Daily Archives: September 25, 2020

• Dear Microsoft, could you make Edge a little more obnoxious?

  Posted on September 25, 2020 at 14:02 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  So I’m sitting here plunking away on one of my production Win10 version 1909 machines, when a new update appears.

  2020-08 Microsoft Edge Update for Windows 10 Version 1909 for x64-based Systems (KB4576754)

  I needed to reboot the system – it had been running for almost two days without a reboot (sarcasm alert) – and when Windows came back up for air, Edge appeared full-screen. I tried clicking lots of things, but it wouldn’t disengage. In the end I navigated through a four-screen “tutorial” that, by default, wanted me to log Edge in to my Microsoft Account and oh-so-helpfully retain Edge surfing information to, you know, make my shopping experiences more tailored.

  When I finally got through unchecking all of the snoop settings, and closed Edge, it showed this on my Taskbar:

  

  And that didn’t go away until I clicked the “X” in the upper right corner.

  It’s entirely possible that Edge is the greatest browser ever – that it’ll make me brighter, more productive and definitely debonair. But it really twists my gizzard when an app takes over my machine and forces me through a series of privacy search-and-destroy questions.

  I’ve been playing with Edge. I think I’ll give it a pass for a while.

  UPDATE: I see that Shawn Brink on Tenforums has a registry hack to keep Windows Update from installing Chredge. Far as I’m concerned, MS can install it — after all, it is their machine (cough) — but I’m not going to use it for a while.

  Windows News Chredge, Edge

• No good deed goes unpunished: Windows XP source code apparently leaked

  Posted on September 25, 2020 at 03:22 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  I’ve heard rumors about this for years, but it looks like the Real McCoy just hit 4chan.

  Dan Thorp-Lancaster at Windows Central has the story:

  Alleged source code for Windows XP leaked online this week. The leak was spread in a thread on the anonymous forum 4chan, which linked to archives of both the alleged Windows XP source code along with source code for other Microsoft products. Notably, the archive includes the Windows NT 3.5 and original Xbox source code dumps that appeared online in May.

  There’s no official confirmation, of course — and lots of reason to be skeptical. Still, folks who know XP at the bit level are impressed.

  Lawrence Abrams at BleepingComputer points to tweets by @RoninDay, who claims:

  I slept at 4 AM yesterday and got up at 8:30 AM. Now its about to be 2 AM and I just discovered a dump. Life comes to you fast, this amazing healthy lifestyle.

  The main concern is that legacy XP code that has found its way into Win7, 8.1 or 10 may be compromised. That seems pretty far-fetched, but still… the sins of the father visited upon the son, and all that.

  Windows News WinXP