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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1718 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Is it possible to run Windows 11 without its inherent spyware and your personal data being vacuumed up by MS (or other big tech they might let in or share data with)?

I've never been too keen on 'upgrading', because 10 has been pretty good to me, and 11 introduces few new things, other than a new start menu that most nerds hated, and some added latency, I think. And the TPM requirement that comes with some issues on some mainboards.

But the Win 10 support cycle is coming to an end in half a year. And 11 does offer better window management, for multi display users, so I've heard. 10 does tend to mess with sizes and positions when the display has been switched away from or turned off. And 11 has auto-HDR so that you don't have to remember to go into display settings and enable HDR before launching a game that has HDR...? That's about all I can think of that I want.

Edit: Found this: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

never had problems with win10 LTSC. "support" won't end until 2037 of you care about such things

I just used this when I got a windows 11 laptop, ended up basically identical to old windows 10 builds with it: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/windows-10-11-decrapifier/975250

I'm just going to keep using 10 for whatever hobby stuff I need it for (mostly Photoshop tbh). I've never once had a security issue with any PC, despite always delaying and often turning off updates.

How many security threats are there for your own home system? Most of the issues I see patched are things where software already running on your PC can bypass permissions to do things it shouldn't. How many threats are there where attackers can sneak through your modem and install a keylogger whenever the PC was turned on?

I work in anti-fruad and anti-ID theft over the internet for a large corporate employer. Though I've been out of the external, customer-facing side and moved to internal-threats recently, the same broad trends have held true for a while.

Actual hacking, that is the creation of novel malicious software, exploiting vulnerabilities in existing legitimate software etc, is a very high effort attack vector and is primarily targeted at high-return targets. Think ransomeware targeted at hospitals or private companies. Or espionage, either between states or industrial. And even these examples often have a social element to them. Our employees are regularly approached (online) by bad actors seeking their cooperation with an attempted attack. I've personally be solicited this way. I blame Linkedin.

A private individual is much, much more likely to fall vicitm to some form of social engineering attack. Though many of these are hybrid attacks. A good example of this is Fake Tech Support. People think they are calling Apple/MS etc for help with a technical problem, but its a phoney outfit that tricks them into installing malware, usually a remote control/desktop application. Some of the slicker operations actually guide the caller though fixing the issue they called in about too.

To answer the direct question about keyloggers, yes these are a danger to be aware of, but in the majority of cases the user has been fooled into installing it themselves. Actual, pure hacking is very rare against members of the general public.

It's time to switch to Linux. There were some good threads on here recently.

I use Linux and fucking hate it. There's no clear instructions on how to do anything. I have hardware encoding and decoding working perfectly... Except in any chromium-based browser, and no amount of troubleshooting has gotten me any closer to figuring it out.

It's not even clear to me how to go about finding out how to find things out with Linux. Shit ends up in random folders that can only be accessed through the terminal, unless it manages to make it into the macOS ripoff start menu

Yeah, it's still not perfect unfortunately. One upside of the impending paperclippening is that the chatbots have ingested everything ever written about how to solve Linux problems. If you haven't tried it yet, I'd recommend prompting an LLM to act like a condescending neckbeard expert Linux user and friendly troubleshooter, with permission to ask you for further info or to ask you to run commands, and see if you can get it to narrow down your problem.

I actually tried that with chatgpt last night, and it did a decent job of working me through all the stuff I'd already wasted hours figuring out. Didn't solve the chromium issue, but at least went faster than using Google.

I might try Linux on my backup PC but I can't see myself maining it. I paid a lot of money for a gaming rig and I intend to use it.

Proton has become astonishingly good. The main problems I think are around invasive anti-cheat systems.

https://x.com/zack_overflow/status/1894821367331332153#m

Hmm. Cool.

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