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It took an unusually long time to download the December update on my machine with Win 10 Pro. I have a slow DSL connection. This led me to expect Copilot to appear when the update completed, since the news about patches was that there weren’t many this month. My machine has 32 GB of RAM and a video card with “Tensor Cores” that AI can use, so I am probably a prime candidate for beta tester. So far there is no sign of it. I hope it remains easy to disable, whatever the future brings in development. But I do have the Student Edition license to fall back on if it becomes a problem.

Does anyone know if this ‘Copilot’ thing will be pushed to Student Edition/Enterprise users? Student Edition is apparently a reduced Enterprise version. Back when Cortana was the fad, they didn’t have that on the Student/Enterprise versions. So I’m wondering if maybe they will not force Copilot on those editions either?

Maybe they don’t update monthly like Google, but yes, most of these variations exist precisely to produce security updates. Lineage OS updates fairly often. Removing the Google surveillance is part of the ‘improved security”…

The selection of hardware supported is a major issue. There is substantial lag between the appearance of a phone from even a popular manufacturer like Samsung and the addition of support for it in one of these variants. Programmers who don’t work for the manufacturers have to start their work after the phone is released. It seems strange that the Google Pixel is probably the one universal phone supported by all or almost all of them, but I guess that one has some security features that very few other Android phones bother with. So that seems likely to be the best phone to go with.

I am also hoping that equivalent functionality of applications I’d like to have will be available on similar ‘alternative’ sites like f-droid.org or http://www.apkmirror.com without having to use Google Play Store.

Well, I guess no one here has bothered to try any of these. I was hoping for some insight beyond the summaries and blurbs on websites.

It’s really impossible to ‘not put personal information on your phone’. It’s your phone. Unless you never enter a phone number of a contact, you can’t help but have personal information on it. And even if so, it can still report things like your location without you knowing it. The phone companies can already triangulate according to what towers you are connecting to, but private apps (and Google’s own programs) can report this to others besides the phone companies.

Also, many phone manufacturers do not give updates beyond a few months, so major bugs that cause security risks can be permanent lifetime features of the phone.

For these and other reasons I’m still interested in the alternatives, but may just have to install one and learn seat-of-the-pants.

 

Wow, the “third-party” security world is much bigger than I realized. All those acronyms for various other utilities in the Wilders Security thread are confusing. Is there a list of these programs and their acronyms/abbreviations somewhere? Long thread, too. It took quite a while to develop OSArmor to the point where it is now. I hope it is stable going forward.

Adobe Flash had become so notorious that I dropped it from my own systems more than a year ago. It will be discontinued by the end of this year, as I recall. Since Chrome has a built-in version, it’s not completely absent from my systems, but I leave it disabled even in Chrome.

I think it will be a while before I make the leap and install some of these things, though. There are many confusing issues, like possible changes in how I use my computers, possible conflicts among the various add-ons, and trust. Annoying that MS isn’t trustworthy themselves… just the OS creator, so we’ve had to trust them by more-or-less default even as they ramped up the “telemetry”. But it still makes me nervous to have to install third-party software at the “ring 0” level.

[PKCano]

I have to agree that the paranoia about patching is a bit over-done, but not getting anymore security patches is concerning. The main threat for casual “home” PC users is through their browser. I use Firefox with NoScript, uBlock Origin, and a number of other protective extensions. And have used the hosts file modifications, and the malware-filtering DNS, for years.

But I am considering some of these other options that you have listed. What is using OSArmor like? Does it prompt for every little thing you run at first? Does it have a “config file” that you can copy to another system? Or does every system have to build up a unique profile through usage?

You mention EMET. Have you actually installed it? Does it have any known compatibility problems with common applications?

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by PKCano.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by Gnutopian.