The Licensing Revolution: Windows Edition

Yves here. As readers know, my strong preference is for devices that are as dumb as possible so as to reduce spying attack surface and feature bloat. My laser printer, for instance, lacks a control/readout panel. It has an on-off button and on-off lights. Perfect! As for Windows, if you are on a Mac, you can buy the Office suite, as opposed to license it. They do make it hard but I had to get a new version a bit over a year ago with a new laptop. You can run a non-updated version for easily 5 years if your uses are simple (IIRC my last one was fine for 10 years but I imagine I won’t get that sort of life now)

I dread the day when I have to go over to Linux. I no one here to do support. I prefer plunging out toilets to having to do computer housekeeping. With toilets, task completion can only take so long and then it is only a tiny bit more time before you have the bathroom all cleaned up. No such certainty with computers.

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies

“Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

—Larry Ellison, billionaire visionary and Oracle CEO

“This is a tale about power.”

—Yours truly

This is Part 2 of a series on the licensing revolution, the move by manufacturers to sell you something that you nevertheless don’t control. Ownership becomes licensing, and control stays with them. In the first part, I wrote:

Two of the most revolutionary inventions man ever made were created in the 20th century, one at its start and the other close to the end. Both offered the same innovation: a quantum advance in individual freedom and power.

I’m talking, of course, about the automobile, personal transportation, and the PC, your own personal computer.

Neither is now yours. The fate of the automobile is described at the link above. The fate of the once-personal computer is described below.

The Personal Computer and the ‘Personal’ Computer: Renting Back What You Own

This is a tale about power.

Before the PC and its business equivalent, the UNIX-based Sun Workstation, access to computing power was through IBM-style mainframes and minicomputers, like those made by DEC. None of these could be considered “personal”; they were too costly, and though they could accommodate multiple users at terminals, the computing itself was central and corporate-owned. You sat in front of a terminal, while a corporate-controlled processor did the work. Nothing was yours.

After the personal computer was created and available, the power was inside the box, which you personally owned and controlled. Check the headline and the first sentence of the advertisement below.

Image source

But today, thanks to Windows 11, that’s all been reversed. The machine is no longer yours; you only paid for it. As this writer put it:

An operating system is the most personal part of a “personal” computer, and it used to be that as a Windows user I didn’t feel like I was renting my computer from Microsoft, but in recent years that feeling has all but evaporated.

It’s not just the feeling of ownership that has evaporated; it’s also the fact.

Windows Owns Your Machine

In every sense but receipts and cash laid out, Windows owns your machine. And that’s due to get worse.

Let’s start with Windows update practices. The operating system updates itself at will, sometimes breaking your machine, and can reset your settings whenever an update occurs. Sydney Butler again, the writer quoted above:

I have lost count of the number of times that I’ve left my perfectly working Windows computer at the end of my work day, only to return to a completely broken computer that won’t boot the next morning. We have numerous articles at How-To Geek on how to stop Windows from updating, and the mere fact that readers are searching for this information should tell you something.

Forced, automatic Windows updates seem inevitable now, and with every workaround people come up with, the loopholes are closed. Updates can be delayed, but not deferred. Resistance is futile.

But it’s more than that. There’s the constant, built-in ads; the forced Microsoft Account logins; unstoppable AI everywhere; the AI-is-watching-you “feature” (called Recall); the moving of your data onto the Microsoft cloud; and, something we’ll cover more in a later piece, the dangerous TPM chip that every modern computer seems to have, which opens the door to the zero privacy hell loved by the Davos world.

As Rob Braxman puts it in this video (emphasis mine):

[1:17] Microsoft is quietly ending the era of the personal computer as we’ve known it. And [Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella is being upfront, but he is not being understood by the average consumer.

So what people are seeing as visible issues are just the fluff. These are perceived to be important but actually only just small building blocks like Lego pieces to the entire big project.

Windows is being turned into something else entirely — an always watching, always AI-connected, cloud dependent system where your machine is no longer fully yours, even though you paid for it.

And the plan is for you to keep paying monthly for the privilege of having this AI control, but you won’t realize till later that this is no longer some progression from Windows XP. The average person isn’t really understanding this, but they are sensing the big picture. Something is afoot.

If you own a machine running Windows 11 on hardware with a TPM chip, that describes you. I could go on and on.

Recall and TPM

A couple of highlights before this gets too long. I may expand on these later.

• Microsoft Recall uses AI “to take images of your active screen every few seconds.” See more from Ars Technica here.

Microsoft claims (now) that the feature protects privacy. But is that really true? What if the government comes calling, Patriot Act-style? And will it always be true? Don’t count on it. (If Recall is turned on, instructions for turning it off are here.)

• The TPM chip — In his video, Braxman says [3:19], “TPM security chip [creates] verified identities in a Microsoft account with hardware monitoring.”

TPM does a lot more, but yes, it creates unique identities saved to a hardware chip and accessible whenever requested by authorized entities.

So, can you picture a world where every computer has your identity built into the hardware itself, available on request by “authorized” entities? Larry Ellison can.

If age verification is required, even on anodyne sites, the TPM chip will be used. And Digital ID will open that door for good.

Davos Man Larry Ellison Describes the World

Billionaire and Oracle CEO — whose son now owns CBS, Warner Brothers Discovery, Paramount Plus and more — looks forward to a world of total surveillance. Chris Hedges:

Oracle founder, business associate of Elon Musk and longtime Trump donor Larry Ellison, who recently announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan alongside Trump, urged nations to move all of their data into “a single, unified data platform” so it can be “consumed and used” by AI models. Ellison has previously stated that an AI-based surveillance system will guarantee that “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

And that’s where we’re headed. Because “keeping you safe,” of course. Who’s “you”? Ellison and friends.