Dran

Remote assistance is not rdp, it’s Microsoft’s support hook over the Internet, which requires telemetry to function. It is distinctly separate from, and not a prerequisite for RDP.

The rest of that I’ll have to look into, but disabling remote assistance seems sane in that context.

I wonder if other parts of the shutdown dialog or hover context menu have phone home functions that can only be disabled in roundabout ways; it wouldn’t be the first time. It would not surprise me to learn that the “which apps are preventing shutdown” dialog would be something that triggers a call to phone that data home.

I must be really old then!

Was backtrack before or after whoppix?

I’d say that the ctt winutil does a pretty good job. I’ve been running installs cleaned by it for a good year now without major issues

Yes they were, so I’m offering you an actual theory as to why this may actually be true, yet difficult to “prove”.

Smoking was bad for your health long before anyone sat down and took the time to prove it. Autoregressive LLM tokenizer are a very new field of computer science and it’s going to take a while for the community to collectively understand everything we’re currently doing by trial and error.

Anecdotally, I use it a lot and I feel like my responses are better when I’m polite. I have a couple of theories as to why.

1. More tokens in the context window of your question, and a clear separator between ideas in a conversation make it easier for the inference tokenizer to recognize disparate ideas.

2. Higher quality datasets contain american boomer/millennial notions of “politeness” and when responses are structured in kind, they’re more likely to contain tokens from those higher quality datasets.

I haven’t mathematically proven any of this within the llama.cpp tokenizer, but I strongly suspect that I could at least prove a correlation between polite token input and dataset representation output tokens

When ML training farms run out of new text to train on, “they” may very well want your original writing too…

Me too brother, but I disagree with your assessment on value

An non-blacklisted residential IP address with reasonable throughput is valuable in and of itself. DDOS botnets, proxies to bypass geo blocks or to obfuscate illicit traffic, etc. Also your gaming PC could be used for distributed compute workloads of compromised, usually crypto mining.

Any hardware/connection has value if it’s “free”. It’s just a numbers game beyond that.

For now, ctt winutil does a pretty good job at removing the cruft. I’ve long since switched to debian for my daily driver, but as a remote-access sunshine host for games that require kernel level anticheat, it’s surprisingly usable.

For anyone looking to keep windows around in some capacity, I strongly recommend it. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

Every packet you send/receive relies on passive security. Your nic drivers, the driver kernel model, all of the userland applications that sit on top of it. I get that in practical terms, your firewall will do a lot of the heavy lifting but there are passive rce vulnerabilities in previous unsupported versions of Windows that are trivially exploitable today.

Even if you trust their intent to not misuse your data, there are now a lot of live rpc hooks into your operating system, controllable by anyone who can compromise their azure implementation, which has happened at least twice in recent memory. If the data never leaves your device, and they didn’t have a way in, they wouldn’t have those things to lose in the first place.

The interdependency itself, regardless of intent, is inherently more dangerous than the previous separate paradigm that used to exist.

Your dad probably got lucky, and your router’s firewall probably did a lot of the heavy lifting. If you were to connect a win 2000/XP computer to the internet today without a firewall between, it would be compromised in minutes (there are loads of videos of people demoing this).

While I don’t have proof that 7 would be the same, I strongly suspect it would be the same. 10 will get there soon too. Firewalls will stop most of the low hanging fruit, but an application that bridges connections through the firewall are that much more vulnerable to exploitations that won’t be integrated by your running kernel.

They won’t brick it, but you can bet that a lot of people are sitting on unreleased 0-days for win10. It will likely be dangerous to connect to the internet on day 1.

Thank you for letting me know what software not to use; good bot

Crossfading and normalization would both independently be dealbreakers for me. I can’t go back

I would be genuinely surprised if fair use draws the line on format-shifted, legally purchased media, at “remote watch-together”, leaving format-shifting and local watch-together in-tact.

If it were up to the studio’s interpretation of the law, you’d need to purchase a license for each person during local watch-together.

RE: backups, I’d recommend altering your workflow. Instead of taking an image of a box, automate the creation of that box. Create a bash script that takes a base OS, and installs everything you use fresh. Then have it apply configuration files where appropriate, and lastly figure out which applications really need backup blobs to work properly (thunderbird, for example). Once you have that, your backups become just the data itself. Photos, documents, etc. Everything else is effectively ephemeral because it can be reproduced through automation.

Takes a lot less space, is a lot more portable. And much better in scenarios where something in your OS is broken or you get a new computer and want to replicate your setup.

agree in principal, but in practice:

1. parents who live across the state

2. plexamp for music

They are indeed just that keen on our data.

They know they can’t get rid of it for all of their customers, but they do want to make it as hard as possible for random users to do so.

The problem with this is it doesn’t work for home users that want to pay for their software. Crazy… I know… but those people do exist.