Elvith Ma'for

Yes and no. They started to limit GPOs. Some are only valid on Enterprise Licenses or Windows Server and will be ignored by your usual Windows Pro License at home. With Windows Home, you’re SOL regarding GPOs.

Also they started to migrate some of these settings to their Intune Device Management and will ignore those if not set via Intune.

Read: Companies can still disenshittify Windows to some degree, but they make it harder and harder for normal people to do so.

You wouldn’t even really question your new device on the network. Since the monitor must forward the packets from and to your PC it’s MAC address would show up in the network, but that’s expected. And good luck separating the traffic of your monitor from that of your PC if it originates from the very same MAC address as it’s basically the new network card of your PC connected via USB C. And since it could act like a bridge, it could strip out the responses to its own requests and not forward those to your PC so you don’t even see them there. On the other side it’s all TLS encrypted so nothing to see either. Heck, it could even only send its own requests when your PC is actively using the connection so that it’s less noticeable.

You might do some DPI and check what IPs you connect to but good luck finding if it really is your monitor and not some random app on your PC. If it’s using DoH, you can’t even inspect its DNS traffic to get a clue what’s going on (SNI in the handshake might still offer some clue).

Also all of the above enables tracking and spying on you covertly. Ads are quite obvious, so there’s nothing to hide there.

HDMI and USB C are used in monitors. Both can transmit more than just the image data, e.g. tunneling an Ethernet connection. Not sure if Display Port also supports that

Most people will be on Win Home which usually locks you out of gpedit. Or ignores your settings there, some even from the registry. In the recent times there are even some GPOs locked for Pro and only available on an enterprise version or Windows server…

Correct. It’s Bayrische Motoren Werke which translates to Bavarian Motor Factories or maybe Bavarian Motor Workshops.

The German Werk has several meanings:

1. The process of work/the work itself needed to finish a specific task.
2. A specific action. E.g. used to imply someone did $thing
3. A specific thing that was produced by someone (e.g. a piece of art) or even someone’s lifeworks as a whole.
4. A factory or industrial complex BUT ALSO depending on context the workers on said factory/complex.

https://xkcd.com/243/

https://xkcd.com/323/

I’m with you, but I think they (large studios/publishers) may have that data anyways from their QA or when checking system requirements. They do not need to be completely precise. Even something like „well we’re using 6 GB VRAM, 4GB of that are textures. Increasing texture quality to the next tier is roughly a 25% increase in texture size, so it will probably take an additional 1GB of VRAM“ can go a long way to help gauging whether that setting might be bad for performance or not on your machine

Instead of focusing on what is “too much settings”, i prefer game studios taking the approach of the settings of e.g. Assassin’s Creed Origins. Not only do you get the usual presets in the menu, but also some stats to your performance. E.g. how much VRAM is used/available. What’s your GPU and CPU load, RAM usage,… And for every setting you hiber over and change, you will get a (cumulative) prediction in those graphs how this combination of setting will affect which part of the system. That way you can tweak the settings more easily to your preference and your system. You may not be able to get a decent frame rate with higher poly models, but you might have enough VRAM to afford higher res textures and get better image quality that way. Having denser crowds might affect CPU load more than GPU load, so your GPU might not be the bottleneck of that feature and so on.

I hope they do remember how they were treated by Nvidia…

Still up for me on the original site.

It depends on their use. The most common certificates that you will “use and check” (implicitly) all the time are probably those, that get served by websites and the APIs that apps talk to. Those are usually quite short lived. Let’s Encrypt IIRC issues them with a default life time of ~90 days and there’s a push industry wide to reduce their lifespan generally to… IIRC something around 40 days. But there are more usecases and certificates and those may be valid longer. E.g. a developer that signs their code/compiled binaries.

Or - and thats more relevant - when you check a certificate you do not only check it’s content, you also check that it was issued and signed by someone “you” trust (or rather the software on your device trusts). Ususally there’s a central store on your PC managed by Microsoft (for Win), Apple (for Mac) or your Linux Distribution with a list of certificates that your device trusts. Those are usually quite long lived (often several years, probably even more than a decade). But will also end. And there will be new ones to replace the old ones. Or new vendors that get added to this trust store. If you do not update your device, this trust store won’t change.

There are now several versions how this can affect the apps in this case, e.g.

• They might not be able to talk to servers using “newer” certificates, as they cannot validate them. There might even be the problem, that the update mechanism breaks, as it wouldn’t be able to get updates from the server to get new certs effectively locking you out.
• They might only allow apps that are signed by them, but their old cert is running out and if it’s invalid, they might prevent the apps from running (as their cert is now untrusted) - note that you can provide ways around that (e.g. checking if the cert was valid when it was issued vs. checking if it would be valid now), but for a device that’s designed to be able to get updates, you might have forgotten that or didn’t think it was an issue or…

The only technical explanation that’s not malice would be that some certificate store on the device had expiring certificates and would need an update to continue to function (or rather connect to remote servers).

Panem et circenses

I do not recognize the bodies in the water air

It wasn’t until the early 2000s when I started seeing licenses verified through the Internet and actually limiting their usage.

Hub, what a coincidence. That somehow started around the time the DMCA came to be and America made most countries world wide adopt a similar legislation to ban cracking drm…

Microsoft doesn’t do it the way Linux does it. Linux supports the Chip(set) and as long as different vendors “connect” them the standard way Linux just talks to these components directly in a standardized way. Microsoft wants drivers for that specific board/hardware revision. Even if it’s just a standard chip, every vendor needs to provide a driver.

Why, are they generated by AI and you have to pay for the tokens? /s

I don’t have an 8bitdo controller but I experienced many games being quite picky on Windows, too.

Oh, you accidentally had the sound set to your speakers instead of the head set? Too bad, well ignore that you switched the sound output. Oh, you connected/woke the controller after starting the game? Too bad. Won’t work. Etc.

I experienced way less of this shit since I switched to Linux…