I have original factory install Win 7. I disabled the update feature a while back. Today I got this incredibly dishonest message from Microsoft in the form of a bright Yellow Danger Triangle (like a hazard button on a car dashboard) Stating: “Optional Update Delivery is Not Working, YOU MAY BE THE VICTIM OF SOFTWARE COUNTERFEITING To use all Microsoft Windows (reg) such as updates from Windows Update; get the latest updates; and receive product support, your copy of Microsoft Windows (reg) must be validated as genuine.”
The consensus seems to be that you can turn off a lot of the phone home features in the OS but you can’t turn it all off and you can’t keep MS from turning them back on at will.
It seems MS would love to flat rate stream all content ad free from the cloud and become a universal Netflix but it’s got a content provider strike especially where new games are concerned. And yet streaming is the means of keeping the source code from being widely distributed and the one temporary means in the case of games for keeping the games from being (cracked if need be) and ripped to services like Popcorn time. Microsoft’s end run around these may be in its EULA clause. It says it will not look at its own stolen IP on your machine but just turn you over to the police. So if it sees an unregistered MS published game running through SAFE on your Win 10 machine through its key loggers it turns you in. And it tells content providers, publish under us allowing us to attach your IP and we will turn end users in.
There will public outrage over this but MS will come up with some jargon like: we’ve been giving you a choice to run your stuff from the cloud or locally for years. We’ve gone to a blended model for security and reliability reasons. This blended model is the model rejected by their customers for their Xbox One platform and rejected for the consolization of the PC with Win rt. They have made the heart of their OS DRM and the heart of their business model DRM. And they are very willing to lie about it in the blackest terms. We wouldn’t be the victim of software counterfeiting they would, despite what ever bs paid for law they might try to come up with.
I think Microsoft loses badly with this model one way or another, including fully cracked versions of their OS becoming much more widespread and through internal hacks likely the blinding of their DRM aparatus so they can’t tell what’s hacked and what’s not for court- this is a firm that has famously lost its source code before leading to Vista. And in the aftermath it will move to a pure cloud pixel streaming method (old Onlive remote desktop method) where the OS and the only thing on your machine is the microscopic self-contained streaming app which can run on bare metal.
Is SAFE defeated by running on WIN 10?
Any chance of the open source community doing a Win emulator with good performance or doing a reverse engineer from say the XP source to create an OS that is clearly not windows and doesn’t violate any of the patents but runs the software well kind of like MS had to do itself after XP or like AMD did with Intel?
You should realize this does leave your system severely vulnerable to dangerous malware. That is far worse than the possiblity of Microsoft spying on you.
Well that means SAFE is complicated by the need for a SAFE native OS at launch. And that looks like Tor Tails type install and all the marginalizing hassle that implies. It also means a pro hacker uptake far before a general public uptake which has implications for SAFE coin.
With the target painted I’ll go ahead and switch on the full metal jacket key logger but you can see that morally and ethically I am not sure that identity theft is worse than a global ratcheting down pay wall censorship regime. They can’t keep selling us the same slightly better code from their cloud dead end so all they’ve got now is cash in and its pig to the slaughter.
I wonder if this Win 10 fraud flies in China. What if China said we are considering severing the global internet link to China? In light of the Joe Armstrong thread it might be like threatening a neutron bomb. The bit of code in the house of cards that was China dependent couldn’t be maintained and the interdependent house would crumble. And yet SAFE type tech is the solution for this type of nonsense but there is a chicken and egg crimp because of the very nonsense.
There is an irony here because MS was stalled in installing and polishing its constant back orifice updates because it would shut your computer for extended periods to make it happen at start or closure.
Now that they’ve got a way to slip it in real time with almost no up or down time for upgrades they are going full force with it. SAFE faces a similar but larger challenge now. So we have the first move with MS and apparently Apple and others. But I think this was the talk all along in low key talke about if the end user hardware is in a crap infected state what’s the point?
Going to limit the SAFE launch to a subset of Linux? How will that work out for the larger coin launch? I am not complaining, the problems were never easy. If only MaidSAFE had a billion in cash and 1000 developers hand picked by David Irvine.
I like the idea of putting an additional layer of login…
So you log into SAFE with an regular potenetially keylogger infected client – but then it only brings up a keylogger resistant quiz login that is customized by the user, and that is the actual SAFE client login – the first was just a safe account to protect your real SAFE account.
You cannot do the keylogger resistant tools directly because they have to be customized by the user and the network doesn’t know who the user is…
Meh same problem as pirating the software. Just back up your data and do frequent wipes and reinstalls. Malware usually targets very specific files anyway like your internet and your core system files. It doesn’t care about your documents or your porn beyond finding something to piggy back on.
There must be a non consumer version free of this junk?
There must be a business version Win 10 without this spying. MS is saying we will look in you machine’s private in encrypted files using our key loggers to aid the IRS and the NSA and our own espionage relative to your trade secrets but when we’ve discovered or suspect you may have stolen IP we’re associated with (or merely helped publish but are now attached) we will use our unique/monopoly position in the windows environment to turn you over to law enforcement without snooping further because we don’t want to be accused of planting evidence.
Can you imagine the MS snooping and the effort required to keep a lid on it. Our highly trained forensics experts working closely with law enforcement know not to type certain things or open certain folders at certain times or press certain buttons at certain times because that would implicate us. If implicated we will settle and burn the evidence, we make this crap up as we go along.
Virtual machines no help?
And virtual machine tech really isn’t useful here because the key loggers and the stuff that sorts through the video output is prior to any VM machine, can’t be turned off and runs separately? And the camera on the laptop is on taking your picture and the audio recording your breathing patterns and time and coupling it to the machine id with the time stamp.
This is MS implementing CISPA/PIPA… on its own
This is why there must be absolute end user control over the hardware and software or as close to humanly possible. This stuff can’t be given a micron of play. Just think of MS’s end user advertiser ID, that right there is a massive betrayal of their customer and end user. The proper remedy should include MS’s break up for the betrayal of the public, its IP should be made public domain. That would send a signal.
This is MS trying to go around the legal process and through its interlocking boards implement CISPA/PIPA… on its own. I wonder if in addition to a settlement people get a corrupt gag order to keep
to keep the public from political responding as they take their chilling effect actions.
What about @jreighley’s suggestion for working with Win 10 and presumably OSX and other commercial consumer operating systems that are increasingly challenged:
" I like the idea of putting an additional layer of login…
So you log into SAFE with an regular potenetially keylogger infected client – but then it only brings up a keylogger resistant quiz login that is customized by the user, and that is the actual SAFE client login – the first was just a safe account to protect your real SAFE account.
You cannot do the keylogger resistant tools directly because they have to be customized by the user and the network doesn’t know who the user is…"
Does that make it into the installer package for those systems and does it help?
Seams reasonable. Keep in mind other types of logging software exist. Most notably screen capture. A screen capture setup on a targets’ machine set to capture low resolution down-scaled images at 2 second intervals with a 5 minute upload lag is the scary monster no one wants except for the remote attacker. Unfortunately, live operating systems that are regularly rebooted with ephemeral use hard drives and an energy drained RAM/BIOS is the only near sure fire way of avoiding these issues.
More complicated setups involve bare metal systems with strict gateways and firewall rules. Whonix can help in this area. Don’t worry though. Maidsafe will soon garner enough attention and investment by giants that will inevitably see and understand the enormous advantages to the SAFE system. They’ll fund at least some development of some locked down SAFE OS with constant peer review from the privacy conscious. SAFE will magnify the importance of security by design.
By 2020 most people will no longer tolerate bullshit exploitation systems. SAFE will do for freedom what the Internet did for communications. Mark my words
I said this before but I’ll say it again: I do not think MaidSafe devs should be solving OS problems. That is a waste of time and against common programming principles.
I run Windows, I will run MaidSafe on Windows and I am not concerned. If I were concerned, I would change my OS. (I will also run MaidSafe on other OS).
Why would MaidSafe waste developers’ time on solving alleged OS problems, while there are dozens of generic (all-platforms) features that need to be added? Who isn’t happy with their OS, he can change it. Say no to OS socialism!
Lol. Agreed. Too much variety to feel crippled. Though I faintly remember reading something about a netboot OS in which a user could load a lightweight SAFE OS with nothing but CPU, RAM, and a network interface. That I personally believe has a place. I’m not perfectly sure how it’ll work but I imagine walking up to a machine booting into a Command line Interface, typing boot SAFE network, it contacts the network, downloads 20 - 50 megs of data (think Damn Small Linux), then loads a lightweight Linux SAFE distro for fast transactions with no need for hard drives.
Systems built purely with volatile memory and no battery backup for the BIOS would be ideal. I would happily buy a raspberry pi for that purpose. Wait, is the BIOS chip volatile memory on the RPI’s? Might have to seek an alternative.
Ms has its key loggers search your encrypted “private” files as it promises to do in its EULA but it stops because it notices you are running pop corn time and you might have a bootleg copy of the Halo game or movie. At this point it stops checking further because it doesn’t want to be accused of planting evidence and turns the issue over to law enforcement. It then helps law enforcement search your computer and law enforcement gets the IRS involved and goes after you and your business and your computer - its now evidence. You get gag order. But all along this is a cover for PRISM, and MS denies all knowledge of what the NSA does with its rummaging through your files using the door MS built for them.
Its as if a private security patrol saw an NRA sticker on a car parked out front of your house and five minutes later the police have kicked in your door and are racking, stacking and confiscating your belongings in the middle of the night because you might have an unregistered weapon.
Give it some time. Soon we’ll have a way to disable the MS keylogging feature unless it’s deeply embedded into the kernel or rooted into the system somehow. A small batch script can be designed to regularly re-enable updates (if the two are linked), install them then disable it again all without user input. I agree what their doing is devious but it’s nothing a little SW engineering can’t handle.
If all goes to shit and MS makes it impossible to completely disable their keylogger, then just dual boot. Run your games on MS, then use your Linux distro for everything else. MS emulation in WINE is steadily improving. Games are the only thing I can foresee being an issue on Linux even with emulation. Shit, I’d even consider buying a raspberry pi dedicated for general computing and be done with it. Use a Y video adapter with a switch. This way you only need 1 monitor. For less than 100 bucks you can maintain your sanity and the convenience of the creepy software we know as windows. On top of all that, you would then have a relatively portable system you can carry around without worry of an asshole planting some spying device onto your pi.
Anyone who configures such a system would help the average user by posting it in detail. Parts, retailers, and a breakdown of the labor. @dyamanaka I’m pointing at you. You’ve proven yourself proficient in this area and you’re definitely not shy of the youtube scene. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a whole box of pi’s just laying around. One video from you could stifle the impending MS tyranny.
About games, I recently switched over to Linux and found that roughly half of my Steam library runs natively in Linux. The gaming situation on Linux isn’t nearly as bad as it was even a few years ago. Valve has really been pushing for Linux to be the new gaming standard and it seems to be working. All the major commercial engines have Linux support now.
Kind of an aside to this topic, but I felt the need to mention it.
Yeah that hit me while I was writing but I was unsure. Come to think of it, the steam box that valve was or is working on is linux based. With the roll out of DX12 I wonder the impact on linux native games. In an ideal world, linux would reign supreme. Only time will tell.
I already see Warren lining up with a shirt pocket full of screwdrivers of various sizes.