Youtube goes scortched earth on Windoze 11 bypass videos

Coffee break
21

I have a friend who recently started a new PC build/repair/data-recovery business.
He might have a contract to do 6 new RTX5070 rigs for another local business.
He wants to pay me $100/build to do 2 or 3 of them for him.
I have no moral objections to doing an off-the-books/cash job, but there are legal issues to consider.
I was weighing this question for a while, then I came up with an alternate offer (which I haven’t presented to him yet)

I will do 1 build for free, if he tries at least one Linux distro on his own pc for at least a week.
I will do 2 for free if he tries a second distro.
I will do all 6 of the damn things if he promises to get himself to the point where he’s comfortable offering Linux to his customers, along with an explanation of why W11 is a BAD IDEA.

Thoughts?

22

One-off payments, especially when they are only a few hundred dollars, do not have to be reported to the IRS

23

I believe that’s a good idea. There’s a multitude of reasons that W11 is a bad idea. E-Waste and Privacy Invasions are the biggest two.

-E-Waste

W11 is creating huge amounts of e-waste with it’s TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot requirements. It’s forced obsolescence so that they can control your machine. Just go look on ebay for used computers and there are tons of relatively new computers for sale for less than $100 because they can’t support W11. So if you are looking for a cheap computer or two there’s never been a better time than now. All this so MS/Bitlocker can encrypt your drives and MS controls the encryption keys.

-Privacy invasions

OneDrive is enabled by default and uploads all files to the cloud without user consent.

All keystrokes are sent to Bing and linked to an advertising ID without user consent.

If users disable invasive “features” they are often re-enabled through updates without user consent.

W11 collects telemetry data about hardware, software, and user behavior by default, even before an internet connection is established, and sends this information to MS and third-party servers once an internet connection is established without user consent.

The automatic sample submission feature in Windows Defender silently sends files to Microsoft for analysis, even when users have opted out. And then uses shady prompts trying to convince users to re-enable the “feature”.

Recall, which is enabled by default, takes screenshots every couple seconds and then mines the screenshots for sensitive information such as passwords, confidential documents, and personal media, storing it locally in a searchable format, which poses significant privacy and security risks. And that’s assuming they are telling the truth and not uploading that information to MS or 3rd party servers. And there’s nothing preventing them from starting to upload that data in some upcoming update.

Data collection is deeply integrated into the OS itself, and with it being closed source there’s really no way for you to know the full extent of what MS is doing on YOUR computer.

This isn’t even an extensive list of reasons. It could be much much longer but I didn’t have the time to keep going so I just listed the reasons I found most important.

24

That would be nice, wish I was in the US lol.

25

Ah, well, just don’t tell your government about it

26

I was aware of most of that, and have been pressuring my friend to switch for some time (perhaps too much), but some of it was new to me, like the sample submission from Windows Offender Defender. Cripes, add that to the “feature” that stores all clipboard contents and you can wave goodbye to secure passwords altogether since even password managers won’t help.

I’m just waiting for MS do do deals with mobo manufacturers to remove any options for disabling TPM and secureboot from their UEFI implementations. At that point MS would have all but won. The only option would be finding hardware that’s compatible with coreboot or similar.
I only learned about UEFI’s being mostly proprietary in the last few days (while trying to dig in to my probs with OMLx on my new build), otherwise I might have looked at system76 a bit more closely. (Assuming they’re even available in au)

27

Yeh, wondering if I should have even mentioned it in here now lol