Microsoft quietly supported legislation to make it easier to fix devices
grist.org
grist.org
It's hard to call it a "win". It has been sabotaged by the governor Kathy Hochul at the last minute, a year after it passed with supermajority. She was waiting a whole year to sign the bill and at the end decided add loopholes which made the bill worse than useless. People now think that the problem is solved when in reality nothing has been done.
Isn’t that the role of the legislative branch?
https://www.nysenate.gov/how-bill-becomes-law-1
>While the Legislature is in session, the Governor has 10 days (not counting Sundays) to sign or veto bills passed by both houses. Signed bills become law; vetoed bills do not. However, the Governor's failure to sign or veto a bill within the 10-day period means that it becomes law automatically.
So what’s with this 10 day timeframe? I’m confused. So, technically, they haven’t been waiting a year and vetoed the bill right away?
> "The legislation as drafted included technical issues that could put safety and security at risk, as well as heighten the risk of injury from physical repair projects, and I am pleased to have reached an agreement with the legislature to address these issues."
The whole bill was altered by the legislature and governor such that assemblies satisfy the requirement to have parts available. So if Samsung glues the battery to the screen and sells it to you as a $300 part, that satisfies the requirement of having the battery available. So the whole bill was sabotaged and used a press release by the government to pretend they were doing something for the people when in fact they were neutering the bill.
(I still am not quite certain why they didn't just give me a refurbished phone and later repair mine as a refurb, but whatever)
https://www.ifixit.com/News/64865/iphone-14-teardown
I think X to 13 models had particularly difficult battery replacements.
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23599780-technets-pr... [2] https://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=S01320&ter...
Now, this seems to be a failure where there were not protests raised to this amendments or the lawmakers ignored such things. Either way, the point of lobbyists is to allow industry experts to provide input. If there is nothing wrong with their suggestions, I don't see a problem with verbatim including of their wording.
(I disagree with how the NY law was changed, but there are reasons lobbying exists).
Traditionally in an debate, it is your responsibility to convince the other side of your view. You can't just get the other side to make your argument for you.
??? There is no "point" to lobbyists, its literally a guy paying to play. Take any industry expert from any industry and unless they themselves are a lobbyist I can near guarantee they would be happier if lobbying was illegal with very harsh punishment
I suppose you mean professional lobbying, with the purpose of influencing laws to make money?
Because when a environmental group tries to block some dirty mining project for example, than this is also lobbying. It is just people using influence. You cannot really make that illegal.
You can force the parties involved for transparency and punish bribery, but you cannot make it illegal for people to talk to politicians.
Even when it is done "professional". The problem in reality is, that when you look closely, in effect lots of lobbying is indeed bribery. (most of the indirect kind, like informal promising lucrative jobs after their terms are over, or giving overpaid talks). And that is and remains illegal.
“Lobbying, which usually involves direct, face-to-face contact in cooperation with support staff that may not meet directly face-to-face, is done by many types of people, associations and organized groups, including individuals on a personal level in their capacity as private citizens, it is also practiced by corporations in the private sector serving their own interests, by non-profits and non-governmental organizations in the voluntary sector, by fellow legislators or government officials influencing each other through legislative affairs (legislative assistance) in the public sector, and by advocacy groups (interest groups).”
> is the act of lawfully
Many laws are a product of the time they were written and in turn, a product of the people who have written them. Why is lobbying legal in the USA? Why is it coded in law? These are genuine questions that people can and should ask.
The idea that lobbyists are ‘the man’ corruptly influencing bent politicians is tiresome and to paint it as the truth is not productive. If you want to stop lobbying vote for politicians that want to stop it or run for office yourself. However once you are in office you might note why it exists, as did many before you.
I mean to me the big issue is that these are laws that corrupt democracy (in the sense that they benefit the few powerful over the many powerless). And your solution of "just vote them out" is not really feasible because both democrats and Republicans (the only two realistic options you have given the electoral system) are pro lobbying!
But is the general population in favour of lobbying? I don't know but I don't think so.
I personally advocate for a new way of doing politics altogether. As I don't think the current system really works well to properly channel the will of the majority of the people in responsible ways.
And lobbying is much, much stricter in pretty much every other country in the world. So the US is an outlier here.
You appear to have strong ideas about politics. Arguing on forums gets them nowhere, you can either preach to the choir or try to convince people who will never change their mind. If you want to change things, get involved in the political process yourself.
The fact is without the non-corrupt side of lobbying, the lawyers whom make up most of the legislature wouldn't have the first clue how their legislation interacts with complex industry specific real world systems.
Lobbying for money is a form of legalized corruption, almost identical in form and function to the illegal one, except designed to protect those who already have a lot of money and power from any legal consequences.
If I donate money to the EFF or Louis Rossmann for a cause I care about, that should not block them from lobbying on my behalf.
Everyone complains about professional lobbying that they don’t like. That’s hardly shocking.
I think you picked the laziest understanding of both the issue and my answer, and made my point in the process.
I'm not talking about you paying someone to represent your ideas to lawmakers, regulators, judges, etc. but about paying those people to directly enact your interests. They're both big problems in their own way. Straight up buying laws or legal decisions happens even if the incentives move from the interest groups to the decision factors through so many lobbying laundromats that they look completely clean and disconnected.
The other problem is not better. As you confirm, real representation in democracy is not with your vote but your donation power. Even when your chosen lobbyist isn't buying anything directly, just having a voice and representation takes money rather than a vote. The EFF or Louis Rossmann have to struggle so much to be heard because other people pay more to be louder. If you have problems being heard for money, imagine the people hoping to be heard for free.
The large majority of people can only spend one vote every few years to choose a representation that a small minority will spend a lot of money to hijack: either drown out everyone else's voice, or directly purchase exactly what they want. If you can't see why "everyone complains" maybe you're too disconnected from the problem to even understand it.
Congress can simply bring people to testify in the open instead of cowering in the shadows like they do now.
Which is also usually driven by financial interests under cover of virtue. It is most obvious in Europe where many people now have become multi millionaires, largely of government imposed enrichment schemes.
Can you cite concrete examples?
This is probably how corruption takes over a society. Something I thought I’d only ever read in history books, but now I have the privilege of living through it. Oh joy.
I wish we had a better example to show to the world.
Like SuperPAC's and all that bullshit
Edit: I see your point wrt alternative bribery schemes existing, and isn't the solution perhaps for those schemes to also be shut down, instead of allowing it because some good might come of it?
Hmmmm, it's difficult not to assume you are yourself a lobbyist or politician if you take this position, given that the coffers of those with ill intent are vastly more lined than the alternative...
We need something better than this fake democracy we inherited.
Well, it probably is difficult if one is not very good at thinking.
Regarding your edit, sure, but that's not the content of the post I replied to. That was about banning lobbying and I'm making the point that consequences of that could be counterproductive and make for an even less level playing field.
Voting lawmaker who don’t know the subject don’t help
If you run a small solar company, it is in your best interest to support SEIA, the member association (lobbyist) for the solar industry.
You might think the system is dumb, and it is, but if you don’t understand why it exists, you can’t design a replacement.
Lawmakers and their teams legislate on topics that they are far from experts in, so they regularly need to consult with experts. Those experts, no matter how you select them, will harbor biases.
How do you get the relevant expertise to the lawmakers? I’ve talked to a chief of staff for a senator and at that level it is a lot of responding to what is next on the agenda, and less deciding.
Same reason you talk to your representative on the regular so that your position is known. It's why you hired someone to represent you, after all. As before, the person you hired is not a mind reader. You have to talk to him. Like any employer, if you don't keep in regular touch with your employees they are not going to do the job you expect of them.
Whatever they are they should be representing the people first. If that involves learning more about whatever they're in charge of, then they should do that, since that's what we pay them to do. Plato said our kings should be philosophers, but what we have are sophists.
Right?
Poor analogy.
But. If we can act coherently on one way, we can do so in another, and I take great hope in that fact.
Money is power, at least until people are fairly represented...
So I'm not so optimistic.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-bag-nearly...
It's now clear we have a critical vulnerability in our political operating system. IMHO, the simplest solution is single-term limits. Obviously, there are upside and downside trade-offs to such a policy. However, I think the upsides might be worth the downsides, especially since the system is so clearly being gamed by well-funded adversaries to the public interest.
Based on the sky-rocketing increases in net worth after becoming a long-term career politician, the incentives are simply overwhelming. It's now attracting people with poor, or at least conflicted, motivations to the career. Another under-appreciated upside would be limiting the influence of entrenched, 'permanent' political parties, as seen in the now-eternal two-party duopoly we have in the U.S. No matter which 'side' you may be on (if any), we'd all be better served by a system more able to evolve and adapt to meet changing conditions.
And they have to consider every proposal.
You know what the most common decision is? "ITL," or "inexpedient to legislate." In most cases, no, there really shouldn't be a law.
Is it the best system out there? Probably not, but it certainly solves some of the commonest problems.
[0] https://www.vnews.com/Upper-Valley-state-legislators-push-fo...
Do you think the government is less complicated than the average software project? Does the idea of firing all mid-level and senior developers strike you as good practice?
Systemic corruption is very much a thing, but I think it's mostly concentrated in the legislative branch of government, than the executive or the judicial. I personally think it's easier to add to a system than remove from it, and maybe we ought to rethink the bicameral system for one that is more capable of representing the interests of the general population.
Now, the real problem is that any changes to the system need to come from the system itself :) so there's obvious interests at play that might not be touched.
What makes you think that every politician being exposed to the public spotlight for a very limited period is even a solution, rather than an accelerant, to the problem of political corruption?
The people in power are the ones to vote on enabling that, but they will never vote against their own power. We already have the power to do this collectively and that is to vote out the incumbent every election as a default.
Oh no, not the gdpr again?
I'm all for right to repair laws, but I would hate to see a law concerning even slightly technical topics written only by elected parties. It would be a disaster.
The legislators approved the editing of the laws and voted for the text as written. They are responsible and should be held accountable.
The legislators' job is to represent their constituents, not those who pay enough to tell them what to legislate.
Specific to the US.
They're rarely if ever written by elected officials directly. Rather legislative aids do the bulk of the authoring and reading of bills along with input from lobbyists.
Laws may be problematic due to the unfamiliarity the authors/sponsors have with technical details and nuances but overwhelmingly the difficulty lies in creating legislature that cannot be interpreted in any other way than it's intention when challenged by an army of highly paid and highly skilled attorneys.
No, an elected official cannot be punished for voting.
/s
Pardon my ignorance on this, I'm not American, but how can the governer do this? How can the governer change the laws the legislature made? Or does it mean it was sent back to the legislature and they were forced to make changes as the governer was not signing? But it passed with super majority, the governor cannot fight a supermajority, right?
In this case, I believe subtle changes were made to this bill just before the NYS legislature was going to be on recess and it passed and signed into law.
But it doesn't explain how the amended-to-the-governor's-preferences version became law.
Wouldn't the legislature have had to vote on the 'subtly changed' bill again for it to become law?
If they don't need to, yet it still somehow can become law in amended form, isn't it bypassing the powers of the legislature?
The changes made it so it would not cover agricultural equipment and big appliances like washing machines and refrigerators.
It still covers electronic devices purchased at retail after it goes into effect (2023-07-1) such as computers, phones, and tablets.
Hew is that "worse than useless"?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9205919/Fridges-was...
It's difficult to imagine someone could be so unaware of the battles waged around them.
Yes, it's the same company. No, this isn't obviously part of their <insert classic Microsoft internal email subject> strategy. Yes, they can take actions that align with your interests. No, they're not "good now".
I guess I read the headline as "Business did business activity to further goal of doing business".
Microsoft indeed sucks, but it's silly to pretend that these devices are instant e-waste because they aren't officially supported by Windows 11. The majority can run it, but aren't allowed to by-default because of the new security policy. Whether Microsoft is using security as an excuse to promote perverse incentives is up to you.
Now they say he can't upgrade [that 'last ever version' thing didn't last, huh] ... I've not found a way around the current restrictions yet?
It's quite good at the moment, there are a flood of good second hand systems from businesses who are upgrading.
There's no problem with MS developing beyond their current systems. Indeed it feels like they go too far with backward compatibility. But lying (or putting in false requirements) in order to get hardware scrapped is just wrong -- do home users really need TPM2, seems more like a nice to have to me.
The reality is that most people will not repurpose a computer, they throw them out. Rarely (in UK) the device might make it to a computer recycling place. Heck, I've seen people throw out computers because the "you're low on disk space" warning came up.
After msft's experiences with Win10, they decided Windows wouldn't become more secure unless they enabled features by default. And the majority of high-impact features depend on a TPM.
I'd argue that home users do need these features in the current security environment. TPMs have been required in new devices since 2016, so people are more likely to have thrown out incompatible devices already (CPU/RAM if not disk)
Unrelated: They should also rejuvenate offline Office and bring back Works.
Unrelated, one other area where MS could make a big splash is hobbyist boards. An x86 SoC with BASIC would probably sell like crazy right about now with nostalgia cycle being where it is.
I had to say I was creating a guest account and I didn't know their email - that is apparently what a "local" account is now in Windows, if either of those things aren't true you need to use Authenticator or Live or Passport or whatever it is called.
And if my internet is spotty, I get a 10 second delay logging into my computer because my login screen needs to show me a picture/ad. I finally cancelled my annual 365 membership because the invasiveness had gotten to be too much and they don't deserve my money.
I am sure if I upgraded to Windows Business Professional Home edition, I could pay for a Microsoft certification course to learn how to disable all these features, but I'd rather just switch to Linux.
Is this the same company that manufactures permanently glued shut Surface tablets and "surface books"? One end of the company is clearly not talking to the other.
Go look at ifixit teardowns for any Microsoft surface product.
They've been like that for a long time. To be honest, most big companies I've worked at/work/for have had that going on to some extent or another.
I'm just happy someone at Microsoft is at least advocating for Right to Repair.
> Go look at ifixit teardowns for any Microsoft surface product.
Newer ones are better. And even old surface machines were mostly awesome, premium devices. (My main gripe was an unacknowledged design flaw, which was well known among users, but not the designers - I hope I complained enough that it finally found its way on someone's radar. Haven't heard the same issue in newer surfaces - but I had the issue across 3 different Surface Book 2's)
They've become pretty okay, actually!
This surprises me. Microsoft legendarily succeeded on the back of "IBM PC compatible" copycat hardware. Their whole concept is that you run their software on whatever machine you have. What were they trying to protect?
Honestly, given the necessity to get security upgrades, I think companies would still buy an OSS windows with connections to repositories.
My personal take is mainly focused on more verbose diagnostic outputs(like for people stuck in "just a moment" screens alike) and more management tools(like some basic control and logging for BackgroundTasks of UWP apps).
I love my Surface pro. (In context of my use cases, which involve a mix of programming/CAD etc on the go, and writing with a pen).
Its biggest downside is lack of repairability, including battery replacement.
Obviously there’s room for improvement, I think they just didn’t have a lot of hardware experience initially and were using a lot of outside design firms who didn’t have a ton of direction.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/68671/does-the-surface-pro-9-mar...
Would you say a car is not repairable because it takes experience and several hundred dollars worth of equipment just to get to the affected part?
If something like that were required for dealing with a broken transmission, that would be something else.
Yep. And a 7/10 score (IIRC) used to indicate easily-repairable-by-the-inexperienced.
Sure, like repairing a car, you won't be able to fix or maintain certain things without the right tools, but being able to use the right tools without voiding your warranty is a huuuge step in the right direction. I mean, imagine if your car insurance company refused to cover you in an accident because you changed your own oil once!
Sure glue helps, but is it really necessary? I haven’t designed any product but I would expect that rubber seals with screws to be good enough for consumers goods.
But getting that strong structure only works if you have good, continuous, bond between all sides of the box structure. Hence the use of glue. Replacing it with screws would require either a huge number of screws to achieve the same quality of bond as glue, or substantially thicker walls to make up for the poor bond between screen and chassis. Each screw then becomes giant stress riser, focusing all the forces applied to the device into the material around the screws.
You really get to have devices like a surface that very thin, with huge screens, without glue the screen to chassis, because the screen and its bond are crucial structural elements.
On the other hand, I do think the current leadership at Microsoft has correctly realized there are huge long term benefits to improving the industry you operate in for the consumer.
Though I wager they'll find a way to carve out exceptions for Surfaces and Xboxen.
When you deny ordinary people the easy path of an upgrade and force them to do a clean install (because "security"), you induce the vast majority of them to avoid the migration pain and just buy new hardware, with the new OS preinstalled. If this isn't a way to force people to buy new hardware via software, I don't know what is.
But my perspective is unusual. The friction increase for Windows 11 over its predecessor is, for me, slight; but I've used so many WMs and DEs that adjusting to a new one is hardly noticeable. To a normie, Windows 11's pebble-in-shoe UI changes -- the start menu location change, the right-click menu change, the emphasis on connecting you to Microsoft and third-party apps and services rather than getting things done -- would be sources of profound aggravation.
That sells you on Windows the same way stepping in cat barf sells you on your new pet.
The entire experience is cheapened.
MS Edge, for instance, actually has an excellent base UI. But the UX is destroyed by plastering horrible tabloid news and ads all over the first launch experience.
The engineers are MS are obviously very good at what they do. But it feels like the rest of the product and marketing departments get ahold of things and jam in trashware and ruin it.
Windows 11 is fine. It's fine. The graphical changes to the UI are in improvement to my eyes, and they are slowly adding back utility. Such as right-clicking on the task bar and being able to launch the activity monitor!
They even have tabbed explorer windows now!
Still, MS did such a bad job of launching W11 that my two gamer teenager kids and their friends have sworn off it for as long as they can!
There were Windows products people were genuinely excited for. 95 being the obvious one, but WinXP did really deliver the promise of modern, NT-based windows for the home desktop, and Win7 felt like we finally broke free of the stagnation of XP (worsened by the bad press Vista got).
I willingly went out and acquired a legit copy of Windows Vista (at the time, the pre-pre-predecessor to Bing Rewards let you grind some crummy games for a few weekends to earn enough tokens for a copy) but even being told Win11 is free and will be delivered directly to my desktop, I just go in and slide the TPM option to "off" in the BIOS to make sure it doesn't prompt it.
Using fucking Corp licenced Win11 Pro and still getting ads/spamcontent in my OS?
I'm staying on Windows 10 until EoL in 2025. If Windows 12 is out by then, I may switch, otherwise, I'm moving to the long-term support version of Windows 10.
The frontend UI still sucks, but it's overall better than the nonsense known as Metro and regardless it's all nothing that can't be addressed with sufficient will.
And being a 'pierat' I've already seen Sony institute 'dont play torrented content on PlayStations'. And that was the PS3.
I completely expect similar with Windows and Mac. We already see keygens and patches marked as "malware" when the only mal- is for the publishers.
It may end up that the best play-anything-anywhere will be Linux.
"I hate big cars and they increased the size of my favorite midrange SUV. I wanted to buy the latest generation but because it's too big I instead bought a Ford F150".
You wouldn't believe how often an equivalent scenario happens with laptops, phones, Linux distributions.
It's largely emotional aka spite. Plus an excuse of sorts for a guilty pleasure.
Also "security" is not a real excuse. If someone can physically grab my computer they will be able to break into it few days after Windows 11 is life since there will be some exploit like there always are.
It might be restrictive in all the ways I don't care about, but oh well.
You mean the way macOS Ventura is only for their hardware released in the last six years? [1]
Apple’s absolutely do discontinue support for older hardware all the time when they release new macOS and iOS versions.
You can keep running the older operating system but it will stop receiving updates. It doesn’t seem hugely different to having to stay on Windows 10 instead of Windows 11.
You absolutely did not have to throw anything away now, you wanted a new toy.
Windows 10 is still supported until November 2025, 2 and a half years from now.
I have noticed that people love their operating systems, especially in the Mac camp, even if switching to a different operating system would make almost no actual day-to-day difference in experience to them because they would be using the same applications/visiting the same websites anyway. And they like to make false claims about the other operating systems that they don't use.
From the top of my mind it seems they would start with "I was struggling to get into the zen mode, disconnect, and seeing Apple failed to do with with ScreenTime their latest effort helped me perfectly. It just works!".
I mean that forum is hard to believe to be real - in short and politer terms.
Bizarre take. It's not random, it's specifically CPUs that support modern hardware security mitigations + features.
There's a pretty great talk from Bluehat a few days ago that goes into why Microsoft is doing this:
https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2021/08/27/update-...
It only added 7th gen processors that have DCH driver support, which is the absolute minimum baseline for W11 support.
Could you explain in what way "DCH driver support" is a "hardware security mitigation" as you wrote?
Moreover, doesn't basing this on "DCH driver support" basically let the hardware vendors decide which otherwise-capable CPUs they'd like to make obsolete through software updates?
And furthermore, note that the OS isn't even turning on the CPU features they require by default, as the article also mentions.
(I'm probably going to just leave it at this, but suffice it to say the evidence doesn't seem in their favor.)
[1] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T-...
That statement seems misleading at best. According to Microsoft's page[0] on that processor, the Dell Precision 5520 is supported as well, which means this support is clearly not limited to Microsoft's own hardware.
Depending on how Lenovo configured the BIOS, it is entirely possible that they disabled certain features that Microsoft deemed critical later on with Windows 11. Vendors do plenty of weird things with BIOSes, which can have far reaching impacts on what an operating system is able to do with the hardware. Or Lenovo didn't provide a necessary driver, or whatever the actual problem was here. Dell managed to meet the requirements just fine, apparently.
Yes, obsoleting a bunch of hardware sucks, but your claim that this was to help Intel sell more chips is extremely dubious. Your claim that Microsoft isn't doing this for security reasons because they're exempting only their own hardware doesn't mesh with the reality of that Dell laptop. None of the evidence here supports some grand conspiracy here, as far as I can tell.
I also found a forum thread[1] where at least one person was struggling to update their Surface Studio 2 to Windows 11, so even that hardly seems cut and dry.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...
[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/window...
> Depending on BIOS settings, it is entirely possible
"Entirely possible" is quite a big umbrella that covers planned obsolescence quite well, too. It's not like using software to make hardware obsolete is lacking in historical precedent.
> There isn't some grand conspiracy here, as far as I can tell.
Well, it's "entirely possible", as far as I can tell. Though I'm not even claiming there is one - there isn't a particular need for a conspiracy here.
> I also found an entire forum thread[1] of people struggling to update a Surface Studio 2 to Windows 11, so even that hardly seems cut and dry.
All of those comments were posted in the span of the first 4 days Windows 11 was officially released. If you dig a bit more you see people have succeeded afterward. [1] So that was most likely just a bug on their side, which isn't surprising given their own device was an edge case they were trying to make an exception for.
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-11/windows-11...
No, someone else responded to that. I was just here to look at a specific claim and see what your evidence showed. If that claim had been supported by the evidence, it would have been scandalous, but it wasn’t. I’m not an expert in the Windows security model, so I don’t claim to know anything about DCH drivers.
If you're going to complain about people not responding to every single thing in your comments, then why didn't you respond to the main point I was making? The Dell laptop was supported as well. Clearly Dell put in the effort, where Lenovo did not.
> Though I'm not even claiming there is one - there isn't a particular need for a conspiracy here.
Your previous comments absolutely are making claims that there were large conspiracies at play. You claimed that Microsoft did this to help Intel sell more chips, which would be a huge conspiracy between Microsoft and Intel. Claiming that Microsoft lied about their reasons for obsoleting old processors by trying to present evidence that Microsoft wasn’t following their own stated reasons naturally also requires the existence of a significant conspiracy within Microsoft. Perhaps you didn’t mean to claim those things?
Because Lenovo did not bother writing DCH drivers, given DCH drivers are the baseline requirement.
> Could you explain in what way "DCH driver support" is a "hardware security mitigation" as you wrote?
I was recalling a 2 year old blog post in my head, but the point is still that much of the requirement is around baseline security. If you watch the video I linked, the speaker does go over all of this.
> basically let hardware vendors decide which otherwise-capable CPUs they'd like to make obsolete through software updates?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. DCH drivers were already the default for current-gen hardware _before_ W11 even came out, W11 just made it a requirement. Vendors clearly aren't going to go write some greenfield drivers for a years-old 6th gen intel product just to support W11, as those devices will be 10 years old by the time W10 support ends.
> note that the OS isn't even turning on the CPU features they require by default
Note that you're still referencing a blog post from 2021. W11 22H2 enables core isolation by default for new installations, and HVCI is enabled by default when using the Windows Enterprise security baseline.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-security-ba...
I have in fact. It's a nice talk about security in Windows 11, but I haven't seen anything in it answering these issues. He says absolutely nothing about DCH and doesn't give any explanation for the minimum hardware requirements. The closest I recall was he was mentioned of integrating Pluton on chip and making its firmware directly updatable, but I don't believe for example that the 7820HQ and the 7700HQ are any different with regards to Pluton.
> I'm not sure what you're getting at. DCH drivers were already the default for current-gen hardware _before_ W11 even came out, W11 just made it a requirement.
No, they didn't even make DCH a requirement; Windows 11 runs with standard drivers too. [1] And, again, DCH doesn't imply anything about hardware security mitigations, which was purportedly their reason for this.
> Note that you're still referencing a blog post from 2021. W11 22H2 enables core isolation by default for new installations, and HVCI is enabled by default when using the Windows Enterprise security baseline.
Because the situation is fundamentally the same since 2021. Core isolation support is not a distinguishing feature between (say) the 7700HQ and 7820HQ, as far as I know. And the Windows Enterprise security baseline seems kind of irrelevant for the millions of average consumer devices out there. A company that cares about consumers or the environment is telling consumers across the planet to turn perfectly good devices into electronic trash now because they might add something that helps security years later?
I'm going to let my comments rest here; people draw their own conclusions.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/pr4kmr/why_is_wi...
The hardware security baseline is one of the first topics he covers as part of Windows 11 security strategy, with mention given to features that require hardware support and how they intend to enable these by default going forward as not doing so was a failure of the Windows 10 strategy. He even mentions "virtualization extensions" aka HVCI-related features which would be non-performant to enable by default in older hardware.
How exactly would a strategy of enabled-by-default work if the hardware wasn't there to support it? You seem to be looking for some hard "gotcha" statement to refute your argument instead of considering all of the information available in front of you.
> No, they didn't even make DCH a requirement;
By setting the minimium CPU requirement to systems that use DCH drivers, they effectively did.
> Core isolation support is not a distinguishing feature between (say) the 7700HQ and 7820HQ, as far as I know.
That's not the issue here. The 7700HQ lacks Trusted Execution support (aka TPM), whilst it's included in the 7820HQ, thus it does not meet the minimum requirements.
> electronic trash now because they might add something that helps security years later?
No, it's giving people the heads up that Windows 11 security strategy requires these features and gives people & companies time to adapt. For example, motherboards now ship with TPM 2.0 enabled by default, so as Windows 11 rolls out more features that require it (some aspects of Windows Hello already do), users aren't stuck with a system that needs a BIOS update or are unable to use the new features. Windows 12 will very likely make these requirements hard-enforced rather than soft-enforced and thus it'll make the 11-to-12 upgrade a smoother experience.
> How exactly would a strategy of enabled-by-default work if the hardware wasn't there to support it? You seem to be looking for some hard "gotcha" statement to refute your argument instead of considering all of the information available in front of you.
I'd say the core issue here is of priorities. Microsoft may be treating aggressive enabled-by-default approach to security as a good thing. A lot of other people don't. If you don't, then the high-level summary of the issue is, essentially, "By making some relatively recent hardware features a requirement for Win11 in the name of sekhurity, while also aggressively pushing users to upgrade and actively preventing them from continuing to use Win10, they're forcing people to destroy perfectly good machines for bullshit reasons".
I'm having hard time seeing fault in this view.
Declarative:
Install the driver by using only declarative INF directives.
Don't include co-installers or RegisterDll functions.
Componentized:
Edition-specific, OEM-specific, and optional customizations to the driver are separate from the base driver package.
As a result, the base driver, which provides only core device functionality, can be targeted, flighted, and serviced independently from the customizations.
Hardware-support-app:
Any user interface (UI) component associated with a Windows Driver must be packaged as a Hardware Support App (HSA) or preinstalled on the OEM device.
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-11-understandin...
I'm typing this on a T430 with an i7-3632QM running Win 11. The stupid thing is I never wanted Win 11 on it. MS suckered me into installing Windows 10 update ver 22000 (just after ver 19043) which didn't mention anything about Win 11.
That's because those are NT kernel version numbers, not Windows marketing version numbers.
Windows 10 and 11 both identify internally as NT10.0.X.Y where the X and Y are the specific build numbers.
So suddenly, all the Windows 10 computers are insecure or what?
A normal person looking at "Windows 11 is not supported on your device" WILL think that their hardware is not good enough to run the authoritative OS.
This is less about security and more about planning a strategy to sell more devices. Anybody denying this possibility is just ignoring on purpose.
Here, I am not actually arguing against the addition of TPM or anything. I am arguing against them being a fixed requirement to run the OS that would otherwise run without any issues because it quite literally is a Windows 10 reskin, nothing more.
This is proven by the fact that they broke their own requirements on their own surface devices. Which tells me that this is less about them being serious about security and more about declaring most fairly recent hardware obsolete.
It's anti-consumer at best and deceitful attempt to sell more computers to non-tech folks at worst.
"Intel® 6th Generation Core Processors or Newer Processors are supported by Windows DCH Drivers."
I'm well aware computing power for practical use cases has plateaued since around 2011, but those Coffee Lake and Zen+ systems (let alone older) are coming due for replacement/upgrade soon for anyone inside of a lifecycle cadence whether Windows 11 demanded it or not.
For anyone who isn't who cares about hanging on to old hardware, it's perfectly fine to just keep running Windows 10. All those guys saying "yOuR sYStEM iS iNSeCurE!!1!1!1" are snake oil merchants wanting to sell you something.
Increasingly hard to get this days, especially through official channels. Currently, Microsoft actively prevents you from getting a Win10 installer/image, by redirecting all the relevant links to Windows 11 pages.
> All those guys saying "yOuR sYStEM iS iNSeCurE!!1!1!1" are snake oil merchants wanting to sell you something.
You mean like Microsoft? Saying that the new system is more secure is equivalent to saying your old system is insecure, given everyone's insistence that you either are fully secured or not at all.
Really? I used this just a few weeks ago and definitely got a Windows 10 ISO.
https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows10ISO
For reference, I searched the following on Google
> windows 10 iso
Additionally, I suspected I'll need a new product key. I couldn't get that from Microsoft - every link I've managed to Google also had a redirect to Windows 11.
(In the end, I purchased an electronic license from some local software shop. Then it turned out that somehow, Microsoft considers my wife's Win7 license still valid for Win10 Pro, which is nice. I used the key to upgrade another machine, which I thought was on Pro, but actually was on Home.)
You're (probably unintentionally) exaggerating, but that's not how it works. When a new CPU comes out, all the machines on the market don't magically replace their CPUs with that one on day 1. The machine I'm typing this comment on right now was a pretty high-end one I got after those CPUs came out, and its CPU is from an older generation. In fact, I don't even recall having seen machines with newer CPUs on the market (at least not with the minimum specs I was looking at) until quite a few months later, though my memory might be hazy here. Sometimes the price points are also a factor here too.
> those Coffee Lake and Zen+ systems (let alone older) are coming due for replacement/upgrade soon for anyone inside of a lifecycle cadence whether Windows 11 demanded it or not.
That's by no means universally true; there are plenty of good machines out there that work just fine and that people want to keep using. Again, speaking from personal experience, I know my machine is perfectly good and I hope to keep using it for several more years. An older one I had from several years before that, which I gave away for unrelated reasons, was also great, and I would still use it if I had it and my current one somehow broke. There's been literally no reason for me to throw these away anytime soon other than Microsoft forcing me to. Lots of people are being forced to throw away perfectly good hardware because Microsoft/Google/Apple/etc. force them to, often via software.
As I already said, if you want to keep running Windows 10 (or 7, or XP) it's perfectly fine. Tell everyone who screams "SECURITY!" at you to screw off, they all want to sell you something.
Even if you do upgrade to a new machine, why does someone have to throw away their old one? Keep it as a sub computer, or give it a new role in your life. Windows 11 mandates TPM2 and SecureBoot, but it doesn't mandate throwing your old machine in the trash.
We are indeed!
AMD also "benefits" with their minimum being Zen+ (aka Ryzen 2000 series and certain 1000 series processors) to Intel's Coffee Lake (8th gen) and certain Kaby Lake (7th gen) processors.
This isn't the main reason, I'm not even sure why they would do that, Microsoft will cheerfully build for whatever hardware is available. They're not indebted to Intel.
The real reason is to finally close the circle of every mainstream OS supporting hardware-backed remote attestation. Once that is in place digital controls ala DRM become extremely reliable and virtually impossible to crack. Pirating locally-ran software will be as difficult as extracting the private key from a Trezor or YubiKey.
Microsoft added software mitigations for it to Windows 10, but they came with a price of a ~20% slowdown.
By the time of Windows 11, Intel fixed the issue in the newer processors, so instead of supporting both old CPUs (with slowdown) and new CPUs, Microsoft just scrapped the mitigations altogether and limited Windows 11 to new CPUs only.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...
Especially with win11 claiming to be eco-friendly in various places ("reduce CO2 footprint") it's somewhat annoying to force a hardware refresh cycle like that.
If people want extensive warranties like that on their electronics, they can already buy extensive warranties on their electronics.
Why force everyone to pay for these things?
Or do you just want to control what other people are doing?
Since you raised the valid point of “why make everyone pay”, it seems they (OP) are concerned that currently _everyone_ is paying for the externalities of shitty electronics and the associated ewaste.
Of course these kinds of externalities are impossible (or just really hard?) to rectify at the individual-action level, its a collective action problem.
So they raised the interesting point why not target the specific companies who manufactured this faulty product and require them to clean-up the problem they’ve created.
If nothing else, it’s a useful conversation to have?
Assume for the sake of argument, that I agree that there are externalities and that we should do something about them.
The economics textbook tells you the simple solution: tax the externalities. In our case, you might want to tax e-waste (or directly tax whatever is bad about e-waste, like heavy metals or so.)
Then let the market figure out how to deal with it. Perhaps offering extended warranties is the way to go? Perhaps developing compostable computers is the way to go? Perhaps using fewer computers is the way to go? Perhaps just sucking it up, doing nothing and paying for the externalities is the way to go?
It's not at all obvious to me which of these (if any) is the best solution. And I don't have high hopes than any government would figure out the best solution either.
Different people might even have different answers, and suppliers can provide for this diversity.
This simple tax avoids a lot of regulatory complexity. Remember, that regulatory complexity leads to loopholes and regulatory capture and endless lobbying.
Do you tax on material weight ? But bigger sized systems tends to be easier to repair/recycle than nano electronics. They also often last longer.
Do you tax on raw materials ? That would exclude all the junk made abroad. Or on components ? That would make a gigantic and perpetually changing list to maintain, creating an incentive to always create alternatives only needed to game this tax.
Hope does that address the externality “not infinite material rarefaction” ? Making thinks more expensive just make them less affordable for a part of the population while the other part can not care much especially for cheap disposable(!) small devices.
I don’t have the perfect solution but IMHO we need regulations, not tax. Creating an obligatory (long) warranty would push the society in the sustainability direction. I don’t need 2$ led lamp, an even slimmer keyboard or a 120hz screen, just want it to last way more (or being able to make repair) that 2/3 product cycle time frame defined by the corp business team. Who want to say to their children “enjoy this tech while there’s still some rare earth left” ?
You can adapt the tax to fix that problem. See how VAT systems handle imports and exports. If your stuff needs eg lead, you either prove that you dispose of it properly, or you pay the tax.
> I don’t have the perfect solution but IMHO we need regulations, not tax.
Why? Wouldn't your argument also work for a 'good enough' tax?
I agree that a tax also needs some careful thinking about what the exactly the externalities are that you want to tax. But it still leaves more flexibility to consumers and suppliers than a blanket regulation like 'mandatory long warranty, whether you want it or not'.
> Making thinks more expensive just make them less affordable for a part of the population while the other part can not care much especially for cheap disposable(!) small devices.
I don't understand this objection. Could you please explain?
Obligatory long warranties also raise the price of goods.
> Who want to say to their children “enjoy this tech while there’s still some rare earth left” ?
Are you suggesting we are going to run out of rare earth elements? Fat chance. We are sitting on a giant ball of matter, we are not going to run out of any elements. We might be running out of easily mine-able deposits of something, but either the price will go up a bit or someone will invent a new technique. (The former often leads to the latter.)
> I don’t need 2$ led lamp, an even slimmer keyboard or a 120hz screen, just want it to last way more (or being able to make repair) that 2/3 product cycle time frame defined by the corp business team.
That's a valid preference, and I suggest you put your money where your mouth is.
It is way harder for a customs officier to distinguish if a package contains some trace of lead, gold, bore, cobalt, disprosium, neodyme… in some micro chip than classifying in “raw material, “alcool”, “processed food”, “weapon” etc.
Making thinks more expensive to prevent usage is pointless and that’s why countries put speed limits in place. Speed is dangerous (see ek=1/2mv2) and a “speed tax” would only reduce a road accidents to the proportional inverse of its users wallets. As the e-waste and elements rarefaction have impacts that last way longer than a road accidents, we need to absolute regulations to avoid those externalities. Relatives regulations (taxes) are good to balance some parts of the economy, not to prevent problems.
Of course I would stand for tax it can do a “good enough” job.
> We might be running out of easily mine-able deposits of something, but either the price will go up a bit or someone will invent a new technique.
What makes you suppose the price will go up only a bit ? What makes you expect a material price will stay bellow the economical threshold of its extraction ? I dream too of new clean techniques but the history showed us those inventions relies on way more energy and/or also have externalities on resources and environnement. I’m sure you’ll find plenty in battery material alternatives and oil replacement/new extraction techniques. Fracking [0] is my Favorite one.
0 https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/D...
I'm not sure why you keep harping on about people's wallets? Yes, rich people can afford more stuff. What else is new?
The economic theory of taxing externalities does not rely on all people having the same size wallet.
Have a look at eg London's congestion charge: it's not a problem for that system, that some people are richer than others.
You can also look at Singapore's congestion charge or Singapore's Certificate of Entitlement system. Or look at the very successful US sulphur dioxide cap and trade programme: it's not a problem that rich people can in theory just pay to emit more sulphur dioxide, the system still works.
> What makes you suppose the price will go up only a bit?
In the long run, the same reasoning that made Simon win his wager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
> What makes you expect a material price will stay bellow the economical threshold of its extraction ?
Sorry, I don't understand. The price will generally be above that threshold, otherwise why would anyone bother extracting the stuff?
> Fracking [0] is my Favorite one.
Fracking is great, yes, I agree. One my favourites as well:
The extra natural gas that the US got from fracking allowed them to reduce their carbon emissions in the 2010s, despite lack of political support for such a goal! Holier than thou Europe meanwhile increased their carbon emissions, because fracking is verboten over there, so they burned more coal and oil instead.
Because some regulation is actually useful in a world where consumers cannot be expected to know everything and be able to test everything.
And some assumptions about a product should hold true as well. E.g. the assumption should be that if I buy a desktop CPU today I should be able to use it for at least n years. Because how would you know this beforehand?
If Intel made an optimization that turns out to be a security flaw, that is totally their fault and they should cover it. This is nothing any consumer could have known (and rherefore avoided buying) beforehand. This is the cost of taking risks in business.
It seems to be a popular stance these days to shill for corporations and protect them from ever having their risks realized. But that makes the products and the world we live in worse for everybody and gives you nothing at all.
You ask the manufacturer, duh? If they lie, that's fraud. If you don't like the answer, you don't buy.
> If Intel made an optimization that turns out to be a security flaw, that is totally their fault and they should cover it. This is nothing any consumer could have known (and therefore avoided buying) beforehand. This is the cost of taking risks in business.
Customers and suppliers should be able to allocate such risks between themselves however they like.
You can fiddle with what the default should be, in case they haven't negotiated anything.
But if both customer and supplier agree, the customer should be allowed to bear such a risk.
> It seems to be a popular stance these days to shill for corporations and protect them from ever having their risks realized.
Why? I have nothing against any particular allocation of the risks, as long as all involved parties agree. (Otherwise, they just don't make a deal.)
> Gotcha, so you are also against electrical regulations like requirements to use tested insulators etc?
If you claim they are tested, you better not lie. Otherwise it's fraud and you should be held liable.
If a customer wants to buy untested insulators, who am I to keep them?
I mean, in the most extreme case, a customer can buy bread and try to use it as an insulator, if they really want to. There's nothing the supplier can do about that.
How should I, as a consumer, have voted against this with my wallet, before it happened?
We can argue whether this is the fault of the hardware manufacturer or the software company that sells the OS, but I am 100% sure that no consumer should take the blame for "not doing their research".
That's what long term reputation is for.
I happily resell you Intel processors at a 10x markup but you get a ten year warranty that I'll replace your processor with a new one of no worse specs, if similar vulnerabilities get discovered.
Details to be negotiated.
(More seriously: you don't need a new manufacturer. Someone else can do the warranty at a price.
That's actually what eg Apple Care: if a part inside your device catches on fire, Apple will replace it, even though they did not necessarily manufacture that part.
I have no clue whether their particular policy covers the vulnerabilities we are talking about. But you can easily imagine a variant of such an insurance policy that does.)
If someone promises you that the product will do something or eg 'not be defective', they should stick to that promise or face prosecution for fraud or false advertising or similar.
I pay my taxes to eg fund national defense or make sure that poor people get some welfare. I don't pay my taxes so that the government can decide how much warranty I need. (They do some of that anyway. But I'd rather they don't.)
Lawmakers could make chip designers replace all the chips but,
1) that's not very environmental either
2) it would be pretty disastrous for everyone when Intel and AMD go under because they can't actually afford to replace every chip they had in existence at the time
3) assuming this was somehow done in a way they could afford, the costs for these replacements ultimately get passed on to customers. For replacements that were never necessary to begin with. It's just kind of wasteful.
Right now, that argument seems to be simultaneously "It's critical enough for Microsoft to explicitly deny running Windows 11 on it" and "It's not critical enough that Intel and AMD should do something about it, except to sell more stuff."
What kind of incentives does that create?
Just like with too big to fail companies and banks, only half of the equation is being applied:
CPU industry wants to start using risky design techniques to get an edge on the competition? Who are we to tell them no? it's a free market.
CPU industry can't afford to replace the defects that came about from their risky choices? They are too big and important to be held accountable.
You're ignoring half the equation too here. There are benefits to having faster and more efficient computers for the past couple decades that could execute more instructions per clock cycle.
These vulnerabilities are subtle, hard to predict, and can take years or decades to discover. Anything that makes computers faster is a risky design technique. If you want safe chips, you'd better say goodbye to caches, multithreading, and hyperthreading as well. You'll be left with a slow, inefficient chip. Non-American companies that aren't forced to take zero risks would take over the market and be miles ahead.
The first part of that isn't right. Microsoft decided it wasn't worth it for them to support 6 year old chips on their new OS. People with older hardware can continue to run Windows 10. The two operating systems are almost the same anyway.
Microsoft's decision is not an indicator that you're in much danger from Meltdown.
These problems can’t be fixed without large sacrifices in performance, perhaps it’ll happen in specialized products but it hasn’t happened yet.
As per your assertion (that I agree with, btw) Intel/AMD Model N+1 is affected (just slightly less so) and can be used with Windows 11.
So, either this is fixable, then it's on Intel/AMD to replace defective hardware (or offer a fix that is worth unlocking Windows 11 over, e.g. through microcode) or it's not fixable in which case, why prevent the older chips from running Windows 11 if they're in exactly the same situation?
Either way, Microsoft's decision seems arbitrary, and puts the onus on their customers instead of the culprits, the chip vendors, who even get rewarded by encouraging new sales!
The claim that this class of issues is the reason for Microsoft’s hardware requirements for Windows 11 is not mine.
Would be nice if upgrading to a new version of Windows came with such a mild penalty!
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-11-understandin...
Beside that in most desktop settings is even useless, you don't even care about elevating privileges with a vulnerability, since most users work with the administrator account anyway (yes there is UAC to ask for privileges but let's face it, 99% of users always click yes because they are used like this).
I usually disable mitigations on my personal computers and I'm not concerned about it.
It was found to be exploitable via a website in your browser. This would have been dire for any kind of user unless they literally only used the computer for gaming and did no web browsing.
Right now, Microsoft is not officially supporting the older processors but Windows 11 runs on 7th gen intel processors without any real issues except that it's a little slower than how it would run with Windows 10. But no work stopping issues at all if you were to run it yourself. I believe Microsoft even has a published way to do it if I'm not mistaken. It's manual and a little messy for now, with some asterisks around risks for automated updates, but it works.
Given all of this and MS's outlook towards backward compatibility I can see them eventually allowing older generations to upgrade after agreeing to some risks/performance degradation.
They lost the phone business, they've just now pulled out of making mice and keyboards. Their MS Surface line is not something people buy - it's something companies buy, with a support contract. Since their consumer hardware business is gone, they now can at least use that to hurt companies that still have a consumer hardware business.
But for selfish reasons and anti-competitive self-interest, they are doing something good for us against a greater evil. It's pretty much the DePanties/Disney thing where we cheer for a large evil corporation.
See Google. Do no evil was easy for them when their business model made that look easy. Once privacy became a big deal then they became evil. But really its just interests we’re no longer aligned.
If they were just an OS company, they can support whatever hardware legislation they want... but to sell a locked down turd on one hand while crying about openness with the other really takes the cake.
They also make unreparable devices, so their pretend support has no weight.
This is merely part of the strategy to drive blows at companies like Apple to hurt margins associated with closed off ecosystems
And so what? Even if they are doing that just to get at each other, if in the end, we get better privacy and devices that are easier to fix, I take it.
ODMs and OEMs may not like Microsoft "trespassing" on their property.
- Howard Tayler, Schlock Mercenary
Bog standard cheap or business desktops and high-end gamer boxes are already very reparable.
Any fortune 100 company can be expected to hedge their bets and secure plausible deniability.
Right to repair is getting silly. Do you have the right to repair a CPU? The manufacturing on the flex connectors inside most iPhones today are incredibly delicate!
Apple need sticking to. Their monopolistic (yes, they don't have a monopoly, only a near one) practices are abhorrent on many levels and seeing that they're incapable of regulating themselves, they need a slap down. They are getting more and more egregious for even very basic stuff - do you know that you can't even upgrade the few remaining non-glued parts on Mac Studios and Minis like SSDs? That replacing stuff like the screen of the iPhone doesn't work without them blessing it? Outside of the meticulous efforts put into making even the opening of Apple hardware harder than it needs to be.
And Apple need even sticking to if they use ex-execs of theirs in blatant conflict of interest to sabotage laws that impact Apple.
... so?
Of course I do. I'll probably fuck it up, but I still have the right to try.
Good idea for all != Right for all