s/reduce/reduced. Our firm is making an emergency plan to keep the business going assuming all Internet-connected PCs may be down for months. We are putting some machines aside offline.
I've been looking forward to this for a while. Historically many companies have been lax about security but AI hacking tools – especially ones that can run locally – will change that.
We could also do a lot for security if we decriminalized certain forms of hacking. It's hard to get a politician to understand that such activities make us stronger, not weaker. An analogy is TSA metal detectors at airports: You want red-team agents trying their best to find gaps and sneak weapons through.
This is big news. But I've heard little concern over something which is not as much of a threat, but more-surprising, and a worse indicator of social breakdown: Microsoft turned Microsoft Office, and Windows itself, into malware a year or 2 ago, and got away with it.
Any version of Microsoft Office that you purchased from 2013 onwards, up until the last Office before the subscription-only Microsoft 365, will be deleted from your computer if you keep it connected to the internet. My Office 2013, a legal copy which I paid for, was last month deleted from the laptop on which I'm writing this, and replaced with Office 365, a subscription service which costs more per year than my Office 2013 cost to purchase. This was done by Microsoft, I think through the Office auto-updater rather than thru Windows Update (probably because a Windows Update can be rolled back).
(At first, sometime in 2025, Microsoft just started removing features from my Office 2013. I noticed when an update removed the "show differences between two Powerpoint documents" feature, which is of course still present in Office 365.)
I expect that the long software license whose terms I probably didn't read had a clause in it, which Microsoft must have written in 2013, reserving the right for Microsoft to change the terms of the license at will. Or else granting Microsoft the right to revoke the license at any time in the future. This is only technically legal; shrink-wrap licenses like this, especially the kind that you can't read until after purchasing the product, should not hold up in court.
Windows 11 has a "feature" which will automatically encrypt drives other than C: with bitlocker if your computer has a TPM chip, without asking or telling you. I don't recall what triggers it. That makes your drives unreadable by anything other than Windows. If you lose your C drive, or otherwise lose your bitlocker keys--this usually happens because the user doesn't KNOW their drives have been encrypted, and so didn't back up the keys, or did something like reformat their boot drive with Linux--your data drives then become unreadable unless you pay Microsoft to decrypt them.
(Meanwhile, modern ransomware has started using the Bitlocker that Microsoft installed on your system to encrypt your hard drive. It's now a Windows security feature which makes you less secure.)
I don't know how many people Microsoft has already robbed in this way, but it's probably in the millions. I don't know why there isn't a class-action lawsuit against them. But there is not.
We have laws capable of stopping Microsoft from brazenly robbing their customers, yet somehow they are not put in operation. We are seeing the return of feudal justice, in which courts or appeals usually existed to redress wrongs, but which in practice were inaccessible to most people. A kind of tyranny created by deliberately dysfunctional social institutions. In feudal days, this dysfunction was open; everyone knew justice was selective. Nowadays, justice is made selective simply by being made too complicated and expensive.
s/reduce/reduced. Our firm is making an emergency plan to keep the business going assuming all Internet-connected PCs may be down for months. We are putting some machines aside offline.
I've been looking forward to this for a while. Historically many companies have been lax about security but AI hacking tools – especially ones that can run locally – will change that.
We could also do a lot for security if we decriminalized certain forms of hacking. It's hard to get a politician to understand that such activities make us stronger, not weaker. An analogy is TSA metal detectors at airports: You want red-team agents trying their best to find gaps and sneak weapons through.
Would you be willing to make a bet on this?
If so?
What terms would you agree to
This is big news. But I've heard little concern over something which is not as much of a threat, but more-surprising, and a worse indicator of social breakdown: Microsoft turned Microsoft Office, and Windows itself, into malware a year or 2 ago, and got away with it.
Any version of Microsoft Office that you purchased from 2013 onwards, up until the last Office before the subscription-only Microsoft 365, will be deleted from your computer if you keep it connected to the internet. My Office 2013, a legal copy which I paid for, was last month deleted from the laptop on which I'm writing this, and replaced with Office 365, a subscription service which costs more per year than my Office 2013 cost to purchase. This was done by Microsoft, I think through the Office auto-updater rather than thru Windows Update (probably because a Windows Update can be rolled back).
(At first, sometime in 2025, Microsoft just started removing features from my Office 2013. I noticed when an update removed the "show differences between two Powerpoint documents" feature, which is of course still present in Office 365.)
I expect that the long software license whose terms I probably didn't read had a clause in it, which Microsoft must have written in 2013, reserving the right for Microsoft to change the terms of the license at will. Or else granting Microsoft the right to revoke the license at any time in the future. This is only technically legal; shrink-wrap licenses like this, especially the kind that you can't read until after purchasing the product, should not hold up in court.
Windows 11 has a "feature" which will automatically encrypt drives other than C: with bitlocker if your computer has a TPM chip, without asking or telling you. I don't recall what triggers it. That makes your drives unreadable by anything other than Windows. If you lose your C drive, or otherwise lose your bitlocker keys--this usually happens because the user doesn't KNOW their drives have been encrypted, and so didn't back up the keys, or did something like reformat their boot drive with Linux--your data drives then become unreadable unless you pay Microsoft to decrypt them.
(Meanwhile, modern ransomware has started using the Bitlocker that Microsoft installed on your system to encrypt your hard drive. It's now a Windows security feature which makes you less secure.)
I don't know how many people Microsoft has already robbed in this way, but it's probably in the millions. I don't know why there isn't a class-action lawsuit against them. But there is not.
We have laws capable of stopping Microsoft from brazenly robbing their customers, yet somehow they are not put in operation. We are seeing the return of feudal justice, in which courts or appeals usually existed to redress wrongs, but which in practice were inaccessible to most people. A kind of tyranny created by deliberately dysfunctional social institutions. In feudal days, this dysfunction was open; everyone knew justice was selective. Nowadays, justice is made selective simply by being made too complicated and expensive.