sudioStudio64

Well, today was the day. I finally got my fill of this site.

Thanks for the memories HN, but this just isn't worth it. I could have been coding. From now on I will be.

Adieu.

You can actually customize a large part of it and turn all of it off.

You can't firewall it off, but you can learn how it actually works and just turn it off.

So, a second ago it was that you can't use a local account...but you can, so now it's..."The defaults are bad and people are dumb."

Literally all of the people who install it or buy a PC with it installed have the choice of making that decision or purchase.

And you're right, they won't change the defaults and that's not a travesty of some kind. It actually really doesn't matter to most people. Not because they don't understand it. They do, and they want to use it for one reason or another. People in our technical circles overestimate the importance of this stuff by some fairly crazy amounts.

I might just be tired of hearing the same arguments over and over, but it I did see the assertion that BitLocker shouldn't be used to keep your "secrets". As if the choice of which drive encryption software you use on your laptop should be your primary concern when securing yourself against an adversary. (The primary concern is to thoroughly evaluate your adversary and look at your available options for opsec and InfoSec. Maybe you need drive encryption. Maybe you need burners. Maybe you should only use public terminals. Etc. It also means seriously asking yourself if you actually have an adversary or just like to think that you might some day.)

Just sort of saying..."How can you trust MS NOT to have backdoored bitlocker just use Linux. Suck it NSA." Won't actually make you secure.

Some of it's pay as you go, oddly enough. But you are largely correct that more money equals more access to these kinds of things.

There is a company in China that paid them to install Office 365 in their data center. There is an amount of money that will make them install it in your data center, too.

I just think that there has never been more choice for end users and a lot of this stuff about privacy is disingenuous. There are a group of people that wouldn't be happy even if MS released their own version of TAILS and hosted part of the Tor network. (It would be "embrace, extend, extinguish!"..."Tor is part sponsored by the Navy...I be MS gives your Tor traffic directly to the NSA."...It's really not hard to imagine the BS.)

One other thing. A "pile of power over you"...that's not helping, man. They have some commercial legal arrangement that you don't particularly care for. They can't come and kick you in the shin and torture you. They can't beat you to death and plant a weapon on you or anything. We are talking about an issue that is squarely within middle and upper class privilege in an industry that literally could not exist without government defense funding.

Take, for instance, Richard Stallman is an Alumn of Harvard and MIT. There literally can't be a place that is more establishment. So all of that "freedom" is about being able to use an expensive commercial product that was developed with RnD money from the DOD...but somehow it's morally wrong to not ship source code to a compiler? Can you see where I'm coming from here? The moralizing is pretty arbitrary.

Furthermore, if they did give your content to the Government because of a national security letter how is that abuse of power? Should they not comply with the law? I disagree with a lot of the laws that have been passed in support the war efforts of the last decade, but that's kind of the way that democracy works. I lost, but I still have to live by the rules.

I just think that the privacy absolutism that everyone keeps bringing up isn't reasonable. Even Bruce Schneier says that the way that you actually change these things is through the political process.

Power is a boot on your neck. This is more of an inconvenience.

I just don't think that's an accurate picture. They aren't recording your voice and storing it somewhere. Browsing and search history are collected by other platforms for predictive browse ahead and autocomplete, and it's a useful feature. App usage is collected for diagnostic purposes.

You don't have to use a MS account. You can use a local account. 10 is different from windows 8 in that regard. You can take Cortana off the taskbar. Use a different browser in incognito mode all the time. Store your encryption keys in a TPM, smartcard, or Active Directory. There are actually lots of options. You have to actually look into it though.

And what secrets are those? If you think that you are secure because you don't use bitlocker or windows AND THAT'S ALL that you do...you aren't secure, you just have bad UI.

That's not really accurate. Maybe we can reach out to someone at MS and they can explain exactly what is being sent. It certainly isn't virtually everything that you do...it's something, it's not accurate to say its everything.

MS people frequent this site. Maybe one of them could get some detail on the subject?

That looks like some amazing work. I'm going to give it a try.