MarionWheeler

Isn’t health data stored locally?

Honestly, AO3 is pretty based for what it is, especially when you consider how the two main competitors (FFN and Wattpad) are ad driven with all the problems that entails. Tho come to think of it, now I’m getting worried about FFN getting enshittified…

I don’t really care about Windows copilot, so long as there’s an easy group policy to disable it.

AtlasOS is not designed with security in mind. It’s only after everyone criticized them that they added back stuff such as Windows Update and UAC.

While I can see what the author was going for, I still don’t think it’s worth it to give yet another third party app admin access in order to make managing settings slightly easier.

That’s not how it works, actually. Its more sophisticated.

How does it work then?

And no, it is more robust than that. This tool doesn’t lead to breakage. IT admins use this tool.

A sysadmin would usually use group policies to manage settings and install apps automatically, especially since they would likely be using Windows Pro or Enterprise in a work environment.

This is…not the best idea, imo. If I had to guess, I would say that it is attempting to disable diagnostic data by setting a registry key — only on Windows Home or Pro, that’s ineffective and doesn’t have any extra benefit compared to just disabling optional telemetry in the settings app. It also seems to pointlessly duplicate things the user already has control of (why does there need to be a toggle for Hyper V and Windows Subsystem Linux?) Last I checked they were pretty simple enough to turn on and off in the base system. Same goes for stuff such as Location Tracking and Activity History, which I’m fairly sure are literally already in the privacy settings.

Attempting to do large scale “debloating” will inevitably lead to system breakage and things not working. Start Menu shortcuts? They’re one click away from being uninstalled. OEM Bloat such as random third party antiviruses? You should be doing a clean install to get rid of those. Apps such as Cortana? winget uninstall. You also don’t need a third party program to manage your app updates, that’s literally what winget upgrade --all is for.

Safari with Adguard plus a few bookmarklets for convenience.

Not on iOS it doesn’t. They explicitly opt out of even iTunes backups made locally.

Even better, there’s been a case where Microsoft Support has used it themselves.

Well for one thing matrix clients on mobile are…not the best. Element X is looking promising, but it’s currently still in beta. Element misorders messages and crashes often, and most other clients are not as feature complete. Whereas in my experience Signal tends to just work. Plus for the average person it makes for a dead simple drop in replacement to WhatsApp or iMessage. Yes, the phone number requirement has led to issues with governments just blocking the sign up SMSes, but that is a tradeoff they make for convenience.

Matrix also leaks more metadata in comparison to Signal (this is just how decentralization works). Not to mention that the recent vulnerabilities seem to suggest (in my opinion at least) that matrix cryptography is not as battle tested as the Signal protocol.

Besides the observed implementation and specification errors, these vulnerabilities highlight a lack of a unified and formal approach to security guarantees in Matrix. Rather, the specification and its implementations seem to have grown “organically” with new sub-protocols adding new functionalities and thus inadvertently subverting the security guarantees of the core protocol. This suggests that, besides fixing the specific vulnerabilities reported here, the Matrix/Megolm specification will need to receive a formal security analysis to establish confidence in the design.

Real world example: The university I study at promoted matrix as a way for students to chat at the start of the semester, and pushed them to use Element. Practically no one uses it, but I’ve met a few people who do chat with Signal.