Yeah, seconding the other person. At least give them 11 LTSC. And instead of worrying about activation, just use MASgrave to activate it and they're golden. It's a real activation as far as MS is concerned.
As far as I know, blocks on Lemmy are one sided. As on, you don't see stuff from who you blocked, but they can still see your stuff. I've definitely gotten comment replies from people I blocked ages ago, I just see it as blocked as long as I'm logged in.
Let's not pretend that the worst thing someone could come across online is just "a naked human body". Even just within the realm of porn there's some absurdly extreme things out there. Then there's LiveLeak, cartel stuff, etc.
Let's also not pretend that protection of children is anything more than the cover story. This is a full-court push by the global elite to tie real world identity to specific hardware and to online identity, eliminating digital anonymity. It's happening over multiple countries too.
A new Evangelion series was just announced directed by Yoko Taro. Can't wait to see what additional batshit trauma he lumps on the characters this go around.
So it's a unique id "stamped" to your Windows install during setup when you sign into a Microsoft account during the OOB setup experience. It gets stored in the machine's registry, and is used for uniquely identifying your hardware and tying it to a Microsoft account for licensing purposes.
It does not persist between reinstalls, and it is in a known registry location so therefore viewable and editable now that we know it's there. We don't yet know the exact effects of editing it, or how exactly they correlated it in this case with the person's network activity.
I expect we'll have some mitigation plan in the next few months. Obviously starting with the recommendations in the article.
Completely pulling this from my ass:
There should be some ways for researchers to watch what accesses that registry key and when.
Hypothetically, one could just randomize their GDID.
Could target specific known ones to flood the data collected (everyone uses all zeros)
Forge evidence against specific targets (collect the GDID off a target's machine, then set a VM to that and go nuts)
or just randomly generate 1000 then activate Windows on all of them using MASgrave and rotate through them. Would probably need to randomly space out the activations, use generic hardware, and randomly shuffle the ones you used. Would also help to have multiple in use at once generating fake cover data to hide the real stuff in.
At this point it's probably easier to just go off grid than to try and make Windows "private".
More so that they used the same Windows machine where they were signed in with their real personal Microsoft account as the machine they used for their illicit actions.
VPN only masks your source IP, not any of the other identifiers, of which we now know a new one.
If it's a side project, then by definition I'm doing it for fun or to build certain skills, not as some sort of "product". Personally, I don't do "professional" work outside of my job.
But yeah, getting sidetracked is absolutely a classic trap.
At risk of sidetracking more, could you turn the monitoring you're doing into its own project or something at least re-usable?
If not, I'd either self-host something or just continue using what you've made as-is.
God how I miss interoperability. I went to college right as all the disparate chat systems started coalescing into everyone just using Facebook, and it was super useful being able to chat across all the platforms (including FB) from one program
However there are a large number of servers that utilize plugins to strip out Microsoft's invasive chat monitoring where you can get banned from all online play for saying no no words, regardless of the rules of the actual server you're on. There's more nuance to it than that, but there are a lot of ways the Microsoft chat reporting system is being abused right now. There was even an exploit recently that allowed people to send fake chat message data back to Microsoft to get arbitrary users banned for things they never said. So Microsoft says "we're doing this thing to address concerns about online content and predators" and major servers go "Microsoft you're just making things worse".
Additionally, there are "offline servers" that use mods to patch out all communication with Microsoft/Mojang/Minecraft systems, and various other pieces of code that attempt to enforce only paid players joining a server, ultimately allowing people to connect without having actually purchased the game.
While this politician is full of shit, I can understand the fervor. Especially if they have a Minecraft playing kid.
To give an example of the state of some of the most popular servers, there is one heavily customized server that allows for effectively any client-side mods to be run on it. It has one of the largest developed maps of any server ever, and effectively allows hacking. There are entire sub-sub-sub communities making mods just for this server to help streamers hide details of how the block textures are randomly rotated that could give away base locations. It's absurd.
Anyway, someone recently did a massive coding project figuring out how they could back up the whole map as a regular user. They also did some data analytics on the map. One of the data points was amount of "5x5 obsidian pinwheels", better known as swastikas.
Sure, it's edgy internet assholes, but it's definitely an image issue that Microsoft would love to have useful idiots like this guy paper over.
Wish my company allowed that. Everything goes to a licensed secure destruction service that literally puts them through an industrial shredder. Awesome to watch, but wasteful as all hell.
Yes. If I want to organize and dedupe what I have then I need enough storage to work on it, a lot of my storage is spinning rust 7-15 years old, and if I have the space I'm going to use it. I have family photos and a music library going back to 2005. Too many things like old games need custom fixes installed to work correctly on modern hardware, and the internet isn't as permanent as it was cracked up to be.
There's plenty of reasons to hold on to older data.
Yeah, seconding the other person. At least give them 11 LTSC. And instead of worrying about activation, just use MASgrave to activate it and they're golden. It's a real activation as far as MS is concerned.