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Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

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Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#121

Post by d3Xt3r »

p_ing wrote: post #102
d3Xt3r wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second slicktux's suggestion: look into OPAL, it's much more easier to setup and use compared to LUKS. The best part is, the encryption is transparent to the OS, so you could multi-boot between multiple OSes and not worry about encryption or compatibility with partitioning tools etc. Your drive does need to support OPAL though, check out sedcli for managing SEDs.

Microsoft abandoned OPAL/SED support due to vendor's just f-ing it up making the encryption worthless. YMMV.

?? OPAL is transparent to the OS, Microsoft doesn't need to see/care about it. I'm multi-booting Win11, Linux and GhostBSD on my OPAL2 encrypted drive (on a ThinkPad Z13) and I've got zero issues.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#122

Post by [deleted] »

trinsic2 wrote: post #2

I am a IT solutions provider for the public and small business. I think the changes to Windows 11 is gearing up to work with organizations to create a surveillance state. So I have to decided to promote Linux over Windows for computers I build for customers. If you have any suggestions on how I can make this promotion, better let me know.

[deleted]

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#123

Post by weq »

heavyset_go wrote: post #28
trinsic2 wrote: post #2

I am a IT solutions provider for the public and small business. I think the changes to Windows 11 is gearing up to work with organizations to create a surveillance state. So I have to decided to promote Linux over Windows for computers I build for customers. If you have any suggestions on how I can make this promotion, better let me know.

If you're going to do this, set them up with something they can get commercial support for. IMO, if a user's needs can be met with a Chromebook, Linux + a browser + email + Zoom/or whatever would suit them well. I think you're going to have a hard sell if they rely on Office or other Windows-only software, and although well meaning, it might be doing them a disservice if they can't run the software they're accustomed…

> something something Chromebook something something

Why wait for mass survellience and remote attesention when u can have it today!!! :D

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#125

Post by xarope »

tartoran wrote: post #20

I have Win10 on a laptop that I use and am thinking of either taking it an offline completely (and keep on win10 forever on it) or upgrade it to Linux but am not sure if it's worth the hassle upgrading a $200 Thinkpad Carbon x1, I may as well get another one and leave this one as is. I still own a laptop with Windows 7 that when I turn on, that is quite rarely, but when I do I am hit by wave of nostalgia. This win10…

go for it (upgrade to linux). My T480s is still my goto laptop when I'm travelling (if I lose it, no biggie - encrypted home dir, meanwhile it can last for 5-7 hours playing videos, running webapps etc), versus my work laptop on windows 11 dying after 2+ hours.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#126

Post by glaucon »

It seems to me that he's missed Teams off his list of "where this might not work for you" situations. A lot more than half my money comes from clients who know of nothing else. I'm not pleased about this, but it's another part of their grip on their more-or-less monopoly.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#127

Post by zrobotics »

moduspol wrote: post #56
zrobotics wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't recommend deploying ublock on customer machines. Or at least ask what their workflow is first. There are a ton of SaaS sites that break with ad locking enabled. I run firefox+UBO+privacy badger on my machines, and the only sites I've had to disable my privacy extensions in the last few years for were work related, B2B SaaS apps. A few years ago I pushed UBO to user machines (Chrome on win10) at work, and h…

Not defending it but for clarity: it’s SQL Server Express that has the 10GB limit, and it’s free. They’re staying under that limit so they DON’T have to pay Microsoft. Aside from the Windows license, presumably.

Thanks for clarifying. Looks like the jump to standard is 989/year (if I'm reading Microsoft's confusing pricing sheet correctly). That's enough of a jump that it would definitely be a budget item for a lot of business. And migrating to a different DB engine isn't often an easy task, but keeping a DB maintained under a size limit sounds like a PITA and prone to accidental deletion of needed data. I definitely don't envy someone having to deal with that.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#128

Post by tombert »

Even if I didn't give a shit about the privacy stuff, I would like to just reiterate something I said a few days ago.

My mom got an automatic update to Windows 11, and it bricked her computer. It wouldn't boot; it would spin and then say it needed to go into repair mode, and then doing repair mode didn't do anything.

My initial thought was that the disk was hosed, but of course my parents had a bunch of priceless documents that were never backed up anywhere else, so I talked my dad through flashing a USB of Ubuntu so I could boot into it [1], mounted the NTFS partition, and ran smartctl and the disk wasn't reporting any errors. I found and ran a few other diagnostic commands and again, no errors. I was able to rsync the files to my home server, so nothing was loss. My initial assumption is that the Windows Update team didn't properly check to see if the CPU was compatible, and that maybe they were calling a newer instruction that wasn't on my mom's relatively old laptop.

After unsuccessfully trying to convince my parents to move to Linux, I talked them through flashing a USB drive with Windows 11 with an official image from Microsoft and using Microsoft's official disk flashing software, and we were able to install Windows 11, and as far as we can tell, it worked completely fine.

My hypothesis now is that whomever built Windows Update fucked up some kind of boot key and it was failing as a result. That or they just decided my mom should buy a new computer.

I was actually more annoyed after Windows 11 worked perfectly fine, not just because that means my parents aren't going to move to Linux, but also because that means that there's no technical reason that the computer should have been bricked, it was just the utter incompetence of Windows Update. Just to reiterate, this wasn't some hacked version of Windows 11, this was directly downloaded from Microsoft, flashed with their tools, with no adulteration on our end, meaning regular Windows 11 works fine. I highly doubt that my mom is the only person who has gone through or will go through this, and a lot of the people that will go through this won't have kids who are software engineers and probably be forced to buy a new computer.

Genuinely, how much e-waste is going to be generated by this forced update?

[1] Why the hell isn't there any kind of "Live USB" version of Windows? I mean officially, not some hacked thing? Why is the best way to fix Windows to use Linux?

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#129

Post by bee_rider »

rolph wrote: post #83
gerdesj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't bother - no idea what your parent is up to. Linux - the kernel is GPL 2 - that means you can use it to your heart's content. If you make changes, it would be nice if you shared them, please do. A Linux distro will generally have a similar license. Again the idea is that positive changes that you make are made available to everyone. That is the idea of the GNU Public License: If you take our freely available stu…

so if someone takes our freely available stuff, bundles it with a newly assembled system, and sells them, at a marked up price, like normal business does, it wont be an issue if no mention is made of GPL2 and what that means for the end user. the idea that positive changes are made available to everyone, is not yet broadly salient. at least now, poster is probably aware of that condition. you seem to be up on GPL2 ,…

Can you say specifically what you this there is to be concerned about, and why you think it is a problem? Just asking questions like this is not an effective warning, I think. We should be direct, to avoid spreading uncertainty and doubt.

Re: Retiring Windows 10 and Microsoft's move towards a surveillance state

#130

Post by mixmastamyk »

apple4ever wrote: post #9

I think it's a good plan, though there might be some pain. I have a bog standard AMD graphics card that does not work in Linux. I've tried multiple distributions and version in those distributions and both the Linux and AMD drivers. It just randomly flashes. Where do I go to get help? Who knows?

This happened with a new AMD chipset with a Framework. One firmware update improved it and then kernel 6.8? I think fixed it. Was about perfect, then kernel 6.13 AMD driver broke it again. ;-)
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