Thanks for the call out. The aspect of "automating" the way of maintaining the household sounds especially useful for me, as the mental overhead of everything gets overwhelming. The old website may be accessible through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Still think it's a shame that someone who at least used to be so well aware of the bullshit of cube farm corporate life could be so fucking disgustingly wrong about everything the hell else.
Rest in piss indeed.
You can find plenty more shit like this just taking a scroll through the settings app/menu. Anything mentioning "predictions", "suggestions", "send data to microsoft", "help us make your experience better", "automatic personilazation", "use your data to improve", "telemetry" and the like is data collection for Microsoft's sake with little to no direct impact on the function of the OS or other software.
Cool it with the attitude. If it's so easy to find this evidence, you could have posted links yourself to it instead of whatever the hell you think this is. Public shaming?
There's plenty of easily proven reasons to hate Microsoft without pulling stuff out of our collective asses. Like the collection of image thumbnails I already mentioned, which as I said was confirmed (as much as analyzing SSL encrypted web traffic can be without breaking the encryption) by traffic analysis.
I have a decade of experience doing tech work in Windows environments. More than half of that time now in systems administration and infrastructure "engineering". I'm better versed in Microsoft's bullshit than the average bear, and I'm definitely not trying to argue they're great.
Proof of this sort of thing can make a career in infosec, so I don't have any issues believing that people have been digging deep for any evidence of this. If direct evidence is out there, you're right that it shouldn't be hard to find.
Did my research, I'm not finding the hard evidence.
That said, all I'm finding are unsourced insistences that it exists, and that those particular settings to disable it. I've done writeups before on Wi-fi security citing white papers and thesis research. Usually I have no issues finding the hard evidence, even the crazy cryptographic math fomulae behind certain cryptography related security issues.
For this though? From what I can find, there's no direct evidence this is a keylogger in the traditional "stealing your data" sense. There's no evidence of the typing data being stored on disk or transmitted back to "home base".
I'm also finding plenty of conversations in information security communities online (and a few news articles) saying what I've already said here. It seems to be clickbait headlines that have turned into an urban myth of sorts.
What I've found in regards to it not being a keylogger (in so far as you can attempt to prove a negative):
The best evidence in favor of the keylogger are discussions about keylogging in the Windows 10 Preview builds, which Microsoft was explicitly open and direct about. But even this is somewhat suspect, and there's no evidence even close to what was found in the preview builds that this is occurring in the prod releases.
There's also a mountain of articles like this one that again, point to the written privacy policy and settings like they're definitive evidence, but again I'm finding no WireShark analysis, no testing through multiple VMs or a control install and an install with tons of keyboard input, no actual testing and results, no snippets of code from any of the source code leaks in the last decade. No hard proof.
So now I've danced to your tune. I've "done my research".
If this is so damn obvious, please for the love of all that is holy just link me the damn receipts. I promise I can handle whatever hacker writeups, white-papers, etc that you could throw at me. I want to see them. Please don't blueball me.
So, it's easy to point fingers at a scary sounding sub-system and scream, but has anyone done any true analysis of what the feature actually does?
There's plenty of ways to check this shit. Just off the top of my head, checking the files it accesses using process explorer would be a start. Should be pretty obvious if one of them grows with keystrokes.
Those are some pretty damn big claims for "trust me bro".
It used to be that with shit like this you could actually find stuff like "Hey, I've analyzed network traffic from the PC, and can confirm that once an hour it's sending encrypted data to a server in Redmond that matches the size of the image thumbnails generated by Explorer in the last hour. If Explorer hasn't generated thumbnails in that time, no data is sent." with receipts when someone claimed that MS was collecting everyone's image thumbnails.
Now it's just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!
Regardless of validity though, it concerns me that people use their computers without taking 30 minutes to go through the settings and shut off shit they don't want.
Whether the implementation of this is a true keylogger or not, I get no benefit out of Microsoft analyzing my typing, and I'm not using any sort of touch screen or stylus so handwriting analysis is a waste too.
I disabled it within the first hour post-install.
Now that's what I call shitposting!
Blaming a shit situation on some form of failure of morals and/or effort in the victims is a far more platable concept than accepting that these situations grow from complex causes and many years of history, and could happen in their own environment to them.
Doesn't help that the billionaires love this sort of attitude because it helps keep the little people playing crab bucket instead of coming together.
Sneering "Why would I ever want to work with people so dumb they could let this happen to themselves?" while the rope continues to tighten around the neck of the whole damn world.
You can look at a lot of crisises in history and see this sort of thinking used to push down groups living through them.
Spill so much blood you'll need a bucket and a mop
Unfortunately with the way you asked, and especially with asking on Lemmy, you'll get a lot of tech saavy people, and FOSS enthusiasts. You'll also get a handful of people here who can't help but talk down to anyone who dares to say that Windows isn't just the fucking worst.
I'm primarily Windows, with an Ubuntu VM for working with obscure FOSS utilities (like I had to use someone's college project to recover data off a USB HDD where the enclosure broke, and it turned out the manufacturer used whole disk encryption so you couldn't just shuck it and go, but it was thankfully trivial with the key stored in a specific sector) and to work with github projects that only provide build instructions for Linux.
I run a personally customized and debloated install of Windows 10 Pro on my desktop, and Windows 10 Ameliorated (someone else's debloat setup I cribbed a decent amount from) on a laptop that is mostly used as a remote endpoint for the desktop through sunlight/moonlight (whatever the open source version of nVidia streaming is). The debloating took maybe 4 hours (6 if you include the time to figure out how to stream updates and drivers into the install media) and I've had no issues with any of the shit people complain about. I'm in control of my own updates (although you can't delay them indefinitely, you can push them back multiple weeks and prevent auto-restarts), no onedrive, stripped out telemetry shit and blocked through host file and DNS in case any was missed or added later. No updates have reset any settings I've set, despite the common insistence that everyone says they do.
But I also have almost a decade in supporting Windows, from intro IT help desk to many years as a sysadmin and IT infrastructure "engineer". I know what levers Microsoft has built for businesses to use to kill the bullshit, anf I cry at just how ridiculously bad a shit ton of Windows advice online is.
As far as Linux goes, I'm no stranger to it, and have been poking around with it since Knoppix was one of the only options (if not the only) for live-boot. I'm the go to guy on my team for the few Linux based appliances we run that don't belong to the network team. I want it to be a competitive alternative for corporatized software.
But I bounced off it in the mid-late 00's as I got tired of how much tinkering it took. By the time I was interested in checking it out again, I was working in IT, and nothing drains you of energy to tinker with computers at home like doing it eight hours a day for work. I wanted my stuff at home to just work, to the point that I even was mostly gaming on console.
I'm out of my burnout now, built a new desktop when I got my sysadmin/infra position, and built up a homelab of VMs to try (and fail to) speedrun studying for the MCSE before MS stopped offering it, since I work in a primarily Windows environment.
Whenever I finally get some free time, I plan to sit down and document customizing Win11 to not suck for the sake of all the people online that insist it simply isn't possible at all... and to set aside a dedicated drive to try out some more modern Linux distros again.
But I'll be honest, most Linux troubleshooting stuff still seems to be pretty finicky and still a tradeoff compared to the amount of stuff that "just works" on Windows (nVidia GPUs, HDR, VRR for a few examples). Definitely far better than it used to be, but still not to the point where the OS just gets out of your way. Windows still seems to be able to get to that point more easily.
I hope to proven wrong in my opinions about the current state of things.
That gives me vague ideas for a fun short story: The AI "revolution" has occurred, but due to training data issues it's all optimizing for some random specific boring schlub. Harold from Oklahoma or something.
Had to argue my case to the transit overseer AI about how me getting to work is vital for Harold's quality of life again. So fucking demeaning.
Harold posted something to social media 15 years ago about having a bad experience at the restaurant chain I worked at. Overseer shut the while chain down and now we're all on the run from enforcers that want to kidnap and make us personally apologize to him. I worked on the other side of the country.
Trying to get a new car but all that's on the market are ridiculous scaled up hotwheels the guy liked as a kid, a shitbox he made teenage memories in, or some generic suburbanite thing that lasted him the longest.
New fashion trend: White t-shirt and green plaid boxers are out, jeans and a grey t-shirt are in!
You can't seriously be suggesting that lying to people about the sitaution is in any way helpful.
Fuck off and sow FUD elsewhere.
Someone gifted this to my wife and I after our successful IVF. Still haven't put our photos in it, and everytime I see it I giggle.
Miracle Love Baby sounds like some magical girl anime shit.
Honestly? That's rookie numbers.
Preface
I'm not trying to call out the mod action of removing my post from the comm so much as I'm calling out the complete lack of mod action leading to the comm becoming shit and having the current top post by scaled, hot, and active being a post that explicitly targets another lemmy user.
That out of the way... !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world has clearly been slipping from the purpose of the comm for a while now. Most of the posts are actually infuriating and/or political. I understand that what qualifies as either of those can be different for different people, but I feel most of this shit clearly isn't mundane or simple enough to fall under the label of just mildly infuriating.
Here's some examples from the first page right now, sorted by scaled.
While I could have sworn the sidebar had a no politics rule, it doesn't at the time of me writing this up, so politics are arguably acceptable, although I personally feel these all clearly don't match the theme of the community, violating Rule 7.
Sidebar, and expanded rule 7
A few other posts have been made calling this out.
Mod harder and [META] What actually constitutes "mildly infuriating" content?
################################
Beyond all that mess, we have what was the final straw for me.
Rule 1 (and less so 5), and the current top post by scaled, hot, and active.
I cannot accept that a post to mildly infuriating that targets a specific user while not even removing their username is respectful, and I personally consider it harassment (while it may not violate rule 5 as there is no call to action). Removing the username is usually the bare minimum even in the fucking reddit brigading subs, for plausible deniability.
And regardless of whatever arguments can be had about interpretations of the community's specific rules, it's a dick move. Just block the guy. It reminds me of the god awful reddit dogpiling and brigading. I don't want any of that to come to lemmy.
So I reported it, then saw the recent posts asking mods for action that got no response. I then looked at the mods.
So I did something dumb as hell. Roughly an hour after I reported it, I made my own post (now removed from the comm). I find people who make call out posts about others, and the absentee mods allowing it, mildly infuriating. Yeah, childish as shit. What's done is done.
Modlog:
Removed for "doesn't fit community", but what do you folks think? Does it really not fit when the top post is what it is? Personally I think both should be gone, lest that comm descend further into shit.
Either way, now that I have this yell into the void out of me, I'm blocking the comm. Maybe I should have made my post in actually infuriating? (kidding)
That is a threat.
From some back to school flyer.
I have so many great memories from childhood vacations to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. I cant believe the disaster happened all the way back in 2007.
At least someone has been collecting and documenting everything they can find from the old place: https://www.mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com/
I still can't make it all the way through the disaster report.
Definitely a repost, but it fits the season
I've not seen womens pants available with larger pockets and non-form fitting. I'm not sure you can say it's just a choice issue when the choice would be to just buy mens pants instead.