While the pattern is the same the world has in fact changed a bit. Consumers generally expect things integrated. OSes need to include browsers, it's expected cloud storage to be included (an Apple innovation with iCloud closely followed by Google with Drive), and lets face it Microsoft was completely late to the party for any attempt to integrate an assistant at an OS level, they just slapped AI on it.

I suspect courts would not find these things anti-competitive in today's world. It's the unexpected bullshit that gets found anticompetitive, like Teams bundling with Office. Actually this has been explicitly tried in Europe, where a complaint to the EU commission directed at OneDrive bundling was eventually withdrawn in 2025 after the commission collectively yawned, ... and then proceeded to issue a ruling against Microsoft on Teams.

Yea, that sounds like a typical USA vehicle company. Meanwhile here in New Zealand, where fuel prices have increase 90% thanks to trump, last month sales saw in new EV registrations increase 380%, with the limiting factor being suppliers running out of stock.

I wonder what country the hackers are in and if they have state connections? Chinese government, like most governments, has double a standard when it comes to hacking. So while they have no problems with their own hackers operating against offshore targets I doubt they will take it well once if they work out which country to blame for this.

If the hackers are based in the USA it would not help relations between them but given how bad they are I guess little would come of it. On the other hand if they are in Russia it could cause friction and Russia is really relying a lot on China right now.

Should be interesting to see how this unfolds politically.

Ok so we have accepted the risks then.

"the streets should have been found and paved 20 years ago"-- this is what I mean.

Ok so it's the same old story.. costs are saved and quality suffers. The fact that they may get hacked was considered and waved off with the cost savings chosen instead.

The problem is having money and resources to fix potholes, not knowing where they are.

During the pandemic I was mind blown about the number of people who could not function unless they are in the company of others. My guess is that people who are dependent on others are easily convinced by salespeople that these things help.

Microsoft specifically denies windows certification to any device that doesn't allow secure boot to be disabled and custom keys loaded, and they have since the release of Windows 8.1 (13 years ago). There's no Windows RT devices on sale, and even Microsoft's own first party Surface Pro Snapdragon devices give you, the user, complete control over secure boot process and custom key loading.

But if the best you can come up with is criticising a Windows version that flopped so badly it nearly took an entire idea of using arm as a desktop computer architecture with it, that was used by so few people that Microsoft abandoned ideas to develop an ARM based system for a full decade, then I'm sorry but you are advertising a huge win for Microsoft there.

Now, have you got anything to say that actually impacted users, preferably something from this decade?

Your lack of understanding doesn't make something bullshit.

You forgot one. I had root on your box. That made me an evil-maid, and you just said secure boot protects against that. There's a difference between malware at a point in time, and achieving residence. Maybe I don't want your shitty dick picks in your mounted volumes, maybe I'm after your bank account details. Oh I know how about a key logger. But what if you attempt to remove said key logger? Well we have the perfect solution, since you don't know about persistent malware and choose to leave secure boot disabled I now have fucked your system beyond your repair. We thankyou for your ignorance and lack of security.

Maybe you should look up the word "secure" in the dictionary. You just described data in its *most* secure state. Nothing is more secure than something inaccessible and unrecoverable. Even if your case were true (secure boot has zero to do with your data) the result would still be more secure not less secure.

At this point it's clear you don't even understand the basic terms being used in the discussion.

You're speaking in circles. You remove all the things you claim you don't want and then you complain that there's nothing left and that you may as well run Linux? Please don't ever advertise for Linux anymore you make it sound horrible.

No it's a conspiracy theory. They admit to specific things, calling it "your data" is FUD. What is actually taken is known and agreed to in ToS, so not only is it not "your data" it's not "stealing".

They don't do anything by default. They force you into a choice screen which is not able to be bypassed by an X. And even if you blindly click okay because you don't want to read it backs up only specific folders on your computer, and does so with big bright green visible tickmarks leaving no doubt.

Yeah nah, no data is being stolen there. They aren't taking all your data, just a database of mistakes that are miscorrected. You can thank me for participating for your spellchecker working better than ever before.

I may have told you before you have no idea how security works, but in case you tried to educate yourself in the mean time you clearly failed. VeraCrypt addresses precisely zero, nada, NIL, none of the issues you list or complained about. It has no ability to hide any data from Microsoft what so ever other than the data that you never access.

Please get some help.

Narcissists don't need evidence to know that talking about themselves to other people in a retreat will help.

And modems no longer exist?

The em-dash is once again crying in the corner for not being invited to the party.

Congrats, you don't understand the basics of secure key exchange, but that's easy to fix: I suggest starting with the colour model for a basic understanding: https://www.arsouyes.org/artic... afterwards you can look into the details of how this works mathematically. No your key is *NEVER* sent anywhere. EVER. It's not required for key exchange.

There's nothing to reverse engineer. Encryption and security is based on well known public algorithms. These are designed to enable secret communication, that you can verify on a mathematical level. There's no reverse engineering anything, there's only breaking the key, and the key generation process relies on a the concept of mathematics that easily calculate but difficult to reverse. E.g. Discrete logarithm problems. Take M^b mod p = x. I could tell you M and p and x and you would still have no hope in hell of figuring out b.

Why post if you don't want to engage in a discussion?

If this is the kind of thing you normally post I don't have any idea why no one has called you deranged before.