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Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

Playing devil's advocate here: For all practical purposes you need an account for macOS, iOS, and Android. What is so different with Windows?

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Ignoring the mobile accounts, which are largely mandatory because of the App stores…

You need an account to login to a Mac, but it’s not an iCloud account. If you want to use iCloud, you can link your login account to it. But it is completely optional. I don’t understand at all why I needed to setup (and link) a Microsoft.com account to my personal computer.

The worst part is, I use multiple Microsoft online accounts. Which one should be associated with my computer login? My Xbox account? My work account? None of this makes sense to me.

It's our Personal Computer, not Microsoft's. But since discovering the peaceful i3WM on Debian the need to boot into the telemetry riddled spyware called Windows has been minimized. Need TPM? Use ProxMox and run Win11 without the 'required' hardware in an isolated network.

I often look at these struggles with modern operating systems and think "BeOS wouldn't have done this". Then I laugh because in that world, BeOS would be where MacOS is now (quite literally certain on this), and would probably have resulted in the same product.

I always roll my eyes when people sneer at the "forced" hardware upgrade Windows 11 requires. Even when I patiently explain to them what it's for

The entire point of the mandated minimum requirements was hardware that had silicon level mitigation support for Meltdown and Spectre type attacks. Something that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's and still has new variants popping up (we're on what, Spectre v4 by now?)

The only way to truly mitigate these issues (other than undoing 30 years of CPU advancement) was an entire top-to-bottom set of mitigations. From the silicon up through the operating system and even applications such as browsers

Windows users have been conditioned into thinking it's acceptable to install invasive, malicious closed-source software. Hardware vulnerabilities are the least of their issues. The windows security model has been completely broken from the start.

There is nothing inherently „broken“ about the security design.

Do you even realise how diluted this sounds? I’m all for watching corporations closely, but the tale you’re telling is simply wrong, and I hope you know that, even if it sure is tempting that you might know better than the rest of the world…

Do you know better than Microsoft itself? Is it not true that Microsoft is tracking your movement across the OS? Is it not true that Microsoft tracks what apps you are running? Is it not true that Microsoft tracks every movement your MS account does? They admit they're doing it - what's your answer to that?

What you’re talking about isn’t the foundational security model of the operating system, but telemetry and tracking systems built into it.

I’m very much opposed to those too, but comparing them to the security model is apples vs. oranges. All I’ve seen so far, is that telemetry doesn’t open up any glaring holes in the security model of the operating system, but I’d be interested if you have any proof of that.

The telemetry is built right into the security model of the OS - thus the security model is broken. OS that betrays me by telling someone what I'm running is insecure.

No it's not, no one not running a shared cloud service cares about such things.

Why doesn't Microsoft explain exactly why they require new CPUs, what in TPM 2.0 they're using that's not in 1.2, etc.

Except that most machines have arbitrary remote code execution via JavaScript in browser. I don't know how easily that can be exploited, but I wouldn't be surprised if ignoring the potential of this happening would bite us in the backside at some point.

If that was why, they should say that, they don't

and I always roll my eyes when knowledgeable people pretend that Meltdown/Spectre/etc are a grave concern for consumer machines.

I roll my eyes even further back when knowledgeable people pretend to not understand that the endgame for TPM/Pluton/etc is DRM, censorship and privacy violations.

Do you know why people sneer at such forced hardware upgrades? Because, as others have pointed out, mitigating security vulnerabilities is seen as merely the narrative.

Forcing hardware obsoletion in favour of those "hardened" platforms has two benefits, as far as certain groups of interest are concerned:

- turning existing machines into ewaste, so people buy new machines, so the money making wheels keep turning for hardware manufacturers

- normalising stronger "trusted computing" (in the Plutonium/DRM sense) capabilities, which is of course a concern for a number of groups interested in controlling what will be running on your machine.

Make no mistake, it appears that Doctorow's article on the war on general purpose computers is becoming more and more compelling as the time goes on. Some of us see forced obsolescence of older machines with weaker "security" norms as a part of that fight - on the side of the enemy.

IMO, undoing/re-thinking the last 30 years of CPU progress might just be the thing we need. We need to re-examine our foundations and fix them.

On macOS it asks you to set up once during the first startup, and then doesn’t nag you all the time if you don’t want to.

I set up Macs for people without an iCloud and it was not an issue - they didn’t miss it, aside from notes not syncing between devices and other features that need iCloud.

On Windows it will keep trying you to sign up all the time. I have just one machine with Windows, I don’t need an MS account, I don’t need their cloud features nor their store, and Windows keeps pushing me to set up one.

My Mac settings app has a permenent "1 notification" red dot, because I haven't logged my Apple ID in, and every so often (about once a month), a notification pops up to remind me to log my Apple ID in.

I'd love to learn how to get rid of those.

Ah, right, I forgot about these.

Question - is it because you didn’t add any apple ID, or that you added it but didn’t log in?

I remember MacOS prodding me the same way even with non-apple accounts when I added them but had expired passwords.

If it’s that then you can go to the „accounts” preference and remove all the accounts. Perhaps it will help.

> Playing devil's advocate here: For all practical purposes you need an account for macOS, iOS, and Android. What is so different with Windows?

Who says that your parent is not similarly opposed to these accounts?

Not really. I set all of my Macs up with a local administrator ID, and Apple does not make that a giant pain in the ass or underhandedly switch it to an online log-in during OS installation the way Microsoft does.

iOS is a bit more tied to an online account, but still not as offensive as Microsoft's execrable hounding and hobbling in Windows.

You definitely don't need an iCloud account to use Apple hardware.

Yet.

However you do have to deal with an unremovable red notification on your system preferences demanding you to sign in to use icloud.

I think you can't install anything on iOS without logging in, and the app store is the only way to get software (without rooting). I guess you could use the built in apps though, and the camera...

The iCloud service is separate from the App Store service, and you can be logged into one but not the other, however you log in to both using the same AppleID. You can actually be logged into iCloud using one AppleID and the App Store with a different one, at least a family member had their phone set up that way for a while, for reasons.

If you set up a Mac without an AppleID you'll constantly get nagged every time anything that requires it tries to do anything, which is frequently.

Like what?

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