Everyone who publishes that data is just providing free evidence. Why would they do that? Who knows, but this is smarter, and only slightly less scrupulous.

They were not. There is a reason Ford introduced the 40h 5 day week and it was not to coddle workers. It merely was the identified peak-point of efficiency for manual labor. There are too many virtue-signalling idiots around that do not even know these basics. Incidentally, for desk work the optimum is 6h for 5 days a week. You can bring that up to 8/5 by doing 2h of low-productivity desk work per day, but that is it. Work more and you produce less.

They charge so much that it's literally cheaper to have a new part soldered to the board. They're fostering an industry dedicated to bypassing their ridiculous design decisions.

It took no skill, because you made no point. You just threw up and called it a meal.

To be fair, they put on a reasonable show about not being evil in the beginning when they needed to hire smart but clueless people. They clearly never believed any of that. I attended one of the Page/Brin recruitment shows way back and it gave me very strong cult vibes. That type of environment is not conductive to truth at all.

Indeed. War-criminals vs. terrorists? Really not much of a difference. Both like to kill larger numbers of unarmed civilians and the lie about it. You know, evil.

Yes, pretty much. An important step in the Enshittifcation process.

I don't think this is true. If you enable emergency mode video recording you have to enter your PIN to end the recording, but biometrics will still unlock the lockscreen. While the recording is going, hit the power button to activate the lockscreen, which will be unlockable with biometrics. You can also swipe up from the bottom (assuming gesture navigation) and switch to other apps. The device is not locked and not in lockdown mode while in emergency mode.

What you can do is press power and volume up to bring up the power menu, and then tap the "Lockdown" icon. That will lock the device and disable biometric authentication.

If you really, really want to lock it down, power the device down, or reboot it and don't log in. Android's disk encryption scheme uses your PIN/pattern/password ("lockscreen knowledge factor", or LSKF) along with keys stored in secure hardware to derive the disk encryption keys. It would make for a long post to go into all of the details, but given the hardware-enforced brute force mitigation,if the attacker gets a device in this state it's extremely difficult to decrypt any of the credential-encrypted data on the device without your LSKF. This is particularly true on devices that implement "StrongBox" (all Pixels, some Samsungs, some others). Android StrongBox moves some crucial functionality, including LSKF authentication and LSKF brute force resistance, into a separate hardened, lab-certified[*] security processor with its own internal storage, a "secure element".

Of course, note that appellate courts in the US have split on whether or not your LSKF can be compelled. Some have ruled that unless the PIN/pattern/password is itself incriminating, it's no different than compelling the combination to a safe, which has long been held to be constitutional.

[*] For anyone interested in the details, the required certification is Common Criteria EAL 4+ (5+ is recommended, and common, many devices meet 6+), using protection profile 0084 for the hardware and equivalent "high attack potential" evaluation for the software, plus AVA_VAN.5 penetration testing, all performed in a nationally-accredited security testing lab. While certification isn't a guarantee of security (nothing is), the required certification applies the highest level of scrutiny you can get for commercially-available devices. Apple also uses a similarly-certified SE in their devices, but it's not clear whether they use it for LSKF authentication, or whether they use their (uncertified) Secure Enclave.

Well. We are clearly heading into a two-class society: Those slave to MS and those that are not. There are signs some more tech-savvy people have had enough and are doing non-MS just for the sake of doing non-MS. And for a lot of things that actually works nicely. My plans for when Win10 is going out of support is to have one gaming machine with Win11, no email, no web-browsing (except related to the games on it), no MS account, no nothing. I will probably also keep a few no-network Win10 VMs. But that is it.

Maybe not hundreds, but at least dozens. For most people their phone is their digital assistant in all sorts of ways... not only for communication for for calendaring, looking up random things, reading the news or books, listening to music, getting directions, checking their bank account/brokerage, doing calculations, fitness tracking, managing shopping and to-do lists... the list goes on and on.

Well, fortunately, the EU still makes them keep that possibility to use a local account. I guess the possibility of a few billion EUR as fine gives even MS pause. But they are making it harder, and I hope they will trip the alerts pretty soon.

MS OneDrive must have been designed by the most fucked up extreme idiots MS could get their hands on. I use it on one company laptop (job end in a few months, I already have handed in my resignation), but the amount of times this utter crap _moved_ files when I wanted copies is staggering. It is like they want to break everything when Azure gets nuked (as it nearly has been in 2023).

Obviously. They want to not only squeeze as much money out of you as possible, they want you to _suffer_ in addition. The time where this could be explained by incompetence and stupidity is way past. This has to be direct maliciousness.