Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shareholders are getting anxious.
I don't think so. https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/price
Some nth derivative growth metric is slowing down, so the company is actually doomed unless it does some shady shit.
Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
491–500 of 543 posts
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145 My favorite part is when someone figures out "telemetry" includes the MAC address, and the dev team just goes completely silent.
The MAC address is very important for developers. It tells them which GUI elements are accesed, what error messages are common and what features of the program are accessed.
For some reason developers think they're magically exempt from judgement of their data harvesting. I don't want you monitoring my activity on my goddamn devices, however much you yammer on about having good intentions. The act itself is hostile, and that's why developers are so goddamn sneaky about it. You're invading privacy and creating metadata records that are trivially deanonymized.
There's an honest, non sneaky way of gathering usage information: pay for rigorous testing and price the cost into the product. Telemetry is lazy, invasive, and user hostile by default. Every bit of information acquired from users should be given with informed consent or not collected at all.
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#493Earlier 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…
The issue isn't the TPM, it's who owns the keys to the machine. If the user configures their own keys, it becomes an empowering technology that allows them to verify their boot process hasn't been tampered with. If Microsoft owns the keys, they own the computer and the technology becomes their means of control over the user. They will use this technology to oppressively deny the user their software freedom while simu…
The logistical problem of key exchange hasn't been solved. Boot viruses are very real, but the most severe threats is information extraction which works fine in user space.
I doubt I will activate TPM on my home PC as it doesn't offer much security to me. You can already say that some services will use remote attestations and I think these services can do without me.
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "Ubuntu Software" screen should be installed by default. > Ubuntu Software Center is a one-stop shop for installing and removing software on your computer. > It is included in Ubuntu 9.10 and later. > - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuSoftwareCenter
The "Ubuntu Software" screen should be installed by default. "Should" being the operative word unfortunately. It clearly wasn't installed by default for this machine that had been upgraded through earlier versions (starting around 16 I think so well after 9.10), nor was there any obvious indication to the user that it was missing and available to be added. There were some other oddities after that upgrade, for exampl…
Ah, the "should-have-but-didn't" class of frustrations! Often undocumented, often not even believed when asking for help online.
I understand your frustration!
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Microsoft's ARM hardware _is_ locked down with no such options That was for 32-bit Windows on Arm hardware. 64-bit Windows on Arm laptops/tablets have unlockable Secure Boot, with a regular SETUP interface and all.
That's really good news and I'm glad they decided to do that.
All this does make Microsoft sound very reasonable, actually. People have been painting dystopian pictures of an ultra-locked down hardware future, complete with evil corporate overlordship etc for many years. Really as long as I've been using computers. Yet, here we are in 2021 and not only old hardware is still open but newly designed hardware too, and Microsoft has even been ensuring that platforms which didn't get the memo (mobile, ARM) open up.
The problem with a completely unlocked bootloader is that the distinction between "a Linux distribution" and "malware" is not one that can be decided technologically. Otherwise malware could just install a heavily customized Linux kernel that directly boots into Windows, hot-patching it along the way, and who is to say it's not really Linux? Someone has to make that call for the ordinary userbase that doesn't care about operating systems and it sounds like out of an ideological fit of pique - what a surprise - Linux vendors just noped out and refused to do their part. Because, you know, malware is other people's problem. So now Microsoft finds themselves carrying water for their own competitor.
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#496The article mentions Process Explorer. Since Sysinternals were bought by Microsoft many years ago and the tools are distributed directly via Microsoft, such tools are unlikely to have an issue being signed. A brief history of the process for those not following it. Originally for kernel-mode drivers, you needed a code signing certificate cross signed by Microsoft's root . This means that the certificate follows a cha…
Very informative. And presumably on OSX none of this applies because it's all BSD underneath? Or is OSX different again to just running BSD out of the box?
On Mac it's significantly more locked down and judging from recent comments by Tim Cook they still aren't happy with it. Presumably they see iOS as the gold standard internally and would love to make OS X work the same way, but can't without breaking too many apps. The recent stance taken by the judge on Epic v Apple re: Gatekeeper will certainly push them further in the lockdown direction :(
On OS X Intel the operating system will basically refuse to run unsigned code unless you know an ever-shifting series of magic undocumented cheat codes. You have to do weird things like hold down certain keys then use the right click context menu to open unsigned apps, you need magic CLI commands to disable notarization checking, you have to go into the system preferences window to enable drivers to be approved and then reboot etc. The UX is atrocious and gets worse all the time - it's barely acceptable even for developers. That's for usermode. Kernel mode drivers are dead now, more or less.
On OS X ARM unsigned code will not run. Period, end of story. The magic cheat codes are gone. All code must be notarized, which is a server-side approval process of the type Microsoft only use for kernel drivers.
There are a few silver linings to all this. One is that getting a cert isn't actually that hard. You need a credit card, basically. It's not like getting an EV cert where you need a company and for a CA to verify the corporate identity. Likewise their "notarization" process is not a manual app store like review, it's fully automated and is mostly just checking that the app is well structured and properly signed. It probably does other things like checking you aren't using internal APIs, and they presumably archive all the binaries they notarize so they can go back in time to investigate malware and so on. But it's not being used for political or commercial purposes, at this time.
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#497Earlier 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…
Re: app store. That's not quite fully correct. It's obscure and not well known but actually, Microsoft isn't doing what you claim.
1. Any signed app with good reputation will be ignored by Windows Defender and other AV tools. That's how Windows security works: the anti-virus programs focus their attention on activity by code that they don't recognize. Signatures are how to handle "good" polymorphic code like app updates whilst stopping "bad" polymorphic code like viruses that constantly rewrite themselves. This isn't connected to the app store.
2. You can in fact make your own app store. Windows 10 comes with something called App Installer. You put an MSIX file and a .appinstaller file on your web server, and open the XML file with a special protocol handler. The app is downloaded, installed, lightly sandboxed (but not aggressively so: win32 apps will work fine), and Windows keeps it up to date for you. This is basically the same experience as the App Store itself, but decentralized.
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#498Are there TPMs where the user has more control and can configure w/ a root password to control keys? I like the idea of a secure tamper resistant security device but I don't like that the owner of the PC does not retain absolute control over this device.
At least historically TPMs weren't even usable at all before you perform a procedure called "taking ownership" in which you set a password. This is one of the reasons nothing much uses the TPM. The privacy/control features it had killed its usability.
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145 My favorite part is when someone figures out "telemetry" includes the MAC address, and the dev team just goes completely silent.
The MAC address is very important for developers. It tells them which GUI elements are accesed, what error messages are common and what features of the program are accessed.
True, and how else should any developer know what food the user had yesterday?
Re: Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you repeatedly fail to anonymize the information and also collect user-entered data like command line arguments? https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/6145
Well, you make my point. What you linked to is definitely not telemetry.
So is your point that what Microsoft is doing is in fact spyware and not technically "telemetry", since what I linked to is what they are actually doing? In that case, to avoid confusion, we should stop referring to it as telemetry.