Indeed. Space-limit, hard-placed default-deny or something. In any case something placed incompetently and then not tested for. Amateurs.

And incompetent testing or no testing. Pathetic.

Which is so clueless it is endlessly funny. Example: Some years ago I had a call with a well-known US maker of thin clients. There were some security concerns. Then they brought in their senior software/firmware people, which turned out to be located in Shanghai. So much for "made in the US".

Then their products turned to shit both on the hardware reliability side and on the software side. Seems their corporate morals are of equal quality. Hopefully this will kill them.

Indeed. They just do not want to and prefer to screw their users and waste their user's time.

While these are "policy settings", they do not require any external server, were done entirely locally with standard MS tools and this is just a regular "pro" version, not enterprise.

Incidentally, I think the same is true with regards to local accounts (which is what I use). As long as there is some not too obscure way to get one they might be fine, legally. If they block it completely, they are very likely in violation of the GDPR which forbids requiring an account unless absolutely necessary.

Yep. Enterprises whose demise would basically benefit everybody. Essentially a cancer on society.

Doing that sounds like an extreme case of medical malpractice? Maybe criminally negligent homicide as a follow-up to that?

This is really the standard expectation and MS consistently delivers. That is when they do not deliver worse quality.

While I agree that LLMs are somewhat useful in a much, much narrower scope than hyped, I am not sure the scam/hype instigators have any agenda besides get-rich-quick. Never attribute to a hidden agenda that which can be nicely attributed to greed. Or something.

That is probably the most likely outcome. Some tech experts need to retain real skills though or it all comes crashing down. LLMs cannot design run, or maintain tech, despite all claims to the contrary.

Yes. Well, make that "many". But incredible as that sounds given some comments, many people here are wayyyy above average in tech understanding and insight. Obviously, we have the occasional keyword-trigger-only-no-insight MAGA and some tech fanatics, but generally we are insulting each other on a comparatively (if not absolute) pretty high insight level here.

My guess would be some other agency asked for it and the IRS is a smokescreen.

Looks just more AI scamming to me. "Poised to explode" = "we hope to pump before we dump".

Well, I am included to believe they mismanaged things badly before, but I would not rule out "AI" playing a significant in their doubtless upcoming demise.

Yep. They are probably in denial because some c-levels do not want to admit having screwed up badly. Let's see whether they are still around in 5 years.