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.

If you buy the right key and blend in, you can put whatever you want to in those panels.

Just imagine the terrible problems a coordinated group sharing information about how to do these things could cause, especially an international one. International people subverting advertisements like some sort of subvertisers-international.net

Shock and gasp! Don’t you realize the horrible trouble someone could get into with that information? The type of trouble that someone might avoid by dressing as a generic blue collar worker? The kind of trouble that might replace advertising with art, guides to privacy, or even information on how to resist our benevolent corporate overlords?

I tell you, I’m completely terrified of the trouble someone like you so casually sharing such information might cause!

Someone might make friends with a local print shop and run anti-marketing campaigns against the shareholders! Won’t someone think of the shareholders?

Go ask the magic productivity fairy to magic you up some free productivity. Come on. All the business magazines swear the magic productivity fairy just hands out free productivity, so you must be doing something wrong.

Did you remember to add a drop of your blood to the milk saucer so you could bind it to your will? What about making a salt circle so it couldn’t run away? Did you do your chant in transliterated fae or in enochian?

How about “it’s entirely possible to automatically delay updates by a month and have the computer give you a one week warning before they install where you can push things back by up to a week every time it pops up indefinitely, so you have the time to set whatever settings you need to not get the suck?”

It’s not ideal, but the reality of a properly configured Windows system is significantly less harrowing than everyone online would have you believe.

Come on, you know the big businesses wouldn’t put up with this shit, so just look up how Windows and these things are managed in Enterprise environments.

Windows sucks. It’s a corporate product made by people with incentives to make it suck. But they also have incentives to give businesses ways around the suck so they don’t lose their market position. So use those tools. If you can manage Linux you absolutely can manage Group Policy and a few lines of PowerShell.

Then use Pro or Enterprise edition and GPO to disable those features, like every business environment should be doing.

If you can navigate Linux you can handle Group Policy, I promise.

I definitely would never suggest that anyone might be able to look up the bolts normally used in these poster holders by city and/or transit company and buy a tool to help them assist their local transit workers with these displays.

Or that there might be plenty of tools that might be used to split an image into a large print over multiple pages.

I just effectively removed the limiter for the master bedroom shower. Wife enjoys being a lobster.

3/32" allen wrench, screwdriver, needlenose pliers, and about 10 minutes.

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.

Now that’s what I call shitposting!

Blaming a shit situation on some form of failure of morals and/or effort in the victims is a far more platable concept than accepting that these situations grow from complex causes and many years of history, and could happen in their own environment to them.

Doesn’t help that the billionaires love this sort of attitude because it helps keep the little people playing crab bucket instead of coming together.

Sneering “Why would I ever want to work with people so dumb they could let this happen to themselves?” while the rope continues to tighten around the neck of the whole damn world.

You can look at a lot of crisises in history and see this sort of thinking used to push down groups living through them.