Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#221

Post by rocqua » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #22

beermonster wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is it with MS these past few months? I was thinking the same. It's not been a good few weeks for them. They're quickly losing trust which was hard to acquire in the first place given their history. Maybe a timely reminder to mention Halloween [1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

They've always been acting as a strong monopolistic corporation with a "fuck you" attitude. Here's a summary of Microsoft attitude these part 5 years: - rebrand as open-source friendly, only open-source whatever narrow side-projects they barely care about but could be run on other systems (VSCode, Powershell); distribute official packages with spyware - monopolize the education system by offering bribes including gra…

Note that secureboot does have a minor advantage for encryption at rest. Making much weaker passwords acceptable. I am happy my work laptop has secureboot. And I get why they lock down their device for me to use.

For devices I own, I gotta control the secure boot, or I simply don't own it.

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#222

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #209

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to disagree here. The threat models where the security that TPM offers are mostly applicable to the enterprise and business sectors where all devices on the network/AD/VPN have to be trusted and their storage encrypted. There TPM makes perfect sense. You average consumer/home user does not benefit at all from the features of TPM since they're not subject to the same threat model. Here TPM, and also stuff of t…

To give an example harm caused by the TPM / disk encryption feature in the consumer space: A recently-deceased friend's wife contacted me about getting personal data off from her late husband's computers. I ended up being able to get nothing for her. My friend, no doubt influenced by dementia and paranoia he was feeling, changed the passwords, made no note of them, and subsequently died. The computers in question run…

This is similar to why enabling 2FA actually scared the heck out of me! I use a password manager to generate strong unique passwords, so I think the chances of someone getting in that way are incredibly low. But I can absolutely see myself loosing all of my 2FA keys some day in a freak accident.

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#223

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

happynacho wrote: post #190

guilhas wrote: post #24

Seriously, I don't understand Firefox, Microsoft, Google... always alienating community to reimplement something that already exists, works well, and they rarely do better....

It's simple. Money.

I had a highschool history teacher who said that money/power is the answer to everything. If you don't know the answer, just say money; it's usually right.

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#224

Post by AwaAwa » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

no_time wrote: post #148

eps wrote: post #25

In related news - ever wondered why Windows 11 can't be installed on "older computers"? You know, the ones that don't have a TPM chip? Now you know. Windows 11 completes the lock-up of the OS. That's why Windows 11 exists in the first place. All other changes are secondary. Microsoft knows they would've not been able to pull shit like this as a Windows 10 update, so they were effectively forced to do a version increa…

Correct. It's one thing that the general population doesn't know what a TPM is but I just can't fathom how do governments deal with the fact that their entire nation's computing is about to be run under lock and key controlled by an american company. You could make the argument that up until this point it was possible to coexist with window's BS because despite it's closed nature, it was extensively documented and ha…

In my experience most people at government orgs simply follow the recommendations of 'someone' else. Said someone is in the pocket of some vendor, and 'champions' their cause. The relatively few folk that actually understand the details, are usually not the type to be able to wine n dine their management (because no vendor supported expense budget). Or worse, are single handedly tasked with the responsibility, and no reward (outside of securing your 'country', which effort will be diluted in front of your eyes anyway).

Everyone just buys the ABC company's TPM to put it into their heads and out of their minds.

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#225

Post by e12e » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #54

intricatedetail wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people only use Windows because the software they have don't have a Linux build. Maybe people should start pressuring vendors to make Linux builds and that could end Windows.

Ironically I have been using Linux via VMWare for about 10 years now, because I got fed up with Year of Linux Desktop, which to this day still doesn't provide a proper experience to anyone that cares about graphics programming and usable UI/UX tooling. When my Asus Netbook dies (1215B with XUbuntu), the next UNIX travel laptop will be an Air. So you can spare the talk about how much GNU/Linux has progressed, since I…

> a proper experience to anyone that cares about graphics programming and usable UI/UX tooling.

I suppose the only answers here are qt or game engines like godot/heaps.io etc - and they probably aren't as good as windows. But it's a little tricky to know exactly what you mean.

> When my Asus Netbook dies (1215B with XUbuntu), the next UNIX travel laptop will be an Air.

> So you can spare the talk about how much GNU/Linux has progressed, since I see it every time I take that netbook into use.

If you're looking for a "windows desktop replacement", you should probably compare it to one of the "big" desktop projects - ie: Ubuntu standard desktop (not a spin, like xubuntu), Red Hat or SuSe.

It's also not clear which version of xubuntu you're running - 20.04 lts?

Personally I think 20.04 with Wayland and pipewire has made great strides as a "just works" Desktop - and I'm looking forward to the next lts (pipewire baked in, hopefully).

That said, I doubt much will beat an m1 Mac in the near future, if you're happy with apple/macos.

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#226

Post by Wowfunhappy » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

kevingadd wrote: post #216

frankzander wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

an who of an average user does need that? I'm not an average user but I never need that. I also know no one who can't wait to get it or even think about wanting it. I only read in blogs or HN that one would need it. I think "you need that because of security" is PR/propaganda from certain companies.

As someone with executive function and memory issues, being able to use short pins/passwords to access my secured hardware is incredibly useful.

I think that’s a wonderful use case for a TPM, but I don’t think it means all users should be forced to buy a TPM in order to get security patches past 2025.

(I realize this is a slightly different goalpost, but I’m not GP.)

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#227

Post by e12e » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:34 PM UTC

blep-arsh wrote: post #220

gavinray wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "which to this day still doesn't provide a proper experience to anyone that cares about graphics programming and usable UI/UX tooling." Genuinely curious what doesn't work in IE Ubuntu 21.04 for you? Not one of those raving Linux zealots (don't really care that much about privacy), I've just had positive experiences on Linux -- not using it masochistically for ethical reasons, but because it worked very well for me…

I'm not the person you were replying to, but here's the straw that broke this multilingual camel's back: unless Gnome is running under Wayland, switching the keyboard layout steals the input focus away from the foreground window briefly, causing focus-loss event handlers to fire. This might seem an easily fixable minor issue but it's actually a decade-old hairball which significantly harms the experience and can't be…

Isn't Wayland standard in 21.04? So it's already fixed?

Ed:

> it's actually a decade-old hairball which significantly harms the experience and can't be fixed cleanly under X.

This is literally the whole argument for Wayland - things that can't be fixed under x11?

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#228

Post by jenscow » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #103

peteri wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several reasons for Windows popularity today: Active Directory - The centralised control it gives corporates. Games and DirectX - Although this seems to be getting to be less of a reason. Backwards compatibility - Windows 16 bit apps are now dead, but you can take the VB6 code I wrote pre-Y2K and run it today. Linux fragmentation - It's difficult to support all the Linux variations with a single binary (or…

There is also one reason many here don't see: you don't have to bother with the console. Everything can be installed and run with a mouse. Don't take me wrong. I understand the good sides of console programs. You can do a lot there but your average user doesn't care.

Honestly, the only examples I can think of which support your claim are development related tools/libraries.

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#229

Post by smoldesu » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

croutonwagon wrote: post #178

jeroenhd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is doing its absolute best to move everyone to the Windows store by packaging the new apps everyone should be making into weird formats such as appx and msix which can't or previously couldn't be easily installed without command line funkiness. Luckily, Microsofts own incompetence is preventing this plan from working. There's another part to the exclusion of old hardware, which is that modern chips are a lo…

TPM, at least older version So it was/is recommended to use a pin/key and/or recovery key to ensure the security of the data. Unless your only threat model was to protect against common thievery and assume the attack had no technical prowess (and that’s perfectly fine, I do this for my company). Not to mention they were kinda used as a warranty canary for Truecrypt [2]. There were suspicions that nation states may ha…

Plus, many Linux users just outright distrust the NIST encryption employed by security subsystems. Why encrypt your drive with SHA-2 keys that might be backdoored when you could just as easily encrypt with Ed25519?

Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker

#230

Post by no_time » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

HeckFeck wrote: post #173

Arisaka1 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw the writing on the wall the moment they could sloppily justify the TPM requirement. Then I got into arguments with people proclaiming that it's just Microsoft enforcing it for the casual user's safety, and that I'm a Microsoft hater. Who? Me, whose first programming language was C#, who worked as an Windows server administrator for years, and my operating systems have been nothing than Windows for 2 decades. An…

I genuinely miss the days of playing with DOS, Windows 9x and then all the excitement of Windows XP. All on my own hardware, which was whatever I could scrape from parents, savings, neighbours. I could do what I wanted with these old PCs. There was an openness that existed in the world of computing. Despite all that was said of Microsoft back then, and much of the complaints about proprietary software were true then…

I have a theory that this seismic shift is the result a demographic shift of PC users. It gradually went from engineers, businessmen and hackers to a much wider audience including younger people who have trouble grasping concepts such as folders[0]

This by itself is not bad, problems arise when companies use this to justify deny control even from those who can be responsible with it.

[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/students-dont-know-what-files-and-fo...