I need to know what people are doing recently because most of the documentation I'm finding online is from 3-5 years ago and I want the most up-to-date information.
People are doing pretty much exactly what they were doing 3-5 years ago, software has been pretty good for a while no so there hasn't been much change.
It's just bigger than any amount I've ever dealt with in my whole life (I'm 30) and also it's hard to find solutions to manage it without running into bandwidth caps and also things are running for a very long time on the client side: days or weeks.
I am only trying to ensure the data on the local system is the same as the data on the server. There is no adversary in the middle modifying data; so this is strictly about detecting corruption.
I am working on this with mine, but even Signal is too weaksauce in my book. Ownerless (and ideally decentralized) p2p chat is what I am after. If everyone in my group used Android then it'd be Briar or Cwtch hands down for primary text/picture msg and SimpleX or Session or Jami as voice/video call and backup. Because there's an iphone upsetting everything that scratches Briar and Cwtch, so it's SimpleX reinforced with Orbot on my group's menu currently and it seems to work reliably. Session has terrible notification delays when in the background, they use the [IMO] boneheaded send-on-select abstraction within the selection gallery when attaching an image on their Android app (oh and your unsent typed text is wiped). Very unprofessional, needs a bottom-up redesign for its interface. Really has that everyone quit feel to it.
Never signal because signal is bad on requiring too much metadata (your number). It was Session for a while but since SimpleX can be hardened with Orbot (or Tor on PC) and it was way more notifications-reliable, we switched. I would much prefer Briar or even Cwtch but an iphone in the group ruins that party.
Otherwise to answer your question it is a bit of a game. I also like to remind them how, being creeped out by Aunt Matilda putting microphones and keyloggers all over, at least Aunt Matilda [most likely] has better interests for you at heart. GOOG/AAPL/MSFT have no such kinship connection yet they are surveilling in precisely the same ways. That was a decade ago, now add in the Universal Function Approximators! *Demo stable-diffusion.* *Demo lm-studio.* *Present to them a performance of Orwell's 1984.* *Show them a few documentaries on social control.* "See? Now would you like to try it?"
Unironically yes. I'm in a bunch of different group chats with little overlap in signal. There was a huge push amongst my friend group to get people on it back in like 2015. I have some family not on it but we just talk in person.
Not everyone switched, but a surprising amount did, and only more have switched over time.
Aside from a couple non-US friends, I know no one in the US who uses anything other than straight SMS (and Apple iMessage). I'm sure they exist but certainly not in the circle of people I communicate with.
For whatever reason, chat seems to definitely encourage tribalism. The last company I worked for eventually bought into Slack because so many people WOULD NOT use anything else while a lot of us were like "ANOTHER chat app??" because we were perfectly happy with Gchat which we had as part of Google Workplace.
I know there are some historical reasons for non-SMS because of text pricing outside the US but everyone I know in the US would look at you funny if you wanted to use some special app for texting.
There's definitely different circles in the US. My circle of friends and family is on Whatsapp. More than 99% of my communications would be through WhatsApp.
iMessage is very much a US thing. Most of the Non US people or people with international connection exclusively use messaging App ( whatsapp, Telegram, Signal)
Not all my friends switched, I had one good friend who decided not to because she already had a bunch of apps and didn't just want to talk to me on yet another app.
It's much easier when it's a group. I got some of my family to get on it too and they pretty much exclusively use it to talk to me.
In the mid 2010s it wasn't that hard of a call because the various Google apps kept getting deprecated (we were all in hangouts before), iPhone users wanted something rcs like and they couldn't for android users with mms, in general the app scene was taking off with Snapchat wechat etc. so people were easier to convince to dl it.
My pitch was 'you know how randomly Facebook or YouTube will serve you some adds about something you were talking about about, even though you didn't search with them? You're much less likely to have that happen with signal'
Then if they pressed I'd share a link from the net neutrality fight days about DNS hijacking etc and having them remember when all their failed urls would go to an ISP run search domain
I definitely used some FUD but it worked.
Actually I think some of the FUD was 'what if the carrier gets hacked?'.... Which, I mean for all carriers and all systems is just a matter of time. As t-> inf the probability of a breach converges to 1.
Also if any of your friends do drugs, of any sort, that was a great motivator for them to switch lol. Weed has only been legal for recreational since 2013 in any state.
Oh, and pretty much every techie friend I had went 'yo that's awesome' and changed over, even if they don't have a tech job.
Finally, back in the day/for many years, signal could default to normal MMS messaging, so the pitch was 'if they don't have signal, you can just text like normal'
I administer a Windows domain at my job that I do 40 hours a week so your assessment of me is just wrong and also offensive.
I just restarted one of the workstations with Teams startup enabled and Teams ran when the computer restarted. Then I tried disabling Teams startup in the task manager on the same workstation and then restarted the workstation, and Teams hasn't started. I checked the startup tab in the task manager and Teams is still disabled after the restart. It hasn't appeared in the task manager either. This is Windows 10 Pro, so the behavior might be different on different versions/editions of Windows. Also this behavior might be affected by updates. These machines automatically install updates every Saturday, so they're running the latest Windows 10. Even if the setting is reset on a future update, I can create a GPO to disable it or even a scheduled task if I'm not allowed to manage this computer at the domain level.
This is the thing: Windows admins praise Windows when they are running a completely different edition of Windows with different configurable behaviors. It looks a lot different for home users who almost certainly do not even know what a GPO is. And this also raises the suspicion of which exact Windows edition those admins are running on their home computer(s) and how they obtained the license for that...
You haven't re-created the described problem - Teams sets itself to auto-start again after you start it yourself. After all, it's very reasonable that you might want to join the occasional Teams meeting but not want it running after every boot.
I'm not sure if it's a particular version or environment that does this, but at the very least I can't replicate it on my home PC with Teams (personal). If I disable it in the task manager's autostart, it remains disabled if I start Teams. It won't even let me enable "Auto-start" in the Teams settings if it's disabled in the task manager.
not to mention that gp editor is disabled on non pro windows. i think there is some kind of a funky command line or registry hack to enable it. So yeah, I moved on from windows largely because of this force fed software.
Windows licensing is the hardest part of my job. Like if I want to have thin clients running Windows 11 VMs hosted on Windows Server 2022, how do I pay Microsoft so they will let me use the software in this way? I have no idea. I think you need to contact some kind of client services representative at Microsoft in order to figure out the whole licensing thing. By the way if it wasn't clear, I hate all of this. The only good thing about it is that I can make a living by dealing with it so other people don't have to.
Task Scheduler is available on Windows 10 Home. I think of it as "cron for Windows" even though despite being able to schedule the execution of specific tasks, it is really nothing like cron aside from that.
Not sure about other people here but I really liked how autostart used to work in 7 and before - just drop a shortcut in the Start menu folder and you're done. In 10 at some point, in order to have 3rd party software launched at login I had to use task scheduler.
I tried that path back then but it still didn't work for me - no program I tried to put there incl Windows ones was able to launch at the login. I had just entries in the task manager's startup page. Maybe something changed in 11 - dunno
I can guarantee you that the startup folder still works fine, but in some cases you must create the folder.
Microsoft does not screw around with backwards compatibility. There are multiple ways to start applications on launch now, including the user or public user startup folder, registry entries, and via scheduled tasks.
Why do Windows users try so hard to keep defending their OS's shitty behaviors? It's always "you can disable it" (but it might come back automatically after an update), and when you can't disable it (one drive), it's "just don't use it".
I think it's a bit overblown. I don't have OneDrive enabled or Teams on my personal device and it was easy and mostly forgettable. I haven't any issues with it coming back after an update or anything. Edge isn't my default browser either.
I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
That's not to say that Microsoft should be forgiven for their obvious over-promotion of internal products. They really need a strong hand to rein in all these departments with their own metrics and agendas.
I think the general principle people are operating out of is that: The USER should be the one deciding 1. what gets installed onto their computer, 2. what gets run on the computer and when, and 3. the configuration of their own system. The OS vendor should not be deciding these things, nor the manufacturer of the computer.
It's not enough that we can just ignore or correct these things that are just happening on our own computers without our consent. These things should not be happening to begin with.
Indeed, they've been playing shenanigans with OneDrive, but you can
actually uninstall it now easily. That didn't used to be the case. Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.
I'm pretty sure I solved definitively the Teams autostart problem long ago,
easily enough I can't recall what I did. It's not a problem for me, even on 'Home'
machines.
> Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.
Long, long ago we had names for software that auto-installs and auto enables even after you have removed it: malware, or spyware if it's not very destructive.
> people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
This, is it exactly.
Microsoft makes some very bad decisions, do not get me wrong. I agree with you and I think this is the core of why people complain so vehemently about Microsoft.
> I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
This goes to explain a lot of reactions that Very Online people tend to have to things. There must be a villain and that villain must be irredeemable. Even when, as the Brits would say, "cock-up" is a more likely explanation than "conspiracy."
Why are you so upset that people derive a lot of value from Windows? Enough that they want to keep using it, and defend it because they don't agree with the "everything is broken" meme.
Because like industrial waste, Windows exports problems to other systems.
1. Windows has an absurdly short maximum path length of 260 characters.
2. On Windows, moving files to a temporary directory can fail, if the temporary directory has a longer prefix than the original path.
3. When uninstalling, the python utility "pip" first collects files into a temporary directory, then deletes that temporary directory.
4. To avoid running into MAX_PATH limits, pip doesn't use a normal temp directory. Instead, it makes a temporary directory adjacent to the directory it is removing. (https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/6029)
5. If pip is interrupted while uninstalling, the adjacent temp directory is never deleted.
So, in order to work around a Windows-only problem, pip stopped using standard file locations, creating a new problem that only existed due to the workaround. And then I'm left trying to figure out why I'm running out of disk space.
The MAX_PATH limit is annoying legacy backwards compatible stuff, but can be avoided by prefixing paths with \\?\ before passing them into the Windows API.
This is something that languages/runtimes with more effort put into portability already handle for you:
Because even if you don't touch Windows (or whatever mediocre malware Microsoft presently peddles) those folks come to you and say stuff like "skype won't start" and lo! it does not start, though after much clicking around and rebooting and trying the obvious things you discover that if you right-click and try "open with skype" on the skype icon then skype will start. That problem at some point disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. Eh, who knows, it's Windows, and there's more science to reading tea leaves or goose entrails.
Then after za'o decades of stories like the above (it is merely the most recent of many) one might wonder how does Microsoft with so many programmers and so much money produce such kusogeware? That continues to waste my time?
You can have your own view. Nobody is taking it away or forcing you to believe otherwise. My point is why are people so upset when someone has a different view or doesn't agree with your personal view on Microsoft?
What? You shouldn't defend bad behaviour regardless of if you derive a lot of value from the same source. A good organization wants to be called out on shitty practices so they improve.
You can make an argument to convince people of your personal point of view, but there is no reason to be all upset if someone has a different viewpoint. Thankfully we are all at liberty to have our own view on this topic.
Apart from the fact that most people don't have a clue, and it shouldn't even have started to begin with... how then? I can see e.g. Widgets in the task manager. How do I disable the service permanently from the task manager?
When I look at the task manager, I literally have a tab called startup. It has an entry for Microsoft Teams. I set it to disabled. Teams doesn't start at startup for me.
I just don't have a personal computer. I just use other people's computers. Accept all cookies. Honestly if advertisers can figure out how to track me across multiple browsers on multiple OSes on multiple computers on multiple networks, then that's actually really impressive and I would like to know how they did it.
That's also something Richard Stallman said he used to do, IIRC. He said that while he didn't browse the web on his own computers, he would sometimes do it on other peoples' computers or public computers.
No point being made. Just an interesting tidbit I remembered.
And as a network admin I am pushing to have all of our office computers replaced with thin clients, and centralizing all of our compute resources on a single machine that is probably running Windows Server 2022. The current year is 2024. This architecture was cutting edge in the 1990s. I'm over 30 years behind the curve on this.
