11–20 of 28 posts
I really wonder how many times the Microsoft legal department gets asked to hand over keys to law enforcement...
Do I read between the lines here that the default setup for home users (who have a Microsoft account) is to have an encrypted drive, but Microsoft gets sent a copy of the key...? I really wonder how many times the Microsoft legal department gets asked to hand over keys to law enforcement...
"When the administrator uses a Microsoft account to sign in, the clear key is removed, a recovery key is uploaded to the online Microsoft account..."
Microsoft does not break down requests by key disclosure, but they do say in their most recent report for 2022 H2 that they released account content for 522 requests to US criminal authorities in that half. It does not note how many accounts were included in those 522 requests.[2]
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating...
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/law...
Do I read between the lines here that the default setup for home users (who have a Microsoft account) is to have an encrypted drive, but Microsoft gets sent a copy of the key...? I really wonder how many times the Microsoft legal department gets asked to hand over keys to law enforcement...
> It turns out that if you skip the Microsoft account sign-in step and only create a “local account”, your data is encrypted but the encryption key is stored on the drive unprotected
So . . . unsupported behavior gets unexpected results?
[cue sad trombone]
Recently I wiped the contents of the Trusted Platform Module of a laptop. Now the laptop failed to boot as the Bitlocker key was not stored in the TPM anymore. To my surprise it was possible to get a code from Microsoft to access the laptop's disk again, as one of the admin accounts was a Microsoft account. I strongly suspect, Microsoft does only activate Bitlocker during the OOBE if it can set-up this kind of Bitloc…
Recently I wiped the contents of the Trusted Platform Module of a laptop. Now the laptop failed to boot as the Bitlocker key was not stored in the TPM anymore. To my surprise it was possible to get a code from Microsoft to access the laptop's disk again, as one of the admin accounts was a Microsoft account. I strongly suspect, Microsoft does only activate Bitlocker during the OOBE if it can set-up this kind of Bitloc…
[0]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/finding-your-bit... [1]: https://www.windowspro.de/sites/windowspro.de/files/imagepic... [2]: https://www.anoopcnair.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/switch...
I have made a claim before which I shall make again: Windows 11 should be considered malware, it is the worst product Microsoft has ever produced. I hope the experience gets even worse so that more people will abandon Windows for better OS's.
Forced online account creation, page after page asking to enable data, ad preferences for what normally costs a lot of money, all of this seems crazy when I compare it with a recent Linux install which had zero things I had to agree to. The windows ULAs are so long you can't even read them if you wanted to.
At least I only paid USD 3 for the license because anything more than that IMO is insane at this point.
