Comment by renegade-otter
15 hours ago
Microsoft once pushed an update that started uploading my data to OneDrive. I had no idea until I was kindly informed that my cloud storage was out of space.
At this point I would ALWAYS assume that anything I do on a Windows system is not completely private, and the only true way to make a PC secure from Microsoft is to air-gap it.
Also, this is completely ridiculous.
You basically have to treat all components of Windows as malware. Your personal threat model needs to include Microsoft as an attacker.
At this point, I would agree. Microsoft Windows is now banned from my network.
Microsoft's threat model seems to include the user as an attacker, so that's fair.
I have a Windows VM with net access (through a consumer VPN) that I install software in, make sure it's all up to date and whatnot. To do any real work I then take a snapshot and run it on its own VLAN with the only reachable thing being my own samba server.
This is the way.
I have some relatives that assured me that they won't upload some embarrassingly drunken pictures of me to the cloud. Guess what they didn't, but One Drive was happy to share those anyway. Wouldn't even surprise me if Windows posted it to Linkedin with automatic face detection to help me find "new work places". And we can we be sure that agentic AI will solve those problems for me