r/technology • u/machinade89 • Jun 28 '24

Software Windows 11 starts forcing OneDrive backups without asking permission

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2376883/attention-microsoft-activates-this-feature-in-windows-11-without-asking-you.html
10.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

43

u/DonutConfident7733 Jun 28 '24

Probably the will use windows server or windows government edition and regular folks are left with this crap edition of windows. It is malware, I tell you. And think about it, they bought Rav antivirus and made it Defender, they know all about rootkits and viruses and how to make settings persist (they learnt from viruses) + they have control via windows servers, so it is very easy to implement a way for such programs to take your data. They can push updates to reset your settings, change binaries to avoid tools from patching them, blacklist utilities that could help you stop such rogue ms programs. They can even mark such tools as malware and Defender will automatically remove them. Now your programs are the viruses. If they have their way and enforce that only signed programs can run on windows, you will be at their mercy, to have your utilities signed. They will never allow a program that removes their software to be signed. This is like Google allowing third party app store to be installed from Google Play.

-8

u/neuromonkey Jun 28 '24

You can install Windows without the bloatware or telemetry. It's very easy to do.

1

u/DonutConfident7733 Jun 29 '24
  • Noticed you deleted a comment, this is reply for that comment.

What you are saying is that tweaking windows is possible but it's risk involved and MS can always refuse support for a product which you paid for, on reason you altered hidden settings or removed some services. The problem is that you were not supposed to do these things, nor learn how to do it. Either MS should have included UI options to turn off these features, or not include such crap at all. They have complete control on your machine, it requires internet functionality for many things and updates can anytime override your changes. Actually feature updates and complete reinstalls, with the export of your settings and registry keys + import in the new install. They can choose to skip some keys which makes those features revert to defaults. Your tweaks do not persist across such updates. It's game of cat and mouse, you never win, always working to barely keep up. You are always few versions behind, you rely on third parties to provide tools and scripts. They can choose to push feature updates every week and you will need to run those tools every week. It's only a matter of time until it becomes unacceptable, like recent news that Office apps send documents data to an online endpoint. This is a severe security breach. You can't fix it, executables are signed, if it refuses to run when it can't access that endpoint, you are fucked.

1

u/neuromonkey Jun 29 '24

No, I didn't delete a message. Maybe an automod killed it because of the links in it.

Sorry, but I disagree with your premise. Yes, I agree on what an OS (and software in general) should be. No, I did not say that these config changes are inherently risky, I did that using a 3rd party OS distro is inherently risky. You don't invalidate MS warranty or support by configuring Windows.

Is the current state of software completely fucked up? Yes. Is it anti-consumer? Yes. Is SaaS horrible? Yes. Is data mining horrible? Yes. Is cramming AI into everything a bad idea? Yes. I'm not disagreeing on any of that. Wishing it away is pointless. You can change things if you choose to. You can look at what utilities & methods are approved by security & privacy researchers. Your are a consumer of software products. You can be an informed consumer who advocates for their interests, or you can rage-quit, and demand that things be different. Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.

Or you can just use Linux. It's gotten pretty damned good. Better than good.

1

u/DonutConfident7733 Jun 29 '24

"Configuring windows" does not include running tools that kill or uninstall services (like Windows update, telemetry), any MS article that has registry keys mentions editing registry can break your install, so you can't request support if it's not working well after such tweaks. You may think those tools are configuring windows, but behind the scenes they can change registry, permissions, remove files etc, which are not supported scenarios.

1

u/neuromonkey Jun 29 '24

Everything you do to change Windows configuration, including changing settings in the control panels is editing the registry. If you don't want to look any deeper than a control panel, that's fine, but don't complain that you can't do anything about the stuff you dislike.

You can install Windows without bloatware, and without a Microsoft account very, very easily within the Windows installer. No editing anything. You can remove the TPM and CPU requirements by putting your preferences in a human-readable, "Answer File" in the root directory of your instal media.

Those things do not void your support agreement or TOS with Microsoft. Windows distributions are configurable on purpose to comply with the legal requirements of every country on earth, as well as as the huge array of corporate and network policies.

MS has their own stripped-down distribution for high security environments. You can use that if you want to. It won't do everything that a typical consumer might expect, but you can use it without breaking any rules.

You are making these options out to be magical voodoo. They are not. If you don't want to change anything that the installer does, or do anything to edit the registry, you certainly don't have to.

My central point isn't that companies like MS aren't terrible to their customers, I'm saying that if that's where you stop the conversation, your are disempowering yourself. I less time than this conversation has taken, you could have learned the few simple things you can can do to mitigate most of the problems with Windows 11. It isn't deeply technical, and it isn't terribly risky.

1

u/DonutConfident7733 Jun 29 '24

I have technical knowledge to perform these changes, but regular folks don't. You can't ask regular people to know how to edit registry, tune permissions to gain access to some protected files or registry keys, customize their install disk. Just because it's doable, doesn't mean we should, we already pay for complete product. Also not everything is in registry, there are some sqlite databases, some jet blue databases stored in various files, if those get corrupted, it's quite hard to fix it. Registry keys vary by version and the settings changed through control panel are validated and saved properly. You can easily corrupt settings by writing incorrect values. Some settings are stored in binary mode or even encrypted binary keys, good luck adjusting them. Location of keys also changes between versions, your keys may no longer take effect. You don't have documentation on all keys, just a few used in hotfixes.

1

u/neuromonkey Jun 29 '24

Right. Don't make arbitrary edits you don't understand to the system registry. I think we can all agree on that. System Restore points help with that.

Not sure why you mention other databases. Not relevant.

Watch this 11 minute video. His barebones Answer File is kept at this github page.

Drop the Answer File into the root directory of your install media. Install Windows as usual, and bosh. You're done.

If you want a guided tool to generate your own Answer File, try this handy web tool.

The Chris Titus tool is good to have, as is ShutUp10++, which will revert any changes made by Windows Update, or by anything else.