Ameliorated: Windows 10 and 11 minus the spyware | Hacker News Reader

Ameliorated: Windows 10 and 11 minus the spyware

ameliorated.io

102 pointswolfskaempf50 comments

"Security patches are not available for AME, as this subsystem has been disabled. In order to secure the system properly, we revoke administrator privileges from all normal users, and activate the hidden administrator account. This will mediate approximately 75% of the critical attack surface, while locking down the system from most foreseeable major future threats."

https://docs.ameliorated.io/common-questions/the-case-for-ou...

Since you can do the same thing on a normal system, by what % is AME less safe vs a patched Windows?

If you install AME on your Windows copy today? Probably not much. A year from now if you don’t update? However many critical vulnerabilities are found in a year in Windows.

If you for example consider a typical company security policy this is 100% less secure considering any vulnerabilities in windows itself minus the the attack surface of the different telemetry systems that have been disabled.

If you care not to report your usage to Microsoft or any agency that Microsoft would need to release data to this is 100% 'secure'.

Security has become the main argument for unwanted ongoing spying and patronising by OS vendors. Look at Google play services and/or safety net. It is like trust us or we render your system unusable it insecure. This amounts to blackmailing IMHO and regulators need to step in.

Blackmailing is screaming "yOuR sYsTeM iS nOt SeCuRe!1!!@1!1!#11$%$!" to anyone who shirks updates of any kind. As if the sky is falling if they so much as miss a single update.

To anyone who engages in that blackmail, and honestly gaslighting: Kindly fuck off. That argument has never been correct nor valuable information.

Anyone from amerliorated.io reading this, the word 'Rigorously' is misspelt, it appears in a headline on the homepage as "Consistently developed. Rigerously tested".

Short of joining their Telegram channel I couldn't find another way of flagging this.

Perhaps it's intentionally ironic, like Bugzilla's "zarro boogs" message? Equally ill-advised, though, IMO.

Is this just the standard "Break my Windows install via 'decrapify scripts'", only with a marketing team?

I don't know if this is the successor to https://ameliorated.info/ or an April Fool's joke, but it got pinned in the official Ameliorated Telegram group. I'm running Ameliorated 10 21H1 right now, and when I used to use simplewall it showed that Ameliorated is very quiet in nonconsensual network traffic, which I absolutely do not expect stock Windows 10 to be. (And hopefully the prebuilt Ameliorated ISOs aren't backdoored, though it doesn't seem to have any *obvious* C&C network traffic). Hopefully the new OS builder tool is open-source and can be audited to verify it doesn't inject backdoors.

The downsides are that the current ISO injects the creator's preferences in ways which are difficult to change (lock screen image, not being an admin account, VBScript disabled which breaks Visual Studio Installer, only one user usable, etc.). Additionally, applications (Visual Studio, VS Command Prompt, C# build tools even on Linux, vcpkg, Discord) invariably exfiltrate endless amounts of information, even if you clean up the operating system.

They link to an LTT video, but guess what? The video links back to another website: ameliorated.info. The source code linked by the website is also hosted on there. For me it seems like someone is trying to revive an old project without approval from the owner. I'm not sure if you should trust it right now without more information

I'm not sure why Java would be an easier path than C#, the next paragraph is a little weird to read -

Native app

We did not take the easy path of writing our app in Java or a web-based Java-script heavy framework. Using C# and .NET allows us to craft an experience that minimizes resource use and is very fast.

Maybe writing C# is not easy for them? Idk, but I agree with your statement. Sounds strange.

//Edit: Nvm, forgot to read today's date. I won't take anything serious today.

The whole project seems misguided, but at least we finally see somebody use WinUI in the wild...

All of this is really weird. C# is easier than Java, and it isn’t necessarily native code. They’re also using the old .NET Framework [0] instead of the modern .NET for some reason.

[0]: https://git.ameliorated.info/Styris/trusted-uninstaller-cli/...

Whole thing screams scam or April Fools joke. There's one commit to the source code repository.

Anyone want to try it on a VM and report back?

Playbook files are password protected archives. Anyone cares to reverse engineer the password from the executable?

> Set the Archive format to 7z, and set malte as the password

https://docs.ameliorated.io/developers/playbooks/creation.ht...

The password seems to be "malte". The executable is completely unobfuscated .NET, and all you need for "reverse engineering" is ILSpy or DotPeek.

    public static void ExtractFile(string apbx, string file, string targetDir, bool recursive = false)
    {
      if (recursive)
        APBX.RunCommand("x \"" + file + "\" -o\"" + targetDir + "\" -p\"malte\" -y -r");
      else
        APBX.RunCommand("x \"" + apbx + "\" -o\"" + targetDir + "\" -p\"malte\" \"" + file + "\" -y -r-");
    }

    public static void ExtractArchive(string apbx, string targetDir, string exclude = null)
    {
      if (exclude != null)
        APBX.RunCommand("x \"" + apbx + "\" -o\"" + targetDir + "\" -p\"malte\" -x!\"" + exclude + "\" -y");
      else
        APBX.RunCommand("x \"" + apbx + "\" -o\"" + targetDir + "\" -p\"malte\" -y");
    }

Interesting; Malte is a common Danish, Swedish and Germanic male name.

Yikes, this alone is grounds to never ever ever use this tool, intentionally obfuscating what commands are being run is malware-level behavior

password is "malte"

https://ibb.co/BNtHF1X

Huh, IDA can do .NET IL? Interesting.

How's this different from NTLite, and does anyone know how this plays along with the ability to update your system?

It's different because of it's a aprils fools joke I guess? Feels off to me - the password-protected playbooks, the empty git repo, and the timing is suspicious.

If so, it's a weird prank. Where's the punchline?

It breaks updates, so it's an absolutely no-go.

It's garbage. It claims to make your windows better... but then it breaks updates, and installs random software. Like VLC, OnlyOffice, Firefox, random wallpapers... What if you don't want those? Or what if it installs other malicious things?

How does this compare to ShutUp10 and others?

The fact that 'rigorous' is spelled incorrectly on the landing page makes me doubt this somewhat

> Java-script

Not the best look when you misname the technology that you’re bagging.

>Rigerously tested

cringe

What a terrible website. And what in the world is a playbook?

Ops people know playbooks as either:

A set of instructions, such as documentation defining what to do.

Or, more commonly these days: Ansible "playbooks" which run a series of idempotent scripts to bring a system into a desired state. (the terminology taken from the above).

Seriously, why bother? Windows 11 is beyond redemption.

Because eventually Win 10 will stop being supported and we'll have to switch to win 11 whether we like it or not. It's nice that tools exist already to get rid of most spyware.

Maybe it's time to ditch Windows once and for all. Put spywares aside, the reliability is ridiculous.

Bought a surface pro for kids, and had to clean wipe Windows 11 less than a week as they pushed an update causing external display to flicker, uninstalling the update screwed up the whole system and the system restore did not work at all. So had to spend half a day just to install Windows 10.

For my own laptop, mostly looked okay until a couple of days ago except a couple different minor issues got fixed now and then. All of a sudden, Edge became unbearably slow. Simply create a new tab or switching to another one could take a minute despite the cpu usage was less than 10% and over 32GB free mem available. Tried everything such as switching off hardware acceleration etc., none worked. Then I noticed that the URL inspection related fuction which was for sure turned off was back on again. Turned those off those, it got much faster but still slower than it should be.

That's the last straw. Installed Fedora and it looks great by default. However, I still need to find some substitution for the stuffs I use on Windows. Once that's done, Windows 11 can go.

my work software is not supported by WINE and honestly after like 30 years with Windows I will rather butcher windows than deal with Linux, which I tried every few years and still found it unusable for me even besides that one software I need

Which program do you need?

Everyone's mileage varies. I had exactly the same feeling until recent couple of year.

I can only do my work on windows. Playstation/Xbox toolchains only work on windows, not to mention most of other video games development tools.

Besides, I honestly think Visual Studio(the full one, not Code) is the best IDE in existence for C++ programming, its tooling and usablity is second to none. Even if I wasn't developing video games I'd stick with windows just to use Visual Studio.

Yep, I get that lots of software are Windows only. I was super happy with Visual Studio until recently a couple of years, basicly when JS component started to replace those native ones. It took only 80MB of memory when loaded a fairly big solution. But now, a few GB just to load a tiny solution. Lots of functions I don't give a f*k about were added recently, but for those small little things indentation while formatting code etc.. are no longer working as what they used to be. And you just reminded me another bug of Windows 10. So on Friday, I was debugging something and decided to stop as I found what was wrong. Debugging stopped but the process did not and wasn't shown at all in the taskmgr, had to kill it using command line so that I could build the new code. Nothing big but super annoying.

Not only Windows 11. Windows period.

This is actually quite nice!

Finally an open alternative to NTLite, I am gonna try this out for sure!

OP here. I am not affiliated with this project. Some people have questioned whether the new domain belongs to the original project or not, so here is how I confirmed that they at least cooperate or belong to the same project team.

The older .info domain also referenced by the LTT video links to a Telegram group, whose owners now link to the new .io domain of this post.

As to why the old website does not reference the new domain directly, I have no idea.

As always with scripts that modify your system in fundamental ways, please take great care and do your own research.

Ok, but what does it actually do?

Exactly - what does it do?

> Completely transform your computer in minutes. Simply download a verified Playbook, or use your own, and run it in AME Wizard.

erm... no thanks.

Going to need a bit more than just a fancy home page before I do that!

https://git.ameliorated.info/Styris/trusted-uninstaller-cli

Source code is public though I admit the detail on the front page is lacking.

Why don't use LTSC and some additional tweaking? Would likely save a lot of time hunting down errors related to some custom iso like this.

Not sure why removing OneDrive is an improvement given that it’s pretty much essential for sharing files.

Is this page created by a buzzword-generator for April fools?

Btw: Have W11 fixed so that's it's possible to "ungroup" items in the task bar yet? I reverted back to W10 after a few weeks because it was absolutely unusable having all my open editor windows grouped to a single thing in the taskbar, making it hard to quickly switch to the correct one.

For a change forgot the day it was.

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