crumbshot

I think this disassembly supports their assertion. The number of times a user copies and pastes isn't in itself input to the console, just a metric of some out of band events.

That is such an outrageous claim I had to check for myself.

From looking at conhost.exe in IDA Pro, there are some references to telemetry in a function HandleKeyEvent: https://i.imgur.com/MwaBLcW.jpg

But looking more closely it's just used to increase some counters when Ctrl+C or Ctrl+V are used: https://i.imgur.com/29e2qLD.png

There is another one for Ctrl+A elsewhere in the function as well.

Seems these are for when clipboard operations happen, there is other telemetry nearby for when key activity causes a paste: https://i.imgur.com/xONKrGJ.png

So Microsoft are indeed collecting keystroke telemetry in conhost.exe, but it's just some boring old counters to measure clipboard usage.

Note however that this is a ranking of perceived corruption from a group of adjudicators, which isn't necessarily the same as actual corruption.

I see your point, I strayed into rhetoric there somewhat.

On the topic of US corruption, it will be interesting to see the outcome of the Mueller investigation. I suspect most of those at the top will get away with it with scant repercussion. At least, that's what usually happens.

While rare in the number of people directly affected by the US abducting and torturing them, the fact that it was permitted and encouraged by the country's leadership says a lot about the attitude of the US to human rights and legal process.

Anyway, the US has more systemic problems in how it affords legal process to the accused. The widespread racism that still permeates the country's institutions. The misuse of plea bargaining, which seems almost designed to deny proper legal process to the accused, unless they're wealthy enough to challenge it. Even in sentencing, the US still uses the death penalty, something that most other countries, especially highly-developed countries, have abolished.

The US routinely makes a mockery of the rule of law, just look at all the people denied legal process, abducted and taken to black sites for torture during the 'War on Terror'.

The US is not some shining beacon of justice and fairness, it's just as corrupt and capricious as all the rest.

Automatic updates are a good thing, otherwise far too many machines would be lagging behind on security fixes.

It sounds like they're complaining about this blog post, where the Tor project disavows use of their software by neo-Nazis, child pornographers, and other assorted deplorable people: https://blog.torproject.org/tor-project-defends-human-rights...

My only suggestion is for everyone to use an adblocker and starve such parasitic websites out of existence.

A non-authoritative source of information that is riddled with adverts. No thank you.

I don't know about serious, but it is a problem in the PDF they published.

No A or AAAA or CNAME record exists for that name or any of the other microsft.com domains mentioned in the document.

Although alpha.telemetry.microsoft.com doesn't currently exist either, others do, e.g. us.vortex-win.data.microsoft.com resolves to a Microsoft-owned IP address.

It's a mistake in the report.

That seems to be a typo, it should be microsoft.com for all these hosts.

The section describing how a function call is made appears to be slightly incorrect.

The return value of the `add` function, in most ABI definitions, would be stored in a register. After that, the `main` function may then copy that value to its own space it has reserved on the stack.

This is at odds with the description in the article, which seems to describe `add` passing its return value to `main` via the stack.

(This is assuming no optimizations - all this would most likely be inlined anyway, with no function call.)

Okay then, I see you're not interested in any meaningful discussion on this topic.

Your claim of backdoors is nonsense of course, but the kernel mode font handling was indeed a security risk. However on recent releases of Windows, they changed font parsing to run in a user mode sandbox: see the "Mitigating font exploits with AppContainer" section of https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/microsoftsecure/2017/01/13/...

That is interesting, I am wondering how this differs in performance for existing page-based approaches used in debugging, such as Page Heap on Windows or Guard Malloc on Mac OS.

The firmware images and hardware designs should be public too, with extensive auditing of machines in the field to check for backdoors or supply chain compromise.

Or, pencil and paper ballots.

Sorry to hear about your friend's racism. I hope she gets well soon.

The problem is that you can't know that for sure. Their public statements don't necessarily reflect their internal operations.

Appealing to common sense doesn't make your argument more appealing.

I mean, I could similarly assume the ideal to be mass incubation in artificial wombs, followed by randomly selected adoption.

> Ideally [...] But tragically,

This is of course a value judgement. I'm sure many adoptees would disagree with your assessment that their situation is tragic.

> The French government claims that fatherhood is determined by society

It is. A child does not need to be genetically related to their parents. Adoption is a common practice.

When being referred to in the manner described, it's being used as a proxy for race, so that was indeed racist.

This is the best outcome for Musk, as he gets the positive PR (and bolsters his supposed "Iron Man" image), but bears none of the risk of his half-baked idea failing and killing someone.

More generally, one should be wary of capitalists claiming they can solve all of your problems. They're likely just in it for themselves.

Or even better in this particular case, using std::variant to provide type-safe unions.

Sexual gratification is one of our most primal urges. Makes sense that it would be a driving factor in this, despite the strong taboo in some cultures.

Same here, we had some buggy PLC controller software that would only run properly on increasingly hard-to-find old PCs, or more expensive embedded kits, due to timing issues. This was in an electroplating plant so they corroded to the point of needing replacement every year or so. Instead, with DOSBox set to an appropriate clock speed, we could use any commodity PC.

If you enjoy reading this, you should also check out the browser security paper from X41: https://browser-security.x41-dsec.de/X41-Browser-Security-Wh...

Could you run Safari under lldb, setting environment variable DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES=/usr/lib/libgmalloc.dylib?

Should look something like this:

    $ lldb /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari
    (lldb) env DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES=/usr/lib/libgmalloc.dylib
    (lldb) process launch

Assuming this is a heap buffer overflow, this should cause it to crash at the point of memory corruption, as it hits an adjacent guard page.