After you’ve already established security, you can add obscurity (without compromising security) on top for an even bigger gain in security overall. But you can’t do obscurity in place of security.

This is not just a dark chapter. If they also get this power, they can eliminate or disappear anyone at will. It’s one of the last major things they need to gain full dictatorial powers.

In this particular case, I don’t get what’s in it for them. Of course they generally want more power and wealth, while ignoring everything else. But is this also really about that? If so, how? Also they are alienating even a big portion of their stupid base with stunts like this. It doesn’t seem useful, any way I look at it. It doesn’t seem lawful evil or neutral evil like they usually are. It seems chaotic evil.

My take on it: most people do have foresight or at least understand the issue, but they still don’t act on it or ignore it as long as the status quo is still convenient enough. So it’s purely a matter of pain and inconvenience. Once enough pain and inconvenience has accumulated, they’re much more ready to make an actual switch. Thankfully, with Microsoft’s services also becoming increasingly enshittified (forced AI chatbot integrations everywhere, even more cloud dependencies, ever more expensive subscriptions, …) there’s also Microsoft shooting itself in the foot a bit in order to accelerate this process. Vile actions from the current US regime are also accelerating the process of course.

Yes. Unfortunately, propaganda, intimidation and many lies and illegal actions from authoritarian regimes do work. The ones in power also don’t need to care if they’re still being supported by the population or not. After they’re in power, they don’t need supporters in the general population anymore, they just need people to be inactive and suck it all up so that they can continue staying in power. As long as there’s no revolt or upcoming election which actually gets rid of the regime and its background helpers, people are simply letting it happen right before their eyes. And so it will happen. And it will get even worse.

His attitude towards humans in general (including Americans) is a disgrace. He only exists to accumulate money and power. Nothing else is of interest to him. The only people who are gladly supporting him are 1) companies and individuals who want more money/power themselves and 2) right-wing extremists who are gullible by definition (pro-authoritarian, want to follow a Führer blindly, hate outsiders of their own group). Hence the strategy to convert conservatives to right-wing extremists via manipulation and propaganda.

That’s the thing with the radioactive waste and it being still dangerous for many thousands of years… We humans manage to ruin the planet within a fraction of that time already. How could we ever manage anything correctly, let alone something that requires attention for tens of thousands of years. It’s like the ultimate technical debt. A burden we can’t handle, among many other problems we also can’t handle. Collectively speaking.

It’s definitely a form of Linux. Their own product Windows Server is just for small and medium businesses and mostly used for managing Windows devices (with Active Directory domain controllers) and various Windows application/terminal servers in an intranet scenario. It’s never really used for anything serious. Linux is basically the only relevant server OS these days, except for some specific use cases or specific preferences (I’ll count the *BSDs to that category).

Consequences? (… are only a thing for poor people, unfortunately)

Russia is doing everything they can to destabilize NATO, Europe and the US. With and without actual war. By helping to get Trump elected and by spreading mass propaganda in social media (to get European/US people to vote for their doom) they’ve reached a lot of their goal already. And they also know that the current war in Iran isn’t making USA look good, so they are supporting its adversary so that this war can drag on for longer. If it’s negative for the US or Europe, it’s positive for Russia. Plus, it serves Russia’s economic interests because they are also a major provider of oil and gas.

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/gov.whitehouse.app/latest/

As usual: this can be interpteted as Malware. That said, many apps are like this these days: full of trackers and way too many permissions. Most people never know or care.

Mildly interesting: one of.the trackers seems to be related to Huawei.

EDIT: Someone decompiled and analyzed the app in detail: https://blog.thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app

Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS (fully degoogled)

Yes, and they intentionally want those lines to be as blurry as possible.

I think still too many people missed the turning point when Microsoft suddenly stopped releasing products/software that were superior in basically all areas to their previous versions. I think that turning point was Windows 8 already, for many who consider Windows 8 a single-time mistake like ME or Vista it was Windows 10, for others it took until Windows 11 until they noticed the decline of Windows as a whole.

And it’s not just MS, but a lot of consumer tech is growing anti-consumer and gets enshittified to the point of where you really have to think hard whether or not you even want the new stuff they’re spewing out. My consumer habits have certainly changed to be much more rigorous than, say, 10-20 years ago. I read a lot more reviews these days and from many more different sources bevore I even think of buying something new.

“AI PCs” will increase your dependency on MS’ online services (which is probably the main thing that MS wants), decrease your privacy even more (also what MS wants - that’s a lot of data for sale), consume even more energy (on a planet with limited resources), sometimes increase your productivity (which is probably the most advantage you’re ever getting out of it) and other times royally screw you over (due to faulty and insecure AI behavior). Furthermore, LLMs are non-deterministic, meaning that the output (or what they’re doing) changes slightly every time you repeat even the same request. It’s just not a great idea to use that for anything where you need to TRUST its output.

I don’t think it will be a particularly good deal. And nothing MS or these other companies that are in the AI business say can ever be taken at face value or as truthful information. They’ve bullshitted their customers way too much already, way more than is usual for advertisements. If this was still the '90s or before 2010 or so - maybe they’d have a point. But this is 2026. Unless proven otherwise, we should assume bullshit by default.

I think we’re currently in a post-factual hype-only era where they are trying to sell you things that won’t ever exist in the way they describe them, but they’ll claim it will always happen “in the near future”. CEO brains probably extrapolate “Generative AI somewhat works now for some use cases so it will surely work well for all use cases within a couple of years”, so they might believe the stories they tell all day themselves, but it might just as well never happen. And even if it DID happen, you’d still suffer many drawbacks like insane vendor dependencies/lock-ins, zero privacy whatsoever, sometimes faulty and randomly changing AI behavior, and probably impossible-to-fix security holes (prompt injection and so on - LLMs have no clear boundary between data and instructions and it’s not that hard to get them to reveal secret data or do things they shouldn’t be doing in the first place. If your AI agent interprets a malicious instruction as valid, and it can act on your behalf on your system, you have a major problem).

The gullible/naive ones. Right-wing extremists are generally quite good at promising simple (but wrong) “solutions” for complex problems that lower-educated people can easily follow and then feel like they’re on the correct track. That’s also why they produce so much easy-to-digest propaganda on the web.

But it’s all lies, accusing others who have nothing to do with the real problems, not making anything better except for the elite, and causing unnecessary cultural wars within the population instead of necessary class wars.

The elite generally wins when parts of the population are in-fighting against other parts of the population. Right-wing extremists love that and regularly pour more oil into that fire due to their general dividing and hateful nature towards all kinds of cultural opponents and minorities, and the elites love watching us fight each other while enriching themselves further and eating popcorn, because they know that when we’re busy in-fighting, we aren’t fighting for more equality or to change things in any meaningful way.

Probably, but it’s still much-needed actual retaliation against the regime. Doing nothing besides complaining helps even less. Wars aren’t being won in an instant but as a result of many cumulative small victories.

Microslop Crashpilot

Just remember that correlation is not causation. Yes, such things distract from the Epstein case and that’s a welcome effect for the US dictator. But he’s not thinking “hmm I really would like to have a distraction from that so that’s why I’ll just commit another war crime or atrocity so they’ll all be distracted”. He commits new atrocities anyway, and it just so happens that new atrocities automatically distract from older ones. He is causing way more problems than we are capable of mentally tracking.

Unfortunately, most Windows users have a long history of complaining about it and then still continuing to use it.

There’s no way around it: if you keep using abusive software, you’ll stay in an abusive relationship.