How Microsoft made it harder to create Windows 10 local accounts
pcworld.com
pcworld.com
It's not like I'm doing illegal things. I just don't trust corporations and I feel that they shouldn't expect to see everything I do.
Windows 10 is doing both of these today, but mainstream expectations for how software should behave have severely degraded. I fear the situation will not improve unless the public can be 're-educated', but a company with the brand recognition and legacy of Microsoft participating in these practices goes a long way towards further normalizing it.
I am reasonably convinced that Microsoft isn't snooping on me, not at a level of detail that would bother me anyway. I'm sure they have the tools to do so if they want, but I'm not an US citizen, not doing anything illegal, not involved in anything shady or uncomfortable for the US government or its allies (which includes my country, for that matter) -- I think it's unlikely enough that I'll ever be a target.
But.
Microsoft, and its cloud servers, are a really big target. It's the holy grail of ID theft. Do I trust Microsoft to safeguard my passwords, preferences and files against attacks, not just today, but over the next ten or twenty years, at a time when Windows isn't really the focus of their business anymore? I'm gonna say a pretty big no to that.
Even if I were convinced they had only good intentions (let's say they do) about this stuff, so did Yahoo, and LinkedIn, and Adobe and countless other vendors who eventually ended up with huge data breaches.
Do I have any guarantees that, twenty years from now, Microsoft's personal data storage systems won't give way, between budget cuts, incompetent management (twenty years is a long time, maybe Satya Nadella's successor is going to be worse than Steve Ballmer...), technical debt and increasing capabilities from malicious actors? Can I be sure that Microsoft is never going to lower their security standards? That they won't make any compromises that they aren't willing to do today, even, say, if they were on the verge of bankruptcy?
Granted, I have neither the budget, nor the security know-how that Microsoft does, but I'm not that big a target, either, nor do I store my data on systems that are accessible 24/7 from anywhere in the world. My passwords aren't too valuable -- for all the reasons that make me unimportant to Microsoft + a bunch of other ones (I'm not that rich, I'm not friends with any celebrity etc. etc.). The costs involved in getting access to my data remotely far outweigh any benefits -- which can't be said for Microsoft's treasure trove of personal data.
"Just trust us, we're the Cloud™ -- what could possibly go wrong?!"
It's unfortunate the vast majority of people don't know any better and easily fall for tech companies' UX dark patterns.
Also, using local account on Windows protects you from about 19 out of 20 critical vulnerabilities:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3173246/94-of-microsof...
>Do I trust Microsoft to safeguard my passwords, preferences and files against attacks, not just today, but over the next ten or twenty years, at a time when Windows isn't really the focus of their business anymore? I'm gonna say a pretty big no to that.
>Do I have any guarantees that, twenty years from now, Microsoft's personal data storage systems won't give way, between budget cuts, incompetent management (twenty years is a long time, maybe Satya Nadella's successor is going to be worse than Steve Ballmer...), technical debt and increasing capabilities from malicious actors? Can I be sure that Microsoft is never going to lower their security standards? That they won't make any compromises that they aren't willing to do today, even, say, if they were on the verge of bankruptcy?
Do any businesses exist that you can apply this guarantee to?
At one point, "the ship" of every tide that humanity has turned "had sailed". For example, there was a time when virtually every potent means of human transportation ran on heavily-polluting fuel -- and while we're by no means back to stone-age levels of environmental friendliness, we're still better off than in the 1960s.
> Do any businesses exist that you can apply this guarantee to?
No, but that's also why there is no company that I trust with a significant portion of my data over an indefinite period of time, nor with any data that I'm not comfortable sharing. (In fact, I don't trust any company that doesn't have a good retention policy -- thankfully, the GDPR makes it a little easier to filter those out now).
The value of data increases exponentially with its amount. For example, mounting a convincing ID theft based on passwords to my LinkedIn account and the local computer shop is difficult, but doable, with the right skills and the right motivation, and for reasonably simple things (e.g. impersonating me to get interesting, but not particularly sensitive data from a former colleague who still works at a former workplace). Mounting an ID theft based on all the data that Google or Microsoft store about a person is a whole different story.
>The value of data increases exponentially with its amount. For example, mounting a convincing ID theft based on passwords to my LinkedIn account and the local computer shop is difficult, but doable, with the right skills and the right motivation, and for reasonably simple things (e.g. impersonating me to get interesting, but not particularly sensitive data from a former colleague who still works at a former workplace). Mounting an ID theft based on all the data that Google or Microsoft store about a person is a whole different story.
Right, so they would just hack Transunion and directly get SSNs and other personal info on 150 million people. Of course practically speaking, there are no 150 million "new" people who are just waiting to assume the identity of someone else.
Also as an aside if you were given the documents folders of 150 million people, you'd need a massive amount of storage space and compute power to run indexing, de-duplication and other automated tasks on all the various document formats before you can even begin mining any data from it. Though I'm sure the cost of that will come down over the next decade...
Is that a fair summary of your point?
What are you talking about? OneDrive? You don't have to use it if you don't want.
Setting? You can disable their syncing too.
> How Microsoft made it harder to create Windows 10 local accounts
The faded out subtitle is:
> The company eases up a bit with the May 2019 Update, however.
The article then goes on to describe at length how complicated the process used to be, and how evil Microsoft is for how having it so complicated. Then suddenly it ends with a few lines describing how it is much simpler now.
I guess the amount of clicks on the article "How the latest Windows 10 update allows for easier creation of local accounts" would be much lower.
Even now, I think it's more than worthwhile to look at what Microsoft did in version 1809. Completely removing the option to create a local account at setup without disconnecting from the internet is clearly user-hostile. That Microsoft would ship Windows in that state is abhorrent, even if they're fixing it now.
>We originally discovered the issue with an October 2018 Update (version 1809) PC. We found similar setup experiences on two different machines by different manufacturers.
Ther is a link to a reference, unless "they" dicovered it and told nobody.
Just as one example, a Windows EULA (last time I checked) does not include an arbitration agreement, and a Microsoft account does.
Using an online account isn't just an inconvenience or a privacy risk for the "paranoid" -- you're just flat-out giving up your rights by signing up.
I made the mistake of connecting to the wifi and even after restarting the computer in an attempt to restart the initial setup process it refused to take me to the internet connection screen so that I could tell it to not connect to wifi.
I could have possibly taken my internet offline entirely, but I ended up using a fake Microsoft account and then switching to a local account after the setup was complete.
This change really needs to be reversed. Forcing Microsoft accounts on people is unacceptable.
On the setup screen, press Shift+F10 to open cmd.
netsh interface show interface
netsh interface set interface "YOUR-ADAPTER-NAME" disable
Microsoft needs to be publicly shamed for dark patterns like these.
No MSFT or AAPL or GOOG clouds for me.
Allow me to choose my own cloud setup.
This will be automated local encryption, versioning, compresion and Wasabi cloud. And yes, local admin account on Win 10 Pro
The main reason for me to use local accounts is as an IT professional I'm often setting things up for other people who aren't present at the time.
Also if I set a Microsoft account up for someone then in their mind I am usually then the contact for any and all issues around that account forever which creates tension in my customer relationship.
The OOBE doesn't help with local domain setup at all for no conceivable reason.
Similarly, if you look at the new Settings app, it's support for domain PCs is close to nonexistent. Out of disk space, and going to the storage tab? Great, it'll tell you 50 GB of data is used by other users, but you can't see anything about who they are. Need to manage other users? No can do, Settings app doesn't even see domain accounts.
You have to go to the legacy Control Panel, System, Advanced Settings, and then User Profiles (a Windows 98 era dialog) to see domain accounts and their local storage use.
All MS's stuff feels half finished these days. I believe they call it 'high feature velocity'.
I mean providing barely visible text that masquerades as an opt-out button is one thing, but only allowing local account creation if you're offline is a next level.
The reason I do it this way is so I can choose my own home directory name. I want it to be C:\Users\Mike, not something based on my email address.
Unfortunately, if you're not a huge enterprise, there's no legal way to acquire it...
That's neat. I was under the impression Microsoft had made it significantly more exclusive.
After using Manjaro Linux / XFCE for the past year, I never want to go back to Windows for work in the field of web programming. I had been working with Linux servers since the mid 90s, but mainly my work revolved around Microsoft tech until about the last 5 years when I switched almost completely to JavaScript/Typescript. I had tried various desktop distros many times, but Manjaro was the first one that was truly very stable for me without a lot of babysitting so now I run it on all of my workstations and work laptops.
Having used Macs for various purposes over the decades, I never want to use one again. Unfortunately, I need to keep one around to build iOS apps and to debug my iPhone or iPad.
So, where does that leave Windows?
Mainly on my TVs and gaming machines. Every TV in the house has a Windows box and we love them for having "YouTube parties", watching Netflix, Amazon Prime Video et. al. and of course for playing games. I have only one Windows workstation in case I need to do some C# programming or something, but I haven't done it in a long while.
If there were a Windows or Linux tablet with comparable battery life and stability as an iPad, I'd definitely use that instead because about 90% of what I do on my iPad is browsing the web. I have tried using some Windows tablets and they do work great, but battery life and stability are usually nowhere near the iPad. I really miss the "Quick Javascript Switcher" Chrome extension on my iPad. Ad-blocking seems to work alright in general, though I wish I had more control.
I just hate the locked-down feel of mac and iOS and I resent Apple daily as I use their devices, whenever I can't do something that I want such as being forced to copy and paste addresses out of Contacts into Google Maps because Apple is such a petty asshole about locking you into their shitty feature-barren digital properties. You can't just do whatever you want, how you want to do it. It's Apple's way or the highway as they say. I hope one day that they become completely irrelevant again like they were in the 90s. (I know it will probably never happen, but I can hope.)
Anyway, this is just a long way of saying that they all suck in some way and shine in other ways. I can't stand Apple but I still use their iDevices since they protect me from more bullshit than Android does. I hate the groups inside Microsoft that push ads and dark patterns, but there's no way I'm going to try playing Rocket League on Linux or Mac because I want to have a good time, not a headache. I love the dev division of Microsoft that is open sourcing everything, building great free products like VSCode and so forth too.
But increasingly, it seems like the saner choice.
My wife's Windows machine kept slowing down. I wanted to put an SSD in it but we didn't have the ability to do a reinstall on a new drive. So we put an SSD, more RAM, and Xubuntu on it. She's been smooth sailing for 6 months.
My sister (40), needed a desktop at home but was cash strapped, so i pieced together a machine and put Xubuntu on it. She's been happy with that for about a year
I put my elderly parents on Xubuntu about 2 year ago, and other than a printer ordeal that I solved, they've been smooth sailing.
it's not going to be perfect if you're a graphics designer or still need some kind of specialized desktop software where they're no web version, but I've been using it as my main driver for 6+ years now.
Price. Control. Privacy. Flexibility. Linux IMHO solves all of those problems way before you get to FOSS ideals or security/AV stuff. And i don't think there's ever been an easier time to do Linux on the desktop. Driver support is better than ever, most software being web software makes it better than ever. As does Electron apps or some kind of standardized packaging (Snaps, FlatPak, AppImage)
That probably has more to do with the hardware upgrade rather than the OS
I also tried Ubuntu on the same system but (among other niggling problems) i couldn't get the ATI graphics drivers to work.
What that practically means is that any linux distro with a kernel at least that new should support your card without needing to download anything from AMD's website. (Generally speaking, downloading drivers from the manufacturer's website is a windows-ism. There are some exceptions, like Nvidia, but a machine well configured for linux use should aim to use hardware supported by FOSS drivers (such as your AMD card.))
It got a hardware upgrade.
But i couldn't do the hardware upgrade without re-purchasing another Windows license since her install was an OEM install and they don't provide install disks.
Secondly - Windows slows down over time. Horribly. Linux does not.
Third - You don't really have to run an AV in Linux, thus chewing up resources.
A couple of examples that come to mind:
1. Key combinations. They're completely inconsistent across the software I use and frequently can't (easily?) be changed. Sometimes commands are cmd+key, sometimes they're ctrl+key. To delete the previous word (something I do hundreds of times a day), some kind of strange incantation seems to be required. The one that works in iTerm deletes the whole line in most other programs, so I accidentally delete work dozens of times a day.
2. Missing window manager features, even basic ones. I can't do focus-follows-mouse, I can't double-tap to click and drag, etc etc. Stuff that's obvious and present on basically every other system.
3. The keyboard (mid-2014 model) is much worse on this MacBook than my Dell XPS.
4. The story for terminal-based and open source software simply isn't as good as it is on Linux. Homebrew is great, but it's limited and can't compete with the convenience of the many binary packages on most distros. Software that's supposed to integrate deeply with the system in some way is a bit of a pain as well.
These won't be problems for everyone, but for what I consider basic power user features, neither Windows nor MacOS are up to par with Linux. But stability and hardware support in Linux is as good (in my experience) as at least Windows. I've had the same install on a rolling release distribution for 6 years without issues. I don't know the last time I found hardware that wasn't supported on Linux.
About a year later, they're now asking me to come over and reinstall Linux on the new computer. Setting up Linux is the hard part -- if they don't need to worry about that, their comparison is that they had a Linux computer that just worked, and now they have a computer that keeps asking them about some thing called One Drive, and updates at inconvenient times, and that forces them to use some kind of weird photo software instead of just letting them organize their files into folders.
If you have a non-technical person you're trying to support, often the easiest thing is to set up a small system that does exactly what they want and nothing else. Linux makes that easier than Windows, at the (small) cost of forcing you to actually take some time and set up the computer correctly from the start.
It feels weird, because when I started using Linux this wasn't the case at all -- but Linux is nowadays my go-to solution any time I want to set up a computer for a tech-newbie. A big part of that is you can set up a system once and trust that it will continue to work the same without missing out on security updates. You can still set up a Ubuntu system with Unity if you want to.
That's a massive advantage, because it means I don't need to re-teach people how to do things every time Microsoft or Apple "innovates" their interface.
You need an MSDN subscription however.
So, to start, in what sense is a "local account" or "Microsoft account" an account at all? Does it cost money? Do I get account statements? Do I get invoices? Are there return privileges? What products or services are involved? I'm about totally to blow my stack in frustration -- what the heck is an "account"????????
Then let's continue with "local" and "Microsoft" ....
In particular, with a "Microsoft account", what passes between us, from me to them or from them to me? What the heck is going on? Me to them? Of COURSE, I want Microsoft to know as little as possible about what I am doing in life, computing, with Windows 10, etc. -- all that is just NONE of their business to know.
Does someone actually understand what these "accounts" are all about?
The article is less clear than mud, and apparently it is clear as air compared with Microsoft. Soooo, I canNOT be nearly the only one who doesn't know. So, can someone explain and get the rest of us caught up?
I hope that in a couple of months i can launch this platform here on HN so i can see what you all think, as i have a great respect for the community formed here.
But we need to not rely on companies that tend to make a profit from the cloud computing, analitics, big data and of what people make and publish for free, if we really want to have our privacy and our freedoms in general, respected in the end.
Anyone that can sum 2 + 2 can see how this can lead to severe consequences into our private lives, and civil liberties in the end if we keep following this path. As we might be only depending of the good will of the status-quo that can change depending on the political context of du-jour. (And i must remind you all that this good will and the more generous environment might reach to an end, as the circustances may lead to economical and political crysis, environmental crysis, shortage of primary resources, political instabilities, war, or just a simple power-hungry drive to control all things)
The problem is that only the political/social point of view is not enough, as we need to respond with a technology good enough, or even better, in a way the end users, and the devs will be naturally inclined to use the platform to reach their own personal goals.
And it´s my believe that organic, p2p forms of content distribution and communication in general, can deliver a superior environment compared to what we have today with browsers. And even if the big players could create themselves this kind of platform, they would not want to, because in the end they are trying to reach absolute control of our data, and our digital representation of life.
The trick is to have the right building blocks carefully combined to make it work in a way that it will make people want to develop for it from the perspective of the devs, and to use it as a medium from the perspective of the users.
Trying to setup one of those without a Google account taking 'ownership' of the machine first... isn't possible.
Why are they doing it? Is the little bit of user data really that valuable? Is it worth it to piss off so many of their users? Are they aware how it makes privacy-focussed Apple and Linux alternatives seem more appealing?
It’s sad because from a technology and UI perspective, I really like Win 10. But they just have to ruin it somehow...
Considering that Mac systems (the only alternative with support for Excel and Word) are so much more expensive than comparable Windows systems, and it’s clear why companies use Windows.
And that doesn’t even take into account that most consumers are entirely unaware of the privacy implications of telemetry and online accounts.
So, Microsoft can just get away with this kind of stuff.
If not (or unsure), how do we report it?
An operating system should be able to operate the system for weeks without automatic reboots.
An operating system should never ever just wake up from sleep on its own to install updates (with the potential to set my house on fire if the laptop is in a bag or something).
An operating system should not lie to it's users and trick them to sign up for online-cloud-stuff.
Those expectations arose because since I was a kid on DOS or Amiga, this is what I learned what an OS is: You turn on your computer, the OS lets you run an program. You exit the program and turn off the computer.
Windows 10 broke this simple contract.