Being super smart and super evil are NOT mutually exclusive. Intelligence =|= morality.

Hardware controls are meaningless if an attacker gets you to click on a dodgy link in a phishing email or you fall for a social engineering scam when "Microsoft" calls you because your computer has a virus.

Umm, no. Just...yeah, no.

The main problem with this theory is that Microsoft is absolutely abysmal at user end security, and they always have been. Frankly, they do not understand the issue.

But, more to the point, the whole TPM/secure boot stuff is a compromise; originally (I think this was about the time of Vista), they partnered with OEMs to have them include a DRM chip that made it literally impossible to install any non-windows OS on your laptop. They've managed to still get an implementation of TPM that makes switching your OS too confusing/difficult for the average user.

Anyway, bottom line is they only care about money, and they neither care or even understand the security needs of the end user.

Because Windows not only encrypts the system disk (C:) but also all connected hard drives

And they're gonna just enable it without asking if i want all my hard drives encrypted first?

Nah dude. TPMs have always been about implementing DRMs. These companies hate that they can't control our PCs, they want to be sure we can only run their approved apps. Like it works in iOS and (to a lesser degree for now) in Android. And even there they are pushing hard for even more restrictive DRM.

For example, some years ago I worked with a SaaS that implemented and sold some security products. One of our customers was a big retailer (for specialized products, not going into more details to avoid doxxing) that was having a problem with scalpers buying all their inventory as soon as they released it. So they were trying to put a show for regulators about stopping scalpers because their customers were complaining. We suggested that the only real solution was to have some real life verification of purchases. But in the end they went with the awful attestation APIs offered by Apple and Google to "fix" this. And in case you are not familiar, these APIs are just TPM based DRMs. So now, if you have a rooted/jailbroken phone you can't even buy with this retailer anymore.

Note that this company wasn't trying to fuck customers directly, they were just lazy and incentivised to not really fix the problem (a sale is a sale, even if to a scalper). But even then the end result is that their customers got their digital freedom rights restricted. It's just a terrible technology IMO, the incentives from companies are all terrible. And that's before we start considering the real intentions of awful companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google. IMO they are actually pushing for techno feudalism, but that's my conspiracy theory hahaha.

So no, I doubt they were thinking about security with this recall bullshit. As other people have explained in their comments it doesn't really protect much in practice. Plus this whole AI push has just been a stupid scramble from these companies to grab a big piece of the stupid AI pie from other companies hahaha, there is no long term plan here, don't lie to yourself and us.

I follow Kevin on Mastodon. He’s the real deal and is absolutely not interested in the clicks or outrage. He’s trying to make it accessible.

Eh, they could have written it differently, each time hypothesizing that someone might wonder XYZ, but I appreciate the brevity of this format. And I do not think that the questions or answers are unreasonable.

Ultimately privacy is part of security so, if anything, everything you mentioned is just more reinforcements that this is a major security concern.

As someone that has been obsessed with tech since being a kid in the 90s I think the tech side of this is super cool and very exciting stuff. As a user, though, I only like this if I'm the one implementing and using it. I do not trust a mega corporation (or really any company) to "leave it locally on my computer and totally not use that data for other purposes". Right now it's supposed to be (as far as I last heard) only on your machine but we've seen EULAs and TOS' etc change many times over the years but especially over more recent years as data continues to be king and data like this is a literal bottomless diamond mine.

I know this isn't your point but it's just worries I have in addition to your points. And let's not even start about what this means for law enforcement abuse. No thanks, I'll wait for a FOSS equivalent that at least gives me and the community the opportunity to evaluate how it works.

I did an interview where the candidate said that if it's one line, it runs in constant time. And they were completely serious. And this was in the context of Python list comprehensions.

They claimed this ran in constant time:

new_list = [value for value in my_list]

Whereas this ran in linear time:

new_list = []
for value in my_list:
    new_list.append(value)

We asked clarifying questions, like what happens to the runtime if the list gets really large, and they doubled down.

And this was for a senior Python dev position... No, they didn't get the job.

My hospital will be freaking the fuck out about this right… about…. Now.

Maybe in the future it can be used by managers to keep an eye on what their underlings are doing at all times. I suggest calling the manager's remote version Microsoft Panopticon.

SteamOS is arch based and uses KDE Plasma as the default DE, so you could probably run Endeavour OS and be pretty darn close

You're gonna get lots of suggestions, lol.

I'd say look at Zorin. It's a Ubuntu-based distro so it has lots of support, and also has several baked-in themes to customize your desktop the way you want it right out of the box. You can make it look like Windows 7/10/11 or macOS without any other apps or themes, which might help your transition.

Do you think it would be a better idea to wait until it’s installed and active on every Windows computer before we start a discussion on how bad Copilot is?

I heard this same argument from people all the time. Until it affects you in a meaningful way to change your mind, it'll be too late.