I don’t see what the problem is. Just don’t get into any business that MS considers shady, or disparage the company publicly, or piss off an executive, or get sanctioned because your work with the UN is at cross purposes with the current US administration.

Or anything that random LLM might consider shady...

You are probably talking about Kahn. The international Criminal Court is not part of the UN. It is distinct from the International Court of Justice.

As of October 2024, there are 125 states parties to the Rome Statute, which are represented in the court's governing body, the Assembly of States Parties. Countries that are not party to the Rome Statute and do not recognise the court's jurisdiction include China, India, Russia, and the United States.

Member states represent around a third of the world population.

Is that sarcasm?

What happens if MS decides that using competitors software is "shady" - they have previous form of unfair competition practices, so it's not unlikely.

Also, what happens if the US administration decides that MS software is only authorised if you have white skin and support Trump?

I think that was sarcasm.

It could also simply be a false positive, as that seems to be happening a lot lately.

As someone who lives in the terminal and uses Obsidian, this is cool. Out of curiosity — have you thought about voice input? 90% of my “notes” start as me talking into my phone for 60 seconds after a meeting, AI structures it, then I drop the markdown into Obsidian. The typing bottleneck is real. A :voice command or something would be killer.

Very much so.

And it's even more scary that MS uses dark patterns to trick older non-technical users into enabling MS online accounts. When the bitlocker activation automatically happens during tricking the user into going from a local account to online account it is without the user's consent or real participation. They don't print out a copy of the key or move it to a usb drive becuase they aren't aware their drives are being encrypted. And afterwards they can't set up recovery keys because the computer itself only shows the blue aka.ms screen. It's effectively dead until they follow the demands.

This is not theoretical, it actually happened to my mother on the local account Win 11 computer I set up for her sewing applications. I had to drive across town in order to figure it out since the weird URL I'd never heard of (aka.ms) and demand for pasting private info sounded so much like ransomware. And in fact, it was effectively ransomware, it was just demanding online activity rather than money.

it does look sketchy, but microsoft used aka.ms since forever, especially for short links to various SDKs (aka.ms/pwsh7)

The actual URL was the least sketchy part of that story.

You can save your recovery key in different formats (printed, on a USB stick, etc). The online recovery is just automatic.

I think that when you have an MS account with the automatic online key backup, BitLocker is actually turned on automatically, and the user isn't presented with the option to back it up elsewhere. You need to know about this, and manually back it up.

So the encryption of your personal computer is at the whims of the least competent employee at Microsoft?

I'm not exactly sure what your point is.

This has always been the case considering Microsoft made the encryption itself.

Regardless of account type, there are many things that could require you to need those Bitlocker keys to get your data. Don't just associate them with an account, have Windows save the keys to a text file, and save that text file somewhere external, on a NAS or Dropbox or email itnto yourself or whatever, and print out 2 or 3 hard copies and keep them close by. I'm 1000x more worried about losing my data to a Windows crash/error than to theft or any other external actor.

OH no worries bitlocker had a backdoor for the NSA so it's actually possible to use that to recover the data.

https://cybernews.com/security/researcher-releases-bitlocker...

>Doesn't that make the account requirement even more scary? So now if MS decides for some reason to lock my account, this will make even the data I have on my local disks inaccessible as well?

Depends. The average user would be more afraid if its not backed up online.

I'm not sure there's anything I dislike more than "the average user" because so much good software has been destroyed because of it.

The actual average user is fine. The problem is most companies seem design for some hypothetical average user, who they hate and/or think is a dumbass.

> The actual average user is fine.

I'm afraid i have some unfortunate news..

>t. someone who deals with "average users" on a daily basis.

Do you really? How? I haven’t done IT, but I would expect you to mostly see people who’d broken something.

I've dealt with users for a few years. Those were already selected to be a bit more technical than your average person because of a niche I am in. I can tell you an average user is in fact a dumbass.. Vast majority doesn't understand concepts like files. People have all kind of crap on their computers as they randomly click around and download everything. They save information in the downloads folder and complain it disappears. Their computer is 10x slower than yours because all the crap that runs on it.

The are also very aggressive when it comes to not reading error message or in fact learning anything about how computers or their OS works. Add to this usual entitlements and not seeing a problem with being dumb on purpose and you get a picture of an average user.

The companies know that and the dumbed down design we get is a diret consequence of it.

Reading this feels like a calculator manufacturer trying to explain why it doesn’t matter that the calculators don’t do every operation exactly right.

Have you seen the user of median (average) intelligence? That's who you seem to describe. The users of even lesser intelligence make me question the survival fitness of our species.

Your average users are getting rid of PCs and getting Android tablets or iPads instead.

And they are used to lose all their accounts and data on a regular basis, which is also fine because they seem to accept that rather easily.

It would be the most beautiful, elegant, well-designed and thoroughly hardened network I'm certain. I get it, the software I'm complaining about was designed for profit.

The point I'm trying to make is imagine you have to tell a customer that they can't keep using the network design they have, which fits their requirements almost perfectly, because it's too much burden for your network engineers to maintain. Instead, the customer can use this other network design that is suitable for the average customer. So it works, but not as well as before, and the customer will probably need to find some workarounds or shift other processes to accommodate. It's just shit.

My rather distant friend has a tendency of not reading what happens on the screen. She uses her computers for years only for browsing the web and writing papers. Whatever else obstructs her way is dealt with "next next finish" approach. Despite I told her many times, she should read and look up for solutions online if there's any doubt.

She locked her W11 laptop. Disk was encrypted and she couldn't recall neither login or password for MS account.

Encrypting disk by default but giving the password to microsoft makes no sense.

I'm way more scared of airport security stealing my laptop and getting access than I am of someone breaking into my home with the purpose of accessing my data.

Basically it hassles people like your friend, protects against the very unlikely scenario while leaving the more likely scenario unprotected.

Not to mention of course the bitlocker backdoor that was discovered last month.

Having helped more than a few users with down PCs. They're mostly not even aware these backups exist. When you explain it to them the result is a mixture of relief and then fear that this was occurring without their awareness.

Yeah exactly.

I remember how many people nuke their iPhone and then call support about getting all their babies photos back. iCloud is largely a support call reduction feature first and foremost.

I'm afraid that the average user still does not think about backup. Sharing with other devices, probably yes, but the two concepts are only distant cousins.

But they have gotten used to lose all their files on a regular basis. Sure they lament it when in happens but most aren't willing to do anything about that.

My SO lost all her pictures several times over the year when changing phones. She still complains about it when she wants to share or find something old she knew she had but she has mostly accepted it.

Microsoft offers it, but they don't need to store it. I store my bitlocker keys locally. (Printed out in a safe).

It does seem a lot like ransomware.

Windows became ransomware? lmao