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wanderingmagus
It’s an always-on AI that sits directly on your device inside a built-in Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, which takes screenshots every 5 seconds and scans the screenshots for information - including passwords, banking information, and other forms of PII. It then stores all of that information completely unencrypted, in a format that has been proven almost immediately after the beta preview to be able to be exfiltrated within seconds, easily, by a very simple piece of malware. The company claims that all the information is only stored locally, and after the backlash, that the AI would be opt-in only, but we’ve seen what Microsoft does with their “promises” before.
Did you make sure that you opened the terminal inside the folder where your iso and txt files are, or at least navigated to that folder after opening the terminal? Basically, it’ll say “file not found” if you run the CertUtil command while not “inside” the folder containing both the iso and the txt files. Same with running the gpg command.
Usually, if you just open cmd.exe by itself from the searchbar, you’ll see something like this:
PS C:\Users\your_username>
If you instead opened the terminal inside the folder, you’ll instead see this:
PS C:\Users\your_username\Downloads\ISO>
Or whichever folder your iso and txt files are located in.
CertUtil and gpg are pretty tunnel-visioned - they can only see stuff that’s in the same folder as they’re being run in, unless you give them specific directions to get to a different location. That’s why it’s easiest and best to have everything in a single folder and open the terminal “inside” that folder.
Again - all this verification stuff with the terminal is, in my opinion, optional as long as you downloaded from one of the mirrors on the website. But since you still want to do it, this is the easiest way to go about it.
All the directions are here: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=291093
It should be fine. If you’re truly worried, go here:
https://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/linuxmint.com/stable/
And click the version of Linux Mint you downloaded - it’s probably 21.3 - and then download both sha256sum.txt and sha256sum.txt.gpg by right-clicking -> “save link as…” to download the files themselves.
After that, verify the iso you had in your downloads folder by following the instructions here:
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/verify.html
Again, as long as you downloaded from one of the mirrors linked on the Linux Mint download page, you should be absolutely fine. This step is a just-in-case, for your personal ease of mind. It will, however, need you to open cmd.exe and copy the code inside the green boxes into the terminal and press Enter. There’s a pictoral guide if you’re doing the verification on Windows still, right here:
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=291093
Let me know if you get stuck!