Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.
They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.
Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.
You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.
This article specifically notes:
For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesnât care which VPN you use, only that itâs still the same Windows installation.
GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.
Other important quotes:
What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows âsurveillance softwareâ.
Two things back that up:
Thereâs no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Appleâs advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Androidâs works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
Then thereâs activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: âItâs impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].â Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.
Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.
You can get and use windows 11 without logging in with a microsoft account, as of five days ago. I am a local user on my computer. Don't ask me how to do it, because my computer repair guy did it when he reinstalled windows, but there are tutorials out there. Refuse to connect to internet until you're set up and can use the computer freely.
Refusing to connect to the internet doesn't help. You have to open a Command Prompt (Shift+F10) and typing start ms-cxh:localonly (and pressing enter) during installation when you get to the sign in/create stupid ms account screen
For comprehensive deets, tomshardware explains
Maintain only a local account on your Windows 11 PC.
Unless there's really really specific reasons to subject yourself to windows, please consider installing linux mint instead.
exciting new innovations in software engineering, they've managed to come up with something worse than 'just paste this random curl command into your terminal'
Using linux is funny. Linux is either a penguin or a transgender fox. My de is a dragon. My wm is an owl holding a candle. My terminal is a kitty. My two file manager is a dolphin and a duck. Until i learn vim my text editor is a bird. My browser is another fucking fox. My drawing app is a robot mouse(?), my image editor is a dog whose name is a slur. I not using a laptop i own a fucking zoo.
I've recently been made aware that if you are thinking of switching to Linux or want to switch but don't know how there's a great website made just to help people migrating from Windows to Linux.
The website has a long list of supporters, so if you really know nothing and / or are afraid of trying it and messing something up you will be able to get professional help from this website.
Extended support for Windows 10 ends in 2026. Donât buy a new PC â revive yours with Linux. It's fast, secure, and help is available to get
There's even a list of places where you can go physically to get help. All over the world, not just in the USA by the way.
Say goodbye to Microsoft treating you like you don't own your PC. Say goodbye to intrusive features you didn't ask for. Say goodbye to ads on the OS you paid for.
Save your PCs from joining the massive amount of e-waste caused by Microsoft's unnecessary requirements.
One core difference between Linux vs windows or mac is on linux problems are made to be solved
To elaborate, on windows or Mac your intended to use the out of box experience and anything else is not really supported
While on Linux there is no single expirence it is designed to be configured and tweaked, it's not always easy but ultimately it is a core part of Linux
Maybe "feature" would be a better word to use here, this isn't a package, just a bit of useful Eshell machinery that I discovered by accident: the paths . and .. are generalized to also allow ... and .... and ..... and so on.
That is, "cd ." means "cd to the current directory", and "cd .." means "cd to the parent of the current directory" (these are sort-of-morally-hard-links-but-fundamentally-different-from-hard-links "special names" that kernelspace machinery creates for you in every directory), and now "cd ..." means "cd to the parent of .." and "cd ...." means "cd to the parent of ..." and so on.
The documentation for the function gives some dodgy advice for how to get this functionality throughout the rest of Emacs, I'll reproduce it here with the accompanying FIXME comment from the source:
With the following piece of advice, you can make this functionality available in most of Emacs, with the exception of filename completion in the minibuffer:
(advice-add \='expand-file-name :around #\='my-expand-multiple-dots)
(defun my-expand-multiple-dots (orig-fun filename &rest args)
(apply orig-fun (eshell-expand-multiple-dots filename) args))
FIXME: This advice recommendation is rather odd: it's somewhat dangerous and it claims not to work with minibuffer-completion, which makes it much less interesting.
It's a monolithic system, the creator just straight up stated that he thinks the Unix philosophy is bad, he's a generally disliked on the internet.
But most importantly, you're kinda forced to use it. There are only few distros without systemd, and there's a surprising amount of packages that depend on it specifically.
People, especially ones interested in free software, really don't like it when they're forced to use something.
Personally i think it's a reasonably fine piece of software, but I still think the lack of init system freedom sucks, and is generally unhealthy for the Linux ecosystem
As someone who has moved away from nixOS to gentoo mostly because of systemd i'll give my two cents.
1. Systemd has massive scope creep. I've made a post about this a while ago but what systemd can do is insane. It's not like they do what they do better than other people too, it's just more used because if you're using systemd you might as well use all of systemd which is how you tie your systemd to a lot of intertwined components and this is how you eventually get projects like elogind.
2. im very opinionated about software and design decisions, imo, just suck. just to make one example: varlink i hate varlink so much who in their right minds thought that JSON would be a good fit for IPC what the fuck why do you need the Inter Process Communication to be human readable and writable why.
3. Poettering volountarily choose to put strain on package mantainers of distros that include systemd alternative as he believes distros should stop supporting "deviating solutions" for the sake of unifications under systemd. source
4. Before even any law passed, systemd was already in favour of supporting the age verification nightmare that was started by California inside of *checks notes* the init system?! This is insane AND a danger to the privacy and freedom of linux users.
There are a ton of reasons to not like systemd, these are just the main ones that made switch away from it but other people can probably give more reasons.
I doubt the motivation was human readability. It probably stems from old RPC (remote procedure call) implementations, where stuff was often sent via http, so it had to make use of ASCII characters.
Older implementations often even used XML formats.
And, I don't think it's really that much overhead to marshall and unmarshal it. Using binary representations comes with complicated bullshit depending on what languages you use. So, might as well use a simple format that already has libraries in pretty much every single language anyways.
Fair but if you're designing a new IPC system to internally replace dbus why do would you do that TwT
also, most people from languages like javascript or python are probably using a library already to interact with varlink so they could've hidden the handling of binary data anyways.
And, people still have to implement the varlink libraries you know. They are still written by people who would like to have an easy time, especially if the alternative of using weird binary stuff doesn't offer any significant advantages.
Also, it's kinda nice that you get to read that stuff? Maybe helpful for debugging?
the point about the library is fair but like i said in the original post im personally really opinionated, so much that im literally writing my own IPC as we speak so im mostly judging the design from a purely technical (and very opinionated) pov, im sure that it wasn't designed by absolute morons (probably)
about the debugging. you're gonna need to write a tool to debug that anyways which, after you have the library, shouldn't be much more than a wrapper.
Computers are so scary what if I accidentally hit F12 in a steam game and it takes a screenshot. What if I press shift + F12 while in word and accidentally save my document đ
If you had to learn what the F keys on your computer do through me reblogging this post, then I'm glad you did. Computer literacy is not a skill that gets taught anymore, and it is absolutely one that needs to be taught in order to be learned. Don't ever feel bad for not knowing something, but âïž don't ever stop learning learning about your environment, the tools you use, and especially the people around you
The thing people don't get is that at its core, game design is a conversation between the designer(s) and the player. The designer makes decisions in the hopes the player will respond in a specific way, and the player has to interpret those decisions to figure out what to do. Millions of words have been written about the art of the tutorial, but this is everywhere once you start looking for it. It's not just the yellow paint or the glowing red weak spot on the boss. It's in the UI, the level design, the dialogue, the abilities your character has, the way the camera operates. Everything about a game's design conveys Something, and training yourself to interpret those signals is the fastest way to improve at games. Not a specific game, but gaming, in general.
Stop taking games as worlds that just happen to be the way they are. Train yourself to question why designers made things the way they did. Is a coin out of place an indication there's more going on in that area? Is that gap in an attack string an opportunity to counter? Is a line of dialogue meant to color your impression of something? Was the explainer of your abilities really complete, or even wholly truthful? Is there a specific reason you have the specific information you have?
When I play a new game I'm constantly asking myself questions like this, and people act amazed at how fast I pick things up. But it's all just... simple deductive reasoning, really. Keep your mind sharp. Keep your hands busy.
As someone working in IT-Infrastructure and knowing a thing or two about IT-Security: If you get a new phone and want to use it as long as possible, please buy one that gets security updates for a long time. The manufacturers that promise delivering updates for the longest are Fairphone(8-10 years) Google and Samsung (~7 years).
Others give 5 at max for Flagship devices and 2-3 for the cheaper models
(And please make sure to not use phones that do not receive updates anymore)
The thing is. "AI" as we've come to call it, is a useful but very niche technology. It's very good at a few things and when applied to those few things it is both economic and non destructive, because those tasks it naturally applies well to don't require environment destroying infrastructure. It's the scale of brute forcing AI to do things that it isn't good at that's become an environmental problem. And when properly applied, it is no more a burden on people than any other new technology. What we should be seeing with AI is the swapping out of old tools in very specific areas for new tools. That would likely cause some job loss, but no one would be trying to replace artists with a machine that's bad at art. For example.
So the question is, what the hell happened?
I genuinely think that a bunch of very rich business people who are morons about computers heard "thinking machine" and immediately jumped to the conclusion "legal slave" because they genuinely thought that the intelligence part of AI was real. And what we have been dealing with since is the consequences of all the largest corporations in the world trying to brute force invent the perfect slave, an idea that they will not let go of no matter how much damage it causes or how obvious it is that it won't work because they are so invested in the idea of not having to pay for labor that they just cannot let it go. They will burn the entire world if that is what it takes. For the same reason prisons of the United States have been warped in the extreme to support as much modern day slavery as they possibly can, these corporations will never stop destroying everything and everyone for the promise of a slave. And like every other attempt to make slaves happen, it's the minority communities, especially racial minorities, that deal with the worst of exploitation and destruction.
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