Yves here. As readers know, my preference is for the devices to be as silent as possible to reduce the area of experimental attack and bloat. My laser printer, for example, does not have a control/reader panel. It has an on/off button and lights off. Perfect! As for Windows, if you’re on a Mac, you can buy the Office suite, instead of licensing it. They make it hard but I had to get a new version about a year ago with a new laptop. You can easily use the un-updated version for 5 years if your usage is simple (IIRC my last one was good for 10 years but I guess I won’t get that kind of life now)
I dread the day when I have to switch to Linux. I have no one here to support you. I prefer to go out of the bathroom instead of fixing the house on the computer. With bathrooms, the completion of the job can only take a long time and then very little time before the bathroom is cleaned. There is no such guarantee with computers.
Written by Thomas Neuburger. It was first published in the book God’s Spies
“Citizens will behave well because we are always recording and reporting everything that happens.”
-Larry Ellison, billionaire visionary and Oracle CEO
“This is a story about power.”
– Submissive
This is Part 2 of the licensing revolution series, a move by manufacturers to sell you something you can’t control anyway. Ownership becomes the license, and control remains with them. In the first part, I wrote:
Two of the most revolutionary inventions ever made by man were created in the 20th century, one at the beginning and the other at the end. Both offered the same innovation: a quantum improvement in individual freedom and power.
I’m talking, of course, about the car, personal transportation, and the PC, your personal computer.
It’s not yours anymore. The end of the car is described in the link above. The fate of the once personal computer is described below.
Personal computer and ‘Personal’ computer: Lease Back Your Own
This is a myth about power.
Before the PC and its corporate equivalent, the UNIX-based Sun Workstation, access to computing power was through IBM-style mainframes and minicomputers, such as those made by DEC. None of this could be considered “personal”; it was very expensive, and although they could accommodate many users at the terminals, the computer itself was centralized and owned by the company. You sit in front of the terminal, while the processor controlled by the company does the work. There was none for you.
After the personal computer was created and available, power was inside the box, which you received owned and controlled. Check out the headline and first sentence of the ad below.
Image source
But today, thanks to Windows 11, all that has been reversed. The machine is no longer yours; you only paid for it. As this writer puts it:
An operating system is the most personal part of a “personal” computer, and it used to be that as a Windows user I didn’t feel like I was renting my computer from Microsoft, but in recent years that feeling has evaporated.
It’s not just a sense of ownership that has evaporated; it is also true.
Windows Owns Your Machine
In all senses except for receipts and deposits, Windows owns your machine. And that’s because it’s so bad.
Let’s get started Windows update processes. The operating system updates itself at will, sometimes breaking your device, and can reset your settings whenever an update occurs. Sydney Butler again, author quoted above:
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve left my Windows computer running fine at the end of my work day, only to return to a broken computer that won’t start the next morning. We have many articles on How-To Geek on how to stop Windows from updating, and the fact that readers are looking for this information should tell you something.
Forced, automatic Windows updates seem inevitable now, and with all the workarounds people are coming up with, the loopholes are closing. Updates can be delayed, but not undone. Resistance is futile.
But it is more than that. That’s it regular, built-in ads; i force a Microsoft Account sign-in; an unstoppable AI all over; The AI-is-watching-you “feature” (called Remember); your departure data in the Microsoft cloud; and, something we will cover more in the next episode, i dangerous TPM chip that every modern computer seems to have, which opens the door to the privacy hell that the world of Davos loves.
As Rob Braxman puts it in this video (emphasis mine):
[1:17] Microsoft is quietly ending the era of the personal computer as we know it. Again [Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella is at the forefront, but not understood by the average consumer.So what people see as visible issues is ignored. These are considered important but in reality they are only small building blocks like Lego pieces to the whole larger project.
Windows is turned into something else entirely – an always-watching, always-connected AI, cloud-dependent system where your device is no longer yours fully, even though you paid for it..
And the idea is that you keep paying every month for the right to have this AI control, but you won’t understand until later that this is no longer some progress from Windows XP. The average person doesn’t really understand this, but they see the bigger picture. Something is happening.
If you own a machine running Windows 11 on hardware with a TPM chip, that explains it. I could go on and on.
Also remember TPM
A few highlights before this gets too far. I may expand on this later.
- Microsoft Recall uses AI to “take snapshots of your active screen every few seconds.” See more from Ars Technica here.
Microsoft says (now) the feature protects privacy. But is that really true? What if the government comes calling, Patriot Act-style? And will it always be true? Don’t count on it. (If Recall is on, instructions for turning it off are here.)
- TPM data – In his video, Braxman says [3:19]“TPM security chip [creates] Authenticated identity to a Microsoft account with hardware monitoring.”
TPM does a lot more, but yes, it creates a unique identity that is stored on the hardware chip and accessible whenever requested by authorized parties.
So, you can imagine a world where every computer has it yours an identity built into the hardware itself, available upon request by “authorized” organizations? Larry Ellison can.
If age verification is required, even on anodyne sites, a TPM chip will be used. And Digital ID will open that door forever.
Davos Man Larry Ellison Explains the World
Billionaire and CEO of Oracle – whose son now owns CBS, Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount Plus and more – is looking forward to a fully supervised country. Chris Hedges:
The founder of Oracle, Elon Musk’s business partner and long-time Trump donor Larry Ellison, who recently announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan alongside Trump, urged nations to move all their data to “one unified data platform” to be “consumed and used” by AI models. Ellison has said that an AI-based surveillance system will ensure that “Citizens will behave very well because we are always recording and reporting everything that happens.”
