Back in January Microsoft encrypted all my hard drives without saying anything. I was playing around with a dual boot yesterday and somehow aggravated Secureboot. So my C: panicked and required a 40 character key to unlock.
Your key is backed up to the Microsoft account associated with your install. Which is considerate to the hackers. (and saved me from a re-install) But if you’ve got an unactivated copy, local account, or don’t know your M$ account credentials, your boned.
Control Panel > System Security > Bitlocker Encryption.
BTW, I was aware that M$ was doing this and even made fun of the effected users. Karma.
They also do spyware. They just renamed it “AI.”
and also Recall
Rectal is what it’s called I believe?
Microsoft Rectal
deleted by creator
It takes a screenshot every five seconds and runs an LLM over it to extract text. Then there’s a UI where you can query it for what you did in the past.
It came under fire when they wanted to introduce it last year, because it stored all that data on your disk in unencrypted form. Meaning if anyone manages to run malicious code on your system, they don’t need to do the collecting themselves anymore, but can rather just send off any screenshotted passwords or whatever other secret things you might’ve been doing on your PC at any point in time. In particular, Microsoft had claimed that the data would be encrypted and it wasn’t. Didn’t even need special permissions to access it.
No idea, if they fixed the encryption now, or if this is just a case of the shitstorm having died down, so they roll it out now. But yeah, even with encryption, the implications aren’t great. If your parents or boss or law enforcement want to know what you were doing on your PC, they now have an exact history. And Microsoft could still change their mind and decide to upload all your data at any point in the future.
Doesn’t that take a ton of CPU/Memory?
Yeah, good question. I imagine the screenshotting itself is largely negligible, although obviously not free either. I don’t know when the LLM gets to do its job. Theoretically, it could be delayed until some point where there’s not much going on on your PC.
At some point, Microsoft wanted to roll out these AI features only on PCs which have an NPU, which is basically an additional CPU with a different architecture optimized for pattern recognition and such. I don’t know, if they still hold onto that requirement, but it would mean that it wouldn’t hog your CPU at least.
They have been somewhat desperate to roll out Recall, because it was the only semi-useful out of a handful of features that they came up with to somehow integrate AI into Windows. So, that’s why I’m never quite sure, what requirements they’re still holding onto.
It logs literally everything you do with screenshots, then sends it to M$ despite their assurances that it would be local only.
Super invasive!
Thanks, it was hard to recall
I’m not aware of them uploading the screenshotted data, not for now anyways.
The data is indexed and parsed somehow. The last report on it that I saw had a picture of a semi-famous person be properly indexed under the person’s name, despite it being a picture that was taken by the person talking about recall, which means the image was not public. Whatever recall was doing, it analyzed the picture, and that’s probably not a local process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Recall
Basically takes screenshots and stores them, then scans them and makes the text searchable. There’s been a bit of controversy over it lately and how it deals with PII/PHI.
Open your mind!
Recall Rec all Record all, their not even being subtle about it anymore
My god it’s all true 🤯
I think they renamed everything to copilot
Office365 is now Copilot 365
Did they change it from “telemetry” to AI now?
Unless the “telemetry” has been removed, shouldnt there be “added extra” instead of “renamed”?
Telemetry is exclusively for internal data collection and the inevitable sale of it. Recall is also for data collection but provides a user interface to access a slice of that data under the guise of the whole thing being a “feature”.
Telemetry isnt always collected to be sold. Open source projects often collect crash data to improve the software
Sure, but we’re talking about Microsoft here. When was the last time they actually improved any of their software?
They added windows explorer tabs a couple years ago. Does that count?
Bit late to this thread but I know a few commands that might help if you’re stuck:
manage-bde -off C:(or any other drive) This decrypts the volume and turns off bitlockermanage-bde -lock/unlockmanage-bde -protectors -get C:(or any other drive) This displays your 48-digit key. I suggest you store it somewhere, just to be safe.Get-BitlockerVolumereveals which of your partitions are encrypted with Bitlocker.Disclaimer: I am not a terminal nerd, I just had similar problems years ago and went down the rabbit hole, used these commands and turned off bitlocker permanently. I don’t use windows anymore, but when I did, it didn’t cause any problems with bitlocker after this. If you’re concerned about your un-encrypted hard drives, consider using Veracrypt (carefully!) or similar open source encryption software.
🤔 shit… you right
Could you elaborate?
If you encrypted your disk/partition, the lock is stored in the luks header. But if that one is broken, you cant decrypt anything even if you remember your key and all data is lost.
Thanks!
As I understand it this shouldn’t concern me if my backups are full disk images via Clonezilla, as those should already include the LUKS header, correct?Correct.
Thanks!
Holy shit, they automatically activate it on computers without an account to back the key up to?
That’s just malicious
IIRC, they only do this if you’re logged in with a Microsoft account.
Bitlocker is disabled by default if you only use local accounts
I’ve occasionally seen it activate itself on computers with only a local account, though I’ve so far only seen it when upgrading in place to 11 with secure boot enabled in the BIOS, and not every time. Fortunately the one time it locked me out was on a freshly cloned drive, so it only cost me redoing the work.
Also, the number of people who I’ve seen lose all their data because they don’t even know they created an MS account during OOBE, and later had a boot or BIOS hiccup, is too bamn high!
I have (had ;'( ) a local account, and bitlocker was activated. I only found out when my motherboard bit the dust, and that triggered the no-TPM bitlocker thingamajig. Goodbye data.
Of course it hits right as I needed the data on that laptop. Fucking murphy and his fancy legal words.
If anyone is in a situation like mine, you might find luck with a little DIY hacking: https://www.techspot.com/news/106166-old-bitlocker-vulnerability-exploited-bypass-encryption-updated-windows.html
They desperately wanted to eliminate personal computers and replace them with dumb terminals running over the net.
When the public rejected this idea
THIS is their response. They are still insisting on total control of our computers.
Just wait until you learn about Intel’s Management Engine…
They desperately wanted to eliminate personal computers and replace them with dumb terminals running over the net.
I don’t know about that.
Dumb terminal concept was more what Chromebook was doing.
Microsoft is doing something even stupider.
MS execs blathered about “the age of software running locally being over” long before Chromebooks.
Dumb terminal concept was more what Chromebook was doing.
I mean, for a lot of people they’re fine especially if they’re priced appropriately. Especially with a lot more software as a service out there. My problem is that all of them have a built in drop dead date on when they’re going to stop getting updates and there’s not really a great option for the devices post ChromeOS.
ChromeOS certainly can be a good system. I still have my old CR-48 from when I got selected to test the OS and even when it was in its infancy, it was solid. I used it for a lot of my college career because it was better than my Asus eeePC which had Ubuntu on it.
I had an Intel Chromebox that I ran galliumOS on. The problem is locked bootloaders which should be illegal
If my Chromebook could run Linux or even pure Android, I’d probably use it way more often. But it being a locked down distro with android bolted on is useless to me.
- I can’t really do anything major on it that I can on a cheap laptop
- I can’t really use it for the same games or programs on Android, as the form factor really gets in the way, even in tablet mode.
It feels like the worst of both worlds. It’s fine for people who use a laptop/OS as a bootloader to a web browser, its not fine for weirdos like me.
Funny thing is that a cheap netbook has stats that would be fine for anything we did in the 90’s maybe even some games too
The Chromebook I have, is overall fine. It runs ChromeOS pretty well, and most web pages don’t make me beg for more RAM or CPU. ChromeOS does a fine job, to the point I wonder if I ran Arch or something on it, it’s a crapshoot.
I think most laptops these days, even the cheap ones, are probably fine when you run a light OS on em. I’ve used computers that were 10 years old and ran most things decently well.
I’ve got an entry level desktop from 2009 I’m gonna throw arch on and run some stuff
You could always put Linux on it. I believe there is a way to do that for most ChromeBooks nowadays.
I tried, doesn’t work. There’s no documentation for my laptop or its board codename. I briefly got it to consider an Arch Linux ARM ISO but it just looped an error code on boot until you turned it off.
I have never bought a device I could not own completely and flash the rom with what I want. Except once I had iPhone 3 but it was easily jail broken, but I still feel dirty. How can someone think they own and control something I bought? There is something fundamentally wrong with that and I agree it should be illegal
Agreed. It’s unacceptable that things have gotten this.had. we need to fight back
I think they want you to only use Windows and pay for cloud storage.
By enforcing BitLocker and Secure Boot, they are trying to eliminate dual-booting (you don’t need to dual-boot Windows/Linux anyway, as you can just use WSL2 /s).
By enforcing disk encryption, in general, they try to force the use of cloud storage, by making data recovery nearly impossible. Most people are probably too lazy to buy external storage, and manually copy their files over.
This guarantees 2 money streams. One from Windows’s tracking/advertising and the other from OneDrive subscriptions.
Data recovery isn’t impossible. You can easily back up the recovery key. This is just typical Microsoft shit design.
My parents wouldn’t even notice that their computer decided to encrypt their files. And they will blame the service guy for not being able to recover their photos, in case of hardware failure.
It does not guarantee any revenue stream. It is just incompetence
you don’t need to dual-boot Windows / Linux anyway
Exactly, as I can just wipe the disc and install OpenBSD.
Good thing PCs aren’t locked into Windows.
yet
Good luck locking loose mainboards sold for the DIY market, which don’t come with anything installed by default, to a given OS, the only way that could maybe work is forcing the OS in ROM.
Another way would be to discontinue the socketed desktop form factors and replace them all with mini PCs that are as locked down as the current Macs.
Thinking for two seconds:
MS pays Google to start enforcing some device verification thing so you can only view a good chunk of the Internet if you pass verification? (Assumes Google goes even harder making the web Chrome-focused)
Ooh Cloudflare could be invited to the party here too. Constant CAPTCHAs if you’re not on an MS AUTHENTI-PC! device. (Think Private Access Token)
…fill in the gaps friends 😉 you know MS has already debated all your “suggestions” anyway
Google already does precisely that with their “open source” mobile OS. People underestimate how easily these guys can ruin stuff
:( tell me more?
First off, Google has made agressive deals with phone manufacturers to ship spyware with their phones by default, and some of the stuff can only get taken out by rooting/jailbreaking the phone. By doing so, they acquired nearly 100% of the app store market share, and then used it to make “useful features” such as integrity checks that are tied to the Play Services app (which is an always on spyware background app).
The end result is, even if you manage to root your phone and install a custom ROM (which is not always available to every model), a bunch of apps will refuse to work properly because you fail the Google Play fingerprinting steps and are assumed to be a security vulnerability. If I’m not mistaken there’s also some shady stuff with certificates, too
This is already part of the trusted computing spec its called “remote attestation” I would actually expect it more targeted at multimedia who are hot to keep you from copying their stuff and banks.
So you’re suggesting MS will somehow block non-Windows OSes from installing, even on hardware like loose mainboards for building your own PC with, or even on barebones mini PC kits or certain laptop SKUs, which don’t ship with an OS installed to begin with and expect the user to install it themselves? I mean, unless something extreme happens like changing the entire PC platform to be like the current Macs, that won’t be feasible.
Also, doing that would kill the Steam Deck which I doubt Valve would take sitting down.
SecureBoot pretty much does this. There is nothing preventing motherboard manufacturers from blocking adding non-MS keys if they wanted to.
No just some laws
Ah no
so you can only view a good chunk of the Internet if you pass verification
/
Constant CAPTCHAs
Get Google & Cloudflare to make the internet suck if you didn’t pay Microsoft[‘s vendors] “enough” for hardware
Just sounds great doesn’t it?!
Not to mention DRM. They want to own your computer and prevent any kind of modification so that movie producers give them money.
Movie producers?
Yeah, shit like HDCP is pushed by the film and TV industry.
Not really. Your problem in us is the lobbying lawyers. It’s a political systematic problem. The demonic corp entities that crave endless growth will never not do anything that could potentially suck any data from or control a customer. The ones that get “money” for things like this are your law makers. The Republican authoritarian faschists are the winners, along with billionaires that can afford to buy laws. No movie producer. No one in any business except exploitation on the mass scale can profit from these moves. In some countries it is illegal. In the us it is business
No idea how you say all that but can’t put together which industry specifically benefits from HDCP.
So not movie producers. You just mentioned them as another category being fucked? Because that’s what they are
The film industry benefits from HDCP and all DRM, they aren’t being fucked. I’ve looked back over the conversation, I think you have it flipped in your head.
Just checked my wife’s laptop. Local account, secure boot off, windows 10. It had a message telling me to setup a microsoft account to ‘finish encrypting the device’. I clicked turn off, and it’s currently decrypting the hard drive. Blech.
I need to check my girl’s laptop.
Shit they do this on windows 10 too? I should check my girl laptop too.
Which version of Win 10 are you using? My girl’s Win 10 Pro laptop is still unencrypted.
It’s not which version, it’s where you are. They follow some laws here some there and now that the US is fascist they roll out features like this on these easy targets first
Oh, ok. I am in EU.
Windows 10 Home
Fuck Microsoft.
I remember back in highschool a buddy encrypted his harddrive, didn’t backup his key. He Lost ALOT when I upgraded his comp
But how is that relevant to your ‘Fuck Microsoft’ if he knowingly encrypted his device, which is how you make it sound?
I’ve enabled FDE on one of my Linux devices, I’ve already had to mount the filesystem in a rescue environment once because a failed update caused the system to be unable to boot. I would also have been hosed if I had lost the encryption key. Ok not really, because that’s what backups are for, but you hopefully get the point.
From what I gather though other memes, It looks like Windows 11 is enabling Bitlocker by default.
I know, and the ‘fuck Microsoft’ is completely warranted for that. But shouting that and then coming up with a story where somebody enabled it themselves and subsequently lost their key, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Unless it was to illustrate the dangers of FDE, but in that case the point could have been made a bit clearer.
Always have backups! Doesnt matter what OS you use, stuff will break eventually.
I prefer bootable full system images to my NAS for easy restores, and online file backups, both running daily.
3-2-1 rule : 3 backups 2 different types of storage 1 copy off-site
And don’t forget to actually test your backups once in a while. It doesn’t count if you can’t use it.
Yup, I treat the ‘3’ as 3 copies of data, so the first copy is just my working system, and the other 2 are various backups.
Windows is the virus.
I can’t even adjust bitlocker settings on my laptop’s windows 11 home Installation…
The what? I think i disabled bitlocker fromsettings on my laptop which is probably home version
Disabling it entirely is possible, but I want to keep the encryption and set a proper password for it instead of the stupidly long recovery key. That and similar features seem to be locked behind the pro version.
Yeah, you need Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, or Education edition.
Not anymore. Now home has it too
Is this person lying/incorrect? https://lemmy.world/comment/16865866
Unlikely. But, there’s a possibility they are both telling the truth. Since, they could be on a different Software version on their story.
Always the AB testing. All versions are regional and they only try these things in faschist us first where it is safest to assault customers
Do home versions even come with bitlocker? There might be nothing to adjust
They do and it auto activates when you add a Microsoft account. It cannot be turned off on the home edition as it doesn’t have the full bitlocker settings. Came across this one on some machine i was working on a while ago and i ended up having to pull the SSD from the customers machine and plug it into something with pro to actually disable bitlocker.
Meanwhile in Linux with luls, which I’ve had since a pre-pre-pre version somewhere back in the early 2000’s, I can have multiple keys, all works like sunshine, never had problems.
On windows… So we work with highly sensitive data, and ever since I came in I thought it insane that people working remote don’t have that highly sensitive data encrypted. We can’t switch Linux yet, so okay, we go for BitLocker.
Boy oh boy oh boy was that a mistake.
50 remote users, 5 get encrypted devices with BitLocker as a trial and within a month, 3 of them already got locked up permanently because apparently it’ll pwrma lock itself after x amounts of invalid passwords which is just incredibly stupid. But don’t worry, there is a backup key! Yeah, that is lie 48 characters that we’d had to pass by phone and they have to type it flawlessly.
Suffice to say, the remote users will be running Linux soon, like it or not.
Yeah, that is lie 48 characters that we’d had to pass by phone and they have to type it flawlessly.
Wouldn’t be so bad if everyone knew their Alpha Bravo Charlies
My one talent: alpha bravo charlie delta echo foxtrot golf hotel India Juliet kilo Lima mike November Oscar papa Quebec Romeo Sierra tango uniform Victor whiskey x-ray Yankee Zulu, typed using voice to text
You have a point. But Bitlocker recovery keys are all numeric. Really not all that hard to translate over the phone. Typically a secure email is what we use to deliver since 99% of employees also have email on their mobile devices.
The pinnacle of secure data is cryptographically sealed with a key in the inbox
Haha. You aren’t wrong. But just rotate the key after. Also, there are plenty of secure delivery methods and encrypted delivery options.
Alpha bravo charlie Delta echo foxtrot golf hotel Juliet Lima kilo Manhattan November Ovaltine Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tatooine uniform Victor wet ass pussy x-ray yokai Zelda
I’m a little fuzzy on some of them…
deleted by creator
Yeah I’m with you. I also manage about 800 devices at my current role and I’ve never had any major issues with BitLocker.
I’m tempted to think they’re just lying but that’s a little mean. Maybe they just didn’t know? I don’t know but BitLocker is not the problem here.
I suggest we move all our machines over to Linux, which is the actual plan. Fuck everything about windows
Also, permanently locking a device after x failed attempts is just plain silly, security wise. You know I can take that drive out and just try to brute force it a million times per second without that silly rule being in my way, right? It’s an anti security pattern similar to requiring password changes every week, it’s a bad idea.
deleted by creator
Exactly. We’ll switch to Linux, finally have security and dependable devices, and then we’ll move on
deleted by creator
hey, at least it tells you if you put in a typo every few chars.
pass by phone
That’s a ticket I would go and overnight mail a pre configured IP KVM
This has been happening to people randomly for years. Ysed to get calls about it all the time, and that was pre-covid
I still don’t understand why there is no other mainstream os in competition alongside MS except IOs, I wouldn’t call Linux mainstream of course, don’t you think that’s a bit weird?!
MS abused its monopoly in the 90s. The Clinton administration was too lenient, then the Bush admin kowtowed completely. Now, there’s largely no chance for another operating system to compete.
Why so! and what Clinton and Bush have to do with an operating system that is used globally!? I think you overestimate MS
I’m not sure how to explain the concept of walled gardens to people who grew up with four websites. In the 90s, most software was “shareware”, you could try it out for as long as you wanted, but businesses were expected to buy licenses.
MS used it’s dominant operating system to drive web browser competitors out of business. This is illegal. The whole concept of capitalism is built around competition, but MS used it’s power to stifle ’ innovation. The Clinton administration beat MS in court, then the Bush Administration dropped the case before the appeal was heard. If they hadn’t done that, instead had broken up Google, Meta, Apple, and the lot of them, the world would be a lot different now.
Right wing politicians will always be in favour of big corporations, they pay good money
Microsoft is almost good as dead. These days, Linux takes just as much maintenance as XP used to. They’ve got maybe 5 years left until laptops start shipping with alternatives to Windows. My bet is it’s going to be SteamOS.
Microsoft is thriving and will continue to do so, just probably on machines running Linux.
They get paid $$ per month per employee by most businesses in the developed world.
There is a mature alternative to desktop Windows now. But there isn’t for AD, Azure, Exchange, Kerberos and M365.My bad, I meant their consumer grade stuff.
I would generally agree with you on their cloud/server solutions. However, I do think AWS will get there some day.
I have way less maintenance to do than on my old XP machine.
And considering all the shenanigans Microsoft does starting with 10, I guess this still holds up.
Maybe SteamOS Lite if the device doesn’t have a proper GPU.
iGPUs are more than enough to play most indie games.
Even older dGPUs like the R9 270/270X or 280/280X, hell, even the R9 290/290X or 390/390X (R9 390/290X is just a faster 290/290X which ships with 8GB VRAM as standard issue), while admittedly pushing it a little, will also work fine for most indie titles and even truly ancient (as in DX9-era and earlier, think stuff like Silent Hill 2 which launched in 2002 for the PC) AAA stuff, you’ll just need to manually enable a compatibility toggle for GCN1 or GCN2 cards to work with AMDGPU in DIY distros like Arch or Gentoo while last time I thought some prebuilt distros like Fedora enabled it by default.
These are the compatibility toggles you’ll need to set in kernel parameters for GCN1 and GCN2 cards to work with AMDGPU if they’re not set already. GCN3 and newer natively supports AMDGPU without needing said toggles.
amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1
If you don’t just look at desktop computers, GNU/Linux and Android/Linux are the most used operating systems in the world (not sure which is in the lead).
If you look only at desktop computers, the most used OS is Minix, which is installed on most Intel CPUs and motherbords.
I’ve been preaching about this for a while. Many modern systems are getting bitlocker turned on by default.
If your system gets messed up, or simply won’t start because of some security vendors bad update, goodbye data. You need the recovery key, and if you don’t have it, you’ll never see your bits the the correct order again.
