Microsoft quietly kills official way to activate Windows 11/10 without internet

[Karel]

Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation,
an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online.
For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"
If you are wondering, that link takes users to the Microsoft Product Activation Portal for online activation.

https://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsoft-quietly-kills-official-way-to-activate-windows-1110-without-internet/

[langwadt]

does it actually change muhc except needing some sort of device that can access  a website instead of phone?

[golden_labels]

So the LLM, beating humans in lawyer and maths exams, is not good enough to handle something IVR robots did 20 years ago? I thought Microsoft told us, that we are getting AGI replacing humans in 2023 2024 2025 2026! I’m so confused. /s

[madires]

Of course that activation portal requires a Microsoft acoount.

[Karel]

Of course that activation portal requires a Microsoft acoount.

Of course, what else did you expect!

[peter-h]

What is the point of a M$ account?

Is it just to improve their telemetry? Nothing stops you creating an account with a fake name etc.

[Monkeh]

What is the point of a M$ account?

Is it just to improve their telemetry? Nothing stops you creating an account with a fake name etc.

Fake name, real data. If you've got an account on a system you actually use, assume they're capable of linking your identity to that account.

There's a reason they give away extended updates for Win10 to people who enable settings backup to their Microsoft account and charge everyone else. What, exactly, has enough value to them to do this I don't know - but something does. Maybe it's just the value of finally suckering you into their SaaS platform.

[golden_labels]

What is the point of a M$ account?

It’s actually hard to explain, because it’s primarily a mentality issue.

It would be great, if there was some malicious intent behind, some evil mastermind with a neat plan. Alas, there is no comic-book villain. It’s not even a case for Hanlon’s razor, it’s less than that. Most decisionmakers behind such ideas can’t themselves tell why they do this. Much of humans hoarded that way remain unused either, making reasons even harder to pinpoint.

Generally it seems to fit into a very nebulous concept spanning between maintaining potential for control, pumping up company value, and optimizing extracting money from people (for practical part), and feelings related to conquering, power, and hoarding (for psychological part). Of course Microsoft may also have their own specific goals, but they’ll not reveal these to us.

Nothing stops you creating an account with a fake name etc.

When will people learn, that faking names is almost irrelevant for privacy. 🤦

Except for identity theft attempts and for linking purposes, legal name holds almost zero financial value. What is it? Very imprecise (quarter century?) age cohort and parents’ social class for given name? A very weak ethnicity and nationality estimate for surname, even futher reduced by marriage-related name changes? It’s so marginal, I never heard of anybody attempting to mine that.

For high-value targets the linking part becomes more relevant and may have a tremendous financial value, but most of us are not in that category.

[coppercone2]

Well I will put it this way , with the compatibility of most SW to linux, the unaffordability of 'good' software by general people and its general performance compared to open source versions (since the pro stuff focuses on enterprise management/team crap you don't need), I don't see why a home user would wanna stay with windows when it gets intrusive like that.

I mean does anyone think that the MS internal meetings discussing this issue are anything but a echo chamber reverberating their leaders plan?? 

I noticed when someone 'wants' their vision in a big company, the way its structured, nothing stops them until the money stops falling in, and usually there is a substantial 'delay' effect and pretty much fabricated feedback/projections that carefully cook data to make it look like the outcome is favorable, meaning that nothing happens and it 'looks good' until the money stops coming in. The analysts doing forecasting (if they even have any, they might because its supposed to be a big smart company) have a extreme bias to offer 'favorable' outcomes for the company based on data gathered.

And when there is a money problem, even that is covered up at first, by making it look like the expenses are preposterous, even if everything is business as usual. Then they will have creative cost cutting, layoffs, relocations and other things that hide the problem,(the problem is with sales and popularity rather then the expenses). Now I am not saying that the people making the spy/bloatware are valuable assets, but that is kind of like a project group, not the organization, and usually they blame the entirety of the organization rather then the madmen responsible, because their ego is usually too big to admit to making a mistake like putting money into a bad R&D effort, and if they point fingers, then someone that is calling the shots up top is responsible, and they can't have that....

The #1 sin I see in big companies that sell to the public is that they think the public is 'dumb'. They get more dumbasses to deal with then usual but its a generalization that puts you squarely into 'scam territory' as far as the product development goes (it seems to be pushed through by sensationalism). Easy to get into one of those meetings and feel that you are in a boiler room. Some how, despite the fact that you are average, you think "well darn, I don't know anyone as stupid as the bulk of what they think the customer base is"... kind of like conservative media (where they sensationalize a issue ,cause outrage, and it turns out that its pretty much a outlier that is taken out of context)

[langwadt]

What is the point of a M$ account?

after the crowd strike disaster there was probably quite a few that was happy to find out they could get their secure boot recovery key from their MS account

[squadchannel]

It still supports XP license activation, which made me laugh.
Though I'm glad it can be done online since the phone call itself was such a hassle.

PS:
Recently, I realized that most of the software I use daily supports Linux. I'm considering switching to Linux, but I still occasionally need to use older 16-bit software.

It might be an outdated image, but Linux still feels like a high hurdle to me. That's just my impression, it might be different in reality.

[ejeffrey]

Itssle.

PS:
Recently, I realized that most of the software I use daily supports Linux. I'm considering switching to Linux, but I still occasionally need to use older 16-bit software.

Which programs?  This isn't necessarily a factor any more as neither windows nor Linux support running 16 bit code natively any more.  Vm86 mode was removed from x86_64 so now all 16 bit code is is run either by emulation or virtual machines on both either platform.

[golden_labels]

Recently, I realized that most of the software I use daily supports Linux. I'm considering switching to Linux, but I still occasionally need to use older 16-bit software.

If you mean MS-DOS software, nowadays this is least of the problems on both Windows and Linux, and actually some other platforms too. See DOSBox.

It creates a filesystem view separated from the rest of the system, so switching to it may require adjusting your routines. But regarding running applications, if they don’t require direct access to hardware (like parallel port for hardware keys), it works just fine.

It’s the more modern applications that I would be worried about.

It might be an outdated image, but Linux still feels like a high hurdle to me. That's just my impression, it might be different in reality.

You may always play with a few distros in a virtual machine to see, how it works for you.

There is no way of telling, what will your experience be. Depends on the person and one’s needs. I’m not going to lie and pretend there is no trouble. There is a strong cultural mismatch between the FOSS environment (including Linux) and the dominant attitudes in both the general public and the market. Which inevitably does lead to tensions and cracks.

[peter-h]

I've had some exposure to linux over the years and I think the biggest hassle is if you have to work with other people who send you documents, spreadsheets, etc. They often do not open properly, or the others cannot open ones you sent them. The other one of course is whether you have high value windows software (e.g. PCB design). Changing to linux would be hassle I totally do not need, and it would not get around having to update the computer; for example I recently had to install debian, and the hardware requirements of the latest one, and the requirements of the latest python etc etc (somebody else was writing some code and he wanted this) meant a lot of hassle. I ended up running it on a win11 machine (yes another win11 machine with non M$ win11 authorised hardware, like so many) in a fairly new version of VMWARE VM. There is simply no escape from having to update stuff periodically when others are involved.

I am staying on win7-64, with win10 in a VM, and win11 on another machine I can access with RDP for running just one win11-only app.

[squadchannel]

Itssle.

PS:
Recently, I realized that most of the software I use daily supports Linux. I'm considering switching to Linux, but I still occasionally need to use older 16-bit software.

Which programs?  This isn't necessarily a factor any more as neither windows nor Linux support running 16 bit code natively any more.  Vm86 mode was removed from x86_64 so now all 16 bit code is is run either by emulation or virtual machines on both either platform.

yes, it doesn't run natively. I'm using software called "MS-DOS Player" that has a conversion layer allowing 16-bit software to run directly on the command prompt. It's a bit different from DOSBox.

I just found out VirtualBox seems to work on Linux. Since I've already switched from Chrome to Firefox, and byebye office software, there's no need for Win11 anymore.
I should buy a SSD ?
If I ever need Windows, use a VM, dual-boot, and I still have a real Win9x machine, so it's not a big deal.

edit:
ah, there's one more. Fusion 360. I need to learn to use FreeCAD. It's such a hassle, I gave up on it.

[madires]

From my experience the best option when moving to linux is to set up VMs for Windows to run software not available for linux (or lack of alternatives). And I'd go for VirtualBox as a SOHO user, since VMware is broadcom'ed.