My work computer has been trying to fly away for a half hour. I switch over to look at it and see this. Thanks, Microsoft and OneDrive. Great stuff.
Tag: Microsoft
Microsoft Strikes Again
CoPilot started to answer this question in the Visual Studio Code “chat window” on my work laptop. It was spitting out an answer which I was digesting — and finally being enlightened about Ruby/Rails namespaces, the autoloader, the :: operator, and directory structure — and then it abruptly deleted its response, and printed this.
When you’re focused on a programming idea, you sometimes get blind to the other things in your code for the moment, but I finally figured out that I had a corporate URL in my code, which CoPilot was parroting back at me for context, despite being irrelevant to the question, and this was why it freaked out. So, ok, my company configured CoPilot requests on its computers to freak out about that.
Searching on this canned response shows a lot of people encounter this, and are similarly bewildered, and I’m suspecting that there are probably many other reasons for this to happen. Quite naturally, people are confused because there’s no indication as to why the “answer” provoked this response. I asked the exact same question on my personal computer and it worked just fine, so this is definitely a corporate filter that’s running… somewhere.
This is why Microsoft rules the corporate world: they give middle managers the power to do things like this. Anything they can dream up as a policy, Microsoft is only too happy to give them the tools to enforce it. However, it seems to me that any company that has the wherewithal to do this would also have the wherewithal to tell Microsoft not to use its code for their AI purposes. If CoPilot can be trained to barf on internal URL’s, it can be trained to not store or train on the response when it hits the configured input conditions, and not interrupt the programming loop with a useless and confusing error message.
This is precisely this kind of BS that I feared when Microsoft bought GitHub, even if I couldn’t put it into words at the time. But who had 2024 as the year of AI coding on their bingo cards when this happened 6 years ago? So no one could have put this into words back then.
Microsoft: It’s not Your Computer
Either Microsoft changed something automatically with the way I log into the Azure portal, or #CorporateIT tried to fix something I complained about without telling me, but either way, I’m trapped in a loop of confirming I’ve done the thing I’m supposed to do. So I go to clear cookies, and I’m treated to not one, but two different messages informing me — as if I didn’t already know — that I don’t own this computer.
I see these messages in the browser, in every Office app, in OneDrive, and in the Windows settings. I get it. I got it. I’m good. Thank you for the continual reminder that literally every single keystroke, sound I make, image the camera can see, file I look at, email I send, web site I use, and everything else I’m tired of typing into this list is logged and reviewed by people who can somehow not go insane by looking at reports like this from 80,000 users. (If there were a use for AI to get its feet wet, this would surely be it.)
You may think I’m exaggerating, but many years ago, I got caught up in a kerfluffle with IT, and literally had someone look me dead in the eye and tell me that he reviewed every single file that got transferred to or from a USB drive connected to a computer. He said this as if I were supposed to be scared; like he was looking for a reaction that I should be worried. I just told him, “I know,” and moved on. This wasn’t something that was being advertised, but I easily inferred it by everything else going on in the way the company approaches IT. It seemed like he didn’t know how to process that.
Tangentially, I think this is why the Microsoft phone died. Microsoft lives and breathes by the average Fortune 500 IT manager — let that sink in — and of course people who bought a Windows phone wanted to connect it to their corporate email. When they tried, they got scary messages that the company could see everything they did with their phone, and remotely wipe it on a whim. I expect most (like me on my iPhone) backed out of the process, and then asked themselves what the advantage was of a Windows phone over others. For decades, it’s become routine for companies to make sudden, sweeping personnel changes, and who wants to wake up to a wiped phone because your company missed its projections for a second quarter in a row? I’m sure they’re only eliminating the people who had something to do with that, right? Right?
Our electronics our very, very personal. This is why people mostly choose Apple products when spending their own money. There is much more “telemetry” going on with Apple products than I would like, and they keep making moves to transform macOS into the same sort of walled garden that iOS is, but Apple is at least presenting an overall message that your stuff is your stuff, and they seem to making the right moves to ensure that. Time will tell, I guess.
Almost everyone has to use Windows at their job. Every company with a fleet of Windows computers is doing these sorts of things, because some upper manager hired some top-4 consulting company who told them they had to, and now everyone distrusts their company and Microsoft. That shows up on the bottom line.
Microsoft has a glorious opportunity to create a new version of Windows for personal use that flips the script. A version where there’s no telemetry and no artificial restrictions on hardware. Instead, they’re quintupling down on their user-last philosophy, and trying this. (Again.) The Windows terminal computer, with no local storage. It’s just a KVM to a Windows image running in their cloud. There will be — there cannot be — any hardware upgrades or gaming or piracy or anything else interesting. And for what? What’s the upside for the user? They still have a “computer” on their desk. What are they getting for the tradeoff? Who would want this?
I’m betting that part of this introduction is a whole fleet of “AI-enhanced” tracking of literally everything going on with the “computer,” so that IT departments can “simplify” this critically-necessary piece of “infrastructure” in their “security” posture, and I’d bet key people in my IT department are touching themselves thinking about foisting it on everyone who doesn’t have to have some sort of engineering or development tool.
The Hell that is OneDrive
My PC — the PC I bought for precisely one game — came with Windows 11 pre-installed. Now, I hate Windows, and I expect it doesn’t like me much either, and that’s fine. For the sake of a game or two, I can live with it. One of the more annoying things I’ve found with Windows is their implementation of cloud storage, with their OneDrive.
I decided to make the effort to “break it” so that everything would just live on my local hard drive, and it made a dog’s breakfast out of the folder structure. It was only after this that it was revealed that folders like “Documents” actually live under a folder hierarchy with “OneDrive” in the path, and I don’t want to try to clean it up for fear of losing files. I don’t have anything worth keeping except the mods for ESO, but it would be a shame to lose them if Microsoft decided to lose its mind here.
First, I’ll admit that there is something to keep straight on Mac’s with iCloud storage enabled. On my MBP, I have this:
There are two locations for “Documents”, but one is “Documents – Local” and one is “Documents – iCloud.”
On my corporate Windows laptop, I have this:
I have two sets of folders mixed into the same namespace. I have no idea which is which. I have multiple links to Desktop’s and OneDrive’s.
Even worse, in the larger folder pane, EVERYTHING listed here is under ANOTHER “Desktop” folder, and ANOTHER “OneDrive” sits at the same level of “My Computer.”
How is anyone supposed to navigate this? How is anyone supposed to find anything? Windows search has NEVER worked. EVER. What were they — what was anyone — thinking!? This is madness.
UPDATE: I spent an hour and cleaned this mess up — only to have it get re-messed-up when I logged into another computer, of course. And now that I deleted the extraneous folders and duplicates, the script that did this — which is still running every time we start the computer — is throwing an error. So I got that going for me.
Windows Being Windows, Shills Being Shills
Windows stays prominent because Microsoft caters to corporations which abuse the poor, defenseless OS into doing things like locking users out of changing the desktop background and the sleep timeout. Until Apple offers power-hungry corporate IT middle managers the same level of user-hostile malfeasance in the name of “security,” Microsoft will hold the high ground in corporate deployments.
This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of not-so-micro-aggressions, as the corporate use of Windows continues to skew all the Microsoft-bought-and-paid-for industry polls that show how much more prevalent Windows is over OSX, and self-justify corporate America that they’re doing the right thing by continuing to stick with it. This, in turn, leads to an entire sub-industry of corporate “security” software which must be installed on Windows, because, well, the bought-and-paid-for auditors told them they had to.
Thus, I wind up with a corporate laptop with 3 different “endpoint” security products installed on it, and something like 30-40 different scripts and checks that run almost by the hour to make sure that the inherent weaknesses of Windows hasn’t compromised our precious meeting PPT’s, which #CorporateIT apparently considers as sensitive as the US nuclear arsenal codes.
Apple offers an alternative to this madness, and I’m very glad they do. In my experience, almost no one runs Windows personally, except for gaming purposes. Numbers like StatCounter vastly over-report Windows usage, because everyone working for a large corporation and in the government is forced to use Windows.
I wish someone would produce a market share report that 1) separates corporate purchases and 2) includes phones as primary computing devices. I think we would see that the “computing world” is vastly different than Gartner would have us believe.
EXCLUSIVE | Microsoft plans Starfield launch for PlayStation 5
According to sources, we understand that currently Microsoft are planning a launch for Starfield on PlayStation 5 post the release of the already announced “Shattered Space” expansion for Xbox and PC, which is on target to arrive at some point later this year. We’ve also been informed that Microsoft have made additional investment into PlayStation 5 dev kits to support ongoing development efforts – adding further fuel to the fire.
Source: EXCLUSIVE | Microsoft plans Starfield launch for PlayStation 5
During COVID, I and several friends started playing Elder Scrolls Online together on PC. It’s a long story, but we all eventually drifted away from it. Eventually, I literally threw away the 12-year-old potato that I used to play it, and had moved all my gaming to a Playstation (except Civ V on my Mac). Then I suddenly developed serious health issues, and started playing ESO again, on the PlayStation. I was rather enjoying the simplicity of NOT having mods, and liked using a controller for combat much better than a keyboard and mouse.
A year and a half ago, Microsoft was saying that Starfield would be an PC/Xbox exclusive. I was kind of ticked. I had long since made my bed with Playstation, but I expected that the game would be Skyrim-level good, and I got sucked into the hype. So I bought an Xbox in anticipation, months ahead of time. I was replaying Fallout New Vegas in glorious 4K at 60 FPS, but I got the bug to go back to PC for ESO, where I could get mods again, mainly for inventory management. So I sold the Xbox and bought a low-spec gaming PC just for ESO.
Microsoft’s stance on making Starfield an exclusive was heralded by the head of the Xbox decision as a serious business strategy, and something on which they were going to build a new era of gaming competitiveness. When they bought Bethesda, they also made a promise not to touch pre-acquisition IP. Hold this thought.
I bought the digital deluxe pre-release of Starfield on Steam. I played over the weekend before the general release, and thought it sucked. After a dozen hours or so, you will hit a wall with inventory management, and you will naturally build a base to try to fix the problem, and find that bases do not solve anything. Unlike Skyrim or Fallout, there simply is no concept of a bottomless container that keeps a game like this from being insane. Being a pre-release copy, I found that I could refund the purchase before the actual release, so, after 13 hours, I did.
Now that the Microsoft purchase of Activision has “gone through,” they now own Blizzard, which runs World of Warcraft. It is, superficially, very similar to ESO, but has over ten times the number of players. You can just smell that someone high up in Microsoft is asking the question: Why are we paying to develop ESO when we could kill it, and most of the player base would probably move over to WoW? The “synergies” from these two acquisitions must be frighteningly tempting.
They’re reversing course on keeping Starfield exclusive, and now I worry that the other “half” of their promises at the time of the acquisition are similarly precarious. Will they, in fact, start messing with pre-merger games? Will they somehow change the offerings or their monetization to better fit within a corporate strategy which now must be conducive to other franchises that were previously competitors? Microsoft breaks a lot of promises. A lot. Just search on it for yourself.
I’m worried for the future of ESO.
And, while I want a vibrant, competitive landscape in gaming and consoles, and this announcement does not bode well for that, the saltiness of the tears of the fanboys in the Xbox subreddit over this announcement — as Microsoft pulls off their mask, and shows them the face of the monster that hasn’t changed since the 90’s — is just too delicious.
Xbox Series X all-digital refresh coming in 2024, plus new controller – Polygon
According to a huge document leak, Xbox will overhaul its hardware range in 2024 with upgraded (but disc-free) Series X, Series S, and controller
Source: Xbox Series X all-digital refresh coming in 2024, plus new controller – Polygon
This constant harping on electronics power consumption is really annoying. These things cost $20-$30 of electricity for an entire year. To put that in perspective, that’s about 2 lunches at a fast food joint, for an entire year. Saving a buck or two here makes no meaningful sense, especially if the unit ever degrades performance to achieve it. Don’t brag to me that the processor does 45 Tflops (or whatever), and then throttle it to say that the new consoles are “green.” Given that Microsoft TURNS BLUETOOTH OFF AFTER A MINUTE on Windows 11 by default, you’ll excuse me if I don’t trust them not to do that.
The bottom is line is that they’re just refreshing the SKU to generate some buzz and try to juice sales, because they’re running third in a three-man race.
Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google
I thought I had malware on my main Windows 11 machine this weekend. There I was minding my own business in Chrome before tabbing back to a game and wham a pop-up appeared asking me to switch my default search engine to Microsoft Bing in Chrome. Stunningly, Microsoft now thinks it’s ok to shove a pop-up in my face above my apps and games just because I dare to use Chrome instead of Microsoft Edge.
Source: Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google
When I was in 8th grade, one of my teachers was out sick, and the principal took over the class for the day. He talked about frames of reference. To illustrate the point, he asked if we had seen the movie, E.T. Of course, we all had. It was the Star Wars-level blockbuster of the summer of 1982. He asked if we remembered the bus scene. None of us could. “You know, ‘Uranus?'” Oh, right. Yes, we all remembered that line. Then he asked us if we could remember what any of the other kids were doing on the bus. Nope. Nothing. They were standing, yelling, throwing things, and generally being disruptive. He said, as a principal, this anarchy on a school bus horrified him. It never even registered with us.
This lesson continues to reverberate with me over 40 years later.
Technical people like me “govern” our computers and devices as much as we can, so when these things happen, they stick out like a sore thumb, and we set about stopping them from happening again. Even after 30 years of “being on the internet,” I am RUTHLESS about spam. When one show up in my inbox, I deal with it, so that, by and large, every email that comes through is of interest and needs my attention.
The people who use Windows because it’s the cheap, default choice are the kind of people that have 10,000 unread emails in their inbox, all of which are spam for services and offers they agreed to be spammed by, because they couldn’t be bothered to at least tick the opt-out box (which only works half the time anyway). When the vast majority of these users see a popup like this, they simply click the button to dismiss it, just like hundreds other digital annoyances they put up with all day long, which they do not understand, and which they do not know how to turn off.
It doesn’t matter that we get upset about this. It’s already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. The incentives just don’t align between users of Windows and Microsoft’s management. You’d expect that they would care about what “power users” like developers would think, so I guess it’s telling how small that community of users is compared to the rest of the people who use Windows.
The real surprise here is that The Verge wrote a piece that is overtly negative about Microsoft.
Fake CISO Profiles on LinkedIn Target Fortune 500s
“I shot a note to LinkedIn and said please remove this, and they said, well, we have to contact that person and arbitrate this,” he said. “They gave the guy two weeks and he didn’t respond, so they took it down. But that doesn’t scale, and there needs to be a mechanism where an employer can contact LinkedIn and have these fake profiles taken down in less than two weeks.”
Source: Fake CISO Profiles on LinkedIn Target Fortune 500s
Allowing companies to take down profiles they don’t like sounds exactly like something Microsoft would be all about.
Pluralistic: 21 Aug 2022 The Shitty Technology Adoption Curve Reaches Apogee – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Office 365 went from being an online version of Microsoft Office to being a bossware delivery-system. The Office 365 sales-pitch focuses on fine-grained employee tracking and comparison, so bosses can rank their workers’ performance against each other. But beyond this automated gladitorial keystroke combat, Offce 365’s analytics will tell you how your company performs against other companies.
That’s right – Microsoft will spy on your competitors and sell you access to their metrics. It’s wild, but purchasing managers who hear this pitch seem completely oblivious to the implication of this: that Microsoft will also spy on you and deliver your metrics to your competitors.
I feel like a fool. I watch Microsoft like a hawk, and I didn’t even know about this. Every time I think I’m too cynical about a FAANG company — and Microsoft in particular — I find that I haven’t been nearly cynical enough.
With this new LinkedIn connection, in Outlook, it’s now possible for Microsoft to connect a particular person to a particular user in your current company’s “metrics.” I suppose they could use this to juice search results for recruiters in LinkedIn, or provide reports to potential employers. I wouldn’t put any of this past them.