#Microsoft Windows security features

[radiantindia]

Advantages of Upgrading to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro

Discover the benefits of upgrading to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro, including enhanced security, performance, and productivity features for modern businesses.

[mikestek]

Is it time to re-consider your browser? Top Alternatives to Google Chrome with Pros and Cons

Alternatives to Google Chrome are becoming increasingly popular as users seek improved privacy and performance. If you’re feeling the pinch of data collection or find Chrome slowing down your browsing experience, it may be time to explore your options. This guide will probe into the pros and cons of various web browsers that could better suit your needs while ensuring a more secure and efficient…

[mohit-mathur]

### The Benefits of Using Ubuntu Over Microsoft Windows in context of Today's Microsoft Outage

In the ever-evolving world of technology, choosing the right operating system (OS) can significantly impact your productivity, security, and overall user experience. While Microsoft Windows has long been a dominant player in the market, an increasing number of users are turning to Ubuntu for its robust security features and cost-effective solutions. Today, we delve into why Ubuntu is a superior…

[ralfmaximus]

Recall is designed to use local AI models to screenshot everything you see or do on your computer and then give you the ability to search and retrieve anything in seconds. There’s even an explorable timeline you can scroll through. Everything in Recall is designed to remain local and private on-device, so no data is used to train Microsoft’s AI models. Despite Microsoft’s promises of a secure and encrypted Recall experience, cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont has found that the AI-powered feature has some potential security flaws. Beaumont, who briefly worked at Microsoft in 2020, has been testing out Recall over the past week and discovered that the feature stores data in a database in plain text.

Holy cats, this is way worse than we were told.

Microsoft said that Recall stored its zillions of screenshots in an encrypted database hidden in a system folder. Turns out, they're using SQLite, a free (public domain) database to store unencrypted plain text in the user's home folder. Which is definitely NOT secure.

Further, Microsoft refers to Recall as an optional experience. But it's turned on by default, and turning it off is a chore. They buried it in a control panel setting.

They say certain URLs and websites can be blacklisted from Recall, but only if you're using Microsoft's Edge browser! But don't worry: DRM protected films & music will never get recorded. Ho ho ho.

This whole debacle feels like an Onion article but it's not.

Luckily(?) Recall is currently only available on Windows 11, but I fully expect Microsoft to try and shove this terrible thing onto unsuspecting Win10 users via Update.

Stay tuned...

[phonemantra-blog]

Sometimes it may not work correctly Microsoft has expanded its PowerToys suite of apps with a new feature called Crop and Lock. [caption id="attachment_51901" align="alignnone" width="600"] Windows[/caption] It offers very unusual opportunities. The function allows you to crop the window of any other application in such a way as to preserve the functionality of the software, but at the same time remove interface or design elements that are unnecessary for a particular user. As you can see, you can cut out the entire interface of the browser, leaving only a text field. The function is available on both Windows 11 and Windows 10. It has two operating modes: Thumbnail and Reparent. In the first case, the cut-off application will stop responding to user actions, but will continue to work and update information in the selected area, and in the second, the software remains fully operational and manageable. However, in some cases, a truncated program may work unstable. A very unusual feature for Windows. [caption id="attachment_51902" align="aligncenter" width="780"] Windows[/caption] The first mode is invoked by the key combination Windows + Ctrl + Shift + T, and the second - Windows + Ctrl + Shift + R. To use the new feature, you need to install the PowerToys package. In addition to Crop and Lock, there are already a number of different functions there. The new feature works well with other software from the same set. We are talking about the Always on Top function, which allows you to pin a selected window so that it always appears on top of other windows. That is, with the Crop and Lock function, you can select some part of some software or site in the browser to get a small window that displays only the necessary updated information, and with the Always on Top function, fix this small window on top of others in order to constantly see the necessary information .

[szhmidty]

Microsoft made Recall—the feature that automatically tracks everything you do in an attempt at helping you except, you know, that's a massive security risk and data mining source—a dependency for the windows file explorer, meaning even if you forcibly strip Recall out you end up losing basic tools.

This is very much a "learn how to install Linux Mint on your laptop" moment. Richard Stallman et al were entirely correct, your computer will soon have spyware integrated deep into the system internals with no ability to cleanly remove it even for experienced, tech savvy users.

Yes, it sucks, there is no Linux distribution that has to even close to the level of support for software and peripherals that windows has, and even the easier distros like Mint still expect a level of tech savvy that Mac and Windows just don't require. Anyone telling you that Linux is just as easy and just as good is lying to you.

But Linux has never been easier, has never been as well supported as today, and simply doesn't contain egregious spyware (well, besides Ubuntu that one time I guess).

[river-taxbird]

Have YOU got an old Windows PC Microsoft has told you can't run Windows 11? It's time to give it a new life!

How to install Windows 11 on unsupported PC Hardware using Rufus. You can also disable some other Windows 11 bullshit like data harvesting and needing a Microsoft account.

It has been in the news a lot lately that Windows 11 isn't allowed to be installed on PCs without certain requirements, including the TPM 2.0, a chip that was only included in PCs made in 2018 or later. This means that once Windows 10 stops receiving security updates, those PCs will not be able to (officially) run a safe, updated version of Windows anymore. This has led to an estimated 240 million PCs bound for the landfill. Thanks Microsoft! I get you don't want to be seen as the insecure one, but creating this much waste can't be the solution.

(I know nerds, Linux is a thing. I love you but we are not having that conversation. If you want to use Linux on an old PC you are already doing it and you don't need to tell me about it. People need Windows for all sorts of reasons that Linux won't cut.)

So lately I have been helping some under privileged teens get set up with PCs. Their school was giving away their old lab computers, and these kids would usually have no chance to afford even a basic computer. They had their hard drives pulled so I have been setting them up with SSDs, but the question was, what to do about the operating system? So I looked into it and I found out there IS actually a way to bypass Microsoft's system requirement and put Windows 11 on PCs as old as 2010.

You will need: Rufus: An open source ISO burning tool.

A Windows 11 ISO: Available from Microsoft.

A USB Flash Drive, at least 16GB.

A working PC to make the ISO, and a PC from 2018 or older you want to install Windows 11 on.

Here is the guide I used, but I will put it in my own words as well.

Download your Windows 11 ISO, and plug in your USB drive. It will be erased, so don't have anything valuable on it. Run Rufus, select your USB drive in the Device window, and select your Windows 11 ISO with the Select button. (There is supposed to be a feature in Rufus to download your ISO but I couldn't get it to work.?

Choose standard windows installation, and follow the screenshot for your settings. Once you are done that, press Start, and then the magic happens. Another window pops up allowing you to remove the system requirements, the need for a microsoft account, and turn off data collecting. Just click the options you want, and press ok to write your iso to a drive.

From there you just need to use the USB drive to install windows. I won't go into details here, but here are some resources if you don't know how to do it.

Boot your PC from a USB Drive

Install Windows 11 from USB Drive

If you had a licensed copy of Windows 10, Windows 11 will already be licensed. If you don't, then perhaps you can use some kind of... Activation Scripts for Microsoft software, that will allow you to activate them. Of course I cannot link such tools here. So there you go, now you can save a PC made from before 2018 from the landfill, and maybe give it to a deserving teen in the process. The more we can extend the lives of technology and keep it out of the trash, the better.

Additional note: This removes the requirement for having 4GB Minimum of RAM, but I think that requirement should honestly be higher. Windows 11 will be unusable slow on any system with below 8GB of RAM. 8GB is the minimum I think you should have before trying this but it still really not enough for modern use outside of light web and office work. I wouldn't recommend trying this on anything with 4GB or less. I am honestly shocked they are still selling brand new Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of ram. If you're not sure how much RAM you have, you can find out in the performance tab of Task Manager in Windows, if you click the More Details icon on the bottom right. If you don't have enough, RAM for old systems is super cheap and widely available so it would definitely be worth upgrading if you have a ram starved machine you'd like to give a new life.

[autolenaphilia]

One thing I noticed talking about Linux and free software is that a lot of people seem afraid of learning things about technology. I constantly read things like "I hate windows, but switching to linux would mean learning a new OS, and you have to be some super-smart programmer-hacker to do that." Or even: "Switching to firefox would mean switching browsers and I don't know how"

And that is precisely the attitude tech companies like Microsoft and Apple try to instill in their users in order to control them. They create these simple and “friendly” user interfaces for their products, but these hide information. From their OS being pre-installed to their settings apps, they keep people from learning things about how their computer works, and letting the companies make the decisions for their users.

I think people are underestimating themselves and overestimating how hard it is to learn new things are. It is like Windows/Macos have taught them some kind of technological learned helplessness. Not knowing how computers work and being afraid to learn how is how companies like Microsoft controls you, and justifies that control.

For example, people hate the forced and automatic system updates on Windows. And Microsoft justifies it as necessary because some people don’t know that their computer needs security updates and therefore don’t update, so they have to force the updates on them. That’s definitely true, and Microsoft’s tech support people is definitely very aware of that but it is a operating system that presumes that the user is incompetent and therefore shouldn’t control their own computer. And of course Microsoft abuses that power to force privacy-invading features on their users. Windows updates are also badly designed in comparison, no Linux distro I’ve used required the update program to hijack the entire computer, preventing the user from doing other things, but Windows does.

This is the dark side of “user-friendly” design. By requiring zero knowledge and zero responsibility for the user, they also take control away from the user. User-friendly graphical user interfaces (GUI) can also hide the inner workings of a system in comparison to the command line, which enables more precise control of your computer and give you more knowledge about what it is doing.

Even GUIs are not all made equal in regards to this, as the comparison between the Windows Control panel and their newer Settings app demonstrates. As I complained about before, Windows have hidden away the powerful, but complex Control Panel in favor of the slicker-looking but simplified and less powerful Settings app for over a decade now.

Of course this is a sliding scale, and there is a sensible middle-ground between using the command line for everything and user-friendly design masking taking control away from the end user.

There are Linux distros like Linux Mint and MX Linux who have created their own GUI apps for tasks that would otherwise use the command line, without taking control away from the user. This is mainly because they are open source non-profit community-driven distros, instead of being proprietary OSes made by profit-driven megacorps.

Still, giving that control to the user presumes some knowledge and responsibility on part of the user. To return to the update example, by default both Mint and MX will search and notify you of available updates, but you will have to take the decision to download and install them. Automatic updates are available in both cases, but it’s opt-in, you have to enable that option yourself. And that approach presumes that you know that you should update your system to plug security holes, something not all people do. It gives you control because it presumes you have knowledge and can take responsibility for those decisions.

All this also applies to the underlying fact that practically all pre-built computers nowadays have an operating system pre-installed. Few people install an OS themselves nowadays, instead they use whatever came with the computer. It’s usually either Windows or MacOS for desktops/laptops, and Android/IOS for smartphones (which are also a type of computer).

Now all this is very convenient and user-friendly, since it means you don’t have to learn how to install your own operating system. The OEM takes care of that for you. But again, this is a convenience that takes choice away from you. If you don’t learn how to install your own OS, you are stuck with whatever that is on the computer you bought. It’s probably precisely this step that scares people away from Linux, few people have installed even Windows, and installing your own OS seems impossibly scary. But again, learning is the only way to take back control. If you learn how to install an OS off an USB stick, you now have choices in what OS to use. (Sidenote: the hard part IMO is not the actual install process, but fiddling with the BIOS so it will actually boot from the distro on the USB stick. This old comic strip illustrates this very well).

That’s how life is in general, not just computers. Having control over your life means making decisions based on your own judgment. And to make sensible, rational decisions, you have to learn things, acquire knowledge.

The only other alternative is letting others take those decisions for you. You don’t have to learn anything, but you have no control. And in the tech world, that means big corporations like Microsoft, Google and Apple will make those decisions, and they are motivated by their own profits, not your well-being.

Computers have only become more and more capable and more important in our lives, and that can enable wonderful things. But it also means more power to the tech companies, more power over our lives. And the only way to resist that is to learn about computers, to enable us to make our own decisions about how we use technology.

[errorid-mt7lt7k7unfr9ttfua5]

me when companies try to force you to use their proprietary software

anyway

Layperson resources:

firefox is an open source browser by Mozilla that makes privacy and software independence much easier. it is very easy to transfer all your chrome data to Firefox

ublock origin is The highest quality adblock atm. it is a free browser extension, and though last i checked it is available on Chrome google is trying very hard to crack down on its use

Thunderbird mail is an open source email client also by mozilla and shares many of the same advantages as firefox (it has some other cool features as well)

libreOffice is an open source office suite similar to microsoft office or Google Suite, simple enough

Risky:

VPNs (virtual private networks) essentially do a number of things, but most commonly they are used to prevent people from tracking your IP address. i would suggest doing more research. i use proton vpn, as it has a decent free version, and the paid version is powerful

note: some applications, websites, and other entities do not tolerate the use of VPNs. you may not be able to access certain secure sites while using a VPN, and logging into your personal account with some services while using a vpn *may* get you PERMANENTLY BLACKLISTED from the service on that account, ymmv

IF YOU HAVE A DECENT VPN, ANTIVIRUS, AND ADBLOCK, you can start learning about piracy, though i will not be providing any resources, as Loose Lips Sink Ships. if you want to be very safe, start with streaming sites and never download any files, though you Can learn how to discern between safe, unsafe, and risky content.

note: DO NOT SHARE LINKS TO OR NAMES OF PIRACY SITES IN PUBLIC PLACES, ESPECIALLY SOCAL MEDIA

the only time you should share these things are either in person or in (preferably peer-to-peer encrypted) PRIVATE messages

when pirated media becomes well-known and circulated on the wider, public internet, it gets taken down, because it is illegal to distribute pirated media and software

if you need an antivirus i like bitdefender. it has a free version, and is very good, though if youre using windows, windows defender is also very good and it comes with the OS

Advanced:

linux is great if you REALLY know what you're doing. you have to know a decent amount of computer science and be comfortable using the Terminal/Command Prompt to get/use linux. "Linux" refers to a large array of related open source Operating Systems. do research and pick one that suits your needs. im still experimenting with various dispos, but im leaning towards either Ubuntu Cinnamon or Debian.

[amalgamasreal]

On Personal InfoSec

Been awhile since I've had one of these posts but I figure with all that's going on in the world it's time to make another one of these posts and get some stuff out there for people. A lot of the information I'm going to go over you can find here:

So if you'd like to just click the link and ignore the rest of the post that's fine, I strongly recommend checking out the Privacy Guides.

Browsers:

There's a number to go with but for this post going forward I'm going to recommend Firefox. I know that the Privacy Guides lists Brave and Safari as possible options but Brave is Chrome based now and Safari has ties to Apple. Mullvad is also an option but that's for your more experienced users so I'll leave that up to them to work out.

Browser Extensions:

uBlock Origin: content blocker that blocks ads, trackers, and fingerprinting scripts. Notable for being the only ad blocker that still works on Youtube.

Privacy Badger: Content blocker that specifically blocks trackers and fingerprinting scripts. This one will catch things that uBlock doesn't catch but does not work for ads.

Facebook Container: "but I don't have facebook" you might say. Doesn't matter, Meta/Facebook still has trackers out there in EVERYTHING and this containerizes them off away from everything else.

Bitwarden: Password vaulting software, don't trust the password saving features of your browsers, this has multiple layers of security to prevent your passwords from being stolen.

ClearURLs: Allows you to copy and paste URL's without any trackers attached to them.

VPN:

Note: VPN software doesn't make you anonymous, no matter what your favorite youtuber tells you, but it does make it harder for your data to be tracked and it makes it less open for whatever network you're presently connected to.

Mozilla VPN: If you get the annual subscription it's ~$60/year and it comes with an extension that you can install into Firefox.

Proton VPN: Has easily the most amount of countries serviced, can take cash payments, and does offer port forwarding.

Email Provider:

Note: By now you've probably realized that Gmail, Outlook, and basically all of the major "free" e-mail service providers are scraping your e-mail data to use for ad data. There are more secure services that can get you away from that but if you'd like the same storage levels you have on Gmail/Outlook.com you'll need to pay.

Proton Mail: Secure, end-to-end encrypted, and fairly easy to setup and use. Offers a free option up to 1gb

Tuta: Secure, end-to-end encrypted, been around a very long time, and offers a free option up to 1gb.

Email Client:

Thunderbird if you're on Windows or Linux

Apple Mail if you're on macOS

Cloud Storage:

Proton Drive: Encrypted cloud storage from the same people as Proton Mail.

Tresorit: Encrypted cloud storage owned by the national postal service of Switzerland. Received MULTIPLE awards for their security stats.

Peergos: decentralized and open-source, allows for you to set up your own cloud storage, but will require a certain level of expertise.

Microsoft Office Replacements:

LibreOffice: free and open-source, updates regularly, and has the majority of the same functions as base level Microsoft Office.

OnlyOffice: cloud-based, free, and open source.

Chat Clients:

Note: As you've heard SMS and even WhatsApp and some other popular chat clients are basically open season right now. These are a couple of options to replace those.

Signal: Provides IM and calling securely and encrypted, has multiple layers of data hardening to prevent intrusion and exfil of data.

Molly (Android OS only): Alternative client to Signal. Routes communications through the TOR Network.

Briar: Encrypted IM client that connects to other clients through the TOR Network, can also chat via wifi or bluetooth.

Now for the last bit, I know that the majority of people are on Windows or macOS, but if you can get on Linux I would strongly recommend it. pop_OS, Ubuntu, and Mint are super easy distros to use and install. They all have very easy to follow instructions on how to install them on your PC and if you'd like to just test them out all you need is a thumb drive to boot off of to run in demo mode.

If you game through Steam their Proton emulator in compatibility mode works wonders, I'm presently playing a major studio game that released in 2024 with no Linux support on it and once I got my drivers installed it's looked great. There are some learning curves to get around, but the benefit of the Linux community is that there's always people out there willing to help.

I hope some of this information helps you and look out for yourself, it's starting to look scarier than normal out there.

[mariacallous]

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella has hailed the company's new Recall feature, which stores a history of your computer desktop and makes it available to AI for analysis, as “photographic memory” for your PC. Within the cybersecurity community, meanwhile, the notion of a tool that silently takes a screenshot of your desktop every five seconds has been hailed as a hacker's dream come true and the worst product idea in recent memory.

Now, security researchers have pointed out that even the one remaining security safeguard meant to protect that feature from exploitation can be trivially defeated.

Since Recall was first announced last month, the cybersecurity world has pointed out that if a hacker can install malicious software to gain a foothold on a target machine with the feature enabled, they can quickly gain access to the user's entire history stored by the function. The only barrier, it seemed, to that high-resolution view of a victim's entire life at the keyboard was that accessing Recall's data required administrator privileges on a user's machine. That meant malware without that higher-level privilege would trigger a permission pop-up, allowing users to prevent access, and that malware would also likely be blocked by default from accessing the data on most corporate machines.

Then on Wednesday, James Forshaw, a researcher with Google's Project Zero vulnerability research team, published an update to a blog post pointing out that he had found methods for accessing Recall data without administrator privileges—essentially stripping away even that last fig leaf of protection. “No admin required ;-)” the post concluded.

“Damn,” Forshaw added on Mastodon. “I really thought the Recall database security would at least be, you know, secure.”

Forshaw's blog post described two different techniques to bypass the administrator privilege requirement, both of which exploit ways of defeating a basic security function in Windows known as access control lists that determine which elements on a computer require which privileges to read and alter. One of Forshaw's methods exploits an exception to those control lists, temporarily impersonating a program on Windows machines called AIXHost.exe that can access even restricted databases. Another is even simpler: Forshaw points out that because the Recall data stored on a machine is considered to belong to the user, a hacker with the same privileges as the user could simply rewrite the access control lists on a target machine to grant themselves access to the full database.

That second, simpler bypass technique “is just mindblowing, to be honest,” says Alex Hagenah, a cybersecurity strategist and ethical hacker. Hagenah recently built a proof-of-concept hacker tool called TotalRecall designed to show that someone who gained access to a victim's machine with Recall could immediately siphon out all the user's history recorded by the feature. Hagenah's tool, however, still required that hackers find another way to gain administrator privileges through a so-called “privilege escalation” technique before his tool would work.

With Forshaw's technique, “you don’t need any privilege escalation, no pop-up, nothing,” says Hagenah. “This would make sense to implement in the tool for a bad guy.”

In fact, just an hour after speaking to WIRED about Forshaw's finding, Hagenah added the simpler of Forshaw's two techniques to his TotalRecall tool, then confirmed that the trick worked by accessing all the Recall history data stored on another user's machine for which he didn't have administrator access. “So simple and genius,” he wrote in a text to WIRED after testing the technique.

That confirmation removes one of the last arguments Recall's defenders have had against criticisms that the feature acts as, essentially, a piece of pre-installed spyware on a user's machine, ready to be exploited by any hacker who can gain a foothold on the device. “It makes your security very fragile, in the sense that anyone who penetrates your computer for even a second can get your whole history,” says Dave Aitel, the founder of the cybersecurity firm Immunity and a former NSA hacker. “Which is not something people want.”

For now, security researchers have been testing Recall in preview versions of the tool ahead of its expected launch later this month. Microsoft said it plans to integrate Recall on compatible Copilot+ PCs with the feature turned on by default. WIRED reached out to the company for comment on Forshaw's findings about Recall's security issues, but the company has yet to respond.

The revelation that hackers can exploit Recall without even using a separate privilege escalation technique only contributes further to the sense that the feature was rushed to market without a proper review from the company's cybersecurity team—despite the company's CEO Nadella proclaiming just last month that Microsoft would make security its first priority in every decision going forward. “You cannot convince me that Microsoft's security teams looked at this and said ‘that looks secure,’” says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and now the VP of R&D at the cybersecurity consultancy Hunter Strategy, where he says he's been asked by some of the firm's clients to test Recall's security before they add Microsoft devices that use it to their networks.

“As it stands now, it’s a security dumpster fire,” Williams says. “This is one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen from an enterprise security standpoint.”

[ailelie]

So Why Linux?

If you've followed my "Adventures in Linux" tag at all then you know I am a technical layperson. I use my personal computer primarily to write and browse the Internet.

So why am I switching to Linux? A taskbar.

Let me explain.

In Windows 11 right now, you cannot move your taskbar from the bottom of the screen to the left side. You can move the icons in the taskbar, but if you want to go vertical, you're out of luck.

This has irritated more than just me, especially because you could in Windows 10, 7, and etc. Microsoft chose to remove functionality.

If you search online, you'll see plenty of posts in forums and on reddit asking about this missing feature. If you want a vertical taskbar, you have to download an additional program. (StartAllBack is what I got; it isn't free).

Microsoft seems uninterested in adding this functionality back.

To me, this suggests that they have an idea or vision for how users interact with their computers, as if a right and wrong way exist. Individuals don't matter; only the vision (and sometimes the majority) do.

It isn't just a taskbar.

When you open Windows 11 (Home) for the very first time and try to install Firefox, you may find that you can't (at least you couldn't when I reluctantly upgraded). The application simply isn't trusted enough to be in their app/software store, which is the only place from which you can install new programs.

If this happens to you, you're likely in S mode. Getting out of S mode is a very non-intuitive process. I'm sure plenty of people don't bother.

Microsoft uses S mode, which they claim is for security, to limit options and further define how people interact with their computer and the Internet.

It isn't just S mode.

I used to use Microsoft 365. When my computer bricked last year, 365 was a godsend because I, foolishly, did not have my documents backed up anywhere else. I did not mind paying each year for cloud storage and the Office Suite.

Then I learned that the price was jumping and all because of Copilot, a feature I wish did not exist. A "classic" version with limited AI was available, but likely only for a year.

The offer of a limited time "classic" subscription felt like a sop to irritated users who did not want to pay more for an unnecessary (unethical, environmentally unsound) "feature." A temporary placation until the noise died down and Microsoft could kill Classic quietly.

All in all, I felt like Microsoft had decided that Windows was their program that I, as a user, was simply lucky and blessed to be able to use and therefore should be grateful to use it as they dictated rather than as I wanted.

I'm not a power user. I'm not in the tech industry. My coding experience is limited to when I played with Python a decade ago and Choicescript, which I use to write my interactive fiction.

But, I have preferences. I like my taskbar to be vertical and aligned to the left of my screen.

I do not think it is that large an ask to want a computer that works how I want it to work, that lets me interact with my files and the Internet the way I want to rather than the way some far-off company decides I have to.

So that's why Linux. Yeah, it is harder to set up at times, but not as hard as some posts and articles make it seem.

I'm sharing my experiences with it to hopefully make someone else's switch easier.

Ultimately, it is just an operating system. I'm sure there's a lot I don't understand or am not appreciating, but, aside from some very minor hiccups, it works.

It works and lets me do what I want; what more could I want?

[andmaybegayer]

Hello it's me with another very naive computer question!

One of the really common complaints you see about modern software (from Adobe, Microsoft, etc.) is the move from the single-purchase model to a subscription-based model. While I understand that people are upset about paying more money over time, this also feels like the only viable option for shipping products that work with modern OSes, especially Windows (I don't have any experience with MacOS). Windows pretty regularly updates, and if you want your product to continue to work, you have to continue paying your engineers to maintain compatibility through time.

Obviously I understand that there are lots of FOSS options out there, but for the companies that are built on making money from these sorts of software products, I don't see another way. Am I way off the mark here?

This is a really good question. I don't have a great answer, but the model I have in my head is that "traditional software distribution" is partially an artifact of an era where companies were starting to use computers but internet use was still spotty so providing support for software was just a very different ballgame. A lot of what I'm saying here is not like. Fact as much as it is my understanding of The Software Business from the side of someone who is a little involved in that but mostly not in that.

(This is mostly about "business software", that is to say, accounting packages, creative suites, design packages, modelling tools, etc. This model does not explain like. Spotify. But that's much easier to explain.)

You're not wrong that the subscription model really make sense given modern software development, where patches come out continuously and you get upgraded to the latest version every time something changes, but there has been a significant change in how software is developed and sold that makes it noticeably different. I think that the cause of this is mostly because it's finally practical to do contract-style deals with hundreds of thousands of customers instead of doing one-off sales like we used to do.

In the Traditional model you charge a pretty sizeable upfront cost for a specific version of the software, you buy Windows XP or Jasc Paint Shop 7 or whatever and then you get That Version until we release The Next Version, plus a couple years of security and support. When the next version hits, we stop adding any new features to your version, and when that hits end of life, you maybe get offered a discount to buy licensing for the latest version, or you drop out of support.

Traditional software with robust support typically costs an awful lot, Photoshop CS2 was $600 new in 2005, or $150 to upgrade from CS, because you're paying for support and engineering time in advance. A current subscription for just Photoshop is $20/mo, and that's after twenty years of inflation. Photoshop is also cheap, a seat for something like SolidWorks 2003 could probably have run you $3000-4000 easy. I can't even give you a better guess there because SolidWorks still doesn't sell single commercial licenses online, you have to talk to their salespeople.

The interesting thing to me about Traditional pricing was that I think it was typically offered to medium to small businesses or individuals, because it's an easy way to sell to smaller customers, especially if it's the 90's and you're maybe selling your software through an intermediary reseller who works with local businesses or just a store shelf.

Independent software resellers were a big business back in the day, they served as a go-between for the software company and smaller businesses, they sold prepared packages in a few sizes and handled the personal relationship of phoning you up and saying "Hey there's a patch for your accounting software so that it doesn't crash when someone's surname is Zero, we'll send you a floppy disk in the mail with some instructions on how to install it." Versioned standard releases are a thing you can put in a box and give to resellers along with a spec sheet and sales talking points. This business still exists but it's much smaller than it once was, it's largely gone upmarket.

If you were bigger, say, if you were a publishing house that needed fifty seats of editing software you'd probably call the sales department of Jasc or whoever and get a volume deal along with a support contract.

Nowadays why would you bother going through resellers and making this whole complicated pricing model when you could just sell subscriptions with well-established e-commerce tools. You can make contract support deals with individuals at scale, all online, without hiring thousands of salespeople. You can even provide varying support levels at multiple cost brackets directly, so you don't need to cultivate a direct business relationship with all your customers in order to meet their needs. Your salespeople handle the really big megacorp and government deals and you let everyone else administer themselves.

It also makes development easier. You can also deploy patches over the net, you just do it in software. You can obsolete older versions faster, since you can make sure most people are using the latest version, and significantly cut down on engineering time spent backporting fixes to older versions. I think a lot of this is straightforwardly desirable on most software.

Now, there are still packages sold by the version, and there are even companies selling eternal licenses.

Fruity Loops Studio is still a "Buy once forever" type deal.

MatLab can be purchased as a subscription or as a perpetual one-version license.

Windows is still sold like this, but also direct to customer sales of Windows are minimal, Windows is primarily sold to OEM's who preinstall it on everything.

But it's a dying breed, your bigger customers are going to want current support and while there are industries where people want to hang around on older versions, for a lot of software your customer wants the latest thing with all the features and patches, and they'd rather hold on to their money until later using a subscription rather than spend it all upfront. Businesses love subscriptions, they make accounts books balance well, they're the opposite of debt.

Personal/private users who might just want the features of Photoshop CS2 and that's fine forever don't matter to you. They're not your major customers. This kind of person is not a person who your business cares to service, so you don't really care if you annoy them.

Even in the Open Source business world, subscriptions are how the money is made, just on support rather than for the software itself. You can jump through relatively few hoops to run Ubuntu Enterprise or SUSE Enterprise Linux on your own systems for free, but really there's not much benefit to that unless you pay for the dedicated support subscription.

In many ways I think a lot of things have changed in this way, I have a whole thing about the way medium-scale industrial manufacturing has changed in the past thirty years somewhere around here.

While there are valid reasons you might want to buy a single snapshot of some software and run that forever, the reality is that that's a pretty rare desire, or at least that desire is rarely backed by money. If you want to do that you either need access to the source code so that you can maintain it yourself, or you need to strike a deal with someone who will, or it needs to be software so limited that it (and the system it runs on!) never need updates. Very few useful programs are this simple. As a result subscription models make sense, but until recently you couldn't really sell a subscription to small businesses and individuals. Changes in e-commerce and banking have enabled such contracts to be made, and hey presto, it's subscription world.

[textlinkfalse]

Polaris Computing Ltd., more commonly known as simply Polaris, was founded by Stanford graduate students Claire Tashi and Joel Lovinger in 2002. The company rapidly rose to prominence after the release of their sophmore operating system Andromeda in 2006. Users praised the system for its balancing of desirable traits from competing companies, namely Apple and Microsoft. Blending the heavy lifting of Windows with the visual sensibilities of Apple and a level of customization offered by neither allowed the small tech startup to skyrocket into financial success and industry acclaim.

Andromeda was a major improvement over its debut OS Centauri (released in 2003), marking major shifts towards a focus on smooth and instinctive UX and UI. The desire for a smooth and highly personalized user experience was Claire's contribution, and something that truly set Polaris's products apart. Joel's contribution was in functionality and capability, pushing their OS products to the limits of technical capability.

Eventually the company began creating its own devices to pair with its software, a way to further engage devoted customers and bring in more sales. While their operating systems could be installed on any device, the launch of the Cygnus desktop computer in 2008 was a foray into a new era of the company. Joel carefully oversaw the technical details of its design, the hardware used, and together with Claire personally monitored the progress of software development for the launch of Lyra, the follow up OS to Andromeda that would debut pre-installed on all Cygnus computers. Shortly after that Polaris released their first laptop, the Gemini. It would also use the Lyra OS, and promised to replicate as much of the experience of a desktop as technologically possible. The design ethos of the company persisted, and accessorizing the Gemini became increasingly popular. The company began to sell official cases and protective equipment in a variety of colours, patterns, and materials, along with laptop bags, headphones, mice and other accessories.

What would truly cement Polaris as an untouchable tech giant was an early wave smartphone meant to compete with the Blackberry: the Lynx. Released in 2009, for a while the Lynx was the only smartphone to properly compete for the market owned by RIM and the Blackberry and Apple's iPhone. Multiple versions of the Lynx with slight modifications were released, along with models in all sorts of colours. The parade of phone cases and charms and holders would further contribute to the individualization continued.

As the market shifted heavily in favour of touchscreens, and iPhones became the dominant cellular device on the market, Polaris too shifted with the tides. In 2011, the company released their own version of a touchscreen phone, essentially a miniature tablet with added features that carried a more true-to-desktop version of Polaris's OS: the Acrux.

This pattern of call and response would continue over the next decade as the company began to balloon to titanic proportions. Its value would grow in a way that seemed exponential. With solid leadership and a better-than-average public reputation than most tech companies of the era possessed it seemed there was nowhere but up, up, and up for Polaris and its C-suite executives. Shortly before the 20 year anniversary of Centauri's release, and what was sure to be a monumental milestone for its leaders, Claire would slowly phase out of the company. With her shares sold and redistributed, and Joel able to secure over approximately 52% ownership of the company's shares, he remained on board as the sole CEO of the company and its single largest shareholder.

This shakeup was met with Joel's very own press tour; interviews in magazines, glowing reviews on tech news sites for new Polaris products, and more public appearances and charitable donations. Amid this flurry of good press was the nugget that would explode into a major story in the tech world: Claire was out at Polaris, and the Lovingers had separated. As far as the public knew it was amicable, quiet. Things have carried on, but whispers in the network have revealed cracks in the foundation. With Claire came a small exodus of loyal supporters, particularly those aware of the impending divorce. New hires worked to Joel's advantage, giving the impression of a growing and thriving company. Polaris still pulls in unconscionable amounts of revenue every year, lining Joel's pockets nicely. So far he has been unscatched, the victor, a man on top of the world.

[ralfmaximus]

Initially planned for release in June, the launch of Recall was delayed to address these security concerns. Microsoft now plans to roll out the feature to Windows Insiders testers in October.

Remember that new Windows 11 privacy-violating feature that freaked everyone out a few months ago? The screen-recording gizmo that watches everything you do, including logins with passwords, then records those screens to a database? Then uses "AI" to interpret what it's recorded, so you somebody can search it?

Everyone thought Microsoft had heard the backlash and cancelled the project. Nope.

It's baaaaaaaack... and coming to a Windows 11 PC near you next month, October 2024.

[digitaldetoxworld]

Web to Mobile: Building Seamless Apps with .NET"

 .NET is a effective, flexible, and open-supply developer platform created with the aid of Microsoft. It enables the creation of a huge range of applications—from computing device to cellular, net, cloud, gaming, and IoT. Over the years, .NET has evolved substantially and has become one of the maximum extensively used frameworks inside the software improvement enterprise.

Dot Net Programming Language

A Brief History of .NET

The .NET Framework become first delivered through Microsoft in the early 2000s. The original cause turned into to offer a steady item-oriented programming surroundings regardless of whether code became stored and finished locally, remotely, or via the internet.

Over time, Microsoft developed .NET right into a cross-platform, open-supply framework. In 2016, Microsoft launched .NET Core, a modular, high-performance, cross-platform implementation of .NET. In 2020, the company unified all its .NET technologies beneath one umbrella with the discharge of .NET five, and later persisted with .NET 6, .NET 7, and past.

Today, the unified platform is actually called .NET, and it allows builders to build apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, and greater using a single codebase.

Key Features of .NET

1. Cross-Platform Development

One of the maximum tremendous features of present day .NET (publish .NET Core) is its ability to run on a couple of platforms. Developers can construct and deploy apps on Windows, Linux, and macOS with out enhancing their codebases.

2. Multiple Language Support

.NET supports numerous programming languages, together with:

C# – the maximum extensively used language in .NET development

F# – a purposeful-first programming language

Visual Basic – an smooth-to-analyze language, regularly used in legacy programs

This multilingual capability allows developers to pick out the nice language for their precise use cases.

3. Extensive Library and Framework Support

.NET offers a comprehensive base magnificence library (BCL) and framework libraries that aid the whole lot from record studying/writing to XML manipulation, statistics get entry to, cryptography, and extra.

Four. ASP.NET for Web Development

ASP.NET is a part of the .NET platform specially designed for net improvement. ASP.NET Core, the cross-platform model, permits builders to build scalable internet APIs, dynamic web sites, and actual-time packages the usage of technology like SignalR.

5. Rich Development Environment

.NET integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio, one of the most function-wealthy integrated development environments (IDEs) available. Visual Studio offers capabilities together with IntelliSense, debugging tools, challenge templates, and code refactoring.

6. Performance and Scalability

.NET is thought for high performance and scalability, especially with its guide for asynchronous programming using async/wait for and its Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation.

7. Secure and Reliable

.NET presents sturdy safety features, including code get entry to security, role-based protection, and cryptography training. It also handles reminiscence management thru rubbish series, minimizing reminiscence leaks.

Common Applications Built with .NET

1. Web Applications

With ASP.NET Core, builders can create cutting-edge, scalable internet programs and RESTful APIs. Razor Pages and Blazor are technology within ASP.NET Core that help server-facet and purchaser-facet rendering.

2. Desktop Applications

Using Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), builders can build conventional computing device applications. .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) now extends this functionality to move-platform computer and cellular programs.

3. Mobile Applications

Through Xamarin (now incorporated into .NET MAUI), developers can create native mobile applications for Android and iOS the usage of C#.

4. Cloud-Based Applications

.NET is nicely-acceptable for cloud development, in particular with Microsoft Azure. Developers can build cloud-local apps, serverless capabilities, and containerized microservices the usage of Docker and Kubernetes.

5. IoT Applications

.NET helps Internet of Things (IoT) development, allowing builders to construct applications that engage with sensors and gadgets.

6. Games

With the Unity sport engine, which helps C#, developers can use .NET languages to create 2D, three-D, AR, and VR games.

Components of .NET

1. .NET SDK

The Software Development Kit includes everything had to build and run .NET packages: compilers, libraries, and command-line tools.

2. CLR (Common Language Runtime)

It handles reminiscence control, exception managing, and rubbish collection.

Three. BCL (Base Class Library)

The BCL offers center functionalities including collections, record I/O, records kinds, and extra.

4. NuGet

NuGet is the package manager for .NET. It lets in builders to install, manage, and share libraries without problems.

Modern .NET Versions

.NET five (2020): Unified the .NET platform (Core + Framework)

.NET 7 (2022): Further overall performance enhancements and more desirable APIs

.NET 8 (2023): Continued attention on cloud-native, cellular, and web improvement

Advantages of Using .NET

Cross-platform assist – construct as soon as, run everywhere

Large developer network – widespread sources, libraries, and frameworks

Robust tooling – especially with Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider

Active improvement – backed by using Microsoft and open-source community

Challenges and Considerations

Learning curve – particularly for beginners due to its giant atmosphere

Legacy framework – older .NET Framework tasks aren't like minded with .NET Core or more recent variations without migration

Platform differences – sure APIs or libraries might also behave in a different way throughout operating systems

Getting Started with .NET

To begin growing with .NET:

Install the .NET SDK from the legitimate .NET internet site.

Create a new project: Use the dotnet new command or Visual Studio templates.

Write code: Develop your logic the usage of C#, F#, or VB.NET.