That’s the neat part, you don’t!

You just get to feel marginally safer that there is at least the opportunity for someone out there to do it.

I didn’t say anything about self promotion because I don’t usually have issues with that.

This isn’t self promotion. As I said, this is pure advertisement.

Self promotion would be someone who is or has been engaging with the community or the wider fediverse at all that does something like “Hey, I did some research on this topic and there’s some things I think people should know about it so I wrote a blog post. Let me know what you think!”

This also isn’t just out in the open. Why would this person set a different display name on their account unless they wanted to add a small delay in people catching onto this? Instead of a direct “this is the site I run”, their profile has some weird promotional wank about the site and a link. It’s not direct and up front.

Just… any attempt at bare minimum effort to indicate that this person had any intention of actually engaging with the community instead of dropping a link and running would have made this more palatable.

Edit: Maybe they did engage some, I can see their profile shows three comments now as well as this post, but I can’t see those. I’ve already blocked them, for better or worse.

Anime and Altered Carbon?

You might like Ghost in the Shell. There’s a handful of different movies and timelines, but I think the anime show Stand Alone Complex is a good entry point. For that continuity, after SAC is SAC 2nd Gig, then the movie Solid State Society, and finally the recent Netflix CG show SAC_2045.

Cyberpunk future, although not as gritty as Altered Carbon or Cyberpunk 2077. This trailer gives a good idea of the action scenes, but the show isn’t mainly about that, instead more about the psychological themes. Story follows a cyborg special forces group in the Japanese Government. Lots of side plots about stuff like privacy and being able to trust your senses when hackers can hijack your eyes, what does conciousness and self mean when someone can literally shove their brain in a self sustaining VR box effectively forever, at what point does AI reach personhood, when brains can be fully digitized and be treated as data how do you ensure abscence of tampering, how do you even begin to handle people that opt into a gestalt existence, and more. The idea of self is a core thing repeatedly. Main plot of Stand Alone Complex is some wide reaching thing about corporations and billionaires holding critical medical knowledge hostage from the public and a specific hacker fighting to get the info out.

Speaking of Cyberpunk 2077, go watch Edgerunners if you haven’t yet. The dub is great, but I can’t find that trailer dubbed. If you’re even remotely aware of the videogame or the tabletop you know the kind of thing to expect. Gritty, dark. Starts about a year and a half before the game, ends around half a year before. Holy shit, nothing I could say would do it justice and it’s best to go in blind. Just… be prepared to hurt. There are no happy endings in Night City.

If you’re up for a little less cyberpunk but still heady sci-fi future, give Psycho-Pass a try. Hard to find a good trailer for this one, the dub is fine but I was only able to find a decent subtitled trailer. The world is one of near omnipresent surveillance by “the sybil system” which can analyze a person’s mental state to detect criminal intent before it happens. MC is a fresh graduate who has just started her job as a police detective, and has to adapt quickly to the reality that detective work is no longer true investigation, but mostly using the reports from the system together with using a troop of people flagged as criminals by that system to hunt down the other potential criminals. Of course cracks in the surveillance and the system itself begin to show pretty quickly, even before someone starts fucking with it for fun. First season is the best and works very well as a standalone thing. The movie and other seasons aren’t bad, just not as good.

If you just want some good anime without the cyberpunk elements, Cowboy Bebop is universally considered a classic. Great great stuff. Struggling bounty hunters just trying to make ends meet as their pasts eventually catch up with them through background details episode to episode. Heavy jazz influence and wonderful jazz soundtrack. You’re gonna carry that weight.

If you only pick one, go with Edgerunners, if you pick two, add Bebop. Edgerunners is a short show, I think 12 eps. Bebop is 25 episodes (and a movie technically between I think episode 23 and 24, but it came out years later and isn’t needed for the overall plot).

22 hour old account, the website is the same name as the account (Joseph is only the display name). And some vague ad for the website as the profile body.

And this is the only post so far.

Pure advertising. Hooray.

Yeah, and when’s the last time anyone has legitimately seen Windows bluescreen for lack of RAM? I’m assuming that’s the “logic” here, because in what world would a stuck browser cause a full crash?

Man, I sure love tech memes not remotely based in reality.

Not sure the exact age, but it’s xkcd 1288, they’re up to 3195 now, and they’re usually posted every Monday Wednesday and Friday.

Napkin math says roughly 12 and a quarter years ago. (3195 - 1288 for total comics since, / 3 for number of weeks since, / 52 for number of years since, gets you 12.22 ish)

There’s some slightly more recent ones that are still many years old:

1625:

And 1697:

Lord, Channing Tatum. The Big Bang Theory. Truly from a different time.

I don’t get why these lazy one-off text replacement extensions keep making “tech news”. You can do this shit easily with a short userscript, and there are plenty of extensions for practically every browser that let you set your own text replacement settings. No need for individual extensions for each.

• slams -> literally disintegrates the bloodline of
• keyboard -> leopard
• cloud -> butt
• microsoft -> microslop
• 

There was this wonderful slice of time around a decade ago where fast food prices had started to rise but local sit-down places hadn’t. If you had the time and around $5-10 extra then it didn’t make sense to get fast food when you could get an actual meal.

Unfortunately inflation has caught up to even the local places now.

There’s always plenty of garbage on Steam and itch.io

Lol, Palantir doesn’t care remotely enough to make an excuse like that. They’re openly proud of what they do.

Yeah, you don’t get Taco Bell because you want real Tacos or Mexican food, just like how you don’t go to McDonalds for a good burger.

You get Taco Bell because it’s convenient, because you’re high as fuck and their crazy monstorsities sound like perfect munchies, or because the call of the void today has manifested in a craving for their specific style of shitty junk food.

Yeah, give me a soggy disintegrating taco with a fucking big dorito chip for the hard shell. I’m going to dump like 5 sachets of the hot sauce on it. And I’ll have the taco salad in a flattened wrap with the massive cheez-it in the middle. Oh, and the burrito half filled with rice and cheese that has extra cheese grilled onto the outside and spicy Doritos inside too. I’ll wash it down with a criminal amount of the formerly exclusive overly sweet Mountain Dew flavor.

Just fuck my shit up.

I read your link, and you need to retake basic literacy if you believe that satisfies any sort of proof. All it says is “Microsoft totally has a keylogger, this setting disables it.” It does not show any evidence of the claim. It does not link to evidence of that claim.

No one’s arguing that they aren’t gathering typing data. I’m arguing that it isn’t a full-on keylogger siphoning passwords.

Please stop fighting a strawman. I’ve not said anything good about Microsoft here. I’ll insist again that I’m more familiar with their rot than most, given my career.

I did Google, with multiple search terms. Check my last post again. There’s a spoiler with plenty under it. It’s the line in a section all it’s own that says “Did my research, I’m not finding the hard evidence.” Tap to expand the multiple paragraphs not only summarizing my findings but also linking specific examples. If you have some specific issue with what I found, let’s hear it.

I’ll state it again and clearly: Everyone should turn off the feature. But hundreds of sites copy pasting the same article, the headline claiming it’s a keylogger, the same instructions to disable predictive text data collection, and nothing else is not evidence. It’s copy paste tech support slop.

If sites claiming things about how Windows worked were reliable, or repetition meant reality, “sfc /scannow” wouldn’t be a meme in the sysadmin world. 90% of the time it doesn’t help. It’s a specific tool for fixing issues caused by corruption to the OS files, not the cure all it’s touted to be by many sources.

So show me some network traffic analysis. Show me a whitepaper. Show me a security reseacher’s write up. Show me process explorer screenshots showing the file lock for the file where the data is stored. Show me someone testing two default Windows installs in VMs, one with keystrokes entered and one without, and the clear difference in network traffic, file activity, anything.

Anything more than simply saying “trust me bro”.

Because headlines can’t be wrong right? The CrowdStrike outage was totally an issue with Microsoft Update, as originally reported far and wide, and not an issue with an update to CrowdStrike software running at kernel level that mirrored the same issue they caused in Linux deployments a few months earlier. People still don’t get that wrong, not at all.

Look. The ball’s in your court. Again, if it’s so easy, prove it. Stop wasting effort trying to rub my nose in it like I’m a bad dog, and just prove I’m wrong.

My research doesn’t show what you insist is so evident it doesn’t need to be sourced. If it’s as you say, spoonfeed me. Prove it. It’ll be faster, and I’ll gladly edit all my previous comments here to say whatever disparaging thing about myself you desire.

Crow is delicious and I look forward to eating it.

Come. On.

Edit: I’m not normally the kind of person to look up who up/downvoted me, but I spent the better part of an hour trying to find evidence in support of this guy’s claim. Apparently it’s easier to downvote than prove me wrong in such a simple way that they claimed I couldn’t have done a google search or I would have found it.

So let’s fucking go. I’ll extend this “bet” to anyone.

Show me evidence that Microsoft is capturing all (or most) keystrokes, specifically including passwords entered across multiple programs, through the setting for predicitve text and handwriting analysis which can be switched off through the settings menu, it is happening on live/prod/general use releases of Windows, not preview builds, and it does not rely on unlikely edge cases like a user somehow accidentally running Calculator with a debugger attached to the process and then typing passwords into Calculator.

Note: Being able to hijack the service and exploit speculative execution shit like spectre to access other areas in memory doesn’t count. This has to be inteded behavior.

If you can prove that for Windows 7, 10, or 11, I will do just about anything you want as a punishment. Want me to speedrun getting banned across the fediverse? Want me to make a video smearing peanut butter on my junk while singing your praises?

No doxxing myself, no physical harm, permanent body modifications, nothing that would get the cops called, make me ill, or jeapordize my job. Monetary cost can’t be over $20. Thinking more like I’d write that you were right on my ass, make it my profile picture here, and edit every comment I made on here (over 4000 at time of writing) to add praises for you and to point to my shame. That sort of thing.

If you can get the instance admins in on it, I’d fully accept old 4chan rules of deliver or suffer permaban.

Just to cover my ass for Microsoft doing something dumb as hell with Recall, that doesn’t count (see specifications about it having to be connected to this predictive text/handwriting thing), and this offer is only valid for the year of 2026.

I highly reccomend Neil Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, which that wonderful quote is from.

Have you been on them, or is this an arm chair take?

Not feeling any empathy is horrible, but feeling absolutely god awful about things you can’t do shit about isn’t exactly a virtue.

Just like many people already have it.

And there it is. This is a not so thinly veiled post being highly judgemental about people on anti-depressants and the like.

As you’ve identified:

I’m sure that what me caring does to my mental state is far worse than however good is anything it does to anyone else.

So… if it’s not helping anything, and arguably harming yourself, what is the point?

I promise you that it is possible to be aware of these horrible things going on, accepting that you cannot do anything about them, minimizing of the negative impact on your own emotions and mental state… and to be able to move on with your own life and enjoy what there is to enjoy around you. All at once.

That isn’t a “lack of caring”, it sure as hell isn’t fucking ignorance. I honestly take quite a bit of offense at that.

It’s basic acceptance of what you can and cannot change. The relatively recent idea that if you aren’t emotionally distraught about world events then you don’t care is one of the most toxic and damaging to mental health things in recent time.

Some people will call it stoicism, but it’s not even going that far.

This whole idea of “I have to stay aware of all the suffering in the world, and I have to have strong feelings about all of it!” is just “thoughts and prayers” with a whole bunch of extra steps that people often use as justification to look down upon others who don’t stay as up to date, or who don’t get as emotionally invested.

So to answer your question, no. I wouldn’t take pills that work as you describe.

Thankfully, that’s not how anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication fucking work! (Unless you’re on far too high a dose or perhaps on anti-psychotics instead)

I’ve not seen womens pants available with larger pockets and non-form fitting. I’m not sure you can say it’s just a choice issue when the choice would be to just buy mens pants instead.

You can find plenty more shit like this just taking a scroll through the settings app/menu. Anything mentioning “predictions”, “suggestions”, “send data to microsoft”, “help us make your experience better”, “automatic personilazation”, “use your data to improve”, “telemetry” and the like is data collection for Microsoft’s sake with little to no direct impact on the function of the OS or other software.

Cool it with the attitude. If it’s so easy to find this evidence, you could have posted links yourself to it instead of whatever the hell you think this is. Public shaming?

There’s plenty of easily proven reasons to hate Microsoft without pulling stuff out of our collective asses. Like the collection of image thumbnails I already mentioned, which as I said was confirmed (as much as analyzing SSL encrypted web traffic can be without breaking the encryption) by traffic analysis.

I have a decade of experience doing tech work in Windows environments. More than half of that time now in systems administration and infrastructure “engineering”. I’m better versed in Microsoft’s bullshit than the average bear, and I’m definitely not trying to argue they’re great.

Proof of this sort of thing can make a career in infosec, so I don’t have any issues believing that people have been digging deep for any evidence of this. If direct evidence is out there, you’re right that it shouldn’t be hard to find.

So now I’ve danced to your tune. I’ve “done my research”.

If this is so damn obvious, please for the love of all that is holy just link me the damn receipts. I promise I can handle whatever hacker writeups, white-papers, etc that you could throw at me. I want to see them. Please don’t blueball me.

So, it’s easy to point fingers at a scary sounding sub-system and scream, but has anyone done any true analysis of what the feature actually does?

There’s plenty of ways to check this shit. Just off the top of my head, checking the files it accesses using process explorer would be a start. Should be pretty obvious if one of them grows with keystrokes.

Those are some pretty damn big claims for “trust me bro”.

It used to be that with shit like this you could actually find stuff like “Hey, I’ve analyzed network traffic from the PC, and can confirm that once an hour it’s sending encrypted data to a server in Redmond that matches the size of the image thumbnails generated by Explorer in the last hour. If Explorer hasn’t generated thumbnails in that time, no data is sent.” with receipts when someone claimed that MS was collecting everyone’s image thumbnails.

Now it’s just Microsoft bad! Trust me bro!

Regardless of validity though, it concerns me that people use their computers without taking 30 minutes to go through the settings and shut off shit they don’t want.

Whether the implementation of this is a true keylogger or not, I get no benefit out of Microsoft analyzing my typing, and I’m not using any sort of touch screen or stylus so handwriting analysis is a waste too.

I disabled it within the first hour post-install.