Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#2The past few years I’ve been hearing crazy stories of workarounds and scripts to deal with all these new features in Windows. Isn’t that what was preventing people from using Linux? Replacing utilman.exe with cmd.exe is not something a normal user would ever do.
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#3> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store.
That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#4Time to migrate to Linux.
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#5> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store. That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.
No, but re-enabling OneDrive might qualify.
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#6Protect yourself, use a local account. Windows 11 does not allow this but Rufus will help when you create your Windows installation media. And obviously never enter your Microsoft account credentials into any Microsoft app until you're certain it won't be linked to your local account.
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#7> The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account.
Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege level interactive user account :) https://security.stackexchange.com/a/66747
This garbage and more is the reason I did my Framework 12's installation of Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15) using this `unattend.xml` generator to disable internet requirement, disable mandatory Microsoft Account, disable intrusive spyware, disable disable disable: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
Sucks to have such an adversarial relationship with my own computer though. One shouldn't have to Know All The Tricks to avoid this shit.
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#8> The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account. Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege l…
> Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15
Not sure if you are aware of this but dual booting can be broken with new Windows update if you're not using different disks.
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#9> The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows’ root account. Pardon my pedantry, but technically Windows' equivalent of the root account is `NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM`, although it's a little different in that it isn't an account one can use to Logon. You're right that `Administrator` is the highest privilege l…
> Windows 11 (dual booting with FreeBSD 15 Not sure if you are aware of this but dual booting can be broken with new Windows update if you're not using different disks.
The BitLocker thing? I turned off the TPM and “““Secure””” Boot so it shouldn't do that.
Re: Dark patterns killed my wife's Windows 11 installation
#10> The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store. That's not a dark pattern, it's just a failure in software development. Microsoft doesn't get anything from overflowing your disk.
If windows borks itself how many people will just give up and buy a new computer? That's Microsoft's entire game right now with obsoleting perfectly good hardware.
But yes, this one is most likely just plain incompetence