Until the release of Windows 11, the upgrade proposition for Windows operating systems was rather straightforward: you considered whether the current version of Windows on your system still fulfilled your needs and if the answer was ‘no’, you’d buy an upgrade disc. Although system requirements slowly crept up over time, it was likely that your PC could still run the newest-and-greatest Windows version. Even Windows 7 had a graphical fallback mode, just in case your PC’s video card was a potato incapable of handling the GPU-accelerated Aero Glass UI.

This makes a lot of sense, as the most demanding software on a PC are the applications, not the OS. Yet with Windows 11 a new ‘hard’ requirement was added that would flip this on its head: the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a security feature that has been around for many years, but never saw much use outside of certain business and government applications. In addition to this, Windows 11 only officially supports a limited number of CPUs, which risks turning many still very capable PCs into expensive paperweights.

Although the TPM and CPU requirements can be circumvented with some effort, this is not supported by Microsoft and raises the specter of a wave of capable PCs being trashed when Windows 10 reaches EOL starting this year.

Not That Kind Of Trusted

Although ‘Trusted Platform’ and ‘security’ may sound like a positive thing for users, the opposite is really the case. The idea behind Trusted Computing (TC) is about consistent, verified behavior enforced by the hardware (and software). This means a computer system that’s not unlike a modern gaming console with a locked-down bootloader, with the TPM providing a unique key and secure means to validate that the hardware and software in the entire boot chain is the same as it was the last time. Effectively it’s an anti-tamper system in this use case that will just as happily lock out an intruder as the purported owner.
XKCD’s take on encrypting drives.
In the case of Windows 11, the TPM is used for this boot validation (Secure Boot), as well as storing the (highly controversial) Windows Hello’s biometric data and Bitlocker whole-disk encryption keys. Important to note here is that a TPM is not an essential feature for this kind of functionality, but rather a potentially more secure way to prevent tampering, while also making data recovery more complicated for the owner. This makes Trusted Computing effectively more a kind of Paranoid Computing, where the assumption is made that beyond the TPM you cannot trust anything about the hardware or software on the system until verified, with the user not being a part of the validation chain.

Theoretically, validating the boot process can help detect boot viruses, but this comes with a range of complications, not the least of which is that this would at most allow you to boot into Windows safe mode, if at all. You’d still need a virus scanner to detect and remove the infection, so using TPM-enforced Secure Boot does not help you here and can even complicate troubleshooting.

Outside of a corporate or government environment where highly sensitive data is handled, the benefits of a TPM are questionable, and there have been cases of Windows users who got locked out of their own data by Bitlocker failing to decrypt the drive, for whatever reason. Expect support calls from family members on Windows 11 to become trickier as a result, also because firmware TPM (fTPM) bugs can cause big system issues like persistent stuttering.

Breaking The Rules

As much as Microsoft keeps trying to ram^Wgently convince us consumers to follow its ‘hard’ requirements, there are always ways to get around these. After all, software is just software, and thus Windows 11 can be installed on unsupported CPUs without a TPM or even an ‘unsupported’ version 1.2 TPM. Similarly, the ‘online Microsoft account’ requirement can be dodged with a few skillful tweaks and commands. The real question here is whether it makes sense to jump through these hoops to install Windows 11 on that first generation AMD Ryzen or Intel Core 2 Duo system from a support perspective.

Fortunately, one does not have to worry about losing access to Microsoft customer support here, because we all know that us computer peasants do not get that included with our Windows Home or Pro license. The worry is more about Windows Updates, especially security updates and updates that may break the OS installation by using CPU instructions unsupported by the local hardware.

Although Microsoft published a list of Windows 11 CPU requirements, it’s not immediately obvious what they are based on. Clearly it’s not about actual missing CPU instructions, or you wouldn’t even be able to install and run the OS. The only true hard limit in Windows 11 (for now) appears to be the UEFI BIOS requirement, but dodging the TPM 2.0 & CPU requirements is as easy as a quick dive into the Windows Registry by adding the AllowUpgradesWithUnsupportedTPMOrCPU key to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\MoSetup. You still need a TPM 1.2 module in this case.

When you use a tool like Rufus to write the Windows 11 installer to a USB stick you can even toggle a few boxes to automatically have all of this done for you. This even includes the option to completely disable TPM as well as the Secure Boot and 8 GB of RAM requirements. Congratulations, your 4 GB RAM, TPM-less Core 2 Duo system now runs Windows 11.

Risk Management

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft will truly enforce the TPM and CPU requirements in the future, that is requiring Secure Boot with Bitlocker. Over on the Apple side of the fence, the hardware has been performing system drive encryption along with other ‘security’ features since the appearance of the Apple T2 chip. It might be that Microsoft envisions a similar future for PCs, one in which even something as sacrilegious as dual-booting another OS becomes impossible.

Naturally, this raises the spectre of increasing hostility between users and their computer systems. Can you truly trust that Bitlocker won’t suddenly decide that it doesn’t want to unlock the boot drive any more? What if an fTPM issue bricks the system, or that a sneaky Windows 11 update a few months or years from now prevents a 10th generation Intel CPU from running the OS without crashing due to missing instructions? Do you really trust Microsoft that far?

It does seem like there are only bad options if you want to stay in the Windows ecosystem.

Strategizing

Clearly, there are no good responses to what Microsoft is attempting here with its absolutely user-hostile actions that try to push a closed, ‘AI’-infused ecosystem on its victi^Wusers. As someone who uses Windows 10 on a daily basis, this came only after running Windows 7 for as long as application support remained in place, which was years after Windows 7 support officially ended.

Perhaps for Windows users, sticking to Windows 10 is the best strategy here, while pushing software and hardware developers to keep supporting it (and maybe Windows 7 again too…). Windows 11 came preinstalled on the system that I write this on, but I erased it with a Windows 10 installation and reused the same, BIOS embedded, license key. I also disabled fTPM in the BIOS to prevent ‘accidental upgrades’, as Microsoft was so fond of doing back with Windows 7 when everyone absolutely had to use Windows 10.

I can hear the ‘just use Linux/BSD/etc.’ crowd already clamoring in the comments, and will preface this by saying that although I use Linux and BSD on a nearly basis, I would not want to use it as my primary desktop system for too many reasons to go into here. I’m still holding out some hope for ReactOS hitting its stride Any Day Now, but it’s tough to see a path forward beyond running Windows 10 into the ground, while holding only faint hope for Windows 12 becoming Microsoft’s gigantic Mea Culpa.

After having used PCs and Windows since the Windows 3.x days, I can say that the situation for personal computers today is unprecedented, not unlike that for the World Wide Web. It seems increasingly less like customer demand is appealed to by companies, and more an inverse where customers have become merely consumers: receptacles for the AI and marketing-induced slop of the day, whose purchases serve to make stock investors happy because Line Goes Up^©.

hackaday.com/2025/05/29/forced…

C''è un modo di raccontare questa storia secondo il quale una intelligenza digitale diventa capace di ribellarsi ai suoi creatori e arriva a ricattarli pur di non essere sostituita.
C'è un altro modo, secondo il quale un generatore di storie produce esattamente le storie che gli vengono richieste, e tutto il bru bru mediatico è dovuto a dei poveracci che fanno delle proprie psicosi il proprio modello di business.

spreaker.com/episode/dk-9x31-c…

A letter by Sen. Ron Wyden about surveillance of senators’ phone lines has an important lesson for journalists, too: Be careful in selecting your phone carrier.

On May 21, Wyden wrote his Senate colleagues revealing which wireless carriers inform customers about government surveillance requests (Cape, Google Fi, and US Mobile), and which don’t (AT&T, Boost Mobile, Charter/Spectrum, Comcast/Xfinity Mobile, T-Mobile, and Verizon).

A handy chart at the bottom of the senator’s press release provides a quick summary.

Wyden’s letter was inspired in part by a Department of Justice inspector general report that revealed that the DOJ had collected phone records of Senate staff as part of leak investigations under the first Trump administration.

But that report wasn’t just about surveillance of the Senate. It also discussed how the DOJ surveilled journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN in 2020-21 as part of leak investigations related to news reporting about the Trump campaign’s connections with Russia and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Investigators demanded telephone records from phone companies for the work and personal phones of journalists at all three outlets. In all three cases, the telephone companies turned over the records, which would have shown the numbers dialed, the date and time of calls, and their duration — information that could reveal the identities of confidential sources.

The telephone companies apparently didn’t notify the Times, Post, or CNN that their records had been sought, even though they legally could have done so. The DOJ also didn’t give the news outlets notice, taking advantage of internal guidelines that allowed them to delay notice to news media companies about legal demands for communications records from third parties in certain circumstances. (The rules for delayed notice from the DOJ remain in effect in the recently revised DOJ news media guidelines.)

According to the inspector general report, DOJ cover letters to the telephone companies asked them not to disclose the demands because the DOJ claimed it might impede the investigation. But the DOJ never sought a court order prohibiting disclosure. One prosecutor told the IG that nondisclosure orders weren’t obtained for the telephone companies “because the providers typically do not notify subscribers when their records are sought.”

That’s a problem, and it’s exactly what Wyden called out in his recent letter. Journalists can’t oppose surveillance that they don’t know about. Notification is what enables journalists (or any other customer) to fight back against overbroad, unwarranted, or illegal demands for their data. That’s exactly what the Times did when Google notified the newspaper of demands for its journalists’ email records in connection with the same leak investigation in which investigators sought phone records from Times journalists.

The Times’ contract with Google required the company to notify the news outlet of government demands. But even contractual agreements might not be enough to compel phone companies to inform their customers when they’re being spied on. Wyden’s letter reveals that “three major phone carriers — AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile — failed to establish systems to notify (Senate) offices about surveillance requests, as required by their Senate contracts.”

In addition, even if large news outlets could negotiate contracts with their phone carriers that require notification of surveillance requests when legally allowed, that wouldn’t help their journalists who speak to sources using personal phones that aren’t covered by their employers’ contracts. Freelance journalists are also unlikely to have the power to negotiate notification into their phone contracts.

Rather than one-off contractual agreements then, it would be better for all phone companies to follow the lead of tech companies, like Google, that have a blanket policy of notifying customers of government demands for their data, assuming they’re not gagged. These policies are now widespread in the tech world, thanks to activism by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has long monitored tech companies’ notification policies and encouraged them to do better.

Phone companies must do better, too. It’s a shame that some of the largest wireless carriers can’t be bothered to tell their customers when they’re being surveilled. Journalists — and all of us — who care about privacy have a choice to make when selecting their wireless provider: Do they want to know when they’re being spied on, or are they OK with being left in the dark?

freedom.press/issues/phone-com…

Vieni a scoprire come vivevano la montagna i primi escursionisti.

Un viaggio nel passato all’interno del Parco Regionale dei Monti Simbruini tra faggete lussureggianti e panoramiche vedute.

Andremo alla conquista della vetta di Monte Autore (1885m), un autentico balcone naturale in grado di regalarci una visuale unica sulle vette al confine tra Lazio e Abruzzo.

Cammineremo lungo itinerari noti sin dall’epoca del Grand Tour per la natura selvaggia, il folklore e le tradizioni.

Ripercorreremo le orme dei nostri illustri predecessori, artisti ed escursionisti dei secoli passati, giunti fin qui alla ricerca del sublime e della bellezza

E' l'occasione ideale per vivere in buona compagnia una splendida Domenica in natura.

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