Bing Wallpaper app, now in Windows Store, accused of cookie shenanigans If you've been tempted to download the Bing Wallpaper app to spice up your Windows 11 desktop backgrounds, you may want to think twice. The Bing Wallpaper app - itself not a new product - was recently added to the Microsoft Store for simpler download and installation. Going on a gut feeling to investigate it when the app …
Given what is going on with Recall etc, this description applies to Windows itself, and indeed pretty much every modern piece of shite that comes out of Microsoft's corporate arse these days.
But even I am a little bit shocked at this, especially Microsoft's not-quite-denial that basically amounts to an admission to decrypting and stealing Firefox cookies (if you are using Edge, then they already have you by the bollocks, so no point stealing those..)
Cookie stealing is not something to be taken lightly. It doesn't just unmask you for surveillance, it could also let someone take control of any web account that you are logged in to. If Microsoft are passing this data on, e.g. via their government / law enforcement portal, then it could be seriously abused
From experience? Forever.
I don't think anyone outside my circle at work would have the slightest idea what any of this article means, and they wouldn't care.
Yet, they'll sit there and rant about how vaccines have Bill Gate's mind control chips. And keep using Windows.
I'm like "dude, if you only knew..."
"From experience? Forever."
Definitely. Microsoft now know they can just keep abusing their customers without any visible limits and they'll keep doing so. Even if regulators were to start taking a serious interest the regulatory process is such that they can't keep up. Microsoft should have been broken up years ago but it seems too late now.
"From experience? Forever."
Its the big corporate users that are the problem, they are so hard baked into the M$ world and are only getting in deeper with office 365 364 363 362 (or whatever it is now), Azure cloud and outlook online that they simply can't afford to retrain literally millions (worldwide) of end users on a new OS, not to mention the cost of retooling production and back end systems where kit only runs on windows.
Consumers on the other hand can walk if they are bothered, but we are only small change and M$ only care as long as there are enough beta testers consumers available to them.
If I had to pick a favorite tech giant, I guess I would need to have a definition of "tech giant" to work with. If restricted to the 3 different companies who supply the operating systems on the vast majority of consumer devices, namely Alphabet (Andriod, ChromeOS), Apple (iOS, macOS), and Microsoft (Windows), I guess I might pick Microsoft? I still hate them, just possibly not quite as much as the other two. News like this does not help at all, though.
The relevant question is not which tech giant is your favourite per se, but which would you least mind having all your data.
Apple will charge me much more to have all my data.
Some Microsoft software is really nice but they have a poor track record keeping even their own data secure.
Google have a pretty solid security record and almost certainly have more of my data already than I do, so them. I guess.
> I guess I might pick Microsoft?
Not a chance.
Google: Maybe we should drop this whole "don't be evil" thing.. It's really holding us back. I think we should be full-on evil from now on..
Microsoft: Hold my beer...
They were Evil before it was cool. Now they realise that all the tech companies are going evil, and they know how to corner that market..
Well, when I was gainfully employed MS were one of my favourite technology firms.
Not for their products but because they gave me a well paid job sorting out all the chaos they left in their wake.
Personally I wouldn't touch any MS stuff with a bargepole and now I am retired you couldn't even pay me to.
I like wallpaper apps, as I rarely see my desktop but when I do a nice photograph of some mountains or some impossibly pretty Mediterranean fishing village makes a nice change from stark code editors. I did try the Bing app once but the nagging to use Bing search and attempts to change browser settings made me uncomfortable. Anyone looking for an alternative could do worse than John's Background Switcher (with which I am not affiliated). It's free and it's happy to load images from loads of image websites or online storage or local storage. Does what it needs to and no more, unlike almost every other app these days.
I use a wallpaper app on my work PC as that (compulsorily) runs Windows - one I wrote myself. It sets APOD as my background daily by default on start-up, but if I don't like that image, I can give it a "kick" and depending on settings I choose it will grab content of mine from Flickr, UnSplash or other image stores, or if I really fancy a bit of variety it will grab content from ANOther from one of those.
No spyware / security issues & works flawlessly (it also does other bits & bobs such as optional image resize or tile if image smaller than screen, adding descriptive text to the image etc.)
One day I should get around to publishing it in a public repo, but that will be a long time from now*.
* Code was thrown together quickly as a test of using various image APIs** & though it works with no issues, the code needs a tidy up before it goes in a public repo with me as the author (as its essentially still original created at high speed proof of concept code)
** POC of a flexible way of calling multiple image stores from same frontend (common API, various arguments, including the image store to use and behind the scenes translates that to appropriate API calls for that image store, injecting creds as necessary as POC was for a "generic" image grabber ) but using same selection criteria as much as possible (e.g. my content, other content, keyword searches, date searches, popularity etc) - APOD did not really fit into that, but I just like my daily astro images!
One of the things I do with any device I have to use for an extended period of time is to change the background to plain black
The blackness of my belt[wallpaper] is like the inside of a coffin on a moonless night.
The 2 issue's I spotted right away were "Bing" and needing an "app" for wallpaper - that should have been a hard pass on both for anyone/everyone right from the get go..
Regarduing this comment - "It's heartbreaking to see one of my favorite tech giants deliberately create software that undermines user privacy and autonomy." Im assuming the sarcasm is dialed upto a 11...
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