> "washington bureaucracy" just means "democrats"

Don't something like 80% of Federal employees vote Democrat?

If so, yeah, they would appear to be correct.

No they don't. They encrypt them in the background after explicitly telling you and flashing up a dialogue box which you can't avoid which gives you the option to sync your key (or not), or print the key, or save the key to the USB stick. Literally 1 of 3, you can't not select an option, and it's a full screen dialogue so you can't provision your computer without acknowledging that the encryption is happening.

Additionally if the OP's case were a new computer than they wouldn't have gotten that far since apparently the sister doesn't even know the password to her account (which is strictly required to provision a new PC)

Learn to recognise when you're being bullshitted to.

Yes, users forgetting things is dumb, including users not writing down bitlocker recover keys, or printing them out. Maybe, just maybe, losing everything due to their stupidity can teach them a lesson.

Tell me you don't know what ransomware is without telling us.

Yes it does. It presents you multiple dialogue boxes when doing so and explains the importance of your key. It also critically doesn't let you bypass the dialogue by hitting the X button like an impatient idiot meaning you will be making a conscious decision to sync your key, to print your key, or to copy it to a USB stick (the three options presented to the user in your scenario).

Additionally if this were the scenario the OP was describing then a) it wouldn't have happened silently, again there's dialogues, and b) it wouldn't work since apparently the OP's sister doesn't know her Microsoft password (in which case she can't provision the laptop in the first place).

Recognise stupid lies when you see them.

They're well aware that the Chinese aren't idiots and their worst nightmare is for China to start selling cheap AI chips which undercut those $50,000 GPUs and put them out of business.

Which is exactly what will happen if China can't buy Western chips and rely on them continuing to work if Trump decides he's going to bomb China next.

People whose machine get owned don't care if the statistics are cherry picked. The reality is if you want a secure PC, don't turn it on.

Trolling? I called it counting, but english is my second language.

Yes. With companies declaring that they're going to replace most jobs with LLMs it seems weird that universities would be telling students they can't use them.

The entire university system is broken and they haven't yet come to terms with that.

But I'm sure Xi would much rather throw money at building up local AI chip design and chip manufacturing.

Oh THAT doesn't feel right?

Dark energy is child's play. How about Einstein's field equation the solution of which implies the existence of white holes and and not one but parallel universes?

Honestly most of advanced physics doesn't feel right.

Atoms? Sure thing.
Electrons, Positron and Neutrons? Okay.
Up / Down Quarks? Who's your dealer and how can I get some of that good shit!

Even things we know to be true:
Light is a particle. Yep!
Light is a wave. Uhuh!
Light is both a wave and particle wait what? Who let the loonie in here?

No it's your fault for believing this insanely stupid story. Enabling bitlocker is a process with quite a few steps. At no point does it either enable itself - there's no mechanism for it to do so, and even if that process was started (even admins can't remotely enable bitlocker unless the machine is tied to a domain account) there would be many dialogues to click through before the encryption process is even started.

Things we don't know for certain:
a) Did laxr5rs' sister lie to him to save face?
b) Did laxr5rs lie to us

Things we do know for certain:
You're super gullible for ragebait.

She's either lying to you or you are lying to us.

That's funny, because close to everyone on Slashdot say they don't use Bitlocker and thus aren't affected by this exploit.

Anyway, what should I run instead? Linux? I mean do you want to count which OS has had the highest numbers of security related stories here in the past couple of weeks? You're not going to like the answer.

Defence in depth people. You shouldn't assume your OS is perfectly secure. You shouldn't assume your applications are perfectly secure. You shouldn't assume your supply chain is perfectly secure. Doing any of the above makes you ignorant, regardless of your chosen solution.

Hey pay it forward, I myself stole it from someone on reddit :-)

Hey it's been a while since I saw your post. None the less I recognised you straight away by you once again saying something incredibly fucking stupid.

This didn't happen in Germany. And even if it did you'd still be wrong. Germany even has multiple different laws governing different values for what is stolen. You are correct only in one case: Diebstahl geringwertiger Sachen" - 248a StGB gives you a single consistent punishment for any low value item. It doesn't matter if what you stole was worth $1 or $50. But that's about it.

Punishment (in Germany too) for theft is based on an range of variables, including the value of the item stolen.

Why is unrealised potential dismissed? The value of an asset is never considered based on the raw material used in its manufacture alone. There's a reason artwork is insured for millions and sells for millions despite being nothing more than a few shades of oil paint on a canvas you can buy at your local Staples for $10.

There's nothing crazy about determining the value of IP based on past performance, and how traditionally early leaks impact performance on release. And if you want to make the case that IP isn't valuable, sure, but first propose a fundamentally different economic system to the one we have today.