Microsoft is finally doing it: Even Windows 11 Pro will soon require a MS Acc.

[gnif]

Now TimeMachine is a backup solution and comes free with all Macs, and mine has every change I've made on this machine going back to October 2019 when I first fired it up when this machine was new.

Just a side point, unless you're making a copy of the data to another machine or storage medium so that two copies exist minimum, this is not a backup solution either. If your hard disk fails, or your computer is stolen, or something/someone malicious destroys the data (including TimeMachine), or your house burns down, your data is gone and you have no backup.

[SiliconWizard]

Yes of course. Any local "backup" is not a real backup. It can still help - main reason, from the very name of the TimeMachine, is to be able to retrieve older versions of a given file, if you happen to need them. Also, having two "copies" of the same data on different regions of a drive *may* help in case of drive failure, as long as the failure is not complete...

But yes, anyone not backing up on at least one separate medium is taking a major risk.

[Someone]

Now TimeMachine is a backup solution and comes free with all Macs, and mine has every change I've made on this machine going back to October 2019 when I first fired it up when this machine was new.

Just a side point, unless you're making a copy of the data to another machine or storage medium so that two copies exist minimum, this is not a backup solution either. If your hard disk fails, or your computer is stolen, or something/someone malicious destroys the data (including TimeMachine), or your house burns down, your data is gone and you have no backup.

To be fair the number of people who have a mac with more than one drive (physical or logical) so they have a local time machine backup is in the vanishing minority. Anyone with that is likely to understand the risks and have other remote/external copies. Having a hard time thinking of any consumer mac that had more than one partition on it!

After the file management change from open/save/save as to open/save/duplicate/move to in 10.7 (2010) versioning became part of the underling system and didn't require time machine, prior to that versioning was through time machine (as I recall it still had some local versions stored so worked even when the remote/external backup disk was not available? no idea if that would function if an external time machine destination had never been setup).

Time Machine is pretty synonymous with setting up a backup solution with a remote/external disk.

[mansaxel]

There must be an edition they'd release like LTSC that doesn't require a sign in setup thing.

There will always be "offline" options with Windows, just like with Windows 10. In some corporate and government (high security) environments, there is no internet connectivity... ever and that's often mandated by cyber security policies and even legislation at times. There is no way on earth Microsoft will ever turn around to those organisations and say "just temporarily connect your devices/network to the internet". That will not can't happen.

How that will look in Windows 11 and whether or not it will be easily accessible to end-users/regular consumers is yet to be seen.

The first step is to put an Active Directory in place, that you control. Microsoft-infested workstations are functional masochists. They crave  whipping by a master computer. Make sure you control that computer.  And, a Samba 4 install is good enough.

My children have W10 boxen, with Professional, (Home was never an option) joined to a Samba 4 directory. No nagging about accounts, what so ever.  As you wrote; this is likely to continue in 11.

[PKTKS]

There must be an edition they'd release like LTSC that doesn't require a sign in setup thing.

There will always be "offline" options with Windows, just like with Windows 10. In some corporate and government (high security) environments, there is no internet connectivity... ever and that's often mandated by cyber security policies and even legislation at times. There is no way on earth Microsoft will ever turn around to those organisations and say "just temporarily connect your devices/network to the internet". That will not can't happen.

How that will look in Windows 11 and whether or not it will be easily accessible to end-users/regular consumers is yet to be seen.

There is no chance on earth they will put the very same crap software they sell to consumer grade customers on govs and MIL hardware deploys ... they will just shoot their own feet if so..

Harboring data was never (and will never be) a profitable business.. who on hell would think that data storage is possibly a profitable cash cow? The cash cow behind that.. is obviously another very very deep and profitable agenda... 

ACCESS to data and most important.. for whom that data belongs..

Obviously  MIL (and gov) institutions would just drop MS head if doing so with their data..
But not mere mortals customers.. in which their agenda is 100% access to whoever data..

Paul

[Halcyon]

There must be an edition they'd release like LTSC that doesn't require a sign in setup thing.

There will always be "offline" options with Windows, just like with Windows 10. In some corporate and government (high security) environments, there is no internet connectivity... ever and that's often mandated by cyber security policies and even legislation at times. There is no way on earth Microsoft will ever turn around to those organisations and say "just temporarily connect your devices/network to the internet". That will not can't happen.

How that will look in Windows 11 and whether or not it will be easily accessible to end-users/regular consumers is yet to be seen.

ACCESS to data and most important.. for whom that data belongs..

Obviously  MIL (and gov) institutions would just drop MS head if doing so with their data..
But not mere mortals customers.. in which their agenda is 100% access to whoever data..

Correct. I deal a lot with Microsoft Azure and Google Workspace. They have the ability to restrict data to certain data centres/countries for big corporate and government clients. If they didn't, they would never make the list for government suppliers. What end-users see in terms of consumer software and free cloud services accounts is very different to the enterprise stuff.

[mansaxel]

Correct. I deal a lot with Microsoft Azure and Google Workspace. They have the ability to restrict data to certain data centres/countries for big corporate and government clients. If they didn't, they would never make the list for government suppliers. What end-users see in terms of consumer software and free cloud services accounts is very different to the enterprise stuff.

Our Tax Authority did read the Schrems trial papers, started a big investigation together with the Social Insurance Agency, and concluded that it probably is incompatible with EU and Swedish law for a public agency or a GDPR data managing entity to use computing bureaux not hosted in-Union. Regardless of service contract type, free or very expensive look-like-local.

The sales droids and the useful idiots from mostly the MSFT camp are all over places like trade rags and LinkedIn and spewing forth their weasel talk about how they, despite the facts on table, can "prove" that mitigations like the ones you mention are "effective".

The harsh reality is that once you have a common legal/technical control plane in the cloud company, the position of data-at rest is irrelevant to the authority in the cloud company country of residence. They just demand what they want anyway.  And there is no way the provider can resist.

[Marco]

I don't think that is fair to Microsoft, they clearly put in a lot of effort to segregate data. If it turns out it's not enough they will fix it. If they have to license Azure to a third party and contract with them that's what they will do.

Meanwhile Apple icloud sits behind a reality distortion field and does nothing. Microsoft will lead the way taking the PR damage the entire way, Apple will quietly follow.

PS. Apple took damage from the scanning mess, but that was self inflicted.

[mansaxel]

I don't think that is fair to Microsoft, they clearly put in a lot of effort to segregate data. If it turns out it's not enough they will fix it. If they have to license Azure to a third party and contract with them that's what they will do.

This is minimum requirement. What they've done so far is not enough. To quote myself: "common control-plane".

Meanwhile Apple icloud sits behind a reality distortion field and does nothing. Microsoft will lead the way taking the PR damage the entire way, Apple will quietly follow.

PS. Apple took damage from the scanning mess, but that was self inflicted.

I am an Apple user,  but make minimal use of iCloud. I can decide that. I can't decide and control what happens to data collected by others and thrown in Azure.

[Marco]

If you email someone how do you know your emails aren't getting stored in iCloud?

[mansaxel]

If you email someone how do you know your emails aren't getting stored in iCloud?

My private email client does not know how to talk to iCloud. What other people do with the information they receive is something I can not control; hence I make certain I do not send everything in email. If I have to use it for sensitive information, I make sure it's encrypted using methods that also protect data at-rest. And encryption I use/trust only to those where I know they have competence and desire to keep things secret. Finally, this is of course not enough for Real Secrets; there one must use approved methods which are in themselves secret.

TBH, Gmail and Outlook are much larger problems here. Their correlation (what SIGINT people call "Traffic Analysis") capabilities surpass most nation-states, turning a distributed problem (survey and tap communication using email) into a neat central sieve/checkpoint.

I would give NSA a real lousy grade on SIGINT if they had not arranged for a constant feed from both with From:, To: and Subject: of all email passed through these providers.

[Halcyon]

If you email someone how do you know your emails aren't getting stored in iCloud?

My private email client does not know how to talk to iCloud. What other people do with the information they receive is something I can not control; hence I make certain I do not send everything in email. If I have to use it for sensitive information, I make sure it's encrypted using methods that also protect data at-rest. And encryption I use/trust only to those where I know they have competence and desire to keep things secret. Finally, this is of course not enough for Real Secrets; there one must use approved methods which are in themselves secret.

TBH, Gmail and Outlook are much larger problems here. Their correlation (what SIGINT people call "Traffic Analysis") capabilities surpass most nation-states, turning a distributed problem (survey and tap communication using email) into a neat central sieve/checkpoint.

I would give NSA a real lousy grade on SIGINT if they had not arranged for a constant feed from both with From:, To: and Subject: of all email passed through these providers.

I've said this before on other threads but it's relevant here too. I think many people don't realise that free Google is an entirely different beast to Google Workspace (formerly Google G Suite). When you sign up to free Google services, part of the terms of use indicate that some of your data will be used for targeted advertising and other purposes. That being said, even Google stopped scanning Gmail messages for use in targeted ads several years ago. If you want better control of your cloud data, pay a few dollars and use the enterprise solution. For under $10/mnth, I get a single user and with that I can have up to 30 email aliases which appear as unique email addresses on my domain.

[50ShadesOfDirt]

It was easy enough to bypass "required account" requirements in Win10 and lower, and it is relatively easy to bypass in Win11 ... not convenient, but easy.

With a tad bit of 'net research, the tips are already out there on how to do it.

[coromonadalix]

Same here 

No MS  account in win 11,  you can bypass it when you install win 11  .... no Onedrive for sure

and i use the ''global'' installation of Ms office, not the ms account connected/locked version, not perfect in any ways  loll

BUT  nothing is really free  loll

EDIT : permanently killed  the Store App   

[SiliconWizard]

It was easy enough to bypass "required account" requirements in Win10 and lower, and it is relatively easy to bypass in Win11 ... not convenient, but easy

For now. Eventually, you won't escape the great surveillance. =)

[50ShadesOfDirt]

It's an "arms race", with one side doing something, and the other defeating it.

I believe they are going after the low-hanging fruit ... this would be the majority of end-users, who think just because the screen says "give us your account info", you must do so. It would be easy to scoop up the majority of users this way.

Research, or get borg'd ...

[Ranayna]

Just to update this from my side of things.

I took action: A week ago i ditched my windows install and am now evaluating Linux. Manjaro with KDE Plasma to be exact.
While this is not running flawlessly, and i had a couple of issues, i am actually very impressed by how gaming on Linux has progressed in the last couple of years.

From the perspective of a "Gamer", there is not much left to do to make Linux a viable alternative to Windows. Valve has Proton seamlessly integrated into the Steam client, and for anything outside of Steam, Lutris seems to be a great way of getting many games to run, though i have not used Lutris yet.

There is only one thing i will miss a tiny bit, and that is Excel.

[gmb42]

And a further update, reinstalled a new Dell laptop (XPS 15 9510) with Windows 11 Pro (it came with Win 10 Pro) using the Dell USB Recovery tool.

I ensured no internet access during the install and was not prompted for, nor did I create, an MS account, a local user account was used. 

The subsequent join to the work domain and switch to a domain account was carried out as usual for Windows since a long time ago (XP??) with the added complication that this was done at home so had to connect the VPN using the local account and then switch user to the domain account while the VPN was still up.

[Ranayna]

For current installations, at least for Pro, the Account is still optional at the moment. Especially when you connect to a domain.

The forced MS Account creation, *if* it really is implemented, will be with at the earliest, on the next major update of Win 11 in fall.

Though, since now Windows 12 is at least rumored, i suspect a change like this will be delayed for that.
A complete new version to introduce such a potential limiting change will keep the lawyers happy i think