Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Eve's posts Post Back to profile
Eve :heart_nb:

Microsoft is using Windows 11 for advertising in a way that may cause less experienced people to be exploited by malicious or low value software.

The Windows menu just advertised a VPN solution to me. Are VPNs bad? No. Are most of the VPNs who advertise bad? Absolutely.

You shouldn't have to be an expert at computers in order to use one safely. A consumer should be able to trust that their OS maker isn't getting paid to present malicious advertising on their computers. This is vile.

#Microsoft #Windows #Windows11

18 Sep 2024 at 16:56 | Open on toot.cat
6 comments
Vincent :coffeecup:

@EveHasWords I just want an OS to play video games on and watch cat videos.

But my child uses the Win11 gaming machine for his school work, games, and surfing.

He legit came to me in a panic because the computer was reporting we had a virus! It turns out, no, we didn't have a virus, but an advertisement for anti-virus malware.

I disabled the hell out of that shit immediately afterward, but I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO.

18 Sep 2024 at 17:03 | Open on mastodon.coffee
C++ Wage Slave

@EveHasWords @jalefkowit
Absolutely.

Microsoft recently made the mistake of sending me a popup on my work machine, asking whether I'd recommend their software. Advertising was one of several reasons I gave for saying no. I'm sure they'll respond to that by completely ignoring it, as usual.

18 Sep 2024 at 17:06 | Open on infosec.space
Pavel Korytov :emacs:☮️

@EveHasWords Just what's going on in the Windows world. Ads in the start menu? X_X

The Windows I left was at least usable.

18 Sep 2024 at 17:06 | Open on mastodon.bsd.cafe
Eve :heart_nb:

@sqrtminusone I think we've had it in at least some capacity since Windows 7 (I have literally never used Vista or Windows ME so I can't swear it wasn't introduced earlier). The difference in previous versions, at least from my perspective, is that those ad blocks were clearly ad blocks and easy to discern from software on my computer.

This one presented itself as if it was software already on my computer that Microsoft was recommending to me. It looked the same as the software I was about to load except it had an icon I didn't recognize and a name I didn't recognize. Until I checked what was going on, I thought some malware had gotten onto my computer.

I've never been a Windows fan but this is a new depth for sure.

@sqrtminusone I think we've had it in at least some capacity since Windows 7 (I have literally never used Vista or Windows ME so I can't swear it wasn't introduced earlier). The difference in previous versions, at least from my perspective, is that those ad blocks were clearly ad blocks and easy to discern from software on my computer.

18 Sep 2024 at 17:13 | Open on toot.cat
Googly Eyed Peas

@EveHasWords windows 2000 was, for me, the perfect work OS. It just got out of the way and let you do stuff and was rock solid (compared to 95/98, which was what everyone else was using in the office at the time)

18 Sep 2024 at 17:47 | Open on mastodon.social
Григорий Клюшников

VPNs are good for circumventing censorship and geoblocks. The internet in Russia is severely broken without one right now. But that's it. Those who market a commercial VPN as a privacy tool are severely misrepresenting it, to put it mildly.

In my own opinion, an operating system should not make its own network requests, period. Maybe some update checking when the user intentionally wants it to happen. But modern Windows straight up behaves like malware. I have ARM Windows 11 on a VM. I deleted Windows Defender, Edge, telemetry services and the updater to make it usable. Not all the cutesy group policy registry things, no, I used the recovery mode command prompt that ignores NTFS permissions to delete these files.

VPNs are good for circumventing censorship and geoblocks. The internet in Russia is severely broken without one right now. But that's it. Those who market a commercial VPN as a privacy tool are severely misrepresenting it, to put it mildly.

In my own opinion, an operating system should not make its own network requests, period. Maybe some update checking when the user intentionally wants it to happen. But modern Windows straight up behaves like malware. I have ARM Windows 11 on a VM. I deleted Windows...

18 Sep 2024 at 19:26
Go Up