Now that's what I call shitposting!
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Blaming a shit situation on some form of failure of morals and/or effort in the victims is a far more platable concept than accepting that these situations grow from complex causes and many years of history, and could happen in their own environment to them.
Doesn't help that the billionaires love this sort of attitude because it helps keep the little people playing crab bucket instead of coming together.
Sneering "Why would I ever want to work with people so dumb they could let this happen to themselves?" while the rope continues to tighten around the neck of the whole damn world.
You can look at a lot of crisises in history and see this sort of thinking used to push down groups living through them.
Spill so much blood you'll need a bucket and a mop
Unfortunately with the way you asked, and especially with asking on Lemmy, you'll get a lot of tech saavy people, and FOSS enthusiasts. You'll also get a handful of people here who can't help but talk down to anyone who dares to say that Windows isn't just the fucking worst.
I'm primarily Windows, with an Ubuntu VM for working with obscure FOSS utilities (like I had to use someone's college project to recover data off a USB HDD where the enclosure broke, and it turned out the manufacturer used whole disk encryption so you couldn't just shuck it and go, but it was thankfully trivial with the key stored in a specific sector) and to work with github projects that only provide build instructions for Linux.
I run a personally customized and debloated install of Windows 10 Pro on my desktop, and Windows 10 Ameliorated (someone else's debloat setup I cribbed a decent amount from) on a laptop that is mostly used as a remote endpoint for the desktop through sunlight/moonlight (whatever the open source version of nVidia streaming is). The debloating took maybe 4 hours (6 if you include the time to figure out how to stream updates and drivers into the install media) and I've had no issues with any of the shit people complain about. I'm in control of my own updates (although you can't delay them indefinitely, you can push them back multiple weeks and prevent auto-restarts), no onedrive, stripped out telemetry shit and blocked through host file and DNS in case any was missed or added later. No updates have reset any settings I've set, despite the common insistence that everyone says they do.
But I also have almost a decade in supporting Windows, from intro IT help desk to many years as a sysadmin and IT infrastructure "engineer". I know what levers Microsoft has built for businesses to use to kill the bullshit, anf I cry at just how ridiculously bad a shit ton of Windows advice online is.
As far as Linux goes, I'm no stranger to it, and have been poking around with it since Knoppix was one of the only options (if not the only) for live-boot. I'm the go to guy on my team for the few Linux based appliances we run that don't belong to the network team. I want it to be a competitive alternative for corporatized software.
But I bounced off it in the mid-late 00's as I got tired of how much tinkering it took. By the time I was interested in checking it out again, I was working in IT, and nothing drains you of energy to tinker with computers at home like doing it eight hours a day for work. I wanted my stuff at home to just work, to the point that I even was mostly gaming on console.
I'm out of my burnout now, built a new desktop when I got my sysadmin/infra position, and built up a homelab of VMs to try (and fail to) speedrun studying for the MCSE before MS stopped offering it, since I work in a primarily Windows environment.
Whenever I finally get some free time, I plan to sit down and document customizing Win11 to not suck for the sake of all the people online that insist it simply isn't possible at all... and to set aside a dedicated drive to try out some more modern Linux distros again.
But I'll be honest, most Linux troubleshooting stuff still seems to be pretty finicky and still a tradeoff compared to the amount of stuff that "just works" on Windows (nVidia GPUs, HDR, VRR for a few examples). Definitely far better than it used to be, but still not to the point where the OS just gets out of your way. Windows still seems to be able to get to that point more easily.
I hope to proven wrong in my opinions about the current state of things.
That gives me vague ideas for a fun short story: The AI "revolution" has occurred, but due to training data issues it's all optimizing for some random specific boring schlub. Harold from Oklahoma or something.
Had to argue my case to the transit overseer AI about how me getting to work is vital for Harold's quality of life again. So fucking demeaning.
Harold posted something to social media 15 years ago about having a bad experience at the restaurant chain I worked at. Overseer shut the while chain down and now we're all on the run from enforcers that want to kidnap and make us personally apologize to him. I worked on the other side of the country.
Trying to get a new car but all that's on the market are ridiculous scaled up hotwheels the guy liked as a kid, a shitbox he made teenage memories in, or some generic suburbanite thing that lasted him the longest.
New fashion trend: White t-shirt and green plaid boxers are out, jeans and a grey t-shirt are in!
You can't seriously be suggesting that lying to people about the sitaution is in any way helpful.
Fuck off and sow FUD elsewhere.
The original game is 75% off ($4.99) as well, with the complete edition for $5.99.
First game has a better story, second game has better gameplay.
First game is absolutely fucking amazing with mods to reimplement a ton of the features they had to cut to push it out the door.
Lol, lmao even. That's some careful word play for the sake of unneccesary hyperbole.
They have shot innocent white American citizens. In some other places they have gone door to door. Those are independent actions, not a combined reality. We can all agree they're god awful as a massive understatement without lying about door to door murder squads.
Inb4 "if you have to make that kind of distinction you're already fucked" yeah, we are, but accurate information about the ground situation is vital for any forward movement.
Lol, same. I spend more time writing guard rails, setting up verbose debugging output/logs, figuring out how I can test without blowing up shit, backing up data before, backing up what it's going to do, and then trying to set up automated confirmation of success or failure than I do coding the purely functional parts.
I've run the "person has quit, yeet their access" script I made on people days early more than I should admit. Had to put in a lot of extra checks on that.
If you're at a place still using VMWare, a tip: if you're trying to automate shutting down all the VMs for some hardware moves (get list of VMs, send Guest OS shutdown command, wait a certain amount of time, if VM still showing online force shutoff), VSphere will return the VM management devices/servers/whatever they're called (what vSphere runs on) in the list of VMs, and it will accept Guest OS shutdown commands sent to the thing hosting VM management/vSphere. Halfway through shutting it all down for a move I started getting "cannot reach VSphere" errors. Added an extra hour or two to that weekend project as we had to get into things through some other back end shanigans to finish shutdowns manually.
I don't disagree, but corps are going to push the settings in their software and products that makes them the most money. It sucks but should be expected.
It'd be better if there were competitve open source options with the same ease of use, of implementation at scale, and ease of management at scale, but unless you're willing to do custom forking and dev work, most of the time it's easier to go with whatever is the overwhelming standard is and work around the rough spots, as at least then you'll almost never be in completely uncharted waters.
I spent a few years building a custom solution for integrating a semi-popular but still relatively new HRIS system with a hybrid AD/Entra environment with a somewhat unique hybrid Exchange (email) setup. Doing it live, no real documentation to speak of because the few other places that had done it turn out to be consulting groups that sell their solutions for ridiculous amounts of money. My workplace has now hired an entire team and spent at least half a mil on a new software suite that will replace my solution eventually, after more dev work by this new team.
That was after I burned a year trying to figure out how in the hell I could programatically try to clean up a horribly misconfigured and mismanaged old SolarWinds Orion setup that had accumlated tech debt for years, only to be stymied because they don't allow public discussion of their fucking database structure, and what I found out myself was batshit. Don't trust software that use their own custom bastardization of SQL.
After those experiences I'm pretty damn content to stay in the land of "well documented and popular" and just work around the rough edges. Keeping up with patch and update news and delaying updates a little usually gives plenty of time to effectively opt-out by changing the settings before it hits our environment at large.
Fuck Microsoft's bullshit, but at some point it's the enemy you know, especially in a corporate environment. I'm no stranger to masochism through tech work, but I've gotten used to MS's brand of fuckery, as a lot of us have.
No... then they don't do what I'm talking about. I'm sorry you deal with the suck, but your IT team still gets hammers.
My workplace backs up to OneDrive itself. No requirement of work VPN, just sign in on a work machine with internet connection and confirm the MFA prompt.
Technically OneDrive is some unholy patchwork on top of Sharepoint Online, as evidenced by a ton of back end settings going through the SharePoint admin UI, but that's not relevant to the discussion.
I didn't even know it was possible to hijack Onedrive to point to SharePoint Server. For that matter who in the absolute fuck is still using Sharepoint Server? It went out of support two years ago, and extended support (at significantly extra cost) ends July 14th.
There is technically another On-Prem version past 2019, but it's obvious bare minimum life support.
Plus, Microsoft locks so many of their security and other features baked into Azure behind Office 365 E5 licenses that most places are just using those for Office etc, and those come with a shit ton of storage per-user in OneDrive and SharePoint online.
We also don't have auto-deletion turned on (yet). I've already done what I can to talk my boss out of it, but we will have options to prevent it on specific files and folders, as we already do with email (auto delete past certain age, unless it's in the archove folder. you can set up auto archive rules if you need, but there's rules on max space).
TL;DR- Your workplace does not in fact do "essentially what I described", which is a large contributor to the issues you've seen. Go get hammers and beat your IT staff with them.
Especially the Sharepoint Server shit. That's horrifying. No one should have to even think about touching that. Ewwww.
Depends entirely on the implementation. If it's wired right into the power line for the camera/mic, then it comes on when power goes to that hardware, but without extra engineering you could just pull off the LED and solder over the gap in the trace/wire.
And I have to apologize, I had forgotten that there are already third party companies advertising services to bypass/disable it on the meta glasses. Have to edit my last comment.
I'm sorry, that sucks. It really only takes about ten minutes to search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings, but I'm sure that at a huge org that would end up stuck in absurd change review hell that IT folk seem to try and avoid.
The meta glasses supposedly are designed with a bright led on the front that comes on when the camera or microphone is recording.
Edit: I had forgotten when I wrote this that there are companies already offering services where you can send in your meta glasses and they claim they will somehow disable/bypass the LED indicator.
If you're good at scripting you might be able to find a spot automating back end stuff for a sysadmin/infrastructure team. Of course, that would be in a sane job market.
I started in IT support with a general tech AA degree (with some extra programming background from a comp sci BS I dropped out of when I realized I could never code 8 hours a day for a living) and started automating the grunt work of tech support and basic access management. Caught the eye of the sysadmin/infra team and they snatched me up. I've been learning project management, infra stuff, and deep sysadmin stuff, but I mostly automate everything I possibly can surrounding our duties. Most systems and software have pretty static apis/sdks for automating with them, so I don't need to stay current with whatever language or fad practice.
Recent projects have been around cleaning up shit in our Active Directory. Easy wins like deleting security groups with no members. Automating checks like once a month checking for any emtpy that haven't changed in two weeks. Recently got rid of our on-prem exchange email servers, so I whipped up a script to take contact objects from AD, delete any non-functional ones (typo'd domains, domains that were internal to us so there was no need for a contact object), and then to recreate the valid ones in Exchange Online, and finally delete the originals from AD.
It's not super difficult scripting-wise. And a lot of greybeards could learn scripting, but a lot are content to let new blood do it, which opens opportunities.
I wasn't. Now I'm hungry.
Go beat your IT department with hammers. I have roughly a decade in IT with primarily Windows in our environment. There's no reason for it to suck so bad in a corporate environment. They can disable it entirely very easily, or make it work amazingly well with some effort.
My workplace:
- We redirect/sync My Documents and My Pictures to OneDrive seamlessly. If it's saved in either of those, autosave is on and it's the same file locally and on onedrive. Files saved follow to any machine. Viewable in explorer always, actually downloaded locally on the fly as needed. Obvious overlaid icon on every file to indicate if it's synced, syncing, or not available locally (when you're offline and can't connect to one drive). You can right click files and folders to easily adjust if they're always downloaded up to date locally or just on demand.
- If there are any conflicts it can't auto-merge (usually only non-office docs) it saves them with the source computer name appended to the end of the file name so you have each version available, and it pops up a notification that stays until it is manually dismissed, so you know it happened.
- If for some reason you're working on a document outside of the synced folders, office programs do not default to saving in one drive, they default to where the document was opened from or to "My Documents" for new docs, so shit doesn't get silently moved on you. I can and have had the same doc opened on multiple machines at once, made edits on each, and it worked just like live collaboration with other users.
It doesn't have to suck, and it's also easily disableable entirely in enterprise environments if your IT doesn't want to configure it well. We kept it entirely disabled from our environment until we had our config planned and thoroughly tested with a pilot group for a few months before we let it hit the company as a whole.
I'm not sure what you think your threat model is here. I'm not happy about it either, but my place of residence isn't entirely private information already. I'm pretty certain it's available through multiple public information sources. Cameras being able to see me in that vicinity might help someone determine my daily habits and schedule, but there are many other ways of that as well.
Again, I'm not happy about it, but I feel like you need to ask yourself what risk you're trying to protect yourself against here.
As another commenter pointed out, any of the amazon based ones are part of amazon sidewalk and record nearby bluetooth and wifi devices. Sidewalk is also partnering with flock, so that data is available to law enforcement and possibly corporations that use flock for security to be able to use for advertisement.
But so is your phone's location data.
So if you're trying to protect against this sort of thing, you'd need to be taking much more extreme steps. Different dogs at different times with entirely different outfits and rocks in shoes to make different gaits. Face coverings. Multiple burner phones not tied to your identity, and only taken out of farady bags to use in association with different identities.
And then it still would all tie back to the same house/general vicinity.
There's no perfect privacy options, so you need to identify your threat model. What are you trying to protect against, how important is it, what are the quantifiable risks of failure, and how inconvenienced are you willing to be to achieve this.
It sucks. I'm not happy about it. But you can't stop your neighbors from using them. So you'll need to accept it, or come up with alternatives. Feel like moving to someplace more rural?
It's always going to be a balance.
Where shitpost?
So, it's easy to point fingers at a scary sounding sub-system and scream, but has anyone done any true analysis of what the feature actually does?
There's plenty of ways to check this shit. Just off the top of my head, checking the files it accesses using process explorer would be a start. Should be pretty obvious if one of them grows with keystrokes.
Those are some pretty damn big claims for "trust me bro".
It used to be that with shit like this you could actually find stuff like "Hey, I've analyzed network traffic from the PC, and can confirm that once an hour it's sending encrypted data to a server in Redmond that matches the size of the image thumbnails generated by Explorer in the last hour. If Explorer hasn't generated thumbnails in that time, no data is sent." with receipts when someone claimed that MS was collecting everyone's image thumbnails.
Now it's just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!
Regardless of validity though, it concerns me that people use their computers without taking 30 minutes to go through the settings and shut off shit they don't want.
Whether the implementation of this is a true keylogger or not, I get no benefit out of Microsoft analyzing my typing, and I'm not using any sort of touch screen or stylus so handwriting analysis is a waste too.
I disabled it within the first hour post-install.