When you make it hard to trust the system, people will look at any component that seems unnecessary. They might not know what it is, but they don't trust it anymore. So it might as well get disabled. You know, to be safe.
But at the end of the day I suppose it's only a small percent of users, isn't it? I'm sure the aggressive push for automatic updates — replacing the "Cancel" button by "Maybe Later", and the "Maybe Later" by "You have 2 minutes" — has worked miracles.
So I think we can expect more of this in the future, and the scripts will get even more paranoid in response. What an antagonistic situation.
The problem is these 'solutions' never go away. They are never revisited. So people just keep applying them because 15 years ago they had an issue with them.
Appreciate the utility you pointed out, will happily look into it.
If you need to search local ntfs drive, try https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/
It does not build any indexes, and always shows up to date results (by scanning MFT)
So regardless of the metrics that support such practice, and casting aside the thousands of people that have routinely seen benefit from the practice, Windows can't be optimized further by the end-user?
As someone who has never encountered a well optimized Microsoft product, and as someone who has routinely had to modify their off-the-shell installs, color me suspicious.
(Agreed, the shady practices and over-zealous disabling of services should stop; but come on -- the end user occasionally understands what they need to do better than the engineer that sold them a generic tool to facilitate generic computer-enabled work.)
I don't know what happened to the idea of user friendly software respecting the intentions of a user. Modern OSes really are effectively just well funded socially acceptable malware.
Privacy scripts are a very common attack vector due to their popularity these days.
Not to mention that the benefits of these “tweaks” is negligible at best.
Naturally I trust both of them more than so called SmartScreen because unlike Smartscreen, I can inspect their code. Yes, the binaries can contain malware, but the first principles tell me that trustability score is inverse of what is being reported by MS.
Naturally I have disabled Smartscreen and Windows defender and admin rights alerts and bajilion things that internet gurus will tell me not to because I don't know what's good for me. Needless to say, my PC runs faster, calmer and is actually malware free because I don't run unauditable things like Smartscreen on it.
Edit: I get WinMerge binary from GitHub repo, and KDiff3 from official website. As trusted as it can get, short of compiling myself.
This is a work machine so I can't control most of Windows behavior. Personal machine runs NixOS for 90% tasks + Windows dual boot for games without connecting to network because I can't be bothered with disabling Smartscreen and defender every other week.
I've got WinMerge installed on my machines and I've never had that issue. Are you sure you're using trusted sources?
> I got Winmerge binary directly from GitHub repo. As trusted as it gets, short of compiling myself.
So, you don't actually know what code you're running and that binary actually could be malware.
So if an untrusted source tells me that a usually varifuably trustable source is not to be trusted, whom do I trust more?
I honestly don't understand how you've made this an adversarial situation. It's almost as if you take offense to Smartscreen telling you it doesn't trust your binary.
The system is pretty straight forward, Smartscreen checks the file source against a list of known bad actors. If there's a hit it's saying "I can't vouch for this".
I checked and WinMerge isn't flagged in Smartscreen. The publisher however does not use a signing certificate which results in a UAC prompt.
In any case neither of these features prevent installation, they're just warnings you can circumvent.
Conversely, just because something is used more, does that get the automatic stamp of approval? More than 2 Billion people use Facebook every month, do you consider FB to be more likely to be good for someone? What kind of messed up logic is that?
Showing a warning about anything is not value neutral. Showing a popup for infrequently used software says that you value number of users as a measure of software quality.
Like I found that SmartScreen and defender blocked my ethminer but that is in general pretty smart because it is common to have it unwittingly installed, and I simply said it is OK to run.
Copy the application out of the disk image first. Verifying the application (and running it) will be much faster.
> Disabling Telemetry breaks Windows updates
> Automatic web searches in start menu
> Application suggestions are silently installed (wat?)
> Allow MS to collect activity history
> Location tracking
> Map updates (who the fuck uses maps on a PC?)
> Tailored experiences (apparently spamming ads on a desktop OS is an experience)
> Advertising ID
> Cortana
This is just from skimming the list for 5 minutes. Not even sure what else is in there.
Seems to who?
Really the only thing different is Apple has made it seem beneficial to users where Microsoft just comes off spammy.
They ask two questions:
* send telemetry to Apple;
* allow sharing telemetry with app developers.
If you don't agree with the first one, the second one is grayed out.
wrt advertiserid, that's iOS/iPadOS only, on macOS it retuns zero-filled UUID.
Eh, I mean they just recently made it effectively useless on iOS (requires a prompt before it works; unsurprisingly very few users give permission). Not sure why they'd go the other direction on MacOS... I suspect it's just there for Catalyst compatibility.
Who doesn't?
Using bing maps via the bloatware app... not used by ordinary people.
This is an outdated fork of a configurable script that I use to do initial config of my windows 10 machines. But I've created my own config saying which functions to run and which not to run based on reading what each function actually does. I'm an IT pro, I knew how to do most of these tweaks in windows settings or group policy, but it's still easier to just run a script than to perform hundreds of clicks, especially when the settings get reorganized in every other windows update.
And as this is HN, I expect lots of people here being IT pros, so I would correct you here: Don't run this stuff if you don't understand what it does.
I purposely disable SmartScreen because I don't need information about applications I'm running shipped off to Microsoft. Setting the current network to private is handy after a first-time install since Windows often doesn't prompt and defaults to public.
As with all these things, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, apparently by tinfoil hatted nut jobs who don’t understand the problem domain well enough to be making decisions for people who know even less than they do.
> SmartScreen, a service that absolutely should not be disabled unless you want your machine to get owned
It's not hard for people, especially ones who read HN, to be perfectly safe with SmartScreen disabled.
SmartScreen sends all your file hashes and unique computer info to Microsoft. If you're not stepping into weird links and running weird executables it's really not doing much for you.
You should only be installing verified trusted apps you can verify the sources or hash for, farming this out to a third party, even if its MS, is a great way to open yourself up to watering hole attacks.
Furthermore, you are encouraging poor user behaviour with "oh man this app said my app is good" and then ending up with all manner of poorly vetted bloatware, not to mention antitrust and legal issues.
Really it should be possible to completely remove and/or replace this whole component.
As for network, why aren't running from behind a properly secured connection? That's just bad practice. If you want to connect from a coffeeshop or whatever, set your firewall to block everything by default.
Do you have a rec or a resource? I haven't looked seriously at this so if it's just like "google it" mea culpa, but it seems like there's a lot of misinformation and what not out there. I saw "O&O ShutUp10" in a sibling thread?
You can see a lot of the kinds of telemetry that Windows is interested in if you go to Event Viewer => Application Logs => Microsoft => Windows, if you read it you see that it's like, Google Lighthouse style stuff, to make Windows faster and more reliable
Use these scripts to figure out the kinds of things you don't want to run, then make really targeted "Disable This" choices
I have issue with Facebook and Google blatantly collecting whatever they can to build profiles of us all to shove advertising down our throat that isn’t even relevant to us.
maybe if MS wanted people to believe that, they wouldn't put so much advertising in their OS
Edit: (seen the articles about it but never actually seen it in Windows)
I don't think there's an up to date resource describing all these tweaks. My recommendations:
- Use the original script, it's slightly more up to date, last update was in november 2020: https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script - Read it's library of tweaks, especially the notes about potential unwanted side effects in comments. If you don't understand what each feature does, google it. The tweaks are grouped. - Don't enable any tweak where you don't understand what it does, especially in the security and network tweaks categories.
Makes you wonder why they bother with any other Windows.
You can't say anything like that without context.
SmartScreen and defender are the first things to go on my machine as they slow down computer at least by the factor of 2, if not more.
People on HN generally don't need babysitting!. Know where you are.
> need me to LMGTFY
You've provided zero evidence to the contrary. The burden of proof is on you.
> As far as I can tell, as long as Windows Defender (and presumably other A/V scanners) are running, there's no way to make the Windows I/O APIs consistently fast.
https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/06/surprisingly-slow/
This is really even a common knowledge - if you did ANY IT work, you should already know it. I can't count the number of times when server wasn't working correctly when it turns out it just has Defender on.
> it just has Defender on
It's unfortunate Defender would come pre-installed even on Server.
I do have ample personal experience - when government web server was randomly dropping from 2k req/s to 2 req/s we disabled defender and from there we had continuous 2k req/s. I have seen this literary hundreds of times. Not sure why people install AV on servers but its common in banks and similar. On home computers its even worst. I witnessed new laptop computer with 2 AVs - defender + something vendor installed like mcafe. It was so slow that while typing letters appeared 1/s.
AVs inject themselves on number of places and do all kind of "funky" stuff. All power users should disable that junk. You have other means to protect yourself. If you are grandma, sure, go for it, but grandma will not run "Reclaim Windows10" from github gist, no ?
Context is everything. It certainly doesn't justify above comment claiming "DO NOT DO THIS!!!" on HN. Its utter nonsense. We are here to talk about hacking things by definition. Power users customize their OS, not the other way around. Its pity that MS doesn't provide minimal OS (like Linux OS's usually do) but the first thing I do is not run single script like Reclaim, but dozen of such scripts and my healthy nervous system thanks me all the time because benefits are huge and minuses are minor and fixable.
If anything, we need more projects like that, more polished, more documented, more maintained. My personal fav so far is [1]
Oh, come on; there are issues like this: https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/issues/5028 and the app developers do handstands in order to minimize the impact; for example, cargo guys had to redo their file closing on Windows to be done asynchronously, so they would not have to wait for Defender.
It's maybe the case if you're running a 15+ year old PC with the slowest spinning rust disk and 1GB of RAM.
Fortunately you can just disable it from the settings though.
you can get slim builds with chrome ready to go already, builds with all these cleanup scripts configured, and more
sadly, they also know people in a rush are looking for this or prefer it, and they install backdoors or ways to steal your crypto on them and stuff
I wouldn't even trust the scripts itself at this point, so I'm another for just don't run this stuff
The scripts (they are mostly forks of https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script) are nicely written toggles for registry values or GPO, that you can read and selectively all. Nothing scary.
It then proceeds to set your current network as Private (aka "open all the ports") regardless of which network you're connected to - hope you're at home! Other changes are completely superfluous, like disabling "3D Objects" which has already been disabled in the latest Windows version
Just don't run this stuff.