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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

This makes more sense to me, I was wondering how that would have gotten set by a clueless user.

The answer turns out to be that old dell machines shipped some shitty avatar software (along with lots of other stuff) that defaulted to on. The lawyer is probably using an ancient dell computer with this software and hasn't used video chat on it before this.

This is extra hostile, because it's separate from whatever video chat application they were using - so it would have been harder to know about and turn off.

As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost. Another reason why the macOS model is better for users. OS companies should make their own hardware.

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> As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost.

This was actually central to the DOJ antitrust case against Microsoft. As part of the settlement, Microsoft had to agree to allow OEMs to keep installing crapware [1].

It's things like this that make me a little nervous when people say that going after big tech with antitrust law will necessarily be good for the consumer.

[1] https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1274453172665253890

Matt Stoller’s “Big” includes an interesting (though flawed) history of how anti-monopoly efforts have often been sacrificed for the good of the consumer. Which arguably was a short-term good.

Yes, a bunch of DOJ lawyers who barely know tech will decide the good of tech.

If I had to guess (without reading the case specifically), it's probably because Microsoft screwed up by forcing OEMs to not install netscape in order to crush them.

It's hard to differentiate 'crapware' from competition, particularly given the context where Microsoft had just leveraged their power over OEMs to crush a competitor.

This still sucks though, a better outcome for users would have been Microsoft being able to require the machines to sell with a clean OS and then allowing OEMs to install software for the user at their request (rather than the OEMs being able to bundle crap for kickbacks).

Somewhat related, apparently the netscape guys went to Redmond and hung up signs around Microsoft's campus mocking them for ignoring the internet. Legend has it Gates saw these and pivoted teams to IE with a focus on crushing Netscape.

Startup talk often discusses how most startups fail not due to competition, but because of internal collapse. Big companies can't compete, innovator's dilemma, etc. There's a lot of truth to that but this is a counter example (and others exist too).

Wildly stupid to antagonize the elephant that's focused on other things to direct all of their resources to destroying you.

> it's probably because Microsoft screwed up by forcing OEMs to not install netscape in order to crush them.

The matter predated the IE / Netscape battle.

The OEMs wanted the ability to yield money off of the desktop for the systems they sell and had been fighting with Microsoft for years to be able to place crap onto Windows when it boots up. The system makers saw dollar signs in being able to sell placement to AOL dial-up and so on. Microsoft used their position to try to keep them from doing that, fearing an inability to control quality for their own product from the first moment the end user begins their experience.

This seems revisionist, and while Sinofsky obviously has some authority on the subject, he likely also has a bias.

The antitrust case was brought by the states because Microsoft's behavior "was not in the public interest." As far as I know, it wasn't just 1 thing. It was the exclusionary licensing (OEMs were forced to pay an "MS Tax" even when they shipped a Linux computer), it was the bundling of IE, and it was their manipulation of their APIs to favor their software.

Plus there was the EU antitrust case that had nothing to do with OEMs.

It's also worth noting that Microsoft defense was...awful? They falsified evidence, they were belligerent/petty. Gates was a particular train wreck (1)

(1) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/revisiting-the-s...

I always enjoyed the cake tradition: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/06/the-c...

It's a bit naive to think that Microsoft's argument there wasn't just them grasping at straws at any attempt to avoid anti-trust regulation. History has shown that Microsoft themselves would happily jump at the chance to stuff their own pockets by pre-installing crapware on your computer, as evidenced by all the junk and ads on even fresh installs of modern Windows. Remember the Candy Crush auto-install debacle? https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-steer-clear-of-windows-...

I mean, what Microsoft did pales in comparison to Apple's standard business model. How many third party apps have been driven out of business by Apple's preferred first party copy? We still cannot run anything but Safari (or an older, less-featured, reskinned Safari) on iOS.

Anti-trust is a joke and holding Microsoft accountable for 1/10th of today's standard operating procedure was ridiculous.

Anti-trust is only a joke in the sense that it doesn't get wielded enough. No more of these enormous companies forming unaccountable pseudo-governments of their own. Break them up and let the fragments enliven the market with their revitalized sense of competition. Then, when a victor emerges fat and complacent, break them up again and begin the cycle anew.

Apple's market share also pales in comparison with Microsoft's.

I'm pretty sure Apple never made anyone selling an iPhone pay them for an iOS license on all the phones they sell.

That's not to say Apple's conduct isn't egregious, but the context isn't the same either.

> I'm pretty sure Apple never made anyone selling an iPhone pay them for an iOS license on all the phones they sell.

That's a wildly different situation. Of course Microsoft charges hardware vendors for Windows licenses - we have to pay for them too! Windows is Microsoft's main product - should they be giving away licenses to vendors?!? (I'm ignoring the underlying issue of sell vs produce here, because it's such a clear fallacy it's not even worth explaining)

Microsoft was charging vendors for Windows licenses per computer; even computers that were sold without Windows.

Huh, I've never heard of that...

It was a sizable part of the big Microsoft anti-trust case. And also an earlier case except for MS-DOS instead of Windows.

Indeed. I bought a Lenovo laptop from the online Microsoft store in early 2011 (or late 2010).

One if the offered extras was “Microsoft signature” optimized install that sounded like it came with extra stuff. As I was going to install Linux anyway, I declined.

Then I received the laptop which somehow did have “signature” set-up, so I looked into it: it was basically just pristine windows setup without crapware; Apparently, that’s the only thing they were selling at the time, but were welling to take extra money from people who didn’t want crapware.

I somehow remember 'clean installs' being an option with retail Microsoft stores; In fact at one point I think it was the norm.

The Candy Crush thing happened two decades after the Microsoft antitrust case (the suit was filed in 1998 and settled in 2002). It's dumb, but it would be a stretch to argue that Microsoft would have done the same thing if they had been allowed to control what shipped with Windows for the previous 20 years.

Back in the day, if you bought Windows directly from Microsoft, you'd get a pretty clean OS without too much bloat. I guess there were things like Minesweeper and Solitaire -- but those were apparently added to help people become proficient at using a mouse back when this was novel.

> It's things like this that make me a little suspicious when people say that going after big tech with antitrust law will necessarily be good for the consumer.

This is what we see coming from a mile away when people (usually user-hostile devs) clamor for the App Store to be broken up etc.

Microsoft installs plenty of their own crapware, so even if they had won that part of the lawsuit, our computers would still be full of it.

And I don't think antitrust is supposed to always benefit the consumers, it seems more designed to help the market through competition. But more competition means less compatibility, so we'd just end up with 20 shitty walled-gardens of services instead of 3 good ones. What we need it competition and cooperation, but the market was simply not designed to allow that.

Especially Google's business model of giving away free services to grow their monopoly, then making money off of their data, would not be able to survive. That sounds like a benefit on paper, but most people would consider not getting free Google services a huge problem.

That being said, I still support it. I don't care about the short-term slight negative impacts if it means we rid ourselves of these invasive companies and get at least some semblance of control over our tech.

> going after big tech with antitrust law will necessarily be good for the consumer.

I believe in US antitrust law, better for the customer => lower prices. And installing crapware on laptops means lower prices.

The theory would be that if anyone actually wanted crapware-free laptops, there's nothing stopping any manufacturer from selling them. It's a problem for a market. I think it would be a bad idea to let courts decide what "product quality" is for something like that

> As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost.

One of the greatest losses from the retail Microsoft Store shutdown was the loss of Microsoft's "Signature Edition" PC program. They only sold in their Stores PCs with clean Windows installs, which they labeled "Signature Edition". Many of the OEMS participated (Dell, Lenovo, others), and generally when you could directly compare Signature Edition models to their regular direct from the OEM counterparts (which the companies model naming/numbering schemes often intentionally tried to make hard to do) it was often about a $50 premium over the "full of junk installed" PC (showing about how much all that bloatware is valuable to the OEMs if it subsidizes machines by about $50).

For a brief period it even looked like other retailers might adopt Signature Edition sales and you could even walk into a Staples or a Best Buy and find sales people that could source Signature Edition machines, for the people that still liked to try to deal shop between multiple retail stores.

I miss being able to give the advice "buy whatever computer you want from Microsoft Store, or if you go to Staples/Best Buy keep asking sales people until you meet the person that knows what Signature Edition means and you generally won't have any problems with the machine".

Now the advice is back to "buy a Surface from Microsoft or be prepared to spend a couple hours using the Windows Fresh Start tool from Microsoft first".

Nice, I never heard about Fresh Start Tool: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/give-your-pc-a-f...

Would I miss the updated drivers from Dell or other vendor?

WHQL standards _should_ mean that for any PC purchase today (and many in the last decade or so) Windows Update will always have the most up-to-date "basic driver" on its servers.

There's some controversy (linked elsewhere in this thread) that those basic drivers are allowed by Microsoft to advertise their "full bloat" versions in notifications and launch time popups. The flipside to that controversy is that if you want the "full bloat" versions (such as the Geforce Experience if you are a game player), that makes it easy to acquire them as it is general a case of go through the notifications and popups on first launch, from what I've seen.

I don’t believe you would, drivers come in via windows update in modern windows. You should at worst miss cutting edge versions made available on the manufacturers website prior to arriving on windows update.

My Dell periodically scans for drivers and bios updates, and asks me to update them if a newer version is available.

It seems that Microsoft learned that advertising (and crapware pre-installs) is so profitable, they just bake it right into the Start menu as of Windows 10. Oh and let's add telemetry as well.

Telemetry in Windows has been out of the box since Windows XP. Whether you are correct or not to be antagonistic about it, that ship sailed a long time before Windows 10 and current HN hysteria about it is almost funny (especially given how often articles about telemetry driven development and A/B testing get upvoted on HN when a startup is doing it).

You can turn off the advertising ("Suggestions") and as long as the bundled "crapware" remains UWP sandboxed, it is a far cry from most of what the OEMs have been accused of.

The best thing about Windows now is that once you've registered your machine via their online tool, reregistering after a clean install is the click of a button.

They have a windows 10 builder tool that downloads the ISO and burns it to USB or DVD. So there's not much stopping a customer from registering and then doing a crapware-free clean install. The downside (besides needing the skill and time to do it) is you'll lose any baked in freeware but the line between freeware, trialware and crapware is so thin now I'm not sure that's a concern.

Finally you can rein in the data collection and remove much of the microsoft freeware by using https://old.reddit.com/r/tronscript.

> The best thing about Windows now is that once you've registered your machine via their online tool, reregistering after a clean install is the click of a button.

> They have a windows 10 builder tool that downloads the ISO and burns it to USB or DVD. So there's not much stopping a customer from registering and then doing a crapware-free clean install. The downside (besides needing the skill and time to do it) is you'll lose any baked in freeware but the line between freeware, trialware and crapware is so thin now I'm not sure that's a concern.

And the best thing about your computer is that it's so complicated that a determined manufacturer like Lenovo can hide their crapware installers in, say, the UEFI. Which will then automatically install them on a fresh OS install.

You make the mistake of thinking that you own your computer. You do not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039870

I found this out with my ASUS motherboard on my desktop. There's a UEFI option which bootstraps an automatic installation of their own software called Armory Crate which then invokes itself to install a load of "junk".

Have you tried Linux?

1. The post I was replying to was about how Windows was great.

2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.

I'm not a free software zelot or anything, but I do this on my desktop and its not too difficult. As far as I can tell they're aren't any binary blob drivers to install anyway and the standard linux drivers work great.

I'm not the person you replied to, but to answer your second question myself, yes, I do. I have four desktop PCs (one for each of my family members including myself), a netbook, and a custom built router in my house. All run Linux except the router, which runs a flavor of BSD. The Linux computers use AMD graphics with the open source AMDGPU driver. No Windows PCs[0], no blob drivers. Works quite well in practice.

[0]: My work laptop runs Windows 10, because they issued it, administer it, and own it. I'm required to use their software baseline for working.

Please don't misunderstand my post starting "the best thing about Windows..." as an overall endorsement of Windows. I didn't mean it to be read that way. I was just saying it's more convenient to have a clean install, although as you pointed out UEFI shenanigans can counteract that, so thank you for that.

>2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.

I ran openbsd for decades, bought every release dvd, a few t-shirts and did my best to own my hardware. The only reason I don't run it now is their networking stack can't sustain gigabit speeds on the firewall hardware I use. Freebsd can't either, but it gets much closer. More than double the performance, actually. At least for me, it'll have to do.

> 1. The post I was replying to was about how Windows was great.

Ah sorry, I got lost in the the thread hierarchy.

> 2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.

Yes, I do. I guess other than CPU microcode and other such stuffs that I can't reasonably get around.

My last 3 laptops were Asus, HP and Acer, none of them had that UEFI crap.

My last 3 desktops were the ones I assembled myself from components, desktop motherboard manufacturers don't do that.

I think your example is a rare exception, not a rule.

Desktop motherboard manufacturers definitely do it, and they have FAQs of how to disable it: https://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/1043788/

Very interesting. I guess I was lucky with Gigabyte last time.

Does anyone maintain a list of crapware-infested motherboards customers should avoid?

Unfortunately many of the driver packages Microsoft itself distributes come with the worst bloatware imaginable.

Quality control on Microsofts driver database is really poor.

Was this the vision for Google’s pixel?

The "Google Play Edition" Android phones were probably closer in concept: standard OEM hardware, but sold through the OS vendor's retail channels with a 'clean' software configuration.

Then there's Android One, but that is an absolute disaster at this point, with unoptimized software and updates that brick phones. Google themselves haven't been doing too good on software reliability this year; just look at Android 11, especially on the Pixel 2 and 4a. Both have huge bugs and in the 2's case, they will never be fixed. And some Android 11 bugs won't be fixed until Android 12 comes out.

I'm seriously considering a switch to iOS at this point.

I really like my Android One Nokia 6.1. It was a little rough for the first 6 months with random slowdowns and stuttering after being on for more than a few days (fixed with a reboot) but since then it has been great.

Admittedly it has a rubbish camera but I don't really take pictures so that's fine with me. For a £200 phone it has been just as good for my needs as every flagship nexus/pixel I've owned asside from the crap camera.

It's got to the point that it'll be out of support soon and I'm having a hard time finding a decent replacement for anything near a comparable price.

Maybe it's time to try out LineageOS?

+1 for nokia 6.1! I really like the continuous stream of updates, unlike on my old phones with samsung flavor of Android

> Admittedly it has a rubbish camera but I don't really take pictures so that's fine with me.

That makes me sad to hear. One of my favorite things about the old Nokia (especially the Lumia series) was that they cared about having good camera hardware. The low end stuff was better than most of the other brands I tried, and if you got something with PureView...

Looking at the latest lineup the cameras are probably better now, they all have the standard array of multiple cameras on the back. Personally I couldn't care less for cameras on phones so a big camera bump is kinda a downside for me!

The Pixel is more of the Surface of Google devices. Devices made by the software company to showcase their platforms.

Another reason why the macOS model is better for users. OS companies should make their own hardware.

Authoritarian walled gardens and "herding" users? Do NOT want!

The freedom to install and uninstall (and also modify, but that's a slightly different argument...) whatever software you want on the hardware you own is extremely valuable to the concept of general-purpose computing, and yet we are slowly losing that freedom due to these stupid "security" and "damaging their brand" arguments --- and the same goes for right-to-repair.

This is extra hostile, because it's separate from whatever video chat application they were using

What's even more hostile? A proprietary feature that only works in one application. Composition is one of the cornerstones of computing freedom, and another thing that is being slowly chipped away by the corporatocracy; also under the guise of security and privacy, not surprisingly. They want to slowly take away your choices and then nickel-and-dime you to get a fraction of them back.

Having the filter on by default is not nice, I'll agree with you on that --- but it's a huge stretch to go from that, to essentially declaring war against general-purpose computing.

Nobody has every forced you to buy a Mac or iOS device, and there are thousands of other options available.

It's old software, it's not like there was much of a standard on how to apply filters and etc decades ago. Everything was a one off attempt to get the job done.

And even today everything about audio / video chat is wonky.

I'm always trying to figure out what application is using what audio or video device. Is the OS messing it up or the application or what is any given conference app choosing to use today ....

It's bad when Lego Star Wars is onto it:

https://youtu.be/dwNWTmN-x4s?t=191

Same here, even if Google Meet, Skype, Teams, Slack et. al worked last week will it work now after latest firmware- and software update? Many times it doesn't without tweaks and the UI might have changed as well. I would like a external physical device I can use for video meetings that guarantee 100% working without needing to tweak anything, I think a lot of companies would be willing to pay for that

Facebook is trying (tried?) that with the Portal, but it was only limited to Facebook Messenger IIRC

> As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost.

And now they are actively distributing it through Windows Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24502768

These manufacturer "drivers" are so incredibly obnoxious. How can Microsoft be powerless against this? I managed to reverse engineer's most of my laptop's features and replace the slow manufacturer software with my own. Surely Microsoft can pay professionals to do the same thing...

Not exactly. The popup in that example is an installer for companion software which provides functionality for the hardware that was listed on the box. The installer appears when you first plug in the device. If you close it, nothing is installed and it never appears again.

Step one, back in the day when computers shipped with cd drives and a windows cd, was to format c:, and then re-install windows from scratch to eliminate the crap ware. I haven't used windows in many years. I assume that's still the way to go.

Download ISO, burn to USB, boot from USB and install is the modern equivalent.

Doing this for MacOS is surprising hard. Fortunately crapware isn’t a thing, although a few of the built in apps seem to try and drive me demented (looking at you Siri, Stock, Music, auto update).

I've bookmarked directions for it. For the admittedly out-of-date High Sierra, for instance: https://www.howtogeek.com/285922/how-to-create-a-bootable-us...

It’s quite easy and well-documented:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

> Plug the bootable installer into a Mac that is connected to the internet and compatible with the version of macOS you're installing.

Why does it have to be connected to the Internet? The point of using a USB installer is for it to work offline.

> A bootable installer doesn't download macOS from the internet, but it does require an internet connection to get firmware and other information specific to the Mac model.

I thought you had given me a way for something that has troubled me repeatedly. Alas no.

On trying to download Mojave from Catalina I get "Update not found. The requested version of macOS is not available."

The system seems to try and be clever and uses software updater, and software updater says I can't have that version.

So how do you get Mojave?

Edit: On further testing, maybe this is a regional issue? I'm not in the US and the link is to the US app Store. This makes the App Store app unhappy ("Cannot connect to app store"). Changing the URL to my region doesn't help. Same issue for all downloads that predate my current version (Catalina). El Cap and Big Sur download nicely.

You can (on most MacBooks at least) restart in recovery mode and do a partition wipe + fresh install with a WiFi connection.

The presence of bundled apps which I don't use realy bother me, and always have. On old versions of macOS, I wiped all of them out with a post-installation script. sudo -rm did the trick, and never broke anything else. (They sometimes came back after major updates, but I had a "post-upgrade" script for that.)

Big Sur makes this incredibly painful though, with its root filesystem stuff. Not sure what I'll do if I ever need to use that version. It may or may not be worth it to modify the snapshot...

If you think the average user understands a single word of what you just said, you’re in for a rude awakening. Not meant to diss you the slightest.

Oh no, that's not the way to go at all. Windows itself is the crapware. Integrated ads in the windows menu, telemetry beyond Facebook's wildest dreams, a dumb search that goes to the internet for things that are on your machine...

Fortunately it is great for gaming and I have macOS for everything else.

Back in the early 2000s I worked in a small Mom and Pop computer store. One of big selling points was that our custom built PCs were not full of the crud you got from the big OEMs. If you didn't buy it, we didn't install it.

Microsoft now have branding around "hardware that ships with vanilla Windows" to try and mitigate the problem; likewise you can download a USB key image and use it to reset to a blank Windows install.

This sort of crapware feeds off the folks who aren't aware of the options, or comfortable performing them.

Microsoft's branding was called "Signature Edition" and seems to have been quietly killed with the shutdown of retail Microsoft Stores.

This works until you plug in a Razer mouse. Then Windows will autodownload and run the Synapse installer. You can exit, and the mouse works fine (it's just USB), but the installer will run again after every boot.

I'm fairly sure the Synapse software is also cloud-based and requires a login to even use.

And it's Electron-based.

I bought a Razor mouse a year ago (a mistake I won't repeat), and wanted to disable the pointless built-in LEDs. Can't do that without Synapse, and the settings are not retained when you exit the program. So you must keep it running at all times, or you'll be forced to have circus lights on your desk.

I disassembled the mouse and tore out the LEDs. So much for the "just turn it off"-crowd that appears whenever I complain about RGB-infested hardware.

Also, Razer hid the screws under the plastic feet of the mouse, so now they're all wonky since I had to remove them to take the mouse apart.

Don't buy Razer.

Also, Razer hid the screws under the plastic feet of the mouse, so now they're all wonky since I had to remove them to take the mouse apart.

Most if not all mouses are designed like that. You can even buy sheets of replacement mouse feet, with varying levels of friction, if you find the current ones too slippery or sticky.

Or just use electrical tape. It's not the same, but it works

Run shitware in a VM, capture USB HID traffic, write an app to replay the same packets using libusb, enjoy /s

I too will never buy razer again due to this

I still do it. I've no use for Dell's live support app and whatever else they ship.

The difference now is that you also have to:

1. Uninstall Candy Crush and similar.

2. Disable Cortana.

3. Disable ads and internet search for your Start button.

4. Click through several small greyed out buttons to have a local account instead of cloud account.

5. Do some of these things again whenever an update nukes part of your settings.

As a bonus, they still haven't fixed the decades old thing in file manager where all your directories default to displaying in stupid mode.

In short: pay for the professional version of Windows or prepare to be annoyed.

Win Pro still annoys me. And they have telemetry baked deep into the OS. Pass. Same for macOS these days. Linux is quickly becoming the only viable privacy preserving OS.

Seems fair. If you want to pay bargain basement prices, you get bargain basement junk.

Is there any way to disable web search in Start Menu without Registry hack?

> Another reason why the macOS model is better for users.

This makes it possible for the OS companies to bilk the entire industry while they protect their ecosystem with an infinitely deep moat.

There's a spectrum here. On one end, we have completely a completely open OS. Less knowledgable people can certainly be harmed. On the other, the OS is a protected fiefdom. An entire industry is protected and taxed, and the execution model held hostage. You can't run or distribute software freely.

There's good reason Microsoft lost their case. The requirements for openness are better for competition and innovation, even if it sometimes hurts the little guy.

A better, targeted solution for this exact case might be regulation requiring that OEMs offer a zero-bloat option to consumers. They could add a price markup to make back their margin. (Hardware, other than luxury hardware, can have razor thin margins.) Zero regulation (maintaining the status quo) isn't really the end of the world, either.

All giants should have weak points. Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. If they don't, we get trampled.

> The requirements for openness are better for competition and innovation, even if it sometimes hurts the little guy.

Except that this is completely false. Microsoft has almost the same PC market share, and no innovation has occurred on the desktop other than by Apple, and to a lesser extent Microsoft’s own response to Apple.

It's probably "on" in the sense that it creates a virtual webcam device. When Zoom pulls up the list of cameras, it probably doesn't know "Actual Camera" from "Cat Mode Virtual Camera" whatever heuristic it uses to decide which one is going to be the default picks Cat Mode.

"OS companies should make their own hardware."

That sounds like car firms should make their own petrol/gas or 3D printer firms should enforce their PLA/etc or perhaps printer firms (like HP) should enforce their own ink/toner.

That's my personal definition of a monopoly with benefits - no thanks.

Performance car and motorcycle manufacturers _do_ have recommended oil and fuel providers

But it's more akin to car companies making both the car _and_ the engine - which wasn't the case in the stagecoach/early era

That's not at all what a monopoly is, just a very constrained product. Which...can describe Apple from day one. And you know what? Even if you despise Apple, you should give them credit for being relevant in even the most dominant days of the PC just for providing some competitive pressure.

I think in the NYT story about this incident, it said that he was using his assistant's computer.

> Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost.

This is only part of the story but functionally it was the same. Also 95/98/Me were woefully insecure. And they didn't take security seriously until it started getting really bad mid-2000s.

> Also 95/98/Me were woefully insecure.

Who could forget the login bypass "hack": https://i.imgur.com/rG0p0b2.gif

Would have been amazing if their QA team had this as something to test for

Something similar works with the Windows 7 recovery partition; it pretends you have to login to one of the administrator accounts to get control, but one of the dialog has a link to a privacy policy that opens in Notepad and from its file open dialog you can start command prompts, explorer etc.

You can do a trick on Windows 10 too (if the disk isn't encrypted and secure boot enabled).

Boot a Linux usb live boot of choice, mount the Windows C: parition. Rename the Command Prompt exe to be the accessibility or sticky keys exe (something roughly along those lines). Save and reboot into Windows. Hit the on screen keyboard button on the login screen and an administrator level command prompt opens allowing you to reset the local admin password to be able to log in or do anything else that you would like to do.

if you can boot a linux usb, you can change the password directly with chntpw. the command prompt trick allows you to do one-up -> work from the system account or create a new administrator-level account and delete it afterwards allowing the user's password to remain the same.

and on most PCs you don't need secure boot to block booting from USBs, a BIOS password is usually enough...

Saw a security presenter do this last year live at MS Ignite on their latest Win10 release. The collective pie on every MS Windows developer in the room could fill a boat.

> Also 95/98/Me were woefully insecure.

To be (somewhat) fair, those Operating Systems were intended to run on standalone consumer machines that weren't permanently attached to a network. The most likely means of getting infected with a virus/malware back in the Win95 days was via the floppy drive.

Though always-on internet connections was clearly the direction things were moving toward the end of the 90s - there was no excuse for going back to the trough with WinME rather than pushing everyone to NT.

Winsock was included with 95 so they had networking available by default. And network has been in Windows since 3.1 so I wouldn't say it was a lack of forethought. They just did not practice basic security and left it to the rest of the world to protect themselves.

> OS companies should make their own hardware.

Microsoft does make their own hardware amd last time I checked, it's still full of bloatware. Not as full as old consumer-tier HP laptops used to be, but still.

As for removing OEM bloatware, an option in Windows to ignore the OEM force install partition would be trivial to add, so people could just factory reset to a clean install after buying their machine.

I don't want the same to happen to Android. Basically every single non-Pixel phone these days ships bloatware with it.

Android being open source based, Google can't realistically stop bloatware.

They can theoretically tie the bloatware ban to the Play Store license, like how they force OEMs to install Chrome, Maps and YouTube if they want to have Play Store on their phone, but alternative stores are already on the rise after recent controversies (deleting negative reviews (robinhood, tiktok), deleting unwanted apps from store (fortnite, parler), regional app blocking (tiktok in india)), and doing so would probably just push OEMs to abandon play store in favor of their own store...

I got a ROG Phone 3 recently, and while it does come with some OEM software, most of it is actually pretty useful. The only obvious "yeah you were paid to put this crap on my phone, not because you thought it improved the experience" application was Netflix, which - while entirely useless to me - is a pretty decent showing as far as OEM bloatware goes.

Still not quite as clean as a Nexus/Pixel but the best install experience I've ever had on any non-Google device, and the only one I've ever decided not to install a fresh ROM on.

> As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost. Another reason why the macOS model is better for users. OS companies should make their own hardware.

You're thinking of this backwards. The problem isn't too much antitrust enforcement, it's not enough.

If all the major OEMs are bundling crapware then it's a cartel and installing the crapware is anti-competitive tying (or is the cartel shaking down the crapware vendors for money to include theirs instead of encouraging the user to choose a competitor), so go enforce antitrust against the OEMs too.

If not all of them do it then the ones who do get panned in reviews and lose business, reducing the incentive to do it.

> Another reason why the macOS model is better for users. OS companies should make their own hardware.

Yeah, I personally love vendor lock in, price gouging, and having no aftermarket parts support whatsoever.</sarcasm>

> As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost

Haven't heard that, but haven't paid much attention to windows since c. 2000 - I believe it's more stable and secure now than it was in the windows 98 days.

Why not have a "reset to clean install" option in windows, which resets everything to just the installed state? Why not distribute the windows CD with the machine so the user can reinstall?

I could be wrong because, like you, I haven't used Windows in quite some time (jumped ship when Windows 8 came along and never used it), but I think Windows 10 does include some sort of clean install/reset setting.

Because you want the drivers and hardware quirk fixes that the oem included, just not the bloatware/malware that they were paid to include.

Not all hardware is as friendly as Linux on a Thinkpad... Sometimes a clean install would leave you without a display, or would put some bizarre peripheral in an unusable state.

A big green 'Accept Windows Defaults' button on the first boot that bricks the computer would be a pretty big incentive for vendors to sort out their drivers.

But they wouldn't sort out their drivers. They'd just tell the user not to click it.

Why wouldn't the OS manufacturer bundle required drivers?

My father asked me to “fix his laptop”, I looked at it and wasn’t able to tell if it was windows 10 or 8 or Vista. It has become some strange hybrid somehow with telling different things in the different parts of the OS. Also the styling would be different at the different parts of the OS(The windows menu looks like 10 but the window decorations are like Vista etc.). He had some professional software that wants to keep so I didn’t dare to do a fresh install or clean up, left it as is. He is still using it just like that.

I think he's running with DWM turned off: https://superuser.com/questions/1016170/temporarily-disable-...

Windows has that feature now. It's surprisingly effective, and is smart enough to preserve, for the most part, user files as well.

A major reason that CD's stopped being used is the straight up lack of optical drives on modern computers. In most cases these days you specifically need to look for a device that includes optical or other physical media that is not USB.

Given the ubiquity of internet access in most markets where computers are sold (even in developing countries), it is very reasonable to expect that even as a last ditch, the user will be able to connect to the internet on a tethered cell phone, and this is reflected by the fact that on consumer OS you can specify that a connection is metered.

The restore CDs that the OEM included with the computer still had all the crap baked into it. You needed a retail copy of Windows and hopefully someone hadn't ripped the OEM key sticker off the computer.

The OEM key would be usually encoded into the BIOS on newer releases of Windows, and could be read from a working Windows install using a freeware utility. In practice, it was unlikely you'd have to reinstall on a freshly wiped PC that you don't have an OEM key for.

I'm talking 20 years ago, when the average windows machine was a bugladen mess of crap piled on by the OEM because they got paid a bit, and the only "restore cd" was an OEM disk which had all the crap.

A proper windows CD would have allowed people to wipe all that out and just have vanilla windows. Microsoft weren't interested in that.

I would agree with their own hardware.

I do like their surface machines a lot (PowerMacBook User before, switched because of the pen input/drawing for workshops).

They should have a fancy/premium Windows version that everyone wants and that's more like OSX for their machines to pull people over. Everyone else gets stock Windows (a little bit like Android model to prevent being sued).

> OS companies should make their own hardware.

If we can't expect hardware companies to write good software, it's unlikely that software companies' hardware will be much better unless they put a ton of effort into it (which they likely won't unless they're a premium brand like Apple).

Microsoft's Surface line of hardware is held in high regard though.

The guy was interviewed by Inside Edition and said that he was using his assistant's computer which she uses to communicate with her daughter. She had the filter set for her. He did not know how turn it off.

The strange thing is that no one will be surprised. If that would have happened with Macs the dissing about Apple would be endless, but Dell will get a pass because expectations are low.

Sounds more like a legal problem than a problem with the model.

He said he is using the laptop of his secretary.

You're making a mountain out of a hill. The threat level here is purrrrple at most

>Another reason why the macOS model is better for users. OS companies should make their own hardware.

That is a pretty strange conclusion to draw. I would say this is a reason computers should ship with no software installed whatsoever. Hardware vendors using software as a differentiator is what started this mess. All PCs are pretty much interchangeable and should be treated like it.

(If they aren't interchangeable, that's because someone is selling broken hardware. Looking at you, Nvidia.)

That was really only the case in the last decade and now no longer the case with M1 chips. Before that we had a wonderful plethora of different personal computers.

Hard disagree, it's a very selective (and unnecessary) reasoning that completely ignores the dangerous mindset and harm to users that closed ecosystems promote.

> fossuser 10 hours ago | parent | on: Viral 'I'm not a cat' filter is decades-old softwa...

This makes more sense to me, I was wondering how that would have gotten set by a clueless user. The answer turns out to be that old dell machines shipped some shitty avatar software (along with lots of other stuff) that defaulted to on. The lawyer is probably using an ancient dell computer with this software and hasn't used video chat on it before this.

This is extra hostile, because it's separate from whatever video chat application they were using - so it would have been harder to know about and turn off.

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