This has already been happening on the Web for quite some time. For example Microsoft Clarity records everything you do on those dodgy Web sites you visit. And they assign a universal identifier to you that can be correlated with the IDs Google and your device have already created and broadcast to profile you.
And you think “oh but I use x, y, and z to prevent tracking”. Guess what: They make your browser do nonsense tasks in the background to benchmark your hardware and then assign a UUID to you based on that.
The only thing that can help this situation is privacy legislation with real teeth.
This is far far worse of a potential risk than a tracking identifier. Bank passwords, balances, social media pages, full text chat Windows, everything you ever view all OCRed and put in a neat searchable database for a hacker.
Had an argument with FIL where he argued his last child Is out of school so he votes against school taxes. I'm like you know that pays for the people you and your family will interact with.
His response was "I want them as ignorant as me". Even as joke it's lacks wisdom. He just complained about doctors being uneducated an hour before.
I don't even have kids. I'm actually pretty against having them in general. But education is an existential requirement to a functioning democracy, and even a basic education is so broadening.
The only reason to want people ignorant is if you're trying to swindle them, which honestly benefits no one in the long run.
Internet Archive is also being sued by the US book publishing and US recording industries associations, which are claiming copyright infringement and demanding combined damages of hundreds of millions of dollars and diminished services from all libraries.
“If our patrons around the globe think this latest situation is upsetting, then they should be very worried about what the publishing and recording industries have in mind,” added Kahle. “I think they are trying to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere. But just as we’re resisting the DDoS attack, we appreciate all the support in pushing back on this unjust litigation against our library and others.”
The problem is that the litigation was entirely "just", as far as the legal system goes. It's an open-and-shut case and everyone saw it coming. The Internet Archive basically stood in front of a train and dared it to turn, and now they're crying the victim. Doesn't exactly entice me to send them donations to cover their lawyers and executives right now.
They really need to admit "okay, so that was a dumb idea, and ultimately not related to archiving the Internet anyway. We're not going to do that again."
Note that I'm not saying the publishers are "good guys" here, I hate the existing copyright system and would love to see it contested. Just not by Internet Archive. Let someone else who's purpose is fighting those fights take it on and stick to preserving those precious archives out of harm's way.
They really need to admit “okay, so that was a dumb idea, and ultimately not related to archiving the Internet anyway. We’re not going to do that again.”
It literally archives internet pages and files. What do you think the internet archive does if it doesn't do that?
Cool idea MS. If only you had access to the OS itself to prevent it from gradually slowing down and littering the system with junk. Since we can't fix Windows (Only the maker of Windows can do that!), let's make a dedicated band-aid app to fix Windows.
Maybe whoever is working on Windows will get the message and fix those problems that your tool was built to fix.
Funny thing that my Android phone and Linux desktop don't need antivirus, don't accumulate junk in registries or system folders, and don't require dedicated optimization tools.
This is the same kind of thing I'd expect when a once nice android app gets bought out by a company like tencent.
Bundle a battery manager and RAM optimizer bs in the file browser or something, fill it with ads, maybe they could have microtransactions for some of the "features".
When Oxygen Not Included was purchased by Tencent, they added some data-mining functionality (as far as I know, opt-in for in-game content, so not the worst, but still). I'd have been less-willing to buy a copy if I'd known that it'd wind up down the road having that happen to it.
I'm a little concerned about the broader prospect of software from one entity being sold to someone, then down the line, that entity going under, and in an always-online world, being a conduit for new updates with less-desirable software with the access granted the earlier one. This wasn't historically a problem when software was sold offline on physical media.
For Android, at least there's some level of app isolation, but on the PC, apps aren't isolated.
Yea, I'm still stuck on Windows at work for the foreseeable future as I don't control that too much.
Otherwise, for personal stuff that I do control, they really can get fucked.
My wife had never used any desktop OS other than Windows before, but I switched her to Pop!_OS and it's gone fine. Certainly not any worse than between 2 Windows versions, but at least now there's no bullshit and things are actually customizable. (Her words)
The solution will be for have developers to fully support Linux. I'd date to say they the majority of people still using windows are doing so because they're gamers. While Linux has done what it can to support gaming, it's now up to the game Devs to build games that run on Linux
They pivoted from serving the user to serving themselves. I still don't know what big improvements have been made to 11 other than another coat of paint, some LLM features searching for a problem and the odd feature like that Android subsystem that's being cancelled. Modern Standby is still being pushed which would rule out most new Windows laptops for me.
It's not like I want something revolutionary, just a number of quality of life things would be nice without feeling like I'm fighting the machine. If I could search images on my machine with OCR like iOS Photos I would be over the moon but noone's seemed to want to copy that.
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