The complaint quotes a Microsoft representative describing the GDID as “a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios”

A Global Device ID (GDID) is a permanent, unique digital fingerprint that Microsoft automatically assigns to your computer when you install Windows or sign into a Microsoft account.

Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

I guess this is why people always said it was impossible to remove the watermark that appears when you are not activated, when it was rolled out many years ago.

Defeating the reasons for activation might've lead the more tech-savvy to figuring out the nature of the identifiers being sent for activation and seeing where else they are sent.

This sounds so much like the snitch code from Thieves' Emporium by Max Hernandez, written in 2014.

Or at least I believe it was 2014.

Hacker

Uses windows

He got what he fucking deserved

Smug Reddit-level takes left and right in this thread. The kid successfully hacked a website, you can assume he knows what he's doing better than you and followed all the best practices short of not using Windows. They didn't get his account from his Edge credential store. He probably used some Firefox-derivative. Tor browser if he was stupid. He probably "hardened" Windows every way he could think of, again, short of disconnecting from the internet. Windows simply does a good job of spying on you, that's all it is.

There are even people in the thread recommending running Windows games on Linux as a way to avoid this surveillance. If you put Microsoft Flight Sim on your Linux computer, then that's now a Windows computer. Microsoft owns that computer, same as the Windows one. If you install Nvidia drivers, Nvidia owns that computer, and the USA can ask Nvidia for your accounts and whereabouts instead of Microsoft. If you put Steam on your Linux computer, that's now Steam's computer and the USA can ask Steam.

There is no "safe" amount of malware.

the fucked up thing is this GDID thing apparently also show up for VM. So that would mean any VM and even a Quebe?

Fuck microsoft

My company is moving to Windows 11, I had one of my service desk teammates tell me that for an IT support person I'm very critical of change

Before Windows 11 I was critical of change because every change came with no new training for my team and a giant email to the company explaining very lazily about the changes and with the same text at the end of every email.. "Any problems call the service desk".

Now we've lost active directory.. Now I'm in a position where an incredibly incompetent IT security have restricted our access to intune and Entra and then the business wants me to still perform my daily duties as normal.

Upside is that same IT security is getting removed in the next few weeks.

Probably to be replaced by someone else even worse.

I just want to learn how to use Entra and Intune..
Everything Microsoft touches turns to shit.

Active directory just worked.. It was built when people at Microsoft actually knew how the operating system worked.. None of those people are still at Microsoft..

If you enjoyed how AD worked, you'll love how I tune and AAD don't.

And the workarounds for them... Like local management... Only get harder.

Good luck.