatibility is worth their time.
It isn't 2005 anymore. Zoom, WebEx, Office 365 (web based) all have installers and work on Linux. MS even has a Teams (no web based) client for Linux, but I never use it as the web based one works perfectly. I have installed Linux on about a half-dozen commodity laptops (Dells, Thinkpads, HPs and so on) and every thing has worked flawlessly out of the box. The only device I had to download drivers for was a scanner. And despite that scanner being 20 years old, it still works flawless on the latest version of Ubuntu.
And by a strange coincidence, 2005 the year of Linux desktop for me - simply because tasks like this were easier. I was taking pictures of my kids with an el-cheapo Kodak camera. It was out of storage, so I needed to download pictures to a computer so I could take more. I plugged it into a Windows computer, hoping to see an E: drive pop up. No dice. After about a half-hour of googling and downloading 100MB of crapware, I was finally able download my photos.
Just before I went out, I plugged that same camera into my Linux box. A dialog box popped up: "A USB camera has been detected. Would you like to import your photos into F-Spot?"
That is the day that Linux officially became easier than Windows for most common tasks.
I'm on exactly the same page. Long term Linux desktop user, can't stand Windows. Mostly Debian. I've been using Linux for everything and today it is better than ever.
One thing that I am experimenting lately with is ChromeOS with Lacros for a laptop. The part that I like is that the Linux VMs open graphical windows on the host, so not only text works but also UIs. Firefox, KeepassX, konsole, all just work. The result is a Debian VM that has very similar functionality as my Debian desktop. The only thing that I miss are the keyboard shortcuts of kwin.
It requires you to be comfortable with using Chrome though. The underlying OS is Linux based and Lacros is so isolated that even the OS cannot enforce policies on Chrome profiles. But the host is still based on Chrome.
This joke is I believe from the last century:
"...Bill Gates, very dead, knocks at the Pearly gates. Saint Peter peaks out.
- Yes ?
- Well I'm, errr, here, errr, to see if you have a spot for me ?
- A spot for you ??? In Heaven ?!? WHY on Earth would we take you in ?!? With ALL the crappy products you made that got countless crowds computer pain and suffering ?!?
- Well, errr, I did actually fix ALL the errors and bugs, and made a Windows that is 100% secure, safe, easy to use, self-deploying, self-updating, self-improving, self-evolving, self-learning, is free, open source, requires zero external programs because it can open every file and has every functionality already, and requires ZERO maintenance.
- What ?!? How ? How did we miss that ? When did you do that ?
- Well, errr, I just announced it, at the IT Professionals convention, about 3 minutes ago..."
So there
It's so refreshing to see a tech news outlet put forward this point of view, even though it shouldn't be contentious. Microsoft spend a fortune on keeping publications like The Reg happy and it's rare that any of the techies get to say what everyone knows: Microsoft software is, and always has been, dangerously insecure.
Whenever there is a report of a "cyber attack", like the one that took out the London Hospitals recently, it's rarely, if ever, mentioned that the attack was on Windows machines. The same crappy Windows people use at home, only all joined together, with fundamentally flawed networking infrastructure, and negligent security protections.
There will be people who say "of course there's more malware on Windows, because windows is so much more widely used!" but. this has always been a bogus argument. Look at the security holes mentioned in the article, and ask yourself how many were down to bad *design*? A classic example is the macro viruses that were so popular in the late 90's - putting executable code into documents was such a brilliant idea. The Outlook preview window? Active-X? lan-manager?
If you don't believe me, take a look at the Stefan Kanthak's dozens of detailed posts to Full-Disclosure titled "Defense in Depth the Microsoft way" (e.g. https://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2024/Apr/28)
For spider solitaire, check https://cardgames.io which has it and a lot of other games. Or install AisleRiot which almost every distro has, and also has all of those games. You can probably use one note through the Office 365 web client. I don't use one node, but I see it when I use the rest of Office 365. And as far as I can tell, the web client has the same functionality of the locally installed one.
... that aside Windows being awful nowadays, Microsoft fails over and over in making it better - for us simple users.
7 was somehow decent, 8 slightly worse, 10 even worse than 8 and 11 is simply awful.
Not to mention the stuff they sell today as "Office 365" - MS Word under Windows 7 was a lot better to work with.
(Out to see my doctor, I need some pills to calm down)
The issue is that every decision Microsoft make that forces the user into a corner is done not because it's "good practice" or "secure", it's because they can make more money. The 'backup' service will only back up 5GB, and by default it saves your files "cloud only". So there's more impetus to buy more storage. And there's more room on the hard disk for 'recall' snapshot data, which can be siphoned off later.
There is so much that they do that is either just crass to deliberately anti-user, that I can't be bothered to list it here. Sufflice it to say that they really need to be brought into line. Microsoft is a monopoly and the company is abusing that position by steering the market in nastier and nastier directions.
That goes to the heart of the actual problem. The Windows kernel was based on VMS, which was pretty solid, but VMS was written with four levels of access (K E S U) and ran on hardware that supported that model. Not much in VMS ran in kernel. Early on, Microsoft noted that running GDI in kernel (in NT 4) was a little faster than running it in userland, and those were its only two levels, so they moved it to kernel. And drivers of course are in kernel. Speed trumped security every time.
But honestly, as a user, I'm not interested in dropping Windows desktop for Linux. My work involves collaborating across the net with many clients. We use a lot of MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. Yes, Office 365 has been enshittified quite a bit from the very solid Office 2010; it's frustrating. I don't touch Windows 11 either; I keep my machines at 10, which is more stable, though 7 was the high point. And Windows is designed for actual normal users, while Linux is a server OS whose desktop is really a tool for developers and folks who are into the Unix head space. User-friendly Linux distros are in general insulting (canonically so ;-) ) or confusing, and the whole experience is a bit like riding a souped-up dune buggy with no doors. Sure, great power, but not suited to the general public. Not that Microsoft does a great job either, with idiocy like Recall and unwanted cloud copies of your private stuff, but to someone who does not dream of greps and bashes, it's much more comfortable. Just keep our firewall up and don't click on unknown attachments!
Mint is less insulting than Ubuntu. But it doesn't do the job for me or others like me -- real work (not software development!) involves collaborating using Microsoft Office, not the Linux substitutes, which are not perfectly compatible, as well as using other Windows programs. And when I last tried Mint as a dual boot, it made itself the primary boot and did not offer a way to change the grub boot order so I had to catch the timing every reboot to get it into Windows. Of course if I were a sysadmin expert I'd know how to find the right grub file but they didn't offer any help there.
> real work (not software development!) involves collaborating using Microsoft Office ...
I do "real work" (which includes some software development... I wonder why you don't consider that real work?), which involves extensive collaboration. Neither myself nor my collaborators need MS Office for this. It is far from the only game in town.
> ... not the Linux substitutes, which are not perfectly compatible, ...
Compatibility, of course, cuts both ways (and perhaps your comment would carry more weight if MS software like Word were even compatible with itself...)
> ... as well as using other Windows programs.
There are no doubt some task domains for which the most suitable software is only available on Windows. The same is true of Mac or Linux.
> And when I last tried Mint as a dual boot, it made itself the primary boot and did not offer a way to change the grub boot order so I had to catch the timing every reboot to get it into Windows.
Interesting... never had that experience. I'm guessing that is quite rare (googling Mint makes itself the primary boot suggests quite the opposite problem is far more common). Of course dual-boot installation is very much beholden to BIOS and hardware configurations, so YMMV.
I think you need to get out of your bubble a bit.
A lot of us have stories like this:
A cousin-in-law got hit with early ransomware back in W7 days (booby-trapped email from an acquaintance's hacked or spoofed address). Fortunately it very badly written ransomware & quickly recovered by Photorec running from a live CD. Cleaning up the files (you wouldn't believe how much cached shrapnel photorec can find) was certainly a job for Unix pipelined commands but that's no problem as I was using those before Windows existed*.
But my CiL, now in her nineties is still running the same PC on Zorin, and has been for years without needing to run "greps and bashes". Why should she? She has a Windows-like GUI running browser (Firefox), email (Thunderbird), and word-processor and spreadsheet (LibreOffice). I can't remember what she uses for photographs and she's particularly keen on looking up places on Google Earth. Even her Windows-using children have no problems with it.
As I said, a lot of us have similar experiences so we know that every time somebody like you comes out with stuff like your "greps and bashes" we know that all you're doing is repeating a lot of utter bollocks you've read somewhere and don't know enough to recognise your echo-chamber for what it is.
*Back in the day I was running RDBMS under Unix in a business where the more senior IT management were wedded to VMS. Sometimes I wonder how that went for them in later years.
To run Microsoft Office on Linux, just point your browser to https://office.com and login. That is it. Microsoft actually has Linux clients for things like Teams, but you don't need them. The browser based edition has all of the same functionality of the local clients.
Yes and no. Unfortunately, browser-based Office is, if anything, buggier than the Windows standalone version. It also seems to have limited functionality compared to the latter - and don't assume the documents it generates are necessarily compatible with the standalone version! (This applies in particular to tables, which, to be fair, have been broken in pretty much every Office version I've ever encountered.) May as well use LibreOffice - certainly not perfect, but, in my experience, less painful in the long run (and that's even taking compatibility issues into account).
I've been grousing here and elsewhere about mictosoft's lack of QC and blatant disregard for security for years. One me first windows work machine I changed the logo so it looked like there were broken pains, I mean, panes, in it. At first our IT manager wasn't too very pleased but he came around as the years and BSDs and security flaws came along. What's really sad is there seem to be beaucoup flaws that were in previous versions on windows and supposedly patched that are showing up in later versions.
I did something similar. I edited the background for Windows Professional to read Windows Amateur and then went around everyone's computer and for those dumb-ass knuckle-draggers that had caused me or my team grief, set theirs to the new background at about 9 oclock in the evening when the national desk had gone home.
Then I had 3 days off and came back to hear the horror stories, cause on some of them I screenshot the task bar and background together and then made that the background and hid the taskbar. Apparently it took them half a day to realise that as their IT team were pretty hopeless. LOL.
Thanks for the article.
I have been castigating MS about 'Recall' for sometime .... when not castigating the great 'AI' con !!!!
Unfortunately, the people who know will avoid 'Recall' as long as possible *but* the masses will get it one way or another (By trick or by stealth)
I am ex-UNIX / Linux, of some years, and only use MS OSes because there are some pieces of software that I cannot find a substitute for with the same usability.
I will eventually reach the end of my patience and kill all MS crap with great 'joy & abandon' ...
:)
I remember about 10 or 15 years ago when something called the interweb was invented and there was a lot of talk of making most apps work over HTML I genuinely do not understand why this has not been happening for the largest companies.CGI, ODBC all seemed to work reasonably well and performed on ancient hardware.
Mozilla tried that and failed.
Google tried that with chromeos, and have "given up by the back door" (they are now separating the browser from the os with "lacros" (why on earth they ever thought that was a good idea, i'll never know), and now have Android and Linux support via integrated VMs.)
The chromeos hterm terminal emulator is unable to process SIGWINCH (window size change) with a virtual keyboard, because there's no way to detect a keyboard popping up from the javascript code.
Time and time again, Google have tested API's that announce various low level details to the browser to aid HTML5 web apps, and each time it ends up as a nasty kludge with all sorts of security problems.
A browser should be a browser, period. It's doomed trying to be the complete OS.
There are advantages of thin clients, but most people here know that that solution was solved many many decades ago!
P.S. Not my downvote!
no as an OS, no. It isn't much different that when I worked with companies like Volantis who tried to sell us a completely Java OS for mobiles. That went well as you can imagine.
But I think the poster was referring to the app gap between Win and Linux and that almost all the biggest usage 'apps' are HTML based. There isnt really any need to use a native app unless for that task it is much quicker than the HTML5 one.
HTML has completely taken over apps. In almost every office I have been too in the last five years, nearly all of their apps are HTML based.
I know one massive charity in England that almost everything they use is HTML apps. They could very easily switch to Mint and not notice any difference.
The OS is much less important these days. And going back to HTML5 Firefox OS. That was quite a few years back and HTML5 apps suffered from being to slow, clunky and lacking many of the features native apps had. You say that when native-level features are added to HTML that cause no end of security isses. Some of that is true, especially at launch! Push notifications on PWA is a prime example of a great technology that has been so abused by scammers that it is near useless on all but the most trusted of sites.
There are a few others too that have been nightmares just like the type that a native apps has. HTML5 apps are established tech now and the chances are u are using one on your phone and you don't know it cause it looks native. Most news orgs in the UK are PWA (not HTML in a native wraper like the old days.).
PWA and apps co-exist. But PWA is bigger.
What I can't stand is Microsoft automatically sets up OneDrive to back up my folders whether I want it to or not. Not cool, Microsoft! Not cool at all. If I want to back up my files, I'll decide where I want them to go – not you.
A few years ago, a customer called me up, frantic that her hard drive was failing. Although I'd set her up with an external backup disk, it apparently had died and she'd simply never bothered to mention it. So she had something like 17 years of her videos/photos/etc., almost 2TB of data, that was slowly dying. She'd bought an external 4TB USB disk, but it "was out of space", so she needed help.
Her 2TB of data should easily fit on a 4TB disk, and by definition, a newly purchased 4TB disk should have 4TB of free space. At first, I assumed it was improperly formatted, maybe with a MacOS format, but no, it was readable by Windows. I thought perhaps it could be FAT32 formatted, which would explain why files over 4GB (which described the majority of her work) wouldn't copy, but it wasn't that, either.
She showed me the error message. She opened two Explorer windows (that was her workflow), one with her 2TB C: drive, and one with the external 4TB D: drive. Drag a folder from C: to D:, and sure enough an "insufficient disk space" error appeared, along with a hex error code, in a popup.
Hmm.
I tried the disk with my laptop, and I could copy to it just fine. It also wasn't user permissions, or anything like that. In fact, she was able to copy some small files, but that was it.
Looking up the hex error code, I was surprised to see it was a OneDrive error code. WTF? She wasn't even using OneDrive, this was a local drive to local drive copy. Or at least, it was supposed to be.
Well, as it turns out, in Windows 10, if you copy a folder from one Windows Explorer window to another, Windows intercepts that, and copies the content to OneDrive, as well. And since she had only 2GB (or maybe it was 5GB, whatever the default is) of OneDrive space, it was completely stuffed, and couldn't take any more.
So, the copy aborted, with a "disk full" error. Not a "OneDrive disk is full" error, just "disk full".
She didn't know what OneDrive even was, Microsoft simply enabled it by default in the Windows installation process.
Thankfully, when I disabled it from starting up when she logged in, she was able to actually use her external drive and do a proper backup.
Luckily, she had called me for help, rather than Microsoft Support. I have no doubt that they would have told her the resolution was for her to by 2TB (or 4TB) of OneDrive space, and then have her struggle with trying to back up 2TB to online storage with her (at the time) 1MB ADSL upload speed. That would have taken months, but probably less, because her disk would be dead long before the backup could finish.
And yes, she told me that after I disabled that "OneDrive virus", her file copies were "so much faster now". Imagine that.
Out of curiosity, she checked out what was on her OneDrive, and was horrified to discover that confidential customer files were online. They were uploaded without her knowledge or consent, simply because that's default behaviour. Default behaviour that slowed her PC to a crawl, prevented proper backups, and uploaded confidential data to the internet without her consent.
If Recall is enabled, it will take screenshots, with no regard for what's private and confidential, and depending on OneDrive configuration, those screenshots may end up online. By default, Recall will be disabled, at first, but how many privacy-breaking settings "accidentally" get reset to the least private after a Windows Update? Far too many.
And that, boys and girls, is why I switched to Mint last year, and why I've been fielding a surprising number of calls from people asking me how hard it would be for them to switch, and whether I can help them do it.
Encrypted communications periodically worry the mighty minds of legislators, The latest EU attempt to assert control is to require 'client side' pre-vetting of data before they are encrypted and sent on their way; this proposal has been placed on hold.
'Client side' surveillance of Internet communication and of activity on individual computational devices could be easy to introduce by modification of existing bundled utilities in MS Windows (Apple products too?) intended harmlessly to aid users. 'Windows Defender' (WD) detects and eradicates malware. It appears to reach deeply into the user's data. Also, WD seems not able to be permanently switched off by the user.
In addition, there are behind-the-scenes algorithms doing housekeeping tasks on users' stored data; these could be extended into noting the nature of the data. Windows 'calls home' regularly; that can be postponed, but not halted. Batches of security fixes, and enhancements arrive, so it is already established that MS, acting independently, has two-way communication with devices and, e.g. through WD, can change user introduced software.
There is no evidence supporting the idea that Microsoft, other than by the nature of its mode of doing business, behaves underhandedly. Yet the scope is enormous.
In principle, MS could report the presence of information proscribed, or indicative of suspicion, to government agencies. MS could contract with 'trusted partners' to enforce copyright; offending materials (e.g. audio) or software aiding its gathering can be blocked, deleted, and reported. DRM could be rigorously administered. Also, access to personal information could be used to further tighten the bond between advertisers and MS. The regular updates might contain freshly acquired hash codes identifying software and data of concern.
Extending state/commercial surveillance does not require an imposition upon device manufacturers, or upon users, to install crippled software. Given the blessing, the apparatus is already to hand, and covers a huge swathe of individual citizens, businesses, academia, and other entities. Those not in the net would be difficult to recruit anyway. Among them would be many anxious to preserve privacy. They must be targeted in a different manner.
So we'll be able to disable the Recall feature. I wonder how sure we can be that this will stick, and that it won't quietly and "accidentally" be re-enabled by a future update? Or by a convenient and exploitable security hole, where malware could enable it, let it run for a while and haul in the net to see if you've done anything interesting in the intervening period. I would much prefer it to e an installable feature that I could purge from the disk.
Not that it's directly my problem at the moment - another Linux user at home, and my PCs are all too old to run Windows 11 anyway, despite working perfectly well with the latest Linux. The work machine, I'm only concerned if something bad happened and it abused my home network while it was connected, I don't keep any of my personal data on there.
Just don't buy anything from any online games from corporations that deliberately making gaming on Linux difficult; Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar Games, Activision Blizzard (or anything Microsoft), Riot, Bungie, and Epic. The AAA scene today is mostly crap with filthy micro transactions for whales anyways. You just have a better gaming experience with smaller game studios.
I find Linux brings the better experience for gaming. Because I am forced to play quality games. Those games with anti cheat made by devs who deny support for Linux, are paved with micro transactions. And most of those games are not completed and are a broken mess upon release. And the games themselves have literally no meaning behind them; nothing that memorable. So, I hardly see what I am missing out on.
And any game companies (particularly with online games) that refuse support Proton on Linux can take a hike as far as I am concerned; meanwhile, many games with with anti cheat on Linux (according to areweanticheatyet.com) . That also includes certain apps made by certain software corporations. If they don't work on Linux, they aren't worth running to begin with. Because Windows itself ain't worth running one bit.
FYI, I never once ran Steam. So, that proves I can run games outside of Steam. It up to you. Stay on Windows and deal with MS's BS, or make strides to remove yourself from the MS ecosystem.
Anyway, I've mostly played more Indies during the pandemic over the AAA garbage that's being made these days. On top of that, I went and did more retro gaming with the PS1 and PS2 games via emulation. I had a better experience than with AAA gaming. And after watching people scream about how those huge game studios abuse their players with their shady monetization practices and unfinished games (making them an awful experience), I am glad I avoided much of the crap gaming today.
I'm not the first to make this observation, but it's worth repeating;
I don't run Windows because I want to run Windows, I run it because the programs I want to run aren't available for anything else.
So, no, the velvet-lined handcuffs aren't coming off anytime soon. They didn't look or feel like handcuffs when I first put them on...
A bit tired of the parade of Linux users announcing how long they've been it.
Sorry.
Congrats to you for avoiding/escaping the Windows trap and all, but that's not helpful to the lot of us that actually do stuff on these stupid things.
If you'd care to list what you actually run/do on Linux, it would be more interesting, possibly even useful.
Approaching retirement here and I would love to spend my golden years wrestling with another OS, but may well decide to just get on with it and do useful things instead while cursing Micrsoft under my breath.
(Mine's the one without so much MS in the pocket.)
Well, the Linux users aren't wrong. It's up to you. Stay on Windows and deal with MS's BS (along with suffering and crying more), or make strides to remove yourself from the MS ecosystem.
And if you need Windows for something and can't absolutely live without it, then be smart and keep that Windows machine completely offline. If you want to remain in control, that is what you will do. Windows is like malware today. Therefore, you need to treat it as such and keep it isolated. From that point forward, only use it as a work horse with that application that you need and nothing but that.
Then you can install Linux on another machine for any online purposes.
But if you really don't need physical hardware to run such programs, just spin up a Windows virtual machine on top of Linux. And of course, keep that Windows virtual machine offline.
> If you'd care to list what you actually run/do on Linux, it would be more interesting, possibly even useful.
OK, here goes.
Browsers, ofc. Currently Waterfox, Chrome and Brave (not forgetting Lynx!)
Thunderbird email client
LibreOffice (Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Writer)
Dropbox - only puts in the cloud what I want to be in the cloud! Irritatingly does not support symlinked files, but I'll cope.
Google Earth
Kate - for the very occasional coding that I do these days, as well as simple text processing. [1]
KDE Connect: links my Android phone with a KDE desktop
Darktable: an open source photography workflow application and raw developer.
Inkscape: a Free and open source vector graphics editor ... widely used for both artistic and technical illustrations
GNU Image Manipulation Program: a cross-platform image editor
Audacity: the world's most popular audio editing and recording app
FreeCAD ... tools to produce, and edit solid, full-precision models, export them for 3D printing or CNC machining, create 2D drawings and views, perform analyses such as Finite Element Analyses, or export model data such as quantities or bills of materials
Steam gaming
There, I think those are the highlights, listed from my apps menu. This is a KDE/GNU/Linux box of moderate spec., I'm sure that others have different and more interesting installs. Oh, I forgot Openshot, a video editor that I've used in the past but don't have installed as of this moment.
[1]I just used Kate to find my HTML errors in this post!
If you want an example of things to do:
SWMBO runs a patchwork class. Most weeks of the year I photograph the example she's made for next week's project.
The image usually needs a bit of adjusting - the "squares are never quite square - so Gimp rotates it to the best alignment. Sometimes it's even been used to pull it a bit squarer. And on a few occasions when only a quarter or a half has been completed Gimp miraculously (so the class thinks) works it up into a complete square.
Gwenview, the standard KDE image viewer crops it (Gimp could but somehow GV is easier).
The finished image is pasted into the handout's cover sheet in LibreOffice and exported as PDF. Sometimes additional images of the same pattern from online are added. The PDF name is set st start with 'A'.
SWMBO's handwritten notes are scanned onto NAS as PDFs, the default name starts with 'B'. Drag into the same directory as the cover sheet (which directory is shared via a Pi NextCloud server with SWMBO's laptop.)
Fire up a terminal in that directory and type pdfunite [AB]*.pdf projecname.pdf to assemble the handout as a single PDF. Yes, there are GUI alternatives but sometimes CLI is just slicker.
Pre-COVID I used to print multiple copies of the notes but now SWMBO emails them to the class to print for themselves (they need the templates on the last page(s) as hard copy).
I don't run Windows because I want to run Windows, I run it because the programs I want to run aren't available for anything else.
Got it in one! I have been trying for several months now and still cannot get what I want to run under Linux. Yes, there are these "Linux" alternative packages but they don't have all of the same functionality as the bespoke windows versions. I can't use the full functionality of my hardware etc.
Until linux can be a proper replacement I'm just wasting my time.
[i]If you'd care to list what you actually run/do on Linux, it would be more interesting, possibly even useful.[/i]
OK, I'll bite. I run all of these without having to install drivers, fiddle with config files, command line, or anything like that:
1. Office - Office 365 (https://office.com), Teams, WebEx, Zoom, Outlook, Word, Excel, One Drive, etc. I actually switched from Windows 10 to Ubuntu for my work daily driver - because all of these worked better - on Linux.
2. Media - Photo Manager, MP3 music libraries, video editing, scanning documents. All of these tools are either pre-installed in Ubuntu or can be downloaded easily through the software center. All GUI, no command line required.
3. Games - Subnatica, Starfield, Jedi: Fallen Order, The Expanse, Control, and probably about 100 others. Just finished Subnatica last night (300 hours). All installable and playable through Steam/Proton. NVIDEA drivers are installable through the GUI, or on my latest system76 model came pre installed.
4. WI-FI - drivers used to be an issues with Linux - 20 years ago. But it isn't 2005. Every computer I have owned since has used WI-FI without any issues. I have never installed WI-FI drivers or anything like that, and I have installed Ubuntu on a lot of different laptops, Dell, Thinkpad, HP, etc.
There is one issue on Linux that I have struggled with. When I first got a 4K monitor, fonts looked tiny. This has largely been addressed in the last few years but it still pops up occasionally.
I remember my manager looking to test Windows 3.11 and rejecting it. I remember a few years later being part of the group that was looking at NT Server and recommending similarly. Both recommendations were ignored. I remember senior managers, accountants etc going on holidays to Ireland and coming back with nice sets of golf clubs.
I remember, in a job interview being asked about network security and reliability and pointing out that MS being very bad on those items indicated that this was unwise.
Despite that, I got the job and a few years later watched the whole place downgrade from Netware to NT. No golf clubs evident here though.
"Is it any wonder I've been a Linux desktop user for over 30 years? The only question I have is: Will any of these latest Windows security fiascos finally get the rest of you to join me?"
No it won't, as I use macOS :)
But in seriousness, I agree with all your points. If you're not running a group policy controlled setup, Windows just seems to become more hellish with each release when it comes to all the built in online garbage, ads, etc.
Mac OS pre iPhone was a thing of extreme beauty that will unlikely be matched again. For me, OSX10.0 was unbelievable. How they integrated Apache into the control panel was worth it alone! Not to mention Tomcat ran so much better on it than on WinXP.
When OSX came out, almost all the Linux boys at work got one.
Nowadays, OSX is horrible. I wouldn't mid paying double for a laptop with OSX10.0 equivalent today as that's how good it was. But now, no. Mint, Mint, Manjaro, Mint and 2 MX23.3. Thats what the boys around me. Mint for me but thinking of Manjaro but is too ugly. Endeavor is beautiful.
From the article:
OPINION I've been pointing out Windows security bugs since Windows for Workgroups showed up in 1992 and I showed how you could steal data from your coworker's spreadsheets using Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). You'd think Microsoft would have figured security out by now.
Why in the name of all that's holy would anyone with an I.Q. above room temperature think that?
I'll hang up and listen for my answer....
I got one of those fancy mini pc's thinking I need something with a current supported OS. Helpfully it had windowz 11 already on it.
Seemed ok and just to get familiar I set it to dont update for a few weeks or so. No chance . Next thing it spent the rest of the day updating itself,and helpfully turned all my turned off setting back on.
So many things to go back in and change I feel its designed so you eventually dont bother.
I would install Linux as some sort of duel boot but not sure how to do it. Internet seems devoid of info in 2024.
I have another PC running windows7 and making that dual boot with linux mint was easy.
Hopefully some boffin here will take pity and point me in the right direction.
Very simple. If you can install Windows, then you can install most distributions of Linux with ease. Start out with Linux Mint or Zorin OS as those are great beginner distros. Just install your chosen distro on a separate drive. Don't install on the same drive Windows is on. Because Microsoft updates are known to overwrite the GRUB loader that start Linux.
As for hardware, if you want a plug and play experience, avoid Nvidia. Go with AMD or Intel as those drivers are open source. Nvidia's are not. So, you'd have to install the proprietary drivers for Nvidia cards. Also, avoid Realtek (as Realtek mostly stinks and is cheap hardware; only things that are passable are Ethernet adapters). So, avoid onboard Realtek audio (onboard audio sucks on any OS anyways; get a dedicated audio device). Also, avoid cheap Realtek WiFi cards in laptops (use Intel WiFi cards as Intel is the better brand for reliable networking).
Keep your peripherals simple as well. The more bells and whistles you have on your keyboard and mouse (like fancy gaming devices that need special software for example), the more problems you will have. Because the software for those keyboards and mice don't exist on Linux. So, depending on your peripherals, you may have to change them to something more simplistic. Keep this in mind.
But first thing to do before you start anything. Look at your software. Will it all work on Linux? If not, are you willing to switch to alternative applications that also work on Linux? Start with this first.
You need to realize that depending on your current setup, that it may not fully transferable from Windows to Linux. Regardless, you may have to take time adjusting/changing your setup to make it work on Linux.
Start with the software, then make sure your peripherals are more simplistic (along with using more compatible hardware; by sticking to AMD or Intel system components), and then start dual booting until you get used to the distro you chose. Essentially, you will have to go back to the basics of computing and build yourself back up as you go along to successfully switch to Linux.
Don't install on the same drive Windows is on. Because Microsoft updates are known to overwrite the GRUB loader that start Linux.
If you've already got Windows installed and there's enough space on the drive for a second OS then you can install Linux on the same drive. It's better mannered than Windows, will recognise the existing OS and put it on the boot menu.
The only thing that's necessary is to shrink the Windows partition to free up the space which you can do in Windows anyway.
I would install Linux as some sort of duel boot but not sure how to do it. Internet seems devoid of info in 2024.
Ignoring the slap at the interwebz and 2024 (of course the "internet" doesn't have that stuff anymore, you have to ask Chat GPT! but I digress....), all you have to do is download the ISO of a Linux distro of your choice (I chose Mint, YMMV of course) and install it. In the ISO were instructions on how to set up a dual boot w/ this utility called "grub", which is, I'm sure an acronym for some geeks' inside joke. I did it on a new machine that had Win 10 pre-installed. It just worked, and with a small amount of noodling around, I managed to get it to read the NTFS Windows partition, so I could get their fonts. That is basically all I have ever used on the MS partition (I really ought to repartition the disk, and clear that dead weight out of the box. Still looking for that round tuit....)
For my part, I've been using Linux at home for almost 30 years. My first distribution was Yggdrasil back on the 90's. Not the absolute best, but it did run directly from the CD-Rom and was pretty god for command line stuff (I had worked on a Unix box before). Advance a bit and at one place of work I took the laptop they handed me for work and before I did any damage to my brain, I took a nice Fedora release DVD and installed it on the drive. It happily asked me if I wanted a dual boot system, and I gleefully said yes. When my home laptop's display went "south", I went to the blue store, and looked around. They had a nice HP laptop (it had an AMD processor in it) and I asked if it could be had "cheaper", and I got an "open box" discount. When I took it home, I erased the pre-loaded virus called "Windows", and haven't looked back.
In another situation I was at an Hawaiian resort back in 2009 (the tsunami of 2011 wiped it out, but it has been rebuilt), and they had two computers for making up boarding passes. They both had locked browsers, but one was running a version of Linux. Not many people noticed the difference.
Life goes on.
At work I can but grit my teeth at the "Everything Microsoft" mentality the local I.T. group has.
And laugh at the frequent crashes of critical infrastructure. But hey, it's only a large health organization, why care about privacy or reliability right? The "offline access" paper backups are well used and tested at least.
So glad I left the server room. Used to work on creating high-availability systems. Now I work in the health sector where the desktop is just another tool. And it's not my problem when the systems go boom. Which they do, because "everything Microsoft" leads to some really, really stupid decisions.
Whilst it's popular to criticise MS / Windows / etc, it's well worth wondering why these issues occur in Windows.
Essentially it boils down to, devs can't stop developing. There's many who would have been perfectly content with Windows 7 carried on ad-infinitum, just bug fixes please. But no, the commercial drive is there to ensure that the developers always have to do something new.
MS are particularly susceptible to the "new code" attack surface, because they make money only if they're churning out new varieties of their software products.
Apple doesn't do that quite so much, but instead has taken on the same drive with its hardware. That's not gone particularly well, and of course they're as prone to software CVEs as anyone else.
And Linux? Well, systemD (for a seemingly continual saga of bug fixes, borked features) and, recently, libzma and the attempted impact on opensshd. With the latter, the whole Linux world came astonishingly close to having zero security (more or less), and it was only because the attacker messed up that meant anyone noticed that something was up. And if anyone says "but it's fine, it *was* found", they'd better accompany that with *proof* that a more adept attacker hasn't already pulled of a similar trick elsewhere. Afterall, the underlying root cause exploit was primarily social engineering, not an unknown bug.
Basically, if the world wants secure IT, it's going to have to get used to having boring IT that doesn't change very much. And as absolutely no one, not even the Linux world, seems to be prepared to vote for "no changes, just bug fixes please", the end users are condemned to running insecure systems because of what devs are either commercially forced or choose to do.
They're now replacing sudo with a "better" thing.
Sudo was an attempt to replace su with a "better" thing - unfortunately it fails one of Saltzer and Schroeder's design principles: "Separation of privilege: Where feasible, a protection mechanism that requires two keys to unlock it is more robust and flexible than one that allows access to the presenter of only a single key."
What other business could get away with having products that are so bad that every month – every month – we have a day, Patch Tuesday, devoted to the latest fixes to their seemingly endless flaws?
I reckon that my Linux machines (Linux Mint x 4) each get about 2GB a month of updates, usually including two kernels.
Depends, when will GIMP v3.0.2 land again. Probably about the time the Prophet Zarquan puts in his final appearance at Milliways' or in planer terms the Heat Death of the known Universe. Case it didn't according to last reports happen last month, it didn't happen this month either, and my Pony Cash is on it not happening next month either.
Linux has this Opensauce or die mentality about it, and if you dare try to scratch a dime off it your a scumbag. Is it any wonder why we don't have M$O2k24, or Creative Cloud on the Platform then?
Fortunately Steam have done some wonderful work for the so-called Masterrace. But, what would I as a Creative give a single not, about the Steamdeck, and it's many many poor man's Switch clones? I'm not a gamer. Yes I can get by with Inkscape, and Darktable, along with Krita, and sigh GIMP v2.10.xxx but, what of the curious case of Resolve? Yes by golly George a Linux version actually exists. Problems are that h.26x are a non starter, due to licensing issues again. Oh yeah you also need a woefully out of date copy of CentOS, and an obscenely overpriced (for '24), nVidia 1080ti to actually run it. So no bueno to it running on a lowly Lenovo Intel 13th Gen Laptop with Xe on-board graphics then.
Meanwhile back at the Redmond Ranch? It just works... It Just WORKS!
Tell me more about the Year of Linux please!
Microsoft has always been the king of entanglement. The more you buy their services, the more impossible it is to back out and most companies were unable to ditch their products without some serious investment.
Until now.
Yes, if you use their cloudy stuff you're stuck with it, including Windows Defender which is reasonable but you keep having that little voice in your head reminding you that this is made by the same company that gave you all those problems in the first place. But I digress.
If you're old enough to remember Netscape, you may recall that their vision was to make everything accessible through a web browser - which is exactly what is happening now at Microsoft, just look at how the new Teams works. And Outlook, although the new version is so full of bugs it barely qualifies as a beta.
However, the web is based on open standards and although they have proven to not shy away from destroying a whole organisation to pretend to have a standard (for those who followed the lamentable demonstration of how easy it is to corrupt a standards agency when they needed MS OOXML ratified - which, incidentally, they have now abandoned themselves), I don't think it will be that easy with the Internet itself. It means other solutions could seamlessly be provided by the same means as the end user won't know any different.
It's a door they have not closed yet, and may not even be able to, however much they spend on bribing wining and dining officials.
It appears we're in violent agreement here, only I look at it from a counter-surveillance perspective.
Author» What other business could get away with having products that are so bad that every month – every month – we have a day, Patch Tuesday, devoted to the latest fixes to their seemingly endless flaws?
To be fair to Microsoft, admitting that your software is buggy and needs regular patching is not a bad trait to have.
I do otherwise agree with the author, Microsoft could make more of an effort to release better quality code.
Could it be that Microsoft is company run by the Sales department and that everything follows from that?
Namely, that the concept of «doing things well» means having lots of products to sell and the concept of «success» is selling lots of things, rather than releasing well-made products, that are safe and intuitive to use.
Linux is also insecure by design, with - among other flaws - a monolithic kernel, Unix permissions, user ID 0 etc.
That is why have the SELinux abomination, that tries to patch some of flaws with digital duct tape :-)
See e.g. https://ubuntu.com/security/cves
And for messaging, just one example:
https://kafka.apache.org/cve-list
(The Windows NT original design was actually better, with a separate security monitor, SRM, and graphic drivers etc outside kernel space.
Microsoft has of course messed up a lot during the decades.)
As long as you use windows on your computer, microsoft can do what ever they want with that computer. You don't own the computer and it can in fact, be taken away from you at will. It says so right in that contract you are forced to sign when you boot up your computer for the first time. Microsoft owns any computer that has windows on it and the data contained on it. They can do what ever they want, and the only thing that pauses them from stealing everything you own is the stock market price. These are not good people doing good things and they are not looking after your best interest.
In most other parallel universes, it died at version 3, and NT never became a thing. Between various UNIX flavours/kernels and Linux, the world patiently waited for the hardware to catch up with what we already had. Windows was not really necessary beyond what it already was*. That Apple's approach to producing a modern operating system was to buy something off the shelf and adapt it says a lot. Months before the launch of XP, Apple's users already had access to a modern OS more secure by design. Linux users were a good few years ahead of both! We are that strange bit of the multiverse where Trump becomes President, Brexit happens, and the worst possible OS dominates.
* A GUI on top of DOS to give the Mac some competition.
Until the issue of inter operability is sorted out, Linux will not replace windows.
there is NO viable way to run Linux in a large business and interact with windows users in other companies.
sorry been trying it for 20 years.
Word/Excel is continually being changed to prevent the seamless sharing of data, and not "open office" is NOT a solution.
If it were i'd be using it.
SJVN is an industry expert, but in railing against Microsoft (for good reason!), he trots out the old saw that we all have to migrate to Linux. From his POV, this is easy, because he has been there for decades. But in telling us all to move to Linux, he disregards entirely the problems of finding apps to replace our Windows app, moving all our data, and, finally, the likely onerous task of making our data compatible with whatever Linux replacement apps we choose.
But I repeat, SJVN is 1000% correct in pointing out how insecure Windows is, and the US govt does not levy fines or take anti-trust action. The EU, though, is well positioned to whack Microsoft, and its regulators have the mindset to do so.
The security problems of Microsoft Windows go back to CP/M, the first control program for what was the first 8 bit micro-processor.
The Intel 8008, and subsequent Intel processors, up to the 2/86, were designed to be used in embedded systems and not as processors for general purpose computers. As such they did not have any hardware memory management which is an essential feature to enable the separation of the operating system and application programs.
Gary Kildall, who wrote CP/M, recognised this. How could a company with IBM's reputation build and market a computer that could not be made secure?
At that time Microsoft was the world's largest supplier of Unix, in the form of Xenix, and those in the fore front of PC development realised Unix was the way forward.
However Bill Gates recognised the business opportunity and sold MS-DOS to IBM which, according to Sir Nigel Evans, ex editor of the Sunday Times, was nothing more than a 'CP/M rip off'. Having got the contract to supply the operating system for the IBM PC, Gates was going to do nothing that would upset Microsoft's position as a monopoly supplier.
Since then a massive, highly profitable industry, has become established that claims it can make Microsoft PCs secure. They are selling nothing other than snake oil.
I have an MS Hotmail account that I have had from the late 90s when my company was a MS "partner" and later for a (short) while had a customer MS reference site. Since I retired, my involvement with MS has reduced - A lot. Before Christmas I turned of my last VMs running Windows 2000, 7, and 10. My day-to-day running is on an iMac, iPad Pro, an iPhone 13, and a couple of Raspberry Pi's. I have noticed that over the last months that I have been regularly asked to input my MS credentials into my mail programs.
Yesterday I received an email from MS "Update your sign-in technology before September 16th, 2024 to maintain email access." Its contents include: "To help keep your account secure, Microsoft will no longer support the use of third-party email and calendar apps which ask you to sign in with only your Microsoft Account username and password. To keep you safe you will need to use a mail or calendar app which supports Microsoft’s modern authentication methods.
If you do not act, your third-party email apps will no longer be able to access your Outlook.com, Hotmail or Live.com email address on September 16th. To help keep your account secure, Microsoft will no longer support the use of third-party email and calendar apps which ask you to sign in with only your Microsoft Account username and password. To keep you safe you will need to use a mail or calendar app which supports Microsoft’s modern authentication methods. If you do not act, your third-party email apps will no longer be able to access your Outlook.com, Hotmail or Live.com email address on September 16th... ...Microsoft provides free versions of Outlook for your PC, Mac, iOS, and Android devices which can be easily downloaded and connect to your email account. How can you set up your Gmail, Apple Mail, or other third-party mail application?
Various non-Microsoft applications will have their own steps for connecting to your Outlook.com email account using modern authentication methods. See our help article - Modern Authentication Methods now needed to continue syncing Outlook Email in non-Microsoft email apps."
After an extended period of my mail programs generating two copies of outgoing messages from the MS account, and the persistent requests to input my credentials, I am finally considering removing MS from my life completely. At the moment if I use a Hotmail address if someone has an MS email address, or they are relatively low on my level of trust (e.g. large retailer, or an acquaintance). Gmail is for people on an even lower trust level. Various other addresses, including my own domain, are for more trusted or "work related" contacts. Inertia means that I will probably keep an eye on this for a month or two; but if it goes as badly as I suspect, it will finally be "Goodbye Microsoft".
I have already installed Ubuntu Linux in a VM on my laptop, which is what I use for development. And I like OS. The latest version is fairly easy to get around.
I would move everything to Linux in a heartbeat if I could get an IDE to support my current development work, which is currently being done in VB.NET\C#.
I keep tracking JetBrains' Rider IDE for .NET but after such a long time with constant updates they still don't have a usable WPF designer in place, which is what my development work is based upon.
I don't need such a designer as I do most of my screen design with the raw XAML but their software doesn't even have a toolbox so I know which components I can use for a specific version of the .NET Core Framework.
As a result, I have to wait...
I am tinkering with Python, which I enjoy, but a complete conversion of my work would be a huge job that right now I don't have time for.
I can more easily convert my work to C# but I find VS Code pretty useless for my requirements...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
The thing that really makes me mad about Recall is that if you are a Windows user who does not want this "feature" you have to opt out? Just like many other shady ideas, dreamed up by marketer's unquenching appetite for more and more data about every person on the planet, they want to make it difficult to disable it. In my view, anything like this invasion of privacy needs to be something that explained fully, in plain language that does not exceed a couple of short paragraphs. It then should be something that someone opts into, not out of. The default should ALWAYS be given the user the choice to allow other to gain this information, not the other way around.
All that being said, Recall is a VERY BAD IDEA.
Thank you Microsoft. I mean it. Thank you.
If you made a decent operating system, I’d be out of a job. I have made a lot of money supporting your rubbish.
I have worked with computers since PDP/11, Dec Vax, CP/M days. I have to say, that since DOS, Microsoft software has been going down hill, which is why I switched to Linux about 20 years.
I also have a MacBook Pro with an M2 processor. It cost little more than the list price of the Lenovo L14 laptops which they use at work.
I am glad that they don’t use MacBooks at work. I’d be out of a job, as they are well built, the cost of ownership is far less as they just work. If they used MacBooks, the team of 24 IT support engineers could be reduced to 6.
So once again. Thank you Microsoft.
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