Dran

Any legal precedent for this has to be a win right?

That’s reasonable; I just wouldn’t have called my wife’s laptop my laptop I guess. It was either that or there was probably an interesting story behind it.

How many laptops do you own lol?

I am fairly certain SmartTubeNext was a rebrand by the same dev.

If you make it only toonami ads I’m in tho

Please do

DRM is already the primary purpose of trusted compute if you read shareholder meeting transcripts; security is a marketing side effect.

Remote assistance is not rdp, it’s Microsoft’s support hook over the Internet, which requires telemetry to function. It is distinctly separate from, and not a prerequisite for RDP.

The rest of that I’ll have to look into, but disabling remote assistance seems sane in that context.

I wonder if other parts of the shutdown dialog or hover context menu have phone home functions that can only be disabled in roundabout ways; it wouldn’t be the first time. It would not surprise me to learn that the “which apps are preventing shutdown” dialog would be something that triggers a call to phone that data home.

I’d say that the ctt winutil does a pretty good job. I’ve been running installs cleaned by it for a good year now without major issues

A lot of industries are semi-forced into it. Let me give you an example I know of first-hand. Modern SAP stacks support 3 operating systems. Windows Server, RHEL, and SuSE.

You’re probably thinking to yourself: “but rhel is just regular linux, surely you can install it on anything if you have the appropriate dependencies, I’ll bet it even just works on rhel-compatibles like rocky, alma, or centos stream!”

And you would be ~sort of~ right, but wrong in the most dystopian way possible. The installer itself does hardcoded checks for “compatible” operating systems, using /etc/os-release and a few other common system files. Spoofing those to rhel 8.5 or whatever is easy enough, but the one that really gets you is a dependency for compat-glibc-X.Y-ZZZZ.x86_64. This “glibc compatibility library” is conveniently only accessible via a super special redhat repository granted by a super special sap license (which is like ~$2,000/year/cpu). Looking at the redhat sources it is actually just a bog-standard semi-modern glibc compile with nothing special. The only other thing you get with this license as far as I can tell is another metapackage that installs dependencies, and makes a few kernel tweaks recommended by SAP.

So you can install it on alma/rocky by impersonating rhel in /etc/os-release, and then compiling a version of glibc and linking it in a special hardcoded location, but SAP/Redhat put as many roadblocks in your way as possible to do this. It took me weeks of reverse-engineering the installer to get our farm off of the ~100k/yr that redhat wanted to charge us for essentially:

./configure --enable-bootstrap --enable-languages=c,c++,lto --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --with-bugurl=http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix --enable-checking=release --enable-multilib --with-system-zlib --enable-__cxa_atexit --disable-libunwind-exceptions --enable-gnu-unique-object --enable-linker-build-id --with-gcc-major-version-only --enable-plugin --with-linker-hash-style=gnu --enable-initfini-array --disable-libquadmath --disable-libsanitizer --disable-libvtv --disable-libgomp --disable-libitm --disable-libssp --disable-libatomic --disable-libcilkrts --without-isl --disable-libmpx --enable-gnu-indirect-function --with-tune=generic --with-arch_32=i686 --build=x86_64-redhat-linux
Thread model: posix
gcc version 9.1.1 20190605 (Red Hat 9.1.1-2) (GCC)

definitely worth $100,000/yr… much capitalism, many line go up