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The Death of Windows 10

Doodski

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I may have not seen that same article, but the concept has crossed my mind many times.
I admit I have done anti security stuff in effort to make things more useable and practical. After some security stuff was annoyingly impractical I decided to make it practical. My bad but it has worked so far.
 

Blumlein 88

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I read a excellent article years ago pertaining to PC security and the main topic was making the security useable and not too complicated that people defeat it or can't use it.
I had a position where IT required a new complex password each month which couldn't be recycled from another even in part. My issue was for different parts of the network I needed about 6 passwords. I asked that they allow me to change them once very 6 months. No dice I was told. So I informed them I was going to velcro a notebook to the side of my desktop with my passwords and label it as such. 72 fully new and different passwords a year seemed a bit much to me. They did give me a 3 month window. They weren't sure if I would really do that or not.
 

Doodski

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I had a position where IT required a new complex password each month which couldn't be recycled from another even in part. My issue was for different parts of the network I needed about 6 passwords. I asked that they allow me to change them once very 6 months. No dice I was told. So I informed them I was going to velcro a notebook to the side of my desktop with my passwords and label it as such. 72 fully new and different passwords a year seemed a bit much to me. They did give me a 3 month window. They weren't sure if I would really do that or not.
I have so many accounts that I regurgitate the password multiple times but it is a very strong password. Your office's terms where unreasonable.
 

mhardy6647

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I had a position where IT required a new complex password each month which couldn't be recycled from another even in part. My issue was for different parts of the network I needed about 6 passwords. I asked that they allow me to change them once very 6 months. No dice I was told. So I informed them I was going to velcro a notebook to the side of my desktop with my passwords and label it as such. 72 fully new and different passwords a year seemed a bit much to me. They did give me a 3 month window. They weren't sure if I would really do that or not.
Stuff like that drove me crazy. It always puzzled me when the company I worked for -- and which paid me rather well -- made it more difficult to do my job.
 

Oristo

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What if you have access to the bios and turn off secure boot temporarily to do a backup or restore?
That is done for running Windows on Macs or e.g. repurposed for older PCs lacking NVMe boot support,
booting from a USB thumb drive with secure BIOS disabled, with software on that thumb drive implementing secure boot emulation.
CloverBootloader
 

rdenney

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I sort of sympathize with those who take the stance of "It's not the thing itself, it's the principle!", even as I admit that my own principles are sorta flexible.

Part of me wants to be thrifty and eco-conscious, by keeping older PC hardware in service for as long as possible. But I also wonder if there are legitimate and un-fixable hardware bugs which make this an unwise policy? Got an i7-7700 CPU, BIOS update from mid-2022, and whatever chipset Lenovo was using at the time. It's here, it works (I even vacuum the dust out of it's air ducts regularly) and I'm too broke to buy a similarly-equipped new system right now.

Despite unsupported CPU (i7-7800x as found in $5K Microsoft Surface Studio is supported, i7-7700 isn't), W11 Pro seems to be working without a hitch. I got one popup urging me to sign up for Teams, but this is an improvement over W10's daily nagging to log into Cortana. Actually, there seem to be fewer, not more, distractions with the newer OS now that I've got the tabloid ("trending") media widget switched off.
Let me propose some definitions to expand on your point:

A bug is a defect in the system that prevents it from fulfilling the user's existing requirements.

An enhancement is a change in the system that fulfills new requirements. If the user has new requirements, then they can initiate an upgrade to get the enhancement.

Support is the modification of the system to continue to fulfill existing requirements despite a changing external environment. This is where security updates should live. I distinguish a bug from support because warranty may cover the former but does not (as a matter of law) cover the latter.

Those are careful definitions that help the buyers of very sophisticated systems keep track of what they are doing. (And even though home computers are not my hobby, in my professional work I work with public agencies that implement systems that affect your lives every day.)

The problem with MS updates (and I have to assume Apple is no better) is that they confuse enhancement with support more often than they admit. They use the term "bug" too loosely--any time they find a defect in the software they seek to repair it even though they have not determined that the defect causes the user's requirements to be unfulfilled. I put these repairs in the "nice to have" category, which is a dangerous category for system stability. It's often accompanied by the "why wouldn't anybody want this?" without actually analyzing the side effects thoroughly. And then they add features they think keeps the OS marketable--features many users didn't ask for and don't need. These features often cause changes that break the use of features used by working systems, causing new bugs. That's the issue I see with MS updates--they now fulfill new requirements I didn't have but introduced bugs--defects that prevent fulfilling requirements I do have. From a systems engineering point of view, it's a nightmare.

And it costs system owners millions to keep their critical systems functioning. At my agency, we are always several versions behind on OSes, because our IT people have to test every update for months to perform the requirements testing of current use cases that MS does not perform. That testing also does not, of course, test every use case, and new bugs still get through, requiring the revision of existing systems to accommodate the changes. That's why the forced updates from Microsoft exempt "managed" systems, which consumers do not have (and which they cannot buy).

The claim is that these updates are for security purposes, but there is very little to no transparency in these decisions. Most critical systems follow rigorous configuration management protocols that include a change management committee to evaluate the needs, requirements, and verification for every proposed change to the system. That also costs millions, but fewer millions and with fewer resulting defects (and therefore less downtime) than fixing things after the fact.

Rick "teaches systems engineering" Denney
 

Trell

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Let me propose some definitions to expand on your point:

A bug is a defect in the system that prevents it from fulfilling the user's existing requirements.

An enhancement is a change in the system that fulfills new requirements. If the user has new requirements, then they can initiate an upgrade to get the enhancement.

Support is the modification of the system to continue to fulfill existing requirements despite a changing external environment. This is where security updates should live. I distinguish a bug from support because warranty may cover the former but does not (as a matter of law) cover the latter.

Those are careful definitions that help the buyers of very sophisticated systems keep track of what they are doing. (And even though home computers are not my hobby, in my professional work I work with public agencies that implement systems that affect your lives every day.)

I certainly understand your point of view. Your definition of a bug is pretty wide, though, as the requirements may be poorly understood (by developers or the user or both) or just out of scope for various reasons.
 

rdenney

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I certainly understand your point of view. Your definition of a bug is pretty wide, though, as the requirements may be poorly understood (by developers or the user or both) or just out of scope for various reasons.
Yes--poorly understood and documented requirements also cost agencies millions. But I do make a distinction there--those problems are caused by people highly expert in their domains but not in systems design, while MS's update decisions are made by people who should know better.

The problem is the motivations for clarity:

1. The OS developers are paid for maximizing features and minimizing the cost to deliver them. They have every incentive to cut corners with their verification processes and configuration management.

2. Users have come to expect that OSes will change and ruin their systems no matter what they do, so they are not rewarded for being clear about their requirements--things are going to change out from under them anyway.

I think Floyd Toole would call this the circle of confusion :)

The result is a lot of economic inefficiency. MS's lowered costs are more than offset by the user's higher costs for testing (if they are able to do that) and accommodation of new OS changes, including eventually just giving up and buying new systems rather than sustaining the current system. I see this as being the case at all scales of systems that use PC networks that share operating environments with consumer systems. But avoiding that and going with specialized systems has the opposite problem--enhancements soon become unmanageable and unaffordable because there is no general market support for the product pool.

From a marketing point of view, many of the changes are motivated by marketing to new customers rather than sustaining the requirements of old customers, who the OS companies take for granted.

Linux is actually a reaction to this, but only by those capable of sustaining that reaction. That means that only professional software people (and dedicated hobbyists) can contribute and keep up. This is the problem I have with Unraid, even though it totally fulfills my requirements as a product. When a new OS update comes out that breaks my access to my Unraid server, questions to the Unraid forum, which I visit only when I need such help, usually result in advice I cannot use, because I am not a pro in that field. I have to decode highly coded instructions full of jargon and abbreviations that assume a floor a knowledge far above my ceiling, and that forces me to spend days just catching up to the advice before I can even implement it. I'd rather have a turnkey system. But no turnkey system on the market so clearly fulfills my requirements for backup storage.

But I can also no longer get my Win10 computer to see network shares on a Win7 computer in my home network. I go in and allow SMB v.1 and make a few other changes, and the computer appears for a while. But then tomorrow it's gone again, even though those settings I changes still show as being changed. So, I edit them again and it appears again, only to disappear soon after. I'm sure it's an easy fix to a pro. But that's the nature of my complaint--things that used to be easy, like moving files back and forth between several computers in my home LAN, are now difficult or impossible for production users (i.e., domain experts who have user needs, not systems experts who are supposed to fulfill the requirements emerging from those needs).

Most people just buy new stuff every two or three years and throw their old stuff in the landfill, and then they feel good about making their local government require that grocery stores charge (me) for the use of plastic bags or whatever because they are so environmentally conscious. Good environmental sustainability means sustaining hardware for it's working life, not replacing it every few years because it has simply become too hard for it to support the latest bloatware.

The problem for me is that my desktop computer needs serious power to do the photo editing I use that computer to do. Being expected to replace it every two or three years just to keep supporting features I neither requested nor want just pisses me off. My system is surrounded by expensive hardware that can't be replaced at all in some cases, and getting the computer to support that hardware is difficult enough as it is. My $3000 Nikon film scanner is irreplaceable and needs firewire, for example. My $3000 (to replace) Eizo monitor is old but highly effective with full hardware calibration and color management and build quality that cheaper models don't have. The Unraid server is just the current issue I'm fighting.

The surrounding hardware in my professional work is even more demanding and expensive.

Rick "wondering how much monstrously expensive hardware is sustained by individuals willing to curate their own computer museum" Denney
 
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Trell

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Yes--poorly understood and documented requirements also cost agencies millions. But I do make a distinction there--those problems are caused by people highly expert in their domains but not in systems design, while MS's update decisions are made by people who should know better.

The problem is the motivations for clarity:

1. The OS developers are paid for maximizing features and minimizing the cost to deliver them. They have every incentive to cut corners with their verification processes and configuration management.

2. Users have come to expect that OSes will change and ruin their systems no matter what they do, so they are not rewarded for being clear about their requirements--things are going to change out from under them anyway.

I think Floyd Toole would call this the circle of confusion :)

The result is a lot of economic inefficiency. MS's lowered costs are more than offset by the user's higher costs for testing (if they are able to do that) and accommodation of new OS changes, including eventually just giving up and buying new systems rather than sustaining the current system. I see this as being the case at all scales of systems that use PC networks that share operating environments with consumer systems. But avoiding that and going with specialized systems has the opposite problem--enhancements soon become unmanageable and unaffordable because there is no general market support for the product pool.

From a marketing point of view, many of the changes are motivated by marketing to new customers rather than sustaining the requirements of old customers, who the OS companies take for granted.

Linux is actually a reaction to this, but only by those capable of sustaining that reaction. That means that only professional software people (and dedicated hobbyists) can contribute and keep up. This is the problem I have with Unraid, even though it totally fulfills my requirements as a product. When a new OS update comes out that breaks my access to my Unraid server, questions to the Unraid forum, which I visit only when I need such help, usually result in advice I cannot use, because I am not a pro in that field. I have to decode highly coded instructions full of jargon and abbreviations that assume a floor a knowledge far above my ceiling, and that forces me to spend days just catching up to the advice before I can even implement it. I'd rather have a turnkey system. But no turnkey system on the market so clearly fulfills my requirements for backup storage.

But I can also no longer get my Win10 computer to see network shares on a Win7 computer in my home network. I go in and allow SMB v.1 and make a few other changes, and the computer appears for a while. But then tomorrow it's gone again, even though those settings I changes still show as being changed. So, I edit them again and it appears again, only to disappear soon after. I'm sure it's an easy fix to a pro. But that's the nature of my complaint--things that used to be easy, like moving files back and forth between several computers in my home LAN, are now difficult or impossible for production users (i.e., domain experts who have user needs, not systems experts who are supposed to fulfill the requirements emerging from those needs).

Most people just buy new stuff every two or three years and throw their old stuff in the landfill, and then they feel good about making their local government require that grocery stores charge (me) for the use of plastic bags or whatever because they are so environmentally conscious. Good environmental sustainability means sustaining hardware for it's working life, not replacing it every few years because it has simply become too hard for it to support the latest bloatware.

The problem for me is that my desktop computer needs serious power to do the photo editing I use that computer to do. Being expected to replace it every two or three years just to keep supporting features I neither requested nor want just pisses me off. My system is surrounded by expensive hardware that can't be replaced at all in some cases, and getting the computer to support that hardware is difficult enough as it is. My $3000 Nikon film scanner is irreplaceable and needs firewire, for example. My $3000 (to replace) Eizo monitor is old but highly effective with full hardware calibration and color management and build quality that cheaper models don't have. The Unraid server is just the current issue I'm fighting.

The surrounding hardware in my professional work is even more demanding and expensive.

Rick "wondering how much monstrously expensive hardware is sustained by individuals willing to curate their own computer museum" Denney

Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

Like you I'm quite unhappy to discard working hardware, but Microsoft has historically been very accommodating to supporting old API's and hardware, until the current Windows 11 debacle with TPM. Older SMB versions is, though, on the short end of this as it has been deemed to unsafe by Microsoft (for good reason, I think). That said, Windows Update has been very disruptive at times, to put it mildly.

As for Linux (kernel, that is), it never has been any goal of backwards compatibility either ABI or interface. For that you'll have to look at OS'es like FreeBSD, OpenBSD or NetBSD.
 

dualazmak

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As shared before, using this procedure we can bypass/avoid all of the CPU, RAM, TPM and SecureBoot restrictions for Windows 11 upgrade installation from Windows 10.

At least in my case, and at least at present (as of June 9, 2023), "Windows 11 Pro 64 bit" is running/working perfectly fine on my rather "old" or "outdated" 9 (nine) PCs/PC-workstations with these motherboards and CPUs; for the details, please find here the "OpenHarwareMonitor (OHM)" views of these PCs.

Of course, so far, all of the "Windows Updates" for Windows 11 are/were perfectly applicable.

Audio dedicated two fanless spindleless silent PCs
Gigabyte Z77MX-DH3: Intel Core i7-2600S
Asus P8Z68-V PRO GEN3: Intel Core i7-2600S

Xeon CPU PC workstations in my office:
Asus X99-E WS: Intel Xeon ES-2630 v3 (usual general office use, ASR use, writing this post!)
Asus P9X79 WS: Intel Xeon ES-2697 v2

PC in dinning room with 4K 55" OLED TV:
Asus B85M-E: Intel Core i7-4790T

Old but still fine backup PCs:
Asus Rampage III Gene: Intel Core i7 Extreme 990K
Asus P5Q Deluxe: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 (even this old outdated PC!)

Intel NUC-PC:
Intel DS4250WYK: Intel Core i5-4250U

Old but still fine small notebook PC:
NEC's small note book: Intel core i7-3517U
 
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