"spying on you" sounds scary... Until you actually think about the person at the other end. A development team tracking a race condition. A mix of people from around the world doing text tagging on screenshots or transcribing voice recordings.

"Your operating system is spying on you" becomes just a dog whistle for "I'm the main character" types because it immediately fails when you start thinking about how it would have to work.

"But they have all this person information on me and they keep trying to sign me up to OneDrive! Any government could just bribe them and get access to it all!" Yes, and then need to recruit and employ thousands of government workers to sift through it looking for dissidence.

Far cheaper and much easier to go through already state owned information or bribe ISPs or just do what's always worked and.. Make stuff up.

The only real value to this information is trying to work out why the latest cumulative update has introduced a printing bug. Nearly all apps ask for you to turn this on and it's not so they can get your browsing habits, it's so they don't have to respond to thousands of angry forum messages that something is not working and then guide every single one of them through the same 10 steps to collect log files and ask about what they were doing and their environment.

1mo ago

Admins finally get the power to uninstall Microsoft Copilot on Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, and EDU versions — devices must meet specific conditions to allow the removal of the AI app

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 1mo ago

Coding is hard and telemetry is a good way to solve problems. I don't know how you work on something as complex as an operating system without it.

1mo ago

Admins finally get the power to uninstall Microsoft Copilot on Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, and EDU versions — devices must meet specific conditions to allow the removal of the AI app

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 1mo ago

It does not need to run at every startup, it just needs to run once.

AppXProvisioned packages are those into the system that which are available to install to each new user. I've just suggested "an option" which would be running it as a start up script the first time you provision the machine. I think it's a much better option to use policy.

Updatss to both Copilot applications are performed based on the state of the appxpaclage.

I think thousands of mouse clicks, error messages and browsing history of tens of millions of hundreds of millions of people is a lot harder to use maliciously than people think.

You can see the starting points of the agentic OS, which will serve the vast majority of people. But it is frustrating to see how slow "do this task" prompts are going to progress just because there's not a lot of good sources for prompts. Apart from asking people wheat prompt they would use and then asking for feedback of what should have happened.

1mo ago

Admins finally get the power to uninstall Microsoft Copilot on Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, and EDU versions — devices must meet specific conditions to allow the removal of the AI app

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 1mo ago

Hi, actual Windows System Engineer here. Both the "Microsoft Copilot" and the "Microsoft Copilot 365"(previously Office Hub) apps have been removable by group policy or Intune configuration policy since mid last year. Previous to that they were also still able to be remove by running the Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage as a start up script, or remediation script. Fun fact, a lot of those "Debloater" acripts are running this command because the massive amount of engineering work done since Windows 7 to make Windows Components modular.

This is a non article.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/topic/policy-based-removal-of-pre-installed-microsoft-store-apps-e1d41a92-b658-4511-95a6-0fbcc02b4e9c

1mo ago

Hard choices. Who would you choose?

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 1mo ago

2mo ago

Copilot [Rule]

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 2mo ago

Right ok, first of, the application known as "Microsoft 365 Office Hub" was renamed to Microsoft Copilot 365... 4 months ago. For some reason some "tech journalist" who runs Pop!OS launches his Windows VM for the first time in 6 months noticed that he had two Copilot apps now and rather than actually read into how and why this happened he just gets angry because he's nostalgic for Control Panel and 300 words of bullshit.

No one was really aware of this application or the very specific use case it served. It actually came out under Windows 8 because it was the application to open office documents under Windows Mobile.

The functionality of this application has been split into one of the "Office Copilot Companion" apps which are brilliant.

Do I agree with the amount of "AI tools" being forced everywhere? No, especially for image and video generation. Do I agree they should be shut down because "well none of my friends in my Discord server use it". No. Agentic Web browsers can be, the new RSS. Automated access to certain websites which are terrible. A website won't work in a screen reader? Now it can. A website requires a paid subscription to access a REST API? Not when my browser can just check it for me.

2mo ago

It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 2mo ago

Ah I was just being impatient. I'm not saying it's not a well done effect, it just seems a little pointless and not ideal in a blog talking about design

2mo ago

Hacktivist deletes white supremacist websites live on stage during hacker conference

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 2mo ago

"Info sec is full of Jews"

What the hell does this even mean?

2mo ago

It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 2mo ago

They also use a snowflake icon for light\dark mode rather than, you know, toggling the distracting falling element.

But, the article does bring up a lot of a valid points

2mo ago

43 years ago, the Internet was created

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Fontasia @feddit.nl 2mo ago

It's good to understand theory and even though you can really only partially map TCP\IP onto the model, it helps with memorising and clarifying the different parts of a packet.

Unofficially, I think it also helps introduce the mindset of what happens to a lot of Working Groups and Standards by Committee. They can have all the best intentions in the world, but sometimes the hack works better and\or is more popular and you just have to get used to it. See Also: JavaScript, UPnP, X500 addressing scheme, dot1q, NAT.