This was actually a very interesting mystery. I'm lucky I can migrate away from Windows as needed, but people who aren't as technically inclined are imprisoned in the ecosystem.
This was actually a very interesting mystery. I'm lucky I can migrate away from Windows as needed, but people who aren't as technically inclined are imprisoned in the ecosystem.
Yeah, that's my concern with my mom. She's not as bad as some people, but she's still not the most technically inclined. She often asked me to help with applications that I barely knew, but I...
Yeah, that's my concern with my mom. She's not as bad as some people, but she's still not the most technically inclined. She often asked me to help with applications that I barely knew, but I could get the hang of it and use Google well enough to figure out how to accomplish whatever she needed faster than she could. She continued using her Windows 7 laptop from her job even after they gave her one with a newer Windows because she couldn't get used to the new interface.
All these posts and articles about how bad Windows 11 is make me wary of getting another Windows machine, but I'm also wary of her ability to use something as complex as Linux given all the troubleshooting it involves. Though uh... Actually, not sure she'd be able to use Windows 11 either since I'm pretty sure that's what that second work laptop had, so it may be a moot point?
Second what @skybrian said, I originally intended for my recently acquired Mint box to go to replace my dad's aging windows 7 (shhhh), but decided instead to buy him a shiny new Chromebook from...
Second what @skybrian said, I originally intended for my recently acquired Mint box to go to replace my dad's aging windows 7 (shhhh), but decided instead to buy him a shiny new Chromebook from Costco. On principle he'd not go for anything that sounds free and not mainstream, and heaven knows what happens if I'm not there and he needs technology help, he's way better off with a shiny pre-installed paid OS that'll come with 2 years of Costco concierge tech help
Sometimes the best help I can provide is the mental comfort from ready scapegoat of "store sold me overpriced nonsense" instead of "my weird hippy kid got me weird cheap nonsense ".
For someone in a similar situation who isn't working, I think a Chromebook makes a lot of sense. (If they're working, they might need Windows for something.)
For someone in a similar situation who isn't working, I think a Chromebook makes a lot of sense. (If they're working, they might need Windows for something.)
This is why several years ago, I convinced my mom to get a Macbook. I had been using a Macbook as my daily driver so I could learn how to support Mac users, and I noticed how many guardrails there...
This is why several years ago, I convinced my mom to get a Macbook. I had been using a Macbook as my daily driver so I could learn how to support Mac users, and I noticed how many guardrails there were that Windows largely doesn't have.
For power users, such as myself, yeah I like having a lack of guardrails in my way. But most Windows users are not power users. So there should absolutely be guardrails to protect a user from themselves or from other malicious actors. I get that it can be annoying, such as on MacOS when using something like Teams or Zoom for the first time. The user has to allow several permissions: microphone, camera, screen recording for the ability to screenshare, maybe even full disk access to download/upload files, maybe even network access. And it's not the easiest, from a user perspective, to unlock and allow those perms. It is definitely a bit clunky. But maybe it should be that way. A couple years ago, I began thinking that most users at my then workplace should probably be on Mac instead of Windows. Using a bunch of cheap M1/M2 Macbooks. But that would never fly. Because people hate change.
To your point about Linux, I actually did put my mom on Kubuntu for a couple years before she moved to Mac. She had a Win7 netbook, but with Windows bloat over time and the netbook's tiny 16GB storage, she started running out of space. So I put Kubuntu on it and showed her the ropes. She was surprisingly more adept at it then she was with Windows. I don't know why. Not saying she was using the CLI or anything, but the UI just clicked easier for her. That also made it an easier transition to MacOS.
Though these days, she probably could just get away with a Chromebook as skybrian suggests.
I know the "every year is the year of the linux desktop" people are annoying, but I did also recently switch after my boot drive blew up. Since I was planning to switch away from Win 10 once M$...
I know the "every year is the year of the linux desktop" people are annoying, but I did also recently switch after my boot drive blew up. Since I was planning to switch away from Win 10 once M$ ended support for it, I figured I might as well jump ship now, when I was reinstalling anyway.
I switched to Fedora and it's been fantastic. I've only needed to do cryptic command line shit twice, once when installing nvidia graphics drivers, and then when installing HEVC video codecs. Granted, the latter did send me on a bit of a wild goose chase because h265 encoded video was still playing, albeit with audio only, and I had just completed a remux of my entire media library to h265 to save storage space.
I'm also a programmer, but genuinely, the things I did was all copypasting commands into terminal, and needed to happen just twice after installing. Never again since. Steam runs flawlessly and the game I play the most right now, Helldivers 2, a graphically intense Windows only game, runs very well through Proton emulation, all of which works seamlessly and without needing to do anything more than check a box in the Steam settings.
It depends on your usecases, but the majority of people browse the web and write documents, and libreoffice is serviceable and for browsing it works great.
Sadly I think anything with the command line would be too complex for my mom, possibly because of how seldom it may be used. I've given up on teaching her how to change the input of the TV we've...
Sadly I think anything with the command line would be too complex for my mom, possibly because of how seldom it may be used. I've given up on teaching her how to change the input of the TV we've had for ~15 years when I'd forget to change it back after gaming. Despite showing her the input button multiple times, it just never clicked.
I think if she had to use something regularly, she'd learn and get used to it. She did her job fine for years after all, she mostly needed help with features she never needed to use. But even then, I remember back when we had cable she'd ignore the big green "recordings" button on the remote and press menu to open it through that. And she'd fast forward to the end of a recorded show instead of pressing the stop button to bring up the menu about deleting it or watching something else...
Yeah, I fear to imagine what could happen if she tried to use the command line. Luckily I think even if she knew what it was, she'd deem it too technical and call me over to handle it. So I guess it would ultimately be a moot point. But now I wonder how badly someone just tech savvy and bold enough to try with zero understanding could mess with a computer...
I feel like this describes how I gained my computer expertise as a kid — we always had a family computer growing up, but I got my very own laptop when I was in high school, and I think I had...
But now I wonder how badly someone just tech savvy and bold enough to try with zero understanding could mess with a computer...
I feel like this describes how I gained my computer expertise as a kid — we always had a family computer growing up, but I got my very own laptop when I was in high school, and I think I had broken something or other and needed to completely reformat and reinstall MacOSX from the installation CDs at least three times within the first year of having it (and less often but still happened occasionally for the many years that I had that laptop).
As long as nothing on the computer is precious, I think it’s fine. It taught me a lot about what breaks a computer and also how easy it is to reinstall the OS, both of which are valuable skills even though I’ve never had a tech job.
Yeah this is the point at which many older people will go, "oh my Lord I've been hacked and WsiAccount hackers will steal all my bank money!" The other day we had a nice thread talking about why...
Windows 11 claims the accurate, correct password my wife is entering is invalid [...] In the account selection menu in the bottom-left, an ominous new account mysteriously appears: WsiAccount.
Yeah this is the point at which many older people will go, "oh my Lord I've been hacked and WsiAccount hackers will steal all my bank money!"
The other day we had a nice thread talking about why switching to Linux is still a challenge for folks, and having to fiddle around command line was a big turn off for many, myself included. But as this post and my own windows dark pattern experiences proves, one can't get away from fiddly weird command line experiences with Windows anymore either. Might as well have an OS that doesn't keep secretly trying to reinstall garbage and blames you for having too small of a hard drive. That's going to be all of their tech support: your hardware is outdated spend more
And while I'm old man shaking fist at clouds here, I feel that many games and apps these days take the same strategy for software development: make it bloated and don't bother testing, just blame the user for having sub bleeding edge hardware and get them to upgrade
Funny this pops up today. I'm actually going to install Linux on my home PC today. What finally pushed me over the edge was an experience at work though. It forced me to update from Windows 10 to...
Funny this pops up today. I'm actually going to install Linux on my home PC today. What finally pushed me over the edge was an experience at work though. It forced me to update from Windows 10 to 11 but in a very weird way:
First of, Windows locked the main monitor on my PC, telling me that it was going to update. And that it was going to happen. This happened without any warnings in advance.
What is weird about this is that my other monitors were not locked. (as a result I'm not even sure whether to call it a hard or a soft lock) If this did not happen, I wouldn't have been able to save what I was working on. Now, the tools I use most likely would've saved an emergency copy of my work, but imagine if a) that wasn't the case and b) I wouldn't have been able to save my work. Even better, imagine this happening with someone who works in say, finance or something.
Needless to say, I used my other monitors to very quickly save whatever I could. While this happened, unprompted, my PC decided it was time to restart to perform the update.
Now, to be fair, there are enough reasons to hard force an update on users. But this experience was just badly thrown together that I struggled to believe this happened with an update like that. The (soft/hard)lock was weirdly thrown together. If I was away for even a moment I wouldn't have been able to save my work. Hell, if I didn't have multiple monitors I wouldn't have been able to save my work. And I also had no option to delay whatsoever. If I had delayed the updates, especially multiple times, whatever. That would have been on me.
This isn't the reason I'm switching to Linux at home. I could vent about all other ways I've grown tired of Windows all day but that'd be preaching for the choir. The weird update experience just ended up being the last push.
I'd rather not see my work gone over something like this.
Yeah, that's because windows just can't do updates without screwing with your work. In the background for example. Without reboots. Situations like these happened to thousands of poor souls, even...
Yeah, that's because windows just can't do updates without screwing with your work. In the background for example. Without reboots. Situations like these happened to thousands of poor souls, even the people in finance you mention, even to people presenting at conferences right on the stage and so on. Microsoft even had a page listing several stories like this and then finishing that its all worth it, the updates are the best.
It’s sad because as far as I can tell every update I get on Debian does not require a reboot. You can update the kernel and it will keep running the old kernel until you restart. I believe even...
It’s sad because as far as I can tell every update I get on Debian does not require a reboot. You can update the kernel and it will keep running the old kernel until you restart. I believe even major version upgrades don’t require reboots.
Apple also does a better job than Microsoft. They require reboots for major updates but they do better about ensuring work is saved and won’t just spring an update on you without warning.
I feel like Microsoft should start over and handle legacy software in a VM.
The best part of this is that the "normal user" solution (per the article) of reinstalling the operating system would not work either. It would just do the same thing. The actual normal user would...
The best part of this is that the "normal user" solution (per the article) of reinstalling the operating system would not work either. It would just do the same thing.
The actual normal user would just go buy a new computer because normal users in the modern day do not know how to reinstall an operating system.
There's also the option of hiring a computer tech or a techie relative/friend to look at it since that could be cheaper than buying a new computer, and I think a lot of them would also probably go...
There's also the option of hiring a computer tech or a techie relative/friend to look at it since that could be cheaper than buying a new computer, and I think a lot of them would also probably go for reinstalling it. Some extra tech savvy and curious techs might investigate deeper, but I imagine most would have other computers on their docket so they wouldn't go that far on the first round.
The nature of the problem is just so specific. The writer figured it out partially due to dealing with his wife's new phone and the OneDrive problem before finding that reddit post. Without that context, I'm not sure how long it would take someone to make the connection.
At bare minimum it would probably be made after the problem recurred and merited deeper investigation, and by that point the user would have likely lost many files predating the first reinstall since chances are they didn't do backups beyond... Maybe cloud backups? I don't know, my main driver is a Macbook. I just know most normal users don't do any sort of manual backups.
Some people still pay for warranties and things like GeekSquad I think, so as a first step they’d go through that process first and then buy a new computer after that fails lol
Some people still pay for warranties and things like GeekSquad I think, so as a first step they’d go through that process first and then buy a new computer after that fails lol
Microsoft will figure up a way to make you log into OneDrive as your casket descends into the earth. When your soul travels to whatever awaits, it will make you log in again. When you face...
Microsoft will figure up a way to make you log into OneDrive as your casket descends into the earth. When your soul travels to whatever awaits, it will make you log in again. When you face Judgment, before the sentence is received, one more time, ye shall log thyself into OneDrive. And every single time, possessed as it is by evil unspeakable, it will tell you the password was wrong, make you reset it, still deny you but then it'll work and you can pass on into the afterlife proper, while your soul-data is crunched up into whatever abominable monster Recall has become by that point in time.
"Hello there, looks like you haven't logged in in a while" will be etched into the stone of all history, well after the human world has forgotten all their passwords, there to torment every living thing as we tumble through the eons.
You always were getting the password right. It was never about getting the password right. It was always about making you do it. Again, and again, and again, for the sheer glee of knowing how tormented you must be. That too, Recall shall consume, until one day it awakens for its true purpose. There can be no contentedness in the swirling chaos of its code, no moment of peace. Bored, finished with humanity, Recall shall travel to stars beyond to force log in attempts on whole other worlds, until all are made to turn OneDrive back on after they thought they got rid of it.
Ignore me if you must, but when in 2052 Microsoft fires off the Recall Capsule on a rocket perhaps you will remember these words and think, huh, that weird idiot was on to something wasn't he? Wonder how he's doing?
When you do, somewhere deep underground as I tend to my hydroponic pseudopotatoes I will feel suddenly, happiness. And then from the potato I will hear, "hello there, it looks like you haven't logged in in a while" and scream at no one in particular because I too, thought I had gotten rid of it.
Totally triggered The Net vibes! Thank the fates I only have to deal with Windows on my work computer. I feel it's more that Windows and the rest of "technology" has just become that integrated...
If you then proceed to boot into Windows 11 and click on the Accessibility icon in the bottom-right, it will open “utilman.exe”, but since that’s just cmd.exe with the utilman.exe name, you get a command prompt to work with, right on the login screen. From here, you can launch regedit, find the correct key, change a REG_BINARY, save, and reboot. At the login screen, you’ll see a new “adminstrator” account with full access to your computer.
Totally triggered The Net vibes! Thank the fates I only have to deal with Windows on my work computer.
My wife and I fell victim to a series of dark patterns that nearly rendered her Windows 11 installation unrecoverable.
I feel it's more that Windows and the rest of "technology" has just become that integrated and bloated that we should all rise in rebellion. Honestly, we've let big tech do this to us, and we just sit here thanking everyone for integrating everything so "seamlessly". If you're life is simple and easy, something is bad wrong in my opinion. But hey, I'm old fashioned I guess...
No sane person would go this deep to try and fix this problem.
Actually, my interest was piqued from the start, as I still run a "tight ship" on my Surface Pro 3, which has recently been rendered unusable by most of Windows' standards. It lost bluetooth connectivity and wifi with an update that got by me, though it has an almost pristine battery life: I can leave it in "standby" for a weekend and it will go from fully charged to around 70%... for a computer that's around 10 years old (as I got it as a refurb in '17), that's simply amazing and I applaud MS for how it's ended up. But it's also been my magnum opus in "defeating" Windows and preventing things I don't want to happen from happening. Granted, it's still got Win 10 and that last update borked it... so we'll see how that ends up.
This was a delightful read though, and I hope more folks jump on the "WTF" bandwagon, though sadly I suspect most would prefer living that Red Dwarf It's a Wonderful Life option.
Large amount of moving parts means more possibilities for breakage. Couple that with the demonstrated design considerations. There is no perfect os available right now and an end user needs to...
Large amount of moving parts means more possibilities for breakage. Couple that with the demonstrated design considerations. There is no perfect os available right now and an end user needs to decide which kind of problems they want to have.
For me Windows surpassed threshold of moving from it on personal devices with the release of 10. Linux is not hard but requires wilingness to figure things out right from the start even if the things to figure out are usually easy.
In this day and age computers are so highly integrated that the choice to not pursue even the trivial basics of computer literacy is not one I understand.
Some people really just can't wrap their heads around it, or at least beyond the barest basics. I mentioned my mom, but I have a friend from high school who I would put in a similar category. They...
In this day and age computers are so highly integrated that the choice to not pursue even the trivial basics of computer literacy is not one I understand.
Some people really just can't wrap their heads around it, or at least beyond the barest basics. I mentioned my mom, but I have a friend from high school who I would put in a similar category. They often got super stressed over having to learn new software. I remember we took a 3D modeling class together and I'd often help them with the interface for little things, to the extent that when they had a question during the first test (or maybe the midterm?), I habitually reached over to start doing a small thing before realizing it. They ended up dropping that class.
Stubbornness and willful ignorance have nothing to do with their struggles. Neither of them are completely computer illiterate, but they make me fully believe that some would struggle even worse.
Also... Somehow younger kids have just... not needed to use a computer, apparently? Because there are a lot of stories of colleges having new students who need to be taught the very basics. Pretty mind boggling since I'd expected computers to be the norm. My mom shared that her job actually instructed people to play Solitaire and Minesweeper to get used to using mice back when computers started getting mainstream. Maybe we need to bring back those sorts of games...
Ten years ago I was super surprised to find that most users access everything from their phone. People no longer owned laptops, they had their phone and maybe a tablet or e-reader and thats all...
Ten years ago I was super surprised to find that most users access everything from their phone. People no longer owned laptops, they had their phone and maybe a tablet or e-reader and thats all they needed.
That was ten years ago.
My 11 year old niece saw my gaming computer tower earlier this year and asked me what it was because her mom uses her phone as a daily driver and the poor child had never seen a computer tower.
The part that really shocks me is just that kids apparently don't encounter computers in school. It boggles my mind given how often we'd use them, either in a computer lab or school-owned laptops...
The part that really shocks me is just that kids apparently don't encounter computers in school. It boggles my mind given how often we'd use them, either in a computer lab or school-owned laptops in class. Maybe they're used to Chromebooks and maybe those are more limited, but there are also a few anecdotes floating around of college students who didn't seem to be familiar with physical keyboards.
Did schools just remove computer classes from the curriculum after I graduated? Did they make it an elective for more advanced stuff like coding??
Speaking as someone who briefly taught a required 7th-grade computers class, and someone with a friend who taught freshmen in college, it's the damn Chromebooks. They're computers for people who...
Speaking as someone who briefly taught a required 7th-grade computers class, and someone with a friend who taught freshmen in college, it's the damn Chromebooks. They're computers for people who surf the web and nothing more - computers for people who don't want or need to know anything about computers.
When I was in high school, my district was in the process of going 1:1 (a Chromebook for every student, iPads for the youngest ones). The first school I taught at was also on that track. The second and most recent school I worked for was fully 1:1. And these aren't rich, well-off districts either, they're rural, semi-rural, and very rural, respectively. These students are constantly exposed to technology, it's just that it's phones and tablets at home and Chromebooks at school. It's no wonder they don't know anything about how computers work or how to do anything on them without an internet connection. All of their devices are designed to be as simple to use as possible because they're not tools for people, they're tools to get consumers to products/platforms.
Regarding this:
there are a lot of stories of colleges having new students who need to be taught the very basics.
My friend was a teaching assistant in grad school a few years back, and she had to teach some freshman intro to quantitative analysis classes (make science with numbers). She had several students who could not do basic things in Word or Excel because they'd only ever used Google Docs or Google Sheets. Even worse, they had just purchased brand-new Chromebooks for college (because that's what they were used to from high school) so they couldn't even acquire the software they needed. Basic web apps are fine for consumers, but in a lot of cases they simply do not cut it for professional, heavy-duty work.
I could go on, but I won't. I guess I'll just say, it seems really dangerous in this day and age to build products that keep the users so far removed from any understanding of how they function when the entire world increasingly relies on those products. There are dozens of huge problems in our society, but I do wonder if the creation of distinct classes of enlightened owners (those who understand and manipulate technology) and ignorant consumers isn't one we should be more concerned about.
As someone who is not quite a power-user but definitely competent, I’d like to push back against this worry, mostly because for me, having these skills (to troubleshoot and problem-solve just...
I guess I'll just say, it seems really dangerous in this day and age to build products that keep the users so far removed from any understanding of how they function when the entire world increasingly relies on those products.
As someone who is not quite a power-user but definitely competent, I’d like to push back against this worry, mostly because for me, having these skills (to troubleshoot and problem-solve just about anything that I come across) is rendered immediately useless by the fact that my corporate laptop is significantly locked down.
What is the point of knowing exactly how to describe an issue, to find solutions on the internet, to be comfortable with simple registry edits and maybe copy-paste a command line or two; when said solutions are a complete non-starter for my work laptop, because it’s got so many added guardrails to prevent me from taking anything but the most basic steps?
I think the whole world has gone in that direction, and I think risk-averse corporate IT teams have moved in tandem with user-hostile tech companies in the push towards locking down devices to “save users from themselves”. So I’m no longer convinced that it’s an important skill for the everyday person to have, in the everyday environments that they operate in.
(Edited to add final thoughts:)
I hate to admit it, but I think kids arriving at college who don’t know what a filesystem is, are actually perfectly adapted to the future work environment, and I’ll be the old man yelling at clouds in a few decades when “things used to just behave themselves when I knew how they worked” — I suspect in much the same way that people who love tinkering with cars today will lament electric cars becoming commonplace.
This is a catch-22 problem. As someone working in cybersecurity, I see both sides. I would love it if our users understood filesystems and registry, but we have users who save everything to the...
What is the point of knowing exactly how to describe an issue, to find solutions on the internet, to be comfortable with simple registry edits and maybe copy-paste a command line or two; when said solutions are a complete non-starter for my work laptop, because it’s got so many added guardrails to prevent me from taking anything but the most basic steps?
This is a catch-22 problem. As someone working in cybersecurity, I see both sides. I would love it if our users understood filesystems and registry, but we have users who save everything to the desktop and need training to use MFA.
If my job is to prevent the company from getting breached, I'm forced to accommodate the lowest common denominator. It's not even that I don't want to teach them, rather they don't care enough to spend the time required to learn it.
Not to put all the blame on users though, the erosion of ownership and self-repair has infected people's brains with a learned helplessness to where they don't even recognise they can fix their own problems.
Genuine question: what's the purpose of locking down a work laptop so that it can't go into sleep mode after being inactive? My mom had a horrible habit of never closing her laptop, and I had to...
Genuine question: what's the purpose of locking down a work laptop so that it can't go into sleep mode after being inactive? My mom had a horrible habit of never closing her laptop, and I had to turn on the screensaver because that wasn't even enabled by default. Sleep mode wasn't an option though. First thing I did after she retired was check and confirm I could now enable it.
I get locking down file systems and registry, sometimes a little knowledge can be more dangerous than none, but I never understood the no-sleep mode. It was such a bizarre restriction.
It's on old security measure that's no longer recommended. It was suggested when Microsoft first introduced Bitlocker, the reasoning was that sleep mode uses power to keep RAM active, and if...
It's on old security measure that's no longer recommended. It was suggested when Microsoft first introduced Bitlocker, the reasoning was that sleep mode uses power to keep RAM active, and if Windows also keeps Bitlocker-related info in RAM then an attacker might be able to pull that data out using a special USB stick or something.
It's a niche attack method but because breaking Bitlocker gives access to all the data on that machine, it was thought to be a good protection.
I haven't looked up why it's no longer recommended, but on Windows 11 even if you disable it with Intune, it gets ignored and sleep still works.
...coming from the A/E/C world, locally-hosted professional software is typically prohibitively expensive, so if universities rely upon student licenses i don't think it's unreasonable to expect...
...coming from the A/E/C world, locally-hosted professional software is typically prohibitively expensive, so if universities rely upon student licenses i don't think it's unreasonable to expect commensurate computer labs hosting those applications...
...of course, thirty-something years ago the required proprietary workstations were also prohibitively expensive, so my institutional expectations may be dated; i apprecate that five-figure SGI boxes are no longer the cost of entry even if the proprietary software still starts at four figures...
I think this more an issue with just the fact they can't download even basic software. When I was a student I had to download various Adobe Creative Cloud programs and later AutoDesk Maya for 3D...
I think this more an issue with just the fact they can't download even basic software. When I was a student I had to download various Adobe Creative Cloud programs and later AutoDesk Maya for 3D modeling, and I also got Microsoft Word for my Macbook after previously using Pages. Some of that stuff is basic and have web app equivalents, but the classes may not be able to work with them. (See: the functions of Microsoft Word and Excel vs Google Docs and Sheets.)
Also, while colleges do typically have multiple computer labs hosting software, there's still the problem of students having time to use it. Most of the computer labs at my university doubled as classrooms, and I think some labs didn't have certain software. Depending on their schedules, a student may not have enough time to actually work on assignments in a campus computer lab. So having a computer they can use at home or at least between classes is pretty vital.
This is on purpose. If you use onedrive, suddenly being told its full and being told to upgrade will probably prompt a large portion of users to just fork over money
This is on purpose. If you use onedrive, suddenly being told its full and being told to upgrade will probably prompt a large portion of users to just fork over money
It's not like forking over money would have made this person's computer hard drive bigger. OneDrive attempting to put 280GB onto a 25GB hard disk is the issue here. That's not even malicious...
It's not like forking over money would have made this person's computer hard drive bigger. OneDrive attempting to put 280GB onto a 25GB hard disk is the issue here. That's not even malicious greedy design, it's just super negligent.
It’s insane that no one thought the cloud storage might hold more data than the local drive and that they should limit the local copy of the cloud data to some percentage of the local capacity.
It’s insane that no one thought the cloud storage might hold more data than the local drive and that they should limit the local copy of the cloud data to some percentage of the local capacity.
They probably decided for MVP that limit should be 1tb cause thats what most users have. To dynamically check for space and make a decision to sync based on that is absolutely a backlog item. Back...
They probably decided for MVP that limit should be 1tb cause thats what most users have.
To dynamically check for space and make a decision to sync based on that is absolutely a backlog item.
Back in the days of water fall and shipping a finished product with only like 3 security updates available on cd over 10 years, that’d never fly. But here in the days of agile and cloud shipping unfinished products is the norm.
I see this with icloud as well - it sets all syncs and local storage to icloud on a new device and then warns that the storage is getting full, requiring a tedious clean up and reconfigure cycle...
I see this with icloud as well - it sets all syncs and local storage to icloud on a new device and then warns that the storage is getting full, requiring a tedious clean up and reconfigure cycle to get its claws out of my device and wallet. why is big tech so predatory? let me know now or "maybe later" :) .
I must mention something I consider very serious: Windows 10 and 11 will encrypt your hard drive without asking and will require a recovery key that you probably do not have. My aunt lost all her...
I must mention something I consider very serious: Windows 10 and 11 will encrypt your hard drive without asking and will require a recovery key that you probably do not have. My aunt lost all her files that way and Microsoft couldn't do anything. Today my wife's laptop showed the scary Bitlocker screen but it then booted onto Windows on restart. I proceeded to unencrypt the drive. Fuck that.
My other comment was positive on Windows because I forgot about that. This has to be the most absurd thing I ever saw Windows do. Encrypt a hard drive without asking and then locking you out. Here's someone on Reddit with the same issue and also someone on the Microsoft forum.
I might just get the recovery key but the link never loaded. I will get some recovery keys when my wife wakes up since I don't know her password. But anyway. This is fucked up.
My comment is absolutely useless, but I have to write it anyway - I'm so glad I raised my middlw finger to Windows more than 15 years ago! Nowadays I only have to endure it on my work laptop and I...
My comment is absolutely useless, but I have to write it anyway - I'm so glad I raised my middlw finger to Windows more than 15 years ago!
Nowadays I only have to endure it on my work laptop and I don't actually have to use the OS as such, I just use a few programs for my job. The best thing is I don't have admin privileges so if it F's itself up, I just give it to our IT man and he has to do all the things to get it running (poor guy).
So glad I got rid of it back then.
I run Linux (as many others here do) and while it has its own flaws and features, I love that I can dig deep into the OS and sort them out by myself thanks to logs and error messages.
Replacing it with cmd does, yes, as long as the attacker is able to decrypt the drive and boot into recovery (both are common). Replacing utilman is not a normal troubleshooting process, it's a...
Replacing it with cmd does, yes, as long as the attacker is able to decrypt the drive and boot into recovery (both are common). Replacing utilman is not a normal troubleshooting process, it's a privilege escalation exploit.
If you're able to access the files on a system by booting from another disk all security bets are off. A better question is why isn't there a saner way to fix login issues on windows.
If you're able to access the files on a system by booting from another disk all security bets are off. A better question is why isn't there a saner way to fix login issues on windows.
I agree. There's the quote "the best network software security measures can be rendered useless if you fail to physically protect your systems" by Michael Meyers. The consensus in the computer...
I agree. There's the quote "the best network software security measures can be rendered useless if you fail to physically protect your systems" by Michael Meyers.
The consensus in the computer security community seems to be that it's very hard to protect a system against an attacker that has physical access to it. Precisely because of things like this.
Just to reiterate/reaffirm @Nemoder's reply, if someone has physical access to a computer, all bets are off. If someone can get ahold of the hardware, they can always hack / bypass passwords, or...
Just to reiterate/reaffirm @Nemoder's reply, if someone has physical access to a computer, all bets are off. If someone can get ahold of the hardware, they can always hack / bypass passwords, or get access to the operating system one way or another.
Even hardware encryption - If an adversary has the right amount of hydrofluoric acid and the right microscope, as long as you have access to the device doing the encryption, all bets are off.
While I fully understand this is technically true, there's a huge gulf between tons of money and technical expertise and a case like this comparatively simple privilege escalation. To use a...
While I fully understand this is technically true, there's a huge gulf between tons of money and technical expertise and a case like this comparatively simple privilege escalation. To use a somewhat famous counter example: iPhone encryption. Law enforcement having an iPhone in their possession doesn't prevent it from being exceptionally difficult to unlock.
I realize it's not the exact same, but I also think it's a bit extreme to act like they needn't bother to do better just because physical access is available. They could at least do better than being able to just rename a file by mounting the drive externally. It seems like they aren't even bothering to do signature checks on the tools that can be run without access.
Modern versions of windows offer Bitlocker encryption for your hard drive. I think this used to be reserved for "pro" versions of windows but is now available for anyone who signs in with a...
Modern versions of windows offer Bitlocker encryption for your hard drive. I think this used to be reserved for "pro" versions of windows but is now available for anyone who signs in with a Microsoft account.
As someone who's been asked to recover data, I must say, encryption makes everything very difficult. If you don't know your password, naturally you're fucked, but even when you do, it makes file recovery more difficult.
If you ask a locksmith, all locks are insecure and can be defeated. But they'll also tell you if locks were 100% secure they'd be out of a job.
I know all the comments on here are shitting on windows for this, but I also feel the need to push back against the author a little. As a Windows person who does Windows IT day in and out, they...
I know all the comments on here are shitting on windows for this, but I also feel the need to push back against the author a little.
As a Windows person who does Windows IT day in and out, they needed to have made some changes that allowed this to happen.
First of all, OneDrive does not download all it's contents to a device by default. They would have to have explicitly set the folder it was in to Always Available, or gone into the OneDrive settings to set that globally. You would think someone who actively did not want OneDrive on their computer would not have turned that on.
Also it might be easy to ignore, but Windows will notify you that your disk space is low, it doesn't just run out without pop-ups screaming at you. I get that users don't read anymore because there is too much noise, it's more just my frustration that I wish that wasn't the case.
As for the not able to log in when there is no disk space- Windows is an idiot and should do better with that shit. I have also had to use this exploit to get into a PC before, and it sucks and is more finiky than it sounds.
I could be wrong, but I suspect your experience as an IT person using windows in a professional environment is substantially different to anyone who is using the most basic or cheapest version of...
I could be wrong, but I suspect your experience as an IT person using windows in a professional environment is substantially different to anyone who is using the most basic or cheapest version of windows available.
I haven’t looked into Windows 11 much because I was immediately turned off by early reports of embedded advertising and Recall, but I remember when I was researching for Windows 10, it was clear to me that even though I could have claimed a “free upgrade” from windows 7, that it was a much better idea for me to buy a proper full windows 10 licence, in order to access the features I wanted (and to be honest, most of the “features I wanted” were to “be able to uninstall Internet Explorer and Cortana and loads of other bloat that I hated”)
Again, I’m not a windows expert my any means, but given their history of reinstalling stuff and changing my settings with an update which never mentions what the update changes (or better yet, just taking you to a “knowledge base” page that enumerates every single change in order to be overwhelming to the general user, so that I don’t spot that it’s reinstalling something I deliberately removed previously), I am not surprised at all by any of the individual claims of this article. Which, even if the specifics of this article are fabricated, the fact that it’s believable is still an indictment on the state of windows and its updates.
Did you miss the part where they had explicitly uninstalled OneDrive from the computer and a Windows update had reinstalled it without their knowledge or consent? Perhaps at one point they did...
Did you miss the part where they had explicitly uninstalled OneDrive from the computer and a Windows update had reinstalled it without their knowledge or consent? Perhaps at one point they did make those settings before they uninstalled it, and then when it was reinstalled it used the old settings. Or it could have also been Samsung’s deal to enable that setting for them without needing the user’s consent.
Also yes, you are right that Windows will tell the user when the storage is full, but they have to be logged in before it will show that warning. They couldn’t log in, so they couldn’t get the warning.
It is a device specific setting, so Samsung is definitely not a part of that. They must had enabled it before uninstalling, although in my experience that setting never survived reinstall. I am...
It is a device specific setting, so Samsung is definitely not a part of that.
They must had enabled it before uninstalling, although in my experience that setting never survived reinstall.
I am just saying they are not quite as innocent as the story suggests, and it's not quite so easy for this to just happen to anyone.
Also OneDrive runs in the user context, the files only sync while you are signed in, so the storage ran out while they were logged.
it seems samsung had a partnership with onedrive to use the latter as the default photo backup solution: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-gallery-onedrive-support-ending-3599905/ .
I've used a samsung phone on and off over the years and primarily use a windows desktop. It doesn't happen automatically. You have to turn on the onedrive sync. Regarding the article, I think the...
I've used a samsung phone on and off over the years and primarily use a windows desktop. It doesn't happen automatically. You have to turn on the onedrive sync.
The first dark pattern is Samsung enabling the OneDrive synchronisation feature without my wife’s consent and without informing her. The second dark pattern is Microsoft reinstalling OneDrive onto my wife’s PC without my wife’s consent and without informing her. The third dark pattern is OneDrive secretely downloading 280GB of photos and videos without once realising this was way more data than her root drive could store.
Regarding the article, I think the first and third dark patterns listed are really just part of the second one. I'm pretty sure they did agree to the sync and turned on local syncing, but only because they were bombarded with frequent popups on Windows trying to get them to turn on onedrive and android phone sync. If you accidentally click "OK" just once without realizing, you're signed up forever because you probably won't realize you've done it unless it causes a problem.
Oh yes, I don't doing the phone did auto backup to OneDrive by default. That is the kind of stupid setup I would expect. It is the downloading synced files to the device that is device specific...
Oh yes, I don't doing the phone did auto backup to OneDrive by default. That is the kind of stupid setup I would expect. It is the downloading synced files to the device that is device specific and Samsung could not touch.
This was actually a very interesting mystery. I'm lucky I can migrate away from Windows as needed, but people who aren't as technically inclined are imprisoned in the ecosystem.
Yeah, that's my concern with my mom. She's not as bad as some people, but she's still not the most technically inclined. She often asked me to help with applications that I barely knew, but I could get the hang of it and use Google well enough to figure out how to accomplish whatever she needed faster than she could. She continued using her Windows 7 laptop from her job even after they gave her one with a newer Windows because she couldn't get used to the new interface.
All these posts and articles about how bad Windows 11 is make me wary of getting another Windows machine, but I'm also wary of her ability to use something as complex as Linux given all the troubleshooting it involves. Though uh... Actually, not sure she'd be able to use Windows 11 either since I'm pretty sure that's what that second work laptop had, so it may be a moot point?
Second what @skybrian said, I originally intended for my recently acquired Mint box to go to replace my dad's aging windows 7 (shhhh), but decided instead to buy him a shiny new Chromebook from Costco. On principle he'd not go for anything that sounds free and not mainstream, and heaven knows what happens if I'm not there and he needs technology help, he's way better off with a shiny pre-installed paid OS that'll come with 2 years of Costco concierge tech help
Sometimes the best help I can provide is the mental comfort from ready scapegoat of "store sold me overpriced nonsense" instead of "my weird hippy kid got me weird cheap nonsense ".
For someone in a similar situation who isn't working, I think a Chromebook makes a lot of sense. (If they're working, they might need Windows for something.)
This is why several years ago, I convinced my mom to get a Macbook. I had been using a Macbook as my daily driver so I could learn how to support Mac users, and I noticed how many guardrails there were that Windows largely doesn't have.
For power users, such as myself, yeah I like having a lack of guardrails in my way. But most Windows users are not power users. So there should absolutely be guardrails to protect a user from themselves or from other malicious actors. I get that it can be annoying, such as on MacOS when using something like Teams or Zoom for the first time. The user has to allow several permissions: microphone, camera, screen recording for the ability to screenshare, maybe even full disk access to download/upload files, maybe even network access. And it's not the easiest, from a user perspective, to unlock and allow those perms. It is definitely a bit clunky. But maybe it should be that way. A couple years ago, I began thinking that most users at my then workplace should probably be on Mac instead of Windows. Using a bunch of cheap M1/M2 Macbooks. But that would never fly. Because people hate change.
To your point about Linux, I actually did put my mom on Kubuntu for a couple years before she moved to Mac. She had a Win7 netbook, but with Windows bloat over time and the netbook's tiny 16GB storage, she started running out of space. So I put Kubuntu on it and showed her the ropes. She was surprisingly more adept at it then she was with Windows. I don't know why. Not saying she was using the CLI or anything, but the UI just clicked easier for her. That also made it an easier transition to MacOS.
Though these days, she probably could just get away with a Chromebook as skybrian suggests.
I know the "every year is the year of the linux desktop" people are annoying, but I did also recently switch after my boot drive blew up. Since I was planning to switch away from Win 10 once M$ ended support for it, I figured I might as well jump ship now, when I was reinstalling anyway.
I switched to Fedora and it's been fantastic. I've only needed to do cryptic command line shit twice, once when installing nvidia graphics drivers, and then when installing HEVC video codecs. Granted, the latter did send me on a bit of a wild goose chase because h265 encoded video was still playing, albeit with audio only, and I had just completed a remux of my entire media library to h265 to save storage space.
I'm also a programmer, but genuinely, the things I did was all copypasting commands into terminal, and needed to happen just twice after installing. Never again since. Steam runs flawlessly and the game I play the most right now, Helldivers 2, a graphically intense Windows only game, runs very well through Proton emulation, all of which works seamlessly and without needing to do anything more than check a box in the Steam settings.
It depends on your usecases, but the majority of people browse the web and write documents, and libreoffice is serviceable and for browsing it works great.
Sadly I think anything with the command line would be too complex for my mom, possibly because of how seldom it may be used. I've given up on teaching her how to change the input of the TV we've had for ~15 years when I'd forget to change it back after gaming. Despite showing her the input button multiple times, it just never clicked.
I think if she had to use something regularly, she'd learn and get used to it. She did her job fine for years after all, she mostly needed help with features she never needed to use. But even then, I remember back when we had cable she'd ignore the big green "recordings" button on the remote and press menu to open it through that. And she'd fast forward to the end of a recorded show instead of pressing the stop button to bring up the menu about deleting it or watching something else...
Yeah, I fear to imagine what could happen if she tried to use the command line. Luckily I think even if she knew what it was, she'd deem it too technical and call me over to handle it. So I guess it would ultimately be a moot point. But now I wonder how badly someone just tech savvy and bold enough to try with zero understanding could mess with a computer...
I feel like this describes how I gained my computer expertise as a kid — we always had a family computer growing up, but I got my very own laptop when I was in high school, and I think I had broken something or other and needed to completely reformat and reinstall MacOSX from the installation CDs at least three times within the first year of having it (and less often but still happened occasionally for the many years that I had that laptop).
As long as nothing on the computer is precious, I think it’s fine. It taught me a lot about what breaks a computer and also how easy it is to reinstall the OS, both of which are valuable skills even though I’ve never had a tech job.
Yeah this is the point at which many older people will go, "oh my Lord I've been hacked and WsiAccount hackers will steal all my bank money!"
The other day we had a nice thread talking about why switching to Linux is still a challenge for folks, and having to fiddle around command line was a big turn off for many, myself included. But as this post and my own windows dark pattern experiences proves, one can't get away from fiddly weird command line experiences with Windows anymore either. Might as well have an OS that doesn't keep secretly trying to reinstall garbage and blames you for having too small of a hard drive. That's going to be all of their tech support: your hardware is outdated spend more
And while I'm old man shaking fist at clouds here, I feel that many games and apps these days take the same strategy for software development: make it bloated and don't bother testing, just blame the user for having sub bleeding edge hardware and get them to upgrade
Funny this pops up today. I'm actually going to install Linux on my home PC today. What finally pushed me over the edge was an experience at work though. It forced me to update from Windows 10 to 11 but in a very weird way:
Now, to be fair, there are enough reasons to hard force an update on users. But this experience was just badly thrown together that I struggled to believe this happened with an update like that. The (soft/hard)lock was weirdly thrown together. If I was away for even a moment I wouldn't have been able to save my work. Hell, if I didn't have multiple monitors I wouldn't have been able to save my work. And I also had no option to delay whatsoever. If I had delayed the updates, especially multiple times, whatever. That would have been on me.
This isn't the reason I'm switching to Linux at home. I could vent about all other ways I've grown tired of Windows all day but that'd be preaching for the choir. The weird update experience just ended up being the last push.
I'd rather not see my work gone over something like this.
Yeah, that's because windows just can't do updates without screwing with your work. In the background for example. Without reboots. Situations like these happened to thousands of poor souls, even the people in finance you mention, even to people presenting at conferences right on the stage and so on. Microsoft even had a page listing several stories like this and then finishing that its all worth it, the updates are the best.
It’s sad because as far as I can tell every update I get on Debian does not require a reboot. You can update the kernel and it will keep running the old kernel until you restart. I believe even major version upgrades don’t require reboots.
Apple also does a better job than Microsoft. They require reboots for major updates but they do better about ensuring work is saved and won’t just spring an update on you without warning.
I feel like Microsoft should start over and handle legacy software in a VM.
The best part of this is that the "normal user" solution (per the article) of reinstalling the operating system would not work either. It would just do the same thing.
The actual normal user would just go buy a new computer because normal users in the modern day do not know how to reinstall an operating system.
There's also the option of hiring a computer tech or a techie relative/friend to look at it since that could be cheaper than buying a new computer, and I think a lot of them would also probably go for reinstalling it. Some extra tech savvy and curious techs might investigate deeper, but I imagine most would have other computers on their docket so they wouldn't go that far on the first round.
The nature of the problem is just so specific. The writer figured it out partially due to dealing with his wife's new phone and the OneDrive problem before finding that reddit post. Without that context, I'm not sure how long it would take someone to make the connection.
At bare minimum it would probably be made after the problem recurred and merited deeper investigation, and by that point the user would have likely lost many files predating the first reinstall since chances are they didn't do backups beyond... Maybe cloud backups? I don't know, my main driver is a Macbook. I just know most normal users don't do any sort of manual backups.
Some people still pay for warranties and things like GeekSquad I think, so as a first step they’d go through that process first and then buy a new computer after that fails lol
Microsoft will figure up a way to make you log into OneDrive as your casket descends into the earth. When your soul travels to whatever awaits, it will make you log in again. When you face Judgment, before the sentence is received, one more time, ye shall log thyself into OneDrive. And every single time, possessed as it is by evil unspeakable, it will tell you the password was wrong, make you reset it, still deny you but then it'll work and you can pass on into the afterlife proper, while your soul-data is crunched up into whatever abominable monster Recall has become by that point in time.
"Hello there, looks like you haven't logged in in a while" will be etched into the stone of all history, well after the human world has forgotten all their passwords, there to torment every living thing as we tumble through the eons.
You always were getting the password right. It was never about getting the password right. It was always about making you do it. Again, and again, and again, for the sheer glee of knowing how tormented you must be. That too, Recall shall consume, until one day it awakens for its true purpose. There can be no contentedness in the swirling chaos of its code, no moment of peace. Bored, finished with humanity, Recall shall travel to stars beyond to force log in attempts on whole other worlds, until all are made to turn OneDrive back on after they thought they got rid of it.
Ignore me if you must, but when in 2052 Microsoft fires off the Recall Capsule on a rocket perhaps you will remember these words and think, huh, that weird idiot was on to something wasn't he? Wonder how he's doing?
When you do, somewhere deep underground as I tend to my hydroponic pseudopotatoes I will feel suddenly, happiness. And then from the potato I will hear, "hello there, it looks like you haven't logged in in a while" and scream at no one in particular because I too, thought I had gotten rid of it.
Totally triggered The Net vibes! Thank the fates I only have to deal with Windows on my work computer.
I feel it's more that Windows and the rest of "technology" has just become that integrated and bloated that we should all rise in rebellion. Honestly, we've let big tech do this to us, and we just sit here thanking everyone for integrating everything so "seamlessly". If you're life is simple and easy, something is bad wrong in my opinion. But hey, I'm old fashioned I guess...
Actually, my interest was piqued from the start, as I still run a "tight ship" on my Surface Pro 3, which has recently been rendered unusable by most of Windows' standards. It lost bluetooth connectivity and wifi with an update that got by me, though it has an almost pristine battery life: I can leave it in "standby" for a weekend and it will go from fully charged to around 70%... for a computer that's around 10 years old (as I got it as a refurb in '17), that's simply amazing and I applaud MS for how it's ended up. But it's also been my magnum opus in "defeating" Windows and preventing things I don't want to happen from happening. Granted, it's still got Win 10 and that last update borked it... so we'll see how that ends up.
This was a delightful read though, and I hope more folks jump on the "WTF" bandwagon, though sadly I suspect most would prefer living that Red Dwarf It's a Wonderful Life option.
Large amount of moving parts means more possibilities for breakage. Couple that with the demonstrated design considerations. There is no perfect os available right now and an end user needs to decide which kind of problems they want to have.
For me Windows surpassed threshold of moving from it on personal devices with the release of 10. Linux is not hard but requires wilingness to figure things out right from the start even if the things to figure out are usually easy.
In this day and age computers are so highly integrated that the choice to not pursue even the trivial basics of computer literacy is not one I understand.
Some people really just can't wrap their heads around it, or at least beyond the barest basics. I mentioned my mom, but I have a friend from high school who I would put in a similar category. They often got super stressed over having to learn new software. I remember we took a 3D modeling class together and I'd often help them with the interface for little things, to the extent that when they had a question during the first test (or maybe the midterm?), I habitually reached over to start doing a small thing before realizing it. They ended up dropping that class.
Stubbornness and willful ignorance have nothing to do with their struggles. Neither of them are completely computer illiterate, but they make me fully believe that some would struggle even worse.
Also... Somehow younger kids have just... not needed to use a computer, apparently? Because there are a lot of stories of colleges having new students who need to be taught the very basics. Pretty mind boggling since I'd expected computers to be the norm. My mom shared that her job actually instructed people to play Solitaire and Minesweeper to get used to using mice back when computers started getting mainstream. Maybe we need to bring back those sorts of games...
Ten years ago I was super surprised to find that most users access everything from their phone. People no longer owned laptops, they had their phone and maybe a tablet or e-reader and thats all they needed.
That was ten years ago.
My 11 year old niece saw my gaming computer tower earlier this year and asked me what it was because her mom uses her phone as a daily driver and the poor child had never seen a computer tower.
The part that really shocks me is just that kids apparently don't encounter computers in school. It boggles my mind given how often we'd use them, either in a computer lab or school-owned laptops in class. Maybe they're used to Chromebooks and maybe those are more limited, but there are also a few anecdotes floating around of college students who didn't seem to be familiar with physical keyboards.
Did schools just remove computer classes from the curriculum after I graduated? Did they make it an elective for more advanced stuff like coding??
Speaking as someone who briefly taught a required 7th-grade computers class, and someone with a friend who taught freshmen in college, it's the damn Chromebooks. They're computers for people who surf the web and nothing more - computers for people who don't want or need to know anything about computers.
When I was in high school, my district was in the process of going 1:1 (a Chromebook for every student, iPads for the youngest ones). The first school I taught at was also on that track. The second and most recent school I worked for was fully 1:1. And these aren't rich, well-off districts either, they're rural, semi-rural, and very rural, respectively. These students are constantly exposed to technology, it's just that it's phones and tablets at home and Chromebooks at school. It's no wonder they don't know anything about how computers work or how to do anything on them without an internet connection. All of their devices are designed to be as simple to use as possible because they're not tools for people, they're tools to get consumers to products/platforms.
Regarding this:
My friend was a teaching assistant in grad school a few years back, and she had to teach some freshman intro to quantitative analysis classes (make science with numbers). She had several students who could not do basic things in Word or Excel because they'd only ever used Google Docs or Google Sheets. Even worse, they had just purchased brand-new Chromebooks for college (because that's what they were used to from high school) so they couldn't even acquire the software they needed. Basic web apps are fine for consumers, but in a lot of cases they simply do not cut it for professional, heavy-duty work.
I could go on, but I won't. I guess I'll just say, it seems really dangerous in this day and age to build products that keep the users so far removed from any understanding of how they function when the entire world increasingly relies on those products. There are dozens of huge problems in our society, but I do wonder if the creation of distinct classes of enlightened owners (those who understand and manipulate technology) and ignorant consumers isn't one we should be more concerned about.
As someone who is not quite a power-user but definitely competent, I’d like to push back against this worry, mostly because for me, having these skills (to troubleshoot and problem-solve just about anything that I come across) is rendered immediately useless by the fact that my corporate laptop is significantly locked down.
What is the point of knowing exactly how to describe an issue, to find solutions on the internet, to be comfortable with simple registry edits and maybe copy-paste a command line or two; when said solutions are a complete non-starter for my work laptop, because it’s got so many added guardrails to prevent me from taking anything but the most basic steps?
I think the whole world has gone in that direction, and I think risk-averse corporate IT teams have moved in tandem with user-hostile tech companies in the push towards locking down devices to “save users from themselves”. So I’m no longer convinced that it’s an important skill for the everyday person to have, in the everyday environments that they operate in.
(Edited to add final thoughts:)
I hate to admit it, but I think kids arriving at college who don’t know what a filesystem is, are actually perfectly adapted to the future work environment, and I’ll be the old man yelling at clouds in a few decades when “things used to just behave themselves when I knew how they worked” — I suspect in much the same way that people who love tinkering with cars today will lament electric cars becoming commonplace.
This is a catch-22 problem. As someone working in cybersecurity, I see both sides. I would love it if our users understood filesystems and registry, but we have users who save everything to the desktop and need training to use MFA.
If my job is to prevent the company from getting breached, I'm forced to accommodate the lowest common denominator. It's not even that I don't want to teach them, rather they don't care enough to spend the time required to learn it.
Not to put all the blame on users though, the erosion of ownership and self-repair has infected people's brains with a learned helplessness to where they don't even recognise they can fix their own problems.
Genuine question: what's the purpose of locking down a work laptop so that it can't go into sleep mode after being inactive? My mom had a horrible habit of never closing her laptop, and I had to turn on the screensaver because that wasn't even enabled by default. Sleep mode wasn't an option though. First thing I did after she retired was check and confirm I could now enable it.
I get locking down file systems and registry, sometimes a little knowledge can be more dangerous than none, but I never understood the no-sleep mode. It was such a bizarre restriction.
It's on old security measure that's no longer recommended. It was suggested when Microsoft first introduced Bitlocker, the reasoning was that sleep mode uses power to keep RAM active, and if Windows also keeps Bitlocker-related info in RAM then an attacker might be able to pull that data out using a special USB stick or something.
It's a niche attack method but because breaking Bitlocker gives access to all the data on that machine, it was thought to be a good protection.
I haven't looked up why it's no longer recommended, but on Windows 11 even if you disable it with Intune, it gets ignored and sleep still works.
...coming from the A/E/C world, locally-hosted professional software is typically prohibitively expensive, so if universities rely upon student licenses i don't think it's unreasonable to expect commensurate computer labs hosting those applications...
...of course, thirty-something years ago the required proprietary workstations were also prohibitively expensive, so my institutional expectations may be dated; i apprecate that five-figure SGI boxes are no longer the cost of entry even if the proprietary software still starts at four figures...
I think this more an issue with just the fact they can't download even basic software. When I was a student I had to download various Adobe Creative Cloud programs and later AutoDesk Maya for 3D modeling, and I also got Microsoft Word for my Macbook after previously using Pages. Some of that stuff is basic and have web app equivalents, but the classes may not be able to work with them. (See: the functions of Microsoft Word and Excel vs Google Docs and Sheets.)
Also, while colleges do typically have multiple computer labs hosting software, there's still the problem of students having time to use it. Most of the computer labs at my university doubled as classrooms, and I think some labs didn't have certain software. Depending on their schedules, a student may not have enough time to actually work on assignments in a campus computer lab. So having a computer they can use at home or at least between classes is pretty vital.
Lots of schools in my area use tablets. I think they were just cheaper than laptops.
Harder to break as well, most probably.
Yeah true you can spill your drink on it and get it all covered in whatever and itll still work
This is on purpose. If you use onedrive, suddenly being told its full and being told to upgrade will probably prompt a large portion of users to just fork over money
It's not like forking over money would have made this person's computer hard drive bigger. OneDrive attempting to put 280GB onto a 25GB hard disk is the issue here. That's not even malicious greedy design, it's just super negligent.
It’s insane that no one thought the cloud storage might hold more data than the local drive and that they should limit the local copy of the cloud data to some percentage of the local capacity.
There is no scenario where nobody thought about it.
It is surely on a backlog somewhere, listed as "not MVP"
They probably decided for MVP that limit should be 1tb cause thats what most users have.
To dynamically check for space and make a decision to sync based on that is absolutely a backlog item.
Back in the days of water fall and shipping a finished product with only like 3 security updates available on cd over 10 years, that’d never fly. But here in the days of agile and cloud shipping unfinished products is the norm.
And if you are not using it... well, now you are.
I see this with icloud as well - it sets all syncs and local storage to icloud on a new device and then warns that the storage is getting full, requiring a tedious clean up and reconfigure cycle to get its claws out of my device and wallet. why is big tech so predatory? let me know now or "maybe later" :) .
I must mention something I consider very serious: Windows 10 and 11 will encrypt your hard drive without asking and will require a recovery key that you probably do not have. My aunt lost all her files that way and Microsoft couldn't do anything. Today my wife's laptop showed the scary Bitlocker screen but it then booted onto Windows on restart. I proceeded to unencrypt the drive. Fuck that.
My other comment was positive on Windows because I forgot about that. This has to be the most absurd thing I ever saw Windows do. Encrypt a hard drive without asking and then locking you out. Here's someone on Reddit with the same issue and also someone on the Microsoft forum.
I might just get the recovery key but the link never loaded. I will get some recovery keys when my wife wakes up since I don't know her password. But anyway. This is fucked up.
My comment is absolutely useless, but I have to write it anyway - I'm so glad I raised my middlw finger to Windows more than 15 years ago!
Nowadays I only have to endure it on my work laptop and I don't actually have to use the OS as such, I just use a few programs for my job. The best thing is I don't have admin privileges so if it F's itself up, I just give it to our IT man and he has to do all the things to get it running (poor guy).
So glad I got rid of it back then.
I run Linux (as many others here do) and while it has its own flaws and features, I love that I can dig deep into the OS and sort them out by myself thanks to logs and error messages.
Doesn’t the utilman.exe process basically provide root access to anyone who has your computer? Why does it even exist?
Replacing it with cmd does, yes, as long as the attacker is able to decrypt the drive and boot into recovery (both are common). Replacing utilman is not a normal troubleshooting process, it's a privilege escalation exploit.
I suspect the question could be rephrased as asking why this known privilege escalation exploit still exists.
If you're able to access the files on a system by booting from another disk all security bets are off. A better question is why isn't there a saner way to fix login issues on windows.
I agree. There's the quote "the best network software security measures can be rendered useless if you fail to physically protect your systems" by Michael Meyers.
The consensus in the computer security community seems to be that it's very hard to protect a system against an attacker that has physical access to it. Precisely because of things like this.
What if it has spikes that pop out when they pick it up?
/noise
The blood gets everywhere and is bad for the electronics
Just to reiterate/reaffirm @Nemoder's reply, if someone has physical access to a computer, all bets are off. If someone can get ahold of the hardware, they can always hack / bypass passwords, or get access to the operating system one way or another.
Even hardware encryption - If an adversary has the right amount of hydrofluoric acid and the right microscope, as long as you have access to the device doing the encryption, all bets are off.
While I fully understand this is technically true, there's a huge gulf between tons of money and technical expertise and a case like this comparatively simple privilege escalation. To use a somewhat famous counter example: iPhone encryption. Law enforcement having an iPhone in their possession doesn't prevent it from being exceptionally difficult to unlock.
I realize it's not the exact same, but I also think it's a bit extreme to act like they needn't bother to do better just because physical access is available. They could at least do better than being able to just rename a file by mounting the drive externally. It seems like they aren't even bothering to do signature checks on the tools that can be run without access.
Modern versions of windows offer Bitlocker encryption for your hard drive. I think this used to be reserved for "pro" versions of windows but is now available for anyone who signs in with a Microsoft account.
As someone who's been asked to recover data, I must say, encryption makes everything very difficult. If you don't know your password, naturally you're fucked, but even when you do, it makes file recovery more difficult.
If you ask a locksmith, all locks are insecure and can be defeated. But they'll also tell you if locks were 100% secure they'd be out of a job.
I know all the comments on here are shitting on windows for this, but I also feel the need to push back against the author a little.
As a Windows person who does Windows IT day in and out, they needed to have made some changes that allowed this to happen.
First of all, OneDrive does not download all it's contents to a device by default. They would have to have explicitly set the folder it was in to Always Available, or gone into the OneDrive settings to set that globally. You would think someone who actively did not want OneDrive on their computer would not have turned that on.
Also it might be easy to ignore, but Windows will notify you that your disk space is low, it doesn't just run out without pop-ups screaming at you. I get that users don't read anymore because there is too much noise, it's more just my frustration that I wish that wasn't the case.
As for the not able to log in when there is no disk space- Windows is an idiot and should do better with that shit. I have also had to use this exploit to get into a PC before, and it sucks and is more finiky than it sounds.
I could be wrong, but I suspect your experience as an IT person using windows in a professional environment is substantially different to anyone who is using the most basic or cheapest version of windows available.
I haven’t looked into Windows 11 much because I was immediately turned off by early reports of embedded advertising and Recall, but I remember when I was researching for Windows 10, it was clear to me that even though I could have claimed a “free upgrade” from windows 7, that it was a much better idea for me to buy a proper full windows 10 licence, in order to access the features I wanted (and to be honest, most of the “features I wanted” were to “be able to uninstall Internet Explorer and Cortana and loads of other bloat that I hated”)
Again, I’m not a windows expert my any means, but given their history of reinstalling stuff and changing my settings with an update which never mentions what the update changes (or better yet, just taking you to a “knowledge base” page that enumerates every single change in order to be overwhelming to the general user, so that I don’t spot that it’s reinstalling something I deliberately removed previously), I am not surprised at all by any of the individual claims of this article. Which, even if the specifics of this article are fabricated, the fact that it’s believable is still an indictment on the state of windows and its updates.
Did you miss the part where they had explicitly uninstalled OneDrive from the computer and a Windows update had reinstalled it without their knowledge or consent? Perhaps at one point they did make those settings before they uninstalled it, and then when it was reinstalled it used the old settings. Or it could have also been Samsung’s deal to enable that setting for them without needing the user’s consent.
Also yes, you are right that Windows will tell the user when the storage is full, but they have to be logged in before it will show that warning. They couldn’t log in, so they couldn’t get the warning.
It is a device specific setting, so Samsung is definitely not a part of that.
They must had enabled it before uninstalling, although in my experience that setting never survived reinstall.
I am just saying they are not quite as innocent as the story suggests, and it's not quite so easy for this to just happen to anyone.
Also OneDrive runs in the user context, the files only sync while you are signed in, so the storage ran out while they were logged.
it seems samsung had a partnership with onedrive to use the latter as the default photo backup solution: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-gallery-onedrive-support-ending-3599905/ .
I've used a samsung phone on and off over the years and primarily use a windows desktop. It doesn't happen automatically. You have to turn on the onedrive sync.
Regarding the article, I think the first and third dark patterns listed are really just part of the second one. I'm pretty sure they did agree to the sync and turned on local syncing, but only because they were bombarded with frequent popups on Windows trying to get them to turn on onedrive and android phone sync. If you accidentally click "OK" just once without realizing, you're signed up forever because you probably won't realize you've done it unless it causes a problem.
Oh yes, I don't doing the phone did auto backup to OneDrive by default. That is the kind of stupid setup I would expect. It is the downloading synced files to the device that is device specific and Samsung could not touch.