Edge sends images you view online to Microsoft
neowin.net
neowin.net
Couldn't this wreak havoc on doing things like viewing medical images, inserting false detail that isn't there?
As well as on text in images, e.g. inventing a cleanly readable but hallucinated license plate number on a car, or financial figure, where the original is blurry?
Not only does this seem like a terribly dangerous idea, but I'm shocked that a legal review at Microsoft would ever have approved this in the first place.
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
Also, reading the timeline was great.
> March 2015 The German Federal Office for Safety in Information Technology bans JBIG2 from being used for archival purposes.
Wonder if any other governments took notice as well.
Without sounding to condescending: Bro... this entire Industry still relies on using fax or snailmail for records. Using slow, leaky, non-private/seure channels for sensitive information is not as much of a concern to this field than one thinks if you've been in the belly of the beast.
Ask anyone who has spent anytime doing IT work at a hospital, or better yet a disgruntled nurse who works the counter after a 12 hour shift.
You ever try requesting an MRI in the US?
After needing several during COVID and being turned a way and having lots of time on my hands I've actually learned a hack to get it the same week (or in my case the same day recently) now that we're out of the pandemic because I knew who to press for a physical paper trail and get it submitted (via fax) and have it approved by all parties: it cost me a day off of work, and tons of leg work on the phone but it was done and I literately didn't care so long as it was done and prove my method was sound. I got it done after business hours, too!
I'm starting to think that the issue with it being so archaic is not because a better solution doesn't exist, but because it's made this way in order for them to justify the long delays in procedures and increase membership duration on their policies and they use things like HIPPA and other acts to justify the lengthy process and obscene amounts of money needed to be able to modify the way things are done, which is why software people just move on and the same mediocrity continues to the detriment of us all.
Yep. My current employer, as well as the two prior to this one, all have and use fax machines despite being tech companies. Not because they want to, but because so many other companies out there still require it.
>They are so fast(no they arent, something can be ahead of them)
>They are safe compared to email(literally anyone can walk by the fax and take it)
>They are faster than a phone call, because doctors don't pick up the phone. (What...)
You can mention the US government has ultra high security communication that uses the internet, you can mention the value of finance information, you can talk about the secrets your billion dollar company sends over email/web. But noooo, patient information is too sensitive and urgent to be sent over email/web....
All 3 still work in the medical field to this day, one of them is a doctor...
I imagine this is a huge issue in the medical field.
But that's vastly different (though perhaps more invasive) than massive breaches like these: https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/cybersecurity-hacking-he...
When an employee snoops, you will never know.
HIPAA has all of these crazy rules for anything digital, but the second you switch to good ol’ telephony the rules all become “there’s no rule because hacking a telephony system would be a federal crime.” I’m not joking. Telephony is considered a “mere conduit” while the internet is not.
It really is stupid. HIPAA has all of these controls, but phones are just fair game.
I think you've been brainwashed by modern storage services (S3) where the URL is essentially always public and out of your control. It's trivial to password protect an image when it's on your server. I would assume any medical provider would protect their images by checking the session and not serve them via AWS.
We need to move away from this model where others are in control of our private data to one where it's owned and controlled by us, giving access to service providers as needed.
...unless there's a fence around it.
A lot of the nonsense around shredding hard drives is just the drive industry convincing people that they need to destroy perfectly good devices.
Unless you're facing state-level actors a simple zero-out or pipe from /dev/random will suffice. Or with a lot of modern drives where the data on the platter is encrypted by default, just send the "secure erase" command, causing the drive to roll over the controller's private key.
Unless you're willing to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that each and every such hard drive does not in any shape or form contain sensitive information and pay hefty fines and jail time when you inevitably fail, the only nonsense here is you. It has been proven time and time again that data once written can be and will be recovered.
Any storage media that contains or contained sensitive information must be physically destroyed. That is the only surefire, foolproof way that we currently know of to securely and permanently delete sensitive information.
I'm not sure which part of "HIPAA says you can take an UNENCRYPTED hard drive and toss it in a dumpster provided it has a fence around it" you didn't understand.
> Any storage media that contains or contained sensitive information must be physically destroyed.
Not for federal data:
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/specialpublications/nist.s...
Not for classified defense department data:
https://www.dami.army.pentagon.mil/site/IndustSec/docs/DoD%2...
...and as previously mentioned: not for PII healthcare data.
The bit about "you can only be SURE if you destroy it" is pure hard drive manufacturer nonsense.
Find me a single case where someone has recovered data from a non-solid state (hybrid or otherwise) drive or tape that has undergone a SMART secure erase or NIST / DoD compliant wipe.
In decades, I have never heard of such an incident.
Now lets get purely logical. There is a non-zero chance of risk, and the best risk avoidance strategy is to not take the risk in the first place, so shred the drive.
So lets make a software, that would secure erase the drive and try to recover the data, and prove that you are not actually an elephant. But why?
Make a lot of money instead? Make a hard drive with a secure erase feature, and yes I know, but like put a spin on it, maybe a button, or better yet, you secure erase the drive backed by an industry grade non-recoverability warranty for a cheap $10/yr./drive subscription access to our secure erase service. We come to you next day, give a certificate and everything, you can put it in your HIPAA folder and show it to your risk committee.
Your market? Health care, gov, and problems that solely exist in between the keyboard and the screen.
Bonus points if You had a spot welder to secure a nut to the bolt.
Fun times.
Sharing the URL is equivalent to sharing the image in these cases.
medical-intranet.example.com/uploads/secure_link/adc83b19e793491b1c6ea0fd8b46cd9f32e592fc/john_doe_1987-04-23_chlamydia_1.jpg
<img src="https://siteunderattack.com/api/computationally-expensive-function/?image=cute_bunnies_####.jpg"/>
<img src="https://siteunderattack.com/api/function123/?name=Robert'); DROP TABLE students;--&image=cute_bunnies_####.jpg"/>It might be PII. It might be sensitive. But if it's not both of those, it's not HIPAA protected.
If you think about medical textbooks where there are pictures of patients and their maladies, but they are not identified this makes sense why both are required. Otherwise educating new doctors would be impossible.
This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background.
But I think all these different divisions just act radically different within microsoft. What is absolutely certain is that the Windows team cannot be trusted, as they have shown repeatedly.
GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet. I'm sure one day it'll happen; statistically it's more likely than not. But what's the point in pre-empting it, exactly?
> GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet.
I abandoned GitHub as soon as MS bought it, but I think my choice was a good one. If I hadn't, then I would have felt betrayed by the copilot stuff.
The real danger. (almost unironically though)
I can switch OS, Office is almost obsolete with google + free stuff, their browser/software is terrible and never used, Github(yikes, well, git works..), LinkedIn(and nothing of value was lost).
So we really are at the whim of M$ when it comes to Github and Minecraft. Scary. But hey, I used to be obsessed with Nintendo games, and now people have Zelda clones so I don't need to pay games that are graded on the Nintendo Curve.
More seriously, Tunic also draws upon newer Zelda titles as well as games outside the series. In addition, many 2D Zelda games have come out since the time of the SNES, not even counting re-releases like the recent remake of Link's Awakening.
Tunic doesn't just evoke Zelda aesthetically as a substitute for developing its own aesthetic! It's a loving homage to a series that absolutely materially inspired the core gameplay, too.
I haven't had a chance to really play Tunic yet, but I just get the feeling that calling it a Zelda clone is unfairly reductive to both. If Tunic and Okami are both Zelda clones, but not clones of each other, something needs reevaulation.
I'll take an up front cost any day over content gating/gambling/fomo.
"Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust. It is inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft."
"Veloren is fully open-source, licensed under GPL 3. It uses original graphics, musics and other assets created by its community. Being contributor-driven, its development community and user community is one and the same: developers, players, artists and musicians come together to develop the game. "
Not only that, but they delayed release for a year to fix bugs and polish TotK [1]. They deliberately missed the holiday '22 window for this! No one else seems to care about their games as much as Nintendo in terms of product quality.
[1] https://www.gamingbible.com/news/tears-of-kingdom-delayed-fo...
Huh?
> Zelda clones so I don’t need to play games that are graded on the Nintendo Curve.
hospitalJail is saying there are similar games out there, and that they don't need to play games from Nintendo that are unfairly rated well just because they're from Nintendo, despite a former obsession with Nintendo.
If we’re querying review bias it becomes inherently subjective so probably not much point in discussing it beyond that even if I disagree.
I’m unsure of anyone producing games of a quality and polish level that rivals Nintendo, but that’s subjective too.
like sub 20 FPS, empty worlds, 5 enemies with different skins(okay, factually there were 11 enemies, meanwhile MM had over 70 enemies), same story as the last 30 years, annoying combat mechanics, grindy crafting(food) mechanics.
But IGN said it was the greatest game of all time 10/10 and never mentioned a single issue. That is what happens when we grade on the Nintendo curve.
Google is also a privacy nightmare tho...
If MS did something super sketchy with Github, I suspect there would be an almost cambrian explosion of new tools to do with Github does.
Look at Richard Stallman, disliked proprietary software so much he spent his life fighting it even building large parts of an OS! Messing with Github would be like creating 100,000 Stallmans - and I don't think anyone wants that. ;)
Granted, there is a reason it got to that place.
It's pretty good. Otherwise it wouldn't have the userbase it has.
How that was pulled off in Electron is insane to me.
They took HTML, JS (well, TS) and CSS and sprinkled in some WASM (I think?) and you get that?
The result of essentially a "web app" is impressive, gotta give 'em that. And they started on it 12 years ago.
Of course, Firefox has sync as well.
It was annoying enough for me to make the switch.
Today?
Where were you when it's 'free' OS' was 'phoning home' or during it's behemoth days in the 90s-2000s when it forced the most pro-business Government (US) to essentially break it up when it was using it's monoploitic practices too far for even them?
I have to use Teams and just logically assume all of what was said or talked about exists on some server somewhere for the employer, LEO or intelengence agencies to retrieve; if Snowden has taught us anything is that M$ is the darling child of the Intelligence agencies in the US for a reason.
Using M$ outside of a (forced) work environment is literately like asking to be tracked, monitored of your own accord. Nothing they do should be presumed to be secure until proven a length to be otherwise. It's very likely why it's so bloated and runs terribly, they are optimizing no for UX but for it's real business model: spying.
Sadly, and with only a slight tinge of despondence: I've given up on preaching about FOSS to the masses, but with stuff like this it's like asking why people sign up for death cults, it alwasy ends in: Humans just being Humans.
If you feel adventurous you can eventually transcend dual boot to a VFIO setup that helps to keep your bare metal protected from Windows entirely.
It completely owns that market. There’s macOS and iOS I guess, but they’re not generally available to install on third party equipment.
Linux, sadly, is just not at all a consumer OS and never became one. The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years).
Surely you are talking about Windows... :-)
It's executable by default, opens up in something like Eddie and just asks for a password.
Nothing about Linux is really more secure than windows other than the fact it is a small target.
You literally just described an .exe or .msi.
Not sure what the example proves. The simple fact you can compile your kernel, have a strong model with Linux SE, it's just another ballpark.
Besides the fundamental aspect that Microsoft are telemetry kleptomaniacs, one OS assumes the user machine does not belong to the user, and Microsoft knows better. Linux assumes it's your machine and nobody else.
You can have your own hardened and lighter Linux kernel, with less surface exposure, while with Windows you start with whatever version version of Cortana Microsoft would like to push that week on it's users...Plus all the other unnecessary components that create an almost infinite opportunity of attack vectors.
Naturally for Linux, the open source code, makes for a more transparent process, even if I don't subscribe to the idea that more eyes on the code, correlates directly to higher safety.
The fact that deb extension is associated with an application (I don’t know what Eddie is) does not make deb executable. It’s like Winzip opening a zip archive on double click in Windows: yes, the file is opened, but no untrusted code has been run (assuming, Winzip is installed already and is considered trusted).
Linux is more secure because it has a much smaller attach surface. Even from the kernel interaction perspective, the number of syscalls in Linux is much smaller than in Windows, they are in a way more primitive and easier to audit. But the biggest distinguisher is lack of DCE (or MS) RPC - in Windows it’s ubiquitous, available both locally and sometimes over the network with various ways to access it (named pipes over SMB, DCE over TCP/IP, even over NetBEUI, over HTTP in some cases) which makes it hard to secure (Windows firewall is very complex as a result). Finally, Windows Carrie’s enormous amount of legacy and Microsoft is not interested in fixing it (they would rather push you to “cloud”).
Combination of code complexity and large attack surface makes Windows less secure that competition (although Pottering seems to be working on fixing it).
- sandboxing
- root of trust hardware encryption
None of the above can be enforced at a distribution level, and where these features are opt-in they’re significantly underdeveloped relative to Windows/macOS/ChromeOS as no-one is using them in significant numbers.
I’m not even sure you could find any amount of FOSS advocates to even get on board with notarization let alone get it implemented.
You could maybe enforce protected folders at the distribution level but I don’t know if anyone could really trust a feature like that if it wasn’t implemented in the kernel directly.
I suspect that the kind of company that uses Teams is just not very interested in critically evaluating Microsoft or competitors (relative to companies that are evaluating specific Microsoft products as one-offs). They're already bought into an ecosystem whose main strength as a collection of mediocre (or worse) software is that it is integrated with all the other mediocre software in the collection. If they don't 'trust Microsoft', where does that leave them? So they 'trust Microsoft', and that's the end of that.
For example, if Bob at ABC Company is working on an MS Word doc, yes, Microsoft can steal that data. But it's worse when Teams is on a corporate network, because maybe Bob has a Teams meeting, pulls up the Word doc, discusses it with coworkers Sarah and Bill, and now Teams tracks the doc, the conversation, who was in the conversation and what the conversation was about. It tracks the email conversation that follows. All of this is proprietary information. Teams has handed Microsoft the internal working projects, context, thoughts and strategy of ABC Company.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m
21 years ago: "It is difficult enough already to engage Gabriel in a discussion of security or Digital Rights Management, and spelling Microsoft M-dollar sign is probably the best way I can think of to get your mail deleted. He might even have a rule that does it now, I haven't asked. When Ross Anderson penned his now famous Palladium FAQ, which reads somewhere between a toaster manual and grim speculative fiction, you will note that he never deploys the dollar sign, because he would like to be taken seriously."
MS is getting really pushy. They probably see the GPT stuff as their ticket to beating Google in search so they are pushing it as hard as they can to get as many users as they can.
I just click "turn off". I don't trust LLMs - all their knowledge is learned from the unreliable internet then you add hallucinations on top of that.
I was wondering if I could make a fake one, just add an appropriate icon and change its label to say something like 6000°C Nuclear Holocaust
Dude, if you ever make this, post it to HN. I'd install that on my computer in a heartbeat.
The stories on there are so bad. Like, borderline conspiracy thinking / conservative media gossip rag stuff. I can’t believe Microsoft puts their company name behind the content that shows up. (Though I’m in Australia. Maybe the people in charge of that content have no idea how bad it is here).
I leave it there and I've been a SWE for over 20 years.
I just like seeing what the temperture is at the moment. So I know how to dress if I was dare to go outside.
The news being part of it though, on HOVER, is a nightmare. They need to stop that ASAP.
Turning on 'reduce updates' just has the taskbar display the weather and not change to some random stock ticker of a company you don't care about or whatever other item of interest they feel like showing.
How true that is depends on the type of software. Web browsers, for instance, don't have an incredible number of meaningfully different options. I can no longer find one that sufficiently meets my needs at all.
Because they are scared of breaking things.
Also, most people actually do change defaults: style and theme.
They are usually quite colorful and this is not the standard.
What did you replace Windows with?
Haiku probably ... s/
The only real alternative option with most hardware is linux. And when the use case is browsing the internet and you are there to help them unstuck a broken update, things should be fine.
Then, they changed the button layout and put a "install" button where the close button was, and she installed it without realising. Some bits of hardware weren't supported in Windows 10 and I had to go around and mess around with drivers, which I failed at.
So, she's been on Fedora since. Considering all she did on Windows was light browsing in Firefox and many hours of Pysol, she barely even noticed the switch.
They pay for "the service" to upload their trade secrets and literally everything to Microsft / the USA. OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, etc etc.
And then boast about their high level of "security". The naivity is unbelievable.
You weren't around when they were threatening linux with patents and forcing OEMs to not deliver PCs without a Microsoft operating system preinstalled then?
>Of the two lists of Microsoft patents disclosed by MOFCOM2, one was a list of 310 patents which included 73 "standard-essential” patents (SEPs) for smartphones; 127 patents which are “implemented in Android”; and 110 “nonstandard-essential” patents and applications (non-SEPs). This list is referred to as Annex “B” by Microsoft.3 The second list is identical to the non-SEP set minus one issued patent, U.S. Patent No.7,111,039. This list is referred to as Annex “A”.
https://www.m-cam.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/patently_ob...
This is a very strange statement!
But thanks - appreciate the link. Not sure how the "media player in the taskbar" got in there, but that's patents for you.
This is anti-customer and needlessly fraught with legal implications.
Of course it seems aligned with their hallucinations-enabled OpenAI investment.
How much of this is just attempts to feed GPT4?
Tangential, but this made me reflect on how "good"/"nice" Ballmer, and Ballmer-era MS, was in a very relative sense. This is slightly startling considering how my mental image of either Ballmer or MS is not great. But now looking back it does feel like relentless anti-competitiveness lessened a bit during that era, and lot of good stuff happened then. Windows 7 probably will go down in history as the pinnacle of traditional desktop Windows, MS giving up on IE gave room for Firefox and (unfortunately also) Chrome, lot of previously proprietary stuff got documented and published (SMB and Office formats comes to mind), and there were some nice product developments.
In contrast Gates era Microsoft was very much characterized by strong-arm tactics and throwing their weight around. And now Nadella era feels very aggressive again, pushing the company forwards no matter what; in some ways maybe less vindictive and direct than Gates, but still definitely not nice.
All of them were present at MS when they pulled their 'millions of lines of code' bullshit in an attempt to kill Linux and harm FOSS.
These days, that's all gone. I don't feel any pressure to use Windows, and I don't see MS doing various legal shenanigans to try to destroy Linux. I'm able to do what I want and not worry about MS much at all. It's very different from the earlier eras that way.
Instead, the difference these days seems to be that MS is the enemy of its own customers (or should I say "users"?). If you use Windows, MS will make your life hard with all this built-in malware and advertising. But if you're like me and you simply don't use Windows, you never see this stuff, except when people complain about it on forums like this, or if you have the misfortune of having to deal with a relative's PC.
Personally, I like this new era much better. I'm able to easily opt out of MS's shenanigans by simply installing Linux. When other people gripe and complain about that stuff, it falls on deaf ears here. ("but but but... I need to play $game on my PC!!!") I feel the same way as when sports fans complain about how much they're getting raped by the media companies so they can follow their favorite team.
By contrast, Gates was "Embrace! Extend! Extinguish!" and Nadella is "Data! Data! Data!"
I miss Ballmer.
"The PM role is unique to Microsoft and was actually created in response to developing software that is more usable and at the same time pushes the state of the art of technology. So when we talk about PM at Microsoft, we're talking from a perspective of creating and evolving the role over the lifetime of the PC industry."
"Program managers got started at Microsoft while developing Excel for the Macintosh. [...] a new role was created in Program Management with the explicit goal of partnering with development and working through the entire product cycle as the advocate for end-users and customers."
https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~xwangsd/courses/w23/readings/PM%...
Committing corporate espionage, which is what their software does now, on the other hand, makes me not want to use them at all. I have agreements with customers about protecting their data, how can I use software that steals everything I put into it and sends it to MS? This is a much bigger deal. (Although I agree you could argue their earlier anticompetitive practices gave them the monopoly that allows them to run their current criminal spying empire unchecked)
Since you didn’t expect respect or decency before, their management culture doesn’t value that, and accordingly doesn’t treat you with it now.
After all, if you tolerated poor treatment before, why wouldn’t you now?
Microsoft was always bad to competition, but not really to customers. (backward compatibility till eternity)
That changed a lot. Tracking and ads build into the OS? No thank you.
I don't understand what you believe this gained you.
At this point, I prefer the UI of the web app (I tried switching back), and since it is a PWA, it behaves like a normal application.
Umm. Should someone tell them?
> This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background.
Today? We've had almost forty years of being taught that Microsoft can't be trusted about what they're doing in the background.
Never could be.
I trust Microsoft far more than I trust Google.
It is difficult to find some of the more awful practices nowadays but I was always amazed at just how far they would go, and a little impressed by the thinking, to undermine all opposition.
Microsoft is like an Alpaca, if they start getting friendly towards you, it means they are about to attack!
Then I switch to brave instead of edge and now I don't have overheating issue anymore. When I start edge it won't take many minutes before the laptop gets burning hot.
I guess the bloat has exceeded what the highest spec'd, top of the line, Lenovo laptop can handle.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/11/rittenhouse-tria...
MICROSOFT!
You can use enhanced images in trials.
In general, Courts rely on expert witnesses so if you can get one that says X method is applicable and used in that field then it's a go. It then becomes the other side's job to find an expert witness to say X actually has these flaws and is untrustable. i.e. the Court is not bothered by confidence intervals; if your profession makes decisions by flipping coins its admissible in court. The Court only cares if somebody is willing to certify it as true.
http://www.curtisreevestrial.com/files/1187.pdf
https://www.jonathanhak.com/2018/02/17/image-clarification-n...
It looks pretty clear to me that a Super Resolution Algorithm enhances images (aka Image Enhancement).
Although I think you missed the point of my post. As long as you can get an expert witness to certify the accurate you can use a technique in court.
Somebody else [2] linked the Rittenhouse case as an example as to this being disallowed but that's not what the Rittenhouse case shows. The Prosecution wanted to use pinch-to-zoom; the defense challenged that zooming wouldn't be an accurate representative; the Judge asked the Prosecution if/how they knew that zooming would be an accurate representation; the Prosecution admitted they had no idea how pinch-to-zoom works; the Judge (very reasonable) didn't allow an unknown method to be used in court. The lack of an expert witness to explain how Zooming wouldn't've changed the image was the problem.
Machine learning super resolution adds detail to image that does not exist, in the same way that image inpainting (or even outpainting) do.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/googl...
"It's important to note that the computed super-resolution image is not real. The added details—known as "hallucinations" in image processing jargon—are a best guess and nothing more."
If you go and research the literature on deep learning super resolution techniques, they also carefully use the term "hallucinate" as well.
[0] https://petapixel.com/2020/08/17/gigapixel-ai-accidentally-a...
https://www.inverse.com/input/reviews/is-samsung-galaxy-s21-...
https://www.samsungmobilepress.com/feature-stories/how-samsu...
Don't want to bring too many Reddit memes over, but if the browser enhances the images on both sides of the comparison, and corporate wants you to identify the differences... what can you say but "they're the same picture"?
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo...
Mastodon at least has had a better culture about this in my experience. Possibly worth investigating, and it may have degraded over the last mass migrations.
This has already happened with copiers, which because of a bug in a compression algorithm, would randomly change figures when copying
Sending these images to Microsoft by default however is scummy.
But it's really not the issue here.
They invented "super resolution" just as they could have used "ultra denoiser" or "elite acne spot remover" or whatever other bullshit term they think they could use to get away with to "explain" why they're sniffing pictures.
The goal is to send the images to Microsoft and nothing else.
Regardless it would seem to me to be a HIPAA violation.
And he was mocked by the whole internet. Really showing how much an average person knows, isn't it.
we browse your habits:
private data worth billions.
-- a privacy haiku
I'm not normally careful about privacy and never felt Linux was a worthwhile alternative on desktop, but this was so plain annoying that I'd probably pick Linux on my primary PC nowadays if I didn't already have a Mac.
They actually don’t quite force this. They just make it very difficult to find the option to use a local account instead.
(Unless they’ve changed things for the worse since last time I installed windows. Very possible!)
Also, the entire reason I was even doing 10 instead of 7 is this laptop came with 10.
On W11 you have to resort to more esoteric tricks, you can't actually complete setup normally without network and a ms account.
Maybe with the latest images, but I have an original W11 RTM image that installs just fine without network and a MS account.
The Home version does not.
Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) offers an option to revert fix this, but you still have to ensure that you keep wifi disconnected and ethernet unplugged during install.
I got tripped up by this too because I was insistent on not connecting it to the internet during setup, but the local account only switch had moved since I last checked up on it.
It will still ask you three or four times ARE YOU SURE you don’t want to sign in to a Microsoft account. But at least you can still avoid it for the moment.
Huh. Aside from the ethics, this creates a chicken-and-egg problem for anyone who needs a PC to set up their home internet.
This isn't correct. Even with network connected, it's 2 "no thanks" clicks to continue with a local account. If you don't have network connected, you go straight to local account as the only option.
At least this is the case with the last 3 versions of W10, and a normal single-user product key, or if you skip the product key. I guess if you use an enterprise or volume key it might be different.
I think you are apologizing for them if you say it wasnt forced. It sure feels forced.
I had to help my grandma get her new laptop up and running for the first time, with Windows 11, and it got to the account screen and there were no hidden/vague options to skip or go local. I assume this is because they detected an internet connection.
She literally had to get an MS account which apparently didn't work because she already had one from the last laptop. MS wanted to send her a recovery code to her email... Which she couldn't access because no computer.
Oh and the amount of opt-in screens after that? 10+ screens. No joke.
It's insane. There's no way she would be able to use her new laptop if she didn't get 2 hours of help.
I eventually used Ventoy, it works on Linux and solved my problems immediately. It also forces the win installer to think it’s offline to avoid the dark pattern of online-“only” accounts.
Then it was loaded with adverts and other horseshit. Seriously degraded experience.
All of this because when I was trying to play a game pass game the play button just did nothing. No logs, no info, nothing. The online help was pretty good, but removing/resetting/reinstalling all game related software did nothing. Real pain when there’s no feedback.
Oh how I remember the days of installing proprietary media codecs on Ubunt-… oh wait we’re talking about Windows? In 2023?
Man, searching anything related to Microsoft software is an instant trip down scam lane. It's not their fault even. Part of me is glad the majority aren't using Macs and bringing that over here.
Good troubleshooting advice can be found but good gravy is it hard to dig up.
If you installed the N version of Windows, try manually installing the Windows Media Center.
I had problems with NVIDIA Shadow play which were resolved by installing it.
Apparently the application is omitted from the N version because of European antitrust action ages ago.
https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater
WARNING: Use at your own risk, no guarantees. Personally never broke anything for me.
I've been pretty leery of them ever since - definitely don't try it on a critical machine, and you're really at the mercy of Microsoft changing something every update. Definitely "use at your own risk" territory.
PS > Get-AppxprovisionedPackage -online | Where-Object {$_.name -notlike "store" -and $_.name -notlike "linux" -and $_.name -notlike "ubuntu"} | Remove-AppxprovisionedPackage -online
My parents have unmodified Win10 and that thing just annoys me to no end, ads, resetting settings after update, etc... Including some behaviour that caused revenue loss in my parents company.
if you want to do this, there are a couple of gotchas. One i'd recommend bearing in mind is not using identical cards. Either two vendors or two different types of cards (like a 1060 and a 1070). This makes it easier to stub the windows card and also write/edit the scripts (which are probably searchable on goog with "vfio-bind").
The second is one that i lost the information about, but if it affects you, it should be possible to dig up the info. Some games get micro-stuttering or stuttering when running with vfio under qemu; the fix can be an application that applies settings on windows or editing the windows registry.
All that aside, it works fine. The audio latency is minimal, but if you have a machine with more than 24 PCIe lanes, you can just dedicate an entire USB PCI card to windows, passing that through and plugging all the windows related hardware through that.
I think Linus (LTT) mentioned doing something like this, virtualizing even multiple windows machines on a single machine with the threadripper (32-64 lanes) and Epyc (64, 96, or 128 lanes) - having a dedicated USB and GPU for each virtualized desktop. Nice.
Technology, it's so advanced.
[0] it may be more complete now. I probably wouldn't do this again myself; but at the time i had been "selling" this service (qemu/xen virtualization of PCI cards) for linux on linux for over a decade, so it was something i already knew enough about to stumble through - windows on linux.
Windows 11 will not let you continue without an online account unless you use a tool like Ventoy which automatically bypasses it
https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...
Microsoft at least let us get security updates without accounts aftet we dodge all that during install. apple doesn't. login or get out.
ZorinOS (https://zorin.com/os) can hopefully change your perspective.
Also, random other users are probably better off with Ubuntu than Zorin purely because that's what more people use and you can actually Google how to do stuff in it. Even a lot of Zorin questions will link to Ubuntu tutorials.
Ubuntu has the windows-itis, change for change's sake. I can't even say i like Ubuntu Server, but i'm regularly forced to interact with it because universities output stuff that "works on ubuntu, just copy and paste these lines!", where ubuntu doesn't update certain packages so you end up with old versions of stuff that works reliably until the next "tick" of an even year, when everything will break again. Windows-itis also implies that there's money in "knowing" ubuntu, because you have to keep up with their new ideas in order to be effective.
I'm less than a year away from just switching to BSD, sooner if gentoo decides to do away with openRC.
Well that's the value in it. There's never going to be a perfect system, just good enough. Until I conceded to that, I was using FreeBSD and enjoying the lack of systemd while I struggled to make random packages work. My servers do run Ubuntu Server now.
> Zoom and Discord also have caveats.
Such as? I use zoom just fine on Linux. Never noticed any caveats. I don't use Discord so not sure what's missing.
> And hardware peripherals are always questionable with Linux
Not a problem with most PCs. Unless you have a really special hardware, Linux will work just fine. Sometimes brand new hardware takes time to receive kernel updates but most hardware is absolutely fine.
> Also, random other users are probably better off with Ubuntu than Zorin purely because that's what more people use and you can actually Google how to do stuff in it
I disagree because Zorin comes with its own support desk. Not only do they provide official installation support (that Ubuntu doesn't), they also have more specific resources than something compared to Ubuntu. Besides, any problems that you run into, you can just search for the same problem for Ubuntu and the fix will work.
With Ubuntu, you have no installation support, no nvidia drivers, no helpful prompts for new Linux users (like WINE), no flathub, no familiar UI for people coming from other operating systems. Ubuntu is imho a worse choice for any new Linux user.
I've always recommended Zorin to family and friends and not a single one has complained about stuff breaking or not working for them. The store has the biggest apps library compared to any other distro, windows application installation support for users who really need it, familiar and one of the most polished UIs in any distro and proprietary drivers that most other distros don't ship with.
> Not a problem with most PCs. Unless you have a really special hardware, Linux will work just fine. Sometimes brand new hardware takes time to receive kernel updates but most hardware is absolutely fine.
Somehow my hardware has always been "special" but worked fine with Windows. And people at work are constantly messaging about Bluetooth headsets flaking with Linux on their Thinkpads, which are supposed to have first-class support.
Of course my servers have always been fine with Linux, but a laptop with a trackpad, BT, wifi, sleep, and USB-connected accessories, that gets dicey.
> any problems that you run into, you can just search for the same problem for Ubuntu and the fix will work.
But those fixes will work for Ubuntu too. I'm no fan of it, in fact I agree with someone else here that it's the Windows of Linux OSes, but "how to do X in Ubuntu" always gives updated results.
I have no idea what the issues are. I've been using screen sharing for years and I haven't run into any issues. Same with my friends and family who switched to Zorin from Windows.
> Netflix requires specific setup to work at all, and you get 720p at best unless you use Chrome with some custom extension to get 1080p at best.
Ah, support issue I guess. Yes, Linux is sometimes not treated well by these companies but at least workarounds exist.
> but a laptop with a trackpad, BT, wifi, sleep, and USB-connected accessories, that gets dicey.
I have used Ryzen and Intel laptops and the only issue I've run into is Ubuntu installer not booting because of missing Nvidia drivers, whereas Zorin worked fine on day 1 (when Ryzen 5th gen was quite new).
Other than that, I haven't had any issues. My desktop's WiFi USB Adapter needs third party drivers so that's always an extra step whenever I'm installing new distros, but I haven't run into any issues that make the device unusable or work in a broken state.
The Bluetooth issues you just mentioned, I haven't seen any, and I am currently writing this on an HP Pavilion 15 Gaming laptop with Bluetooth connected to my speakers. I'm sure there are a few bluetooth chipsets that need kernel updates. For example, Victus has a mediatek BT+WiFi chip and it needs the latest 6.2 kernel, so it doesn't work on Zorin out of the box. However, upgrading kernels on Zorin is quite easy and there's a guide on the forums: http://maglit.me/upgrade-zorin-kernel
Besides, Linux in its current state is still a lot better than terrible software like Windows. No ads, no spyware, the system runs smooth no matter how old the installation is. All of these things are a luxury on the Windows side; it's terrible software.
The thing is, like I said, Windows has gotten so annoying on its own that I don't want to deal with it ever again.
based on ubuntu
Just do it! I bought a Framework laptop and, because I forgot to buy an OS with it, decided "what the hell" and installed Ubuntu. I figured I could always install something else if it didn't work out. And it's actually been pretty good! In some ways better, in some ways worse than macOS (my main OS) and Windows (my gaming pc OS). It is actually quite nice to run the same OS as my server(s) on my laptop - it means I can use the same knowledge in two places.
(MacOS is no saint either, I vivdly remember the frustration of having to run random system commands taken off the internet to try in vain to get "smart sleep" to work. If I'm going to have to futz with my system regardless, I'll just use Linux.)
The horrors or trying to get that thing reset without an Apple account! I gave up after a few hours and it is just sitting as back up in case I blow away an install and need a machine to get a disc image from.
But the joy of having a fresh install of something like Linux Mint (or Kubuntu)and having nothing to lock down is so refreshing. It is like stepping back into the simplicity of Window XP but knowing it is up to date with current technology requirements.
"Allow Microsoft to save your browsing activity including history, usage, favorites, web content, and other browsing data to personalize Microsoft Edge and Microsoft services like ads, search, shopping and news."
It's a freaking shitcoin browser, but that probably means enormous PR budgets.
Sad that a mozilla has apparently sunk itself in the meantime.
It's really a sad dystopian future we live in compared to the cypherpunk optimism of the 90's.
Luckily uBlock Origin is open source and viewable on github, and isn't driven by greed. So I trust it more than Microsoft or any big tech company.
But, somehow I trust a random dev that refuses to accept donations, even though my cheap ass would definitely donate to him, more than Microsoft, apple and (insert BigTech here)
Yes.
Such a weird thing to post in reply.
It has a 'nuh uh' feeling, but doesn't actually refute the parent. However it seeds doubt in the parent argument without ever touching the parent argument.
"You are authorized to use this software only if you are properly licensed and the software has been properly activated with a genuine product key or by other authorized method."
I don't want to be the product.
Your algorithm is fairly broken.
(25% /s)
"You don't recognize that [the thing you just said]?"?
so, a bunch of third party apps made for Reddit are getting killed this month because Reddit decides to jack up the prices. What's going to happen to Kagi if/when it becomes somewhat of a competitor to Google/Bing and they want it dead?
I have found it isn't usually the games that are the issue but the utilities. They are almost always alternatives but a lot of the time, you don't want the alternative - you want that specific program. Wine compatibility can be good but it can also be very strange. Notepad++ for instance, it works... but hits my systems CPU harder than GTA V. Go figure!
It is a case of our economic system is pitched in such a way as to drive these large companies to this path. In optimizing for shareholder profit, eventually they will go the path of least ethical solution provided they can get away with it. Those that do not do that will be left behind . An absolute shame really.
There's a toggle for "Enhance images for all sites" which if enabled gives them the URL of every image you view, but if you disable that, you're still allowing MS to "Enhance" images and collect data on some sites. MS could for example still collect data on every other image you see. Then MS gives you boxes where you can enter the sites you don't want them to enhance images on, which I'm sure they collect via telemetry anyway.
What's missing, and actually needed to prevent data collection, is a "Do NOT enhance images for ANY site" option which MS does not provide.
What if I'm deliberately showing a comparison of compression artifacts, or a screenshot of bad vs good game textures, or comparing photos of different cameras? Now the browser will alter the intended good vs bad quality comparison.
The feature as such seems okay, and I can even see myself using this on occasion. But it really should be a button in the image or something, for usability and privacy concerns.
Would love to be able to stream 360p video and have 1080p equivalent quality, for when I'm just absently listening to what's happening.
But sending a picture to the cloud, to get a bigger picture in exchange, that sounds stupid.
If Apple does something – this is obviously the correct thing to do, and everyone should copy them.
If Microsoft does the same thing – meh, no one cares.
If Google or Meta does the same thing – pitchforks, outrage, a thousand daily top-voted blog posts detailing how terrible these companies are.
Goes to show how much of the current outrage culture is driven by marketing and perception rather than reality.
People use to hate Microsoft because it was a monopoly. Apple was the underdog. Ultimately the MS hate was the perfect case of watch what you wish for.
Because both companies back then were actually selling stuff to users.
Then came the culture of "do not evil" and "move fast and break things". Users became product, the only clients are the advertisers. Technology was not sold, it was simply provided for "free".
This undercut the old MS monopoly which survived because of its corporate stranglehold. Apple flourished through devices and could afford to take the moral high ground on privacy.
But the political and regulatory normalization and extreme profitability of surveillance capitalism means that there is no technology company today that can afford not to be an adtech company.
And if you haven't noticed, literally every tech company (apple, Amazon, Ms, Netflix,...) is now attempting to get in on the online ads market.
Nice?
HN users tend to use more Apple and Linux. If Microsoft gets more of a pass my guess is it's because no one expects anything from them. The opinion of many HN users about Windows and Edge is already very low.
Here are some of the recent posts I can find about Edge and Windows. There's no shortage of outrage and frustration:
Microsoft Edge removes ability to delete Sync Data from Cloud - Jun 2023 (186 points, 118 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36267087
The Day Windows Died - Apr 2023 (1146 points, 894 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35415758
The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge - Mar 2023 (506 points, 377 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35207830
Not-so-great features coming soon to Windows 11 - Dec 2022 (543 points, 654 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33943777
This is either the result of decades of marketing or astroturfing.
There’s also the general media trend of punching up / publishing surprising content so it gets clicks. Google especially had the reputation for being “good” for so long that any kind of expose or criticism rings as juicy and surprising. Microsoft had the reputation for being “bad” for so long that they are expected to be bad; it’s them being “good” that is surprising and gets clicks.
In addition this I think a lot of software professionals hate Google because they failed the interview.
And Google is the biggest privacy invader out there.
Google's main product is YOU. Without your privacy, they would have nothing to sell to advertisers --- which accounts for about 80 percent of their revenue.
You’re speaking on an agenda without accounting for reality
More then 80 percent of MSFT's revenue comes directly from selling software and services.
Google earns about as much money from privacy invasion as MSFT does from software and data services. You can try to deny or ignore the reality of it --- but you have nothing to refute it other than personal bias.
Google's privacy invasion spans the globe.
They have the world's most popular browser feeding them user's web activity. They have the most popular mobile OS feeding them users' physical location. They operate the world's most popular email service feeding them users mail habits and purchase receipts. They have trackers embedded on virtually all of the world's most popular web sites.
It is really possible for anyone to get more "predatory" than Google?
There are more mosquitoes than tigers
I'm not sure what more you expect?
Are we talking about the same website?
“If they can, they will.” The past 20 years has been a steady march towards desensitizing users towards making users give up their privacy.
But that means it's getting all of these features by default, leaking yorur data to Microsoft and with deceptive questions to make you use Bing as the default search engine. Every time I get the prompt I need to do a double take because they use their 'blue button' thing as a way to guide you to a certain choice.
Same thing with downloading a file.
Do you want to keep it? Yes. Are you sure? And then you need to EXPAND something and click something that looks like a link, not a button to keep the file.
That's just bad. A link shouldn't cause an action to be executed.
This kind of record keeping was mocked for thirty years in the West when it was done in other places, now its here on the "standard" PC. PC sales have slowed in the last dozen years. This is the kind of invasive, unbridled abuse you get now on a "personal computer"
Second order effects are rarely considered, and bad actors ignored.
As this article shows, you can fiddle with Edge and other browsers to try and make them more privacy respecting --- but why bother trying to hit a constantly moving target?
Clearly, your privacy is not in their best interests and they will only continue to circumvent it.
Unfortunately any browser with telemetry turned on by default is not fixing privacy related issues, but is making them worse.
My point was just that Firefox is a lot better than Brave. I’ll stand by that.
I mean, heaven forbid Google stores my data in their impenetrable ultra secure data centers, but ISP's, TV providers, Cellphone carriers and Credit Card companies - go to town with my data and sell it to as many data brokers as you can.
Boggles my mind that people view them as the solution to privacy
An employer that forces me to use an OS that treats me like the audience to a television soap opera (meaning, a dumb shmuck who can be puppeted around) is not worth it, it'll kill my joy in working real quick. Tried it, it was horror. So right now, I'd say I'd rather drink my own piss than use a windows box as my daily workstation.
Or otherwise make it a gentle enquiry, "I see you provide laptops, can I get a linux/Mac machine to work on?"
Framing is key ;)
Edit: personally I outright asked "can I choose my own OS, I can't deal with windows, it makes my head hurt" or something like that. If you have the confidence just tell em how it is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/podcasts/the-daily/workpl...
* I don't want to use the terminal at all if possible. Not to configure my OS, not to do basic stuff which Win can do with a few clicks. I'm in awe how fast and efficient some people are with it, but if I need it at most once or twice a day, it's a nuisance.
* No binaries. I don't want to compile software ever.
* Packages and dependencies.
* Game compatibility. But apparently not for much longer.
* The problems I have with Win10 have been solved by running a debloater once after installing it.
There are so many binary packaging formats available, almost to a fault.
The only few things I do from terminal is updates, because I do not want to load application icons from the update manager. My bandwidth is metered most of the time due to travel. Doing it from terminal is text based.
I cannot remember the last time I had to compile anything that wasn't related to something I was tinkering with out of curiosity. I wanted to compile those things.
Package and dependencies are issues on windows as well. The builtin application manager takes care of those? So I am not understanding that complaint.
Aside from a handful of multiplayer games that do run, you just cant play due to anticheat software not working. Every game in my steam library, and GOG has worked without issue through wine/proton. Native games also work great.
The problems I have with windows 10/11 even after running those is all the data it is constantly sending. Again I am on a metered network so MBs count. You cannot disable telemetry, you can only reduce how much is sent.
2 - It's very rare I compile anything, and it's never manual. I'm OK with the AUR. I use Yay so it's all seemless anyways. If I weren't and had a no compile no matter what mindsey, I'd probably just use Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora where you really never need to compile anything. Or use Flatpaks.
3 - I don't game, but from reading, that's really made a ton of strides lately.
When Linux becomes an actual viable platform for getting work done.
That, and lawsuits (as others have mentioned, this easily could have resulted in violating HIPAA and other laws) could help stop behavior like this. But fines are the price of doing business for many companies, so outright blocking Edge may be even more effective.
I want competition in the browser space, but Microsoft simply has not offered that in over 15 years. IE obviously was worse than Chrome and Firefox in many ways, the original Edge still had worse W3C compliance and performance than Chrome and Firefox, and the new Edge is just a Chromium fork. They seem highly interested in getting your data, but not all that interested in actually creating an good product.
I'm not even sure why Microsoft is doing things like this at this time. If they wanted to increase the number of Edge users, this is not the way to do so. Are they content having less than 10% of users on desktop and just want to milk those users for all they can? As others have said [1], even if this was done locally (so that there'd be no privacy concern), this is is a terrible feature to have on by default due to the risk of inserting false details.
I fixed my Windows install to be perfect, took me hours.
A few weeks later, it was reverted.
1. You have a good enough onboard AI chip you can use to run this locally
2. You only do it for low resolution photos
3. You have a screen with a lot of pixels
This can be nice when Apple releases their latest ultra super retina screen and most web pages suck
When I'm publishing an image, I invest some time into presenting it just as I intend it to be seen, including the orchestration of sharpness. My intent that this is exactly what I want to arrive at the user and is to be seen is expressed and enforced by HTTPS encryption. And now MS circumvents this in order to apply whatever filtering they think may suit best, thus exchanging the content behind the scenes? Moreover, doesn't this involve breaking protective encryption? (Maybe not in a strict technical sense, but still.)
Safari is a peaceful tenant.
Such simple heuristic also circumvents most (or all) the concerns about medical images.
That's how it passes.
1. Go to your favorite search engine
2. Download a different browser
3. Never use Edge again
It was a little startling, realizing the browser is watching the url and that someone had to write code for that scenario.
there is it, was not remembering wrong:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/2/22813733/microsoft-window...
At one point, there are so many ads stacked up that there's no article text left!
We've been there with IE. With safari. Now its time do to it to edge.
This may be a thing with Beta versions of Edge browser but not released versions. I think neowin.net is missleading people in to believing that its the default for the excitement.
Most likely everything is on by default in the beta versions because of beta testing scenarios.....
I only use a Microsoft PC for gaming.
I use MacOS generally, because I prefer its UX & general software & hardware quality.
I use Linux Desktop if I choose not to use MacOS for some reason.
I would never want to use Microsoft for anything. I would not use it at all, if it weren't that its the primary OS for most PC games.
...And... just found out I can run Squad on Linux via steam. Ill have to start looking into gaming on Linux.
I guess you could say that they're back.
Funny thing is that in large corporations, Edge is often preferred as the default browser over Chrome, for Edge being a "cleaner" Chrome.
I work as a photographer half the time, and opted out of using lightroom and other cloud services because I don't want my images to land in the various clouds and AI bullshit.
But I guess now I don't have any control over that anymore, do I?
"Unreasonable search and seizure" needs to become a legal duty on platforms, where the bar for "reasonable" (absent extremely informed consent) is very high.
In the current Edge on Windows x64, macOS x64, and macOS Apple Silicon does not have this option.
That's why I use Google Chrome on Windows... wait.
Microsoft will continue down this path until it becomes unprofitable.
You can try to disable each new instance but it will keep coming. These "features" will get harder to disable as time goes on.
Microsoft's goal is to make as much money as possible. Your data is worth money. They will attempt to make use of that. Will this harm Windows use long-term? Likely. But it definitely makes money in the short term.
https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/index.en.html
"Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman"
Read the Firefox Privacy Notice, for example: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
It sounds to me like Firefox can collect and send out a lot of information beyond what is necessary for user-initiated browsing actions to be performed.
There are also numerous references to sharing information/data with "partners".
Maybe that data collection, transmission, and sharing can be disabled easier than in other browsers. A browser that truly respected user privacy, however, just wouldn't include such functionality to begin with.
If the last two versions of their OS are crap, then it makes sense to consider previous versions IMO.
I do miss Paint.NET though.
But of course, you are either in or out, and unless you're completely out, you're in. As long as there's MS stuff on the PC and it's connected to the internet, some bullshit will surely seep in.