If society and ppl would function on the "no brainer" principle, there would be other, much bigger changes than microsoft

When I used Windows95, I wasn't even online! I used it to translate and edit the family letters that my mother had kept since the War. That's what I bought my first computer for. There was no way it could have been done with pen and paper as all the letters were handwritten and a lot of my translation was guesswork at first.

Later I went online with Windows98, using a winmodem and my telephone. Again, I don't see how M$ could have spied on me. You didn't even need to register Windows in those days.

That's either naivety or rose-tinted glasses.

Yes that would obviously work well to mitigate any surveillance tech, telemetry, data collection, backdoors etc.

With Windows 98 and a dial up modem connection straight to the WAN, with no firewall, your machine was pretty much "open day" for anyone, not just Microsoft.

Windows update was introduced with Windows 98 and the file manager / IE web browser were integrated / one and the same thing. All of those were ways and means for MS (and others) to capture data. However, this is admittedly nothing compared to the data being harvested in Windows 10/11.

I agree that you couldn't do that nowadays! I did in fact have a firewall and an antivirus but I can't remember any more what they were, only that they were well-known free ones.

But you also need to remember that the internet was a lot less dangerous in those days. There were no criminal gangs harvesting data for sale or assembling botnets for hire. Crackers were mostly bored teenagers in their bedrooms and if they did put a virus on your machine, it would probably just do something silly like making all the letters fall off your screen.

There was little value in those "personal firewall" applications for Windows. Windows 9x had no file permissions or any kind of privilege separation anyway. It was basically a single user system.

Whether or not the web was "less dangerous" in those days, or whether the OS was or was not connected to it, is somewhat of a moot point.

I had some laptops for a few years infected with Windows 95, then W98, and then with NT. Windows 9x was basically DOS. It was only a layer on top of MS-DOS or, if you ignored the fake warning messages, on top of the far superior DR-DOS. I hated it by the end of the first day: I recall that 9x crashed every few minutes, especially if one was actively working. I got into the habit of saving documents I was working on every time I got to a full stop or took a pause to think. The browsers were another matter. Eventually the browser Opera showed up and had a feature to restore tabs as they were after a crash made up for lost time so only 5 or 10 minutes got lost instead of 25 to 35 minutes — per crash. NT crashed less often but still was not safe.

Anyway, firewalls were later marketed as the panacea for Internet-connected Windows systems. IIRC the TCP/IP stack was added with W95, replacing the third party Trumpet Winsock. However, about the firewalls, no one I spoke with at the time really thought it through to consider that if you allow port 80 (and eventually 443) out and the compromises come in that way, the firewall does effectively nothing. Same for other ports that needed outward connectivity.

If I recall correctly the telemetry or surveillance really got going with Windows XP, but I had already long since stopped using it at home and then (as now) had no experience with it at work.

That goes for me too. I hated the XP UI so much that I never wanted to use it. So I continued with Windows98 for a while, then moved on to Linux.

Viruses in those days were 99.999% windows viruses. The few linux viruses were inclined to be carefully crafted against servers like sendmail, inetd, or bind usually run on internet servers. They would trigger a buffer overrun in one of these less secure servers. In those early days, the ram above the buffer & stack was executable, and the overrun would have the machine code for the Assembler instruction "Goto 0x0000", which gave them root privileges over the box. These server programs were patched or superseded, and that whole attack vector was cut off by improvements in gcc & the kernel. Software 'Canaries' were introduced. Canaries were used in a coalmine to warn about (odourless) carbon monoxide poisoning. If carbon monoxide leaked in the mine, the canary would fall off his perch before everyone passed out or died. The workers would drop everything, pick up the canary and run away from the poison gas. Likewise, software canaries allowed the kernel to kill the offending process before any damage was done.

Today, sendmail, bind & inetd are no longer mainstream, but people have better alternatives than those early programs. People inventing unix & linux never thought about bad actors, but they reacted quickly enough once the problem was encountered. One Bind alternative provided an alternative use of the initials: "Buggy Internet Name Daemon." https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/blurb/unbind.html

Some of what Microsoft says about 'Recall':
""How does Recall work?
Recall uses Copilot+ PC advanced processing capabilities to take images of your active screen every few seconds. The snapshots are encrypted and saved on your PC’s hard drive. You can use Recall to locate the content you have viewed on your PC using search or on a timeline bar that allows you to scroll through your snapshots. Once you find the snapshot that you were looking for in Recall, it will be analyzed and offer you options to interact with the content.

Recall will also enable you to open the snapshot in the original application in which it was created, and, as Recall is refined over time, it will open the actual source document, website, or email in a screenshot. This functionality will be improved during Recall’s preview phase.

Copilot+ PC storage size determines the number of snapshots that Recall can take and store. The minimum hard drive space needed to run Recall is 256 GB, and 50 GB of space must be available. The default allocation for Recall on a device with 256 GB will be 25 GB, which can store approximately 3 months of snapshots. You can increase the storage allocation for Recall in your PC Settings. Old snapshots will be deleted once you use your allocated storage, allowing new ones to be stored."

and:

Privacy
"Recall is a key part of what makes Copilot+ PCs special, and Microsoft built privacy into Recall’s design from the ground up. On Copilot+ PCs powered by a Snapdragon® X Series processor, you will see the Recall taskbar icon after you first activate your device. You can use that icon to open Recall’s settings and make choices about what snapshots Recall collects and stores on your device. You can limit which snapshots Recall collects; for example, you can select specific apps or websites visited in a supported browser to filter out of your snapshots. In addition, you can pause snapshots on demand from the Recall icon in the system tray, clear some or all snapshots that have been stored, or delete all the snapshots from your device.

Recall also does not take snapshots of certain kinds of content, including InPrivate web browsing sessions in Microsoft Edge. It treats material protected with digital rights management (DRM) similarly; like other Windows apps such as the Snipping Tool, Recall will not store DRM content.

Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry."

and:

"Recall snapshots are kept on Copilot+ PCs themselves, on the local hard disk, and are protected using data encryption on your device and (if you have Windows 11 Pro or an enterprise Windows 11 SKU) BitLocker. Recall screenshots are only linked to a specific user profile and Recall does not share them with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements. Screenshots are only available to the person whose profile was used to sign in to the device. If two people share a device with different profiles they will not be able to access each other’s screenshots. If they use the same profile to sign-in to the device then they will share a screenshot history. Otherwise, Recall screenshots are not available to other users or accessed by other applications or services."

Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wind...nqgocvk00#faq2
"

Microsoft's systems have been a happy hunting ground for hackers and other ne'er-do-wells for decades.

Despite Microsoft's reassurances and soothing words, I doubt whether Recall on Copilot+ PCs will be much different.

Time will tell.

Quite correct. The large quantity of data is present, therefore can be exploited by any program running including of course the OS. Glad I don't have any Win OSs spinning.

To my shame, I must acknowledge one installed windows OS. Reasons are:

1. My computer was actually cheaper with the OS. I didn't have an option to get no OS.
2. It doesn't know me, except as "User." So tracking is moot.
3. It doesn't have anything installed really - Libreoffice, Zoom, my Library.
4. It is there because my7an of my friends freeze at the sight of a terminal or a GUI that isn't a recognizable M$ one. They may need to use my pc one day.

All my laptops came with Win OS too. I simply just wiped and installed Linux over the top. That was that.

None of mine have, for ages and ages now. It's entirely avoidable. Furthermore, not avoiding OEM Windows has a much, much higher cost in the long run.

Not any more:

• The new ones have UEFI / Restricted Boot and no BIOS, so any distro wishing to even boot must pay m$ for that privilege which was once taken for granted now that third party UEFI certificates have been disabled. The era of general purpose computing is drawing to a close if enough of us don't act.
  
• The newer ones have TPM 2, so that the distros which have paid Danegeld to m$ won't even boot until a factory reset because the hardware is thus tied to Windows in general.
  • As this thread is on the topic of surveillance, it should be pointed out that there are also things like Management Engines to provide hardware-level back door access
• The newest ones have Pluton, so the hardware is immutably tied to a specific version of Windows and contains "chip-to-cloud" surveillance complete with its own TCP/IP stack and backdoor, hardware level access.
  

Buying hardware with Windows on it only feeds the problem and hurts the rest of us. However, at this point small groups making even smaller purchasing changes aren't going to change anything. The vendor lock-in situation has gotten bigger than that. Wintel is over, the only question is can we rid the market of it before the final stages of lock-in are complete.

There is potential with Linux on the new Arm chips, which out of necessity have to have full Linux support. If enough people and businesses move away from Wintel then we can finally relegate the duopoly to its rightful place on the dust heap of history, albeit about three decades late.

tldr; Pluton is being rolled out by OEMs and puts the surveillance in at the firmware level.