I've read this piece before. It's all very well for MS to get on their high horses about Easter Eggs but this quote in particular, at the very beginning, seriously grinds my gears:

"One of the aspects of Trustworthy Computing is that you can trust what's on your computer."

Then explain to me why my laptop is always running the fans. Explain to me why there's always some OS-related background process chewing CPU and draining the battery. Explain the lack of transparency and control I have over these processes. Explain to me why such processes are "essential" when neither macOS or Linux behave similarly. Explain to me why Windows 11 is slow and unstable. Explain to me why it appears to be engineered to actively thwart my attempts to get useful work done.

Trustworthy, my eye.

Their whole line of reasoning is faulty BS built on a false premise.

It was true when they wrote the rule back in NT 4 days I suspect. It might have been true still in 2005 when they wrote that blog post.

Now it’s an embarrassing shit show.

Trustworthy Computing means that you have the choice to trust Microsoft, as they vend the entire OS - and assuming you actually pay the big bucks[0], you can also be certain the data on the OS isn't being used for advertising purposes.

Windows provides trustworthy computing, but by no means is it required. iOS is the opposite of this where you're forced to trust Apple, which comes with UX inconveniences.

0: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compare-micros...

Yeah MS is full of shit. No one should be trusting windows at this point. Windows had its fair share of easter eggs anyway (at least up until NT) and more recently I saw this one: https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/gxgyvd/i_think_i_f...

Microsoft: "no undocumented features"

also Microsoft: adds a hidden linker option in 2019 and nothing about it is known until 2022 in a community forum post[0]

0: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/add-linker-opt...

It paid off: Microsoft's software is well-known to avoid bloat and be transparent to the user. /s

[GIF of Jennifer Lawrence sarcastically agreeing]

Thanks for your counterpoint parent.

Just before Mike Nelson shit himself in the car on the way home last night, I pointed out to him that what his generation calls "Easter Eggs" are often just security flaws that can be used to fingerprint the internet traffic of dissidents, and that his cavalier attitude towards data privacy is why they had to close the Russian Consultate in Seattle.

(Or maybe the above is creative nonfiction, and your hands deserve to shake if you make this poster explain the joke.)