The app automatically installs Bing Visual Search and includes code to decrypt cookies saved in other browsers, Rivera said, and it also brings a “free” geolocation web API to the system.

The developer discovered “many” nasty tricks Microsoft integrated in Bing Wallpapers, which include trying to change the browser’s settings and set Edge as the default system browser. If the default browser isn’t Edge, the app will open the default browser after some time asking to enable the previously installed Microsoft Bing Search for Chrome extension.

  • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
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    12 hours ago

    Why would you download bing wallpaper app anyways? First rule of computers: only install from trusted sources

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      11 hours ago

      Most average users consider Microsoft a trusted source, that’s the root cause of a whole lot of crap.

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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    14 hours ago

    Haven’t we already categorized windows as malware and Microsoft as a malware company? We really shouldn’t be surprised that they put out another piece of malware. It’s their MO.

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        13 hours ago

        I’m not a windows fan boy, in fact I haven’t used one in years, and have no intentions to.

        But this is a weird way of thinking about MS shenanigans.

        • Hate it or like it, windows update is still an update to your system, to fix security vulnerabilities even. I wish they had implemented it in a user friendly way. But it is NOT a thing that disrupts you with ill intent as you mentioned here.
        • That is a task manager running some process. But no indication on what the process is !
        • Enabled by default is an horrible design decision no matter who does it. I agree on that. But this is NOT unauthorised access. You signed up for it when you decided to use windows.

        Again I don’t like MS. Hate them for their bad decisions, but don’t hate them by misrepresenting them.

        (My comment is only about this screenshot posted here)

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    18 hours ago

    They are trying so hard to push everybody to linux. The only thing that has kept me using windows is game development tool chains, but even that isn’t gonna be enough to keep me on windows much longer.

      • pycorax@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        If you’re already using a third party engine it shouldn’t be as big of a deal jumping to Linux. But if you’re doing engine development, the tools on Windows are still superior. There’s a big reason why Direct3D is still so popular despite being constrained to only Xbox and Windows. Tooling and documentation for Vulkan and OpenGL are light years behind and it’s frustrating to see how vast the differences are as someone who primarily works with Vulkan/OpenGL and haa dabbled with Direct3D as a hobby.

        • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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          14 hours ago

          You realize it’s open source and you don’t need their blessing to use it right?

          You’re not entitled to force people to deal with you being a raging jackass.

          • tekato@lemmy.world
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            14 hours ago

            You realize it’s open source and you don’t need their blessing to use it right?

            Yes, everyone knows that. What they did is banned developer accounts, thus preventing you from contributing to it.

            You’re not entitled to force people to deal with you being a raging jackass.

            There it is. The community of inclusion once again unable to express their thoughts without insulting people. Almost comical, but I guess there’s nothing funny about hypocrisy.

            • Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              9 hours ago

              The community of inclusion once again unable to express their thoughts without insulting people.

              Funny how calling someone a jackass is “insulting” to you, but you treat bigotry like fair game.

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              14 hours ago

              They banned “developer” accounts who were being incredibly disruptive throwing a tantrum about the social media account celebrating games with a wide variety of perspectives. I don’t think there’s any actual evidence for them banning a single person who ever did anything useful, but it doesn’t actually matter. They aren’t obligated to let you be in their community.

              Don’t behave like a raging jackass and you won’t be called one. I’m not obligated to ignore bad behavior either. It’s perfectly OK to call bad people behaving badly bad people.

              • tekato@lemmy.world
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                13 hours ago

                They banned “developer” accounts who were being incredibly disruptive throwing a tantrum about the social media account celebrating games with a wide variety of perspectives. I don’t think there’s any actual evidence for them banning a single person who ever did anything useful

                Sure, if by not doing anything useful you mean donating money to the project, and saying that the project should focus on the project [1].

                They aren’t obligated to let you be in their community

                Beautiful statement.

                Don’t behave like a raging jackass and you won’t be called one. I’m not obligated to ignore bad behavior either. It’s perfectly OK to call bad people behaving badly bad people.

                The fact is the mass banning was not justified, and people were not being “raging jackass”, no matter how many times you call them that. There’s a reason Godot apologized for the incident, yet you fail to see that.

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                  13 hours ago

                  Donating money doesn’t give you free rein to be an asshole, and shockingly, their donations went way up when they removed the trash.

                  They elected to decide that some of the people being jackasses didn’t technically violate their community guidelines and apologized, but that doesn’t mean that there was a single person who was banned who didn’t deserve it. Yes, jumping on a bandwagon of unforgivable horseshit without technically saying a banned thing still makes you a bad person, and yes, everyone they banned should have stayed banned.

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          14 hours ago

          You mean a few github accounts and a bunch of jerks on Discord, which you are bringing up on Lemmy?

          If anything this is just another repudiation of Discord as a whole. I hate how its eating the internet like mad cow disease.

            • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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              11 hours ago

              Yes blocking major backers is bad, I agree with that. The mod behind this kind of sounds unpleasant too.

              What does being on Lemmy matter?

              Discord is like the antithesis of Lemmy, a siloed off, inefficient, unscrapable, private, proprietary and dangerously monopolistic echo chamber. I’ve seen it swallow too many of my niches, and from my experience, it turns people into jerks.

              Hence what I’m getting at is that this may not have happened without all that nonsense in the unoffiical discord.

    • poleslav@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      If only flight sims and peripherals worked on Linux It’s been the one think keeping me back.

    • TechnologyChef@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      I left a long time ago while they would entertain my classmates of new features I had been using for 4 years. Everyone thought I was embarrassed when the MS rep told me they had to look at legal consequences before adding features that could be patented by others when I asked why they hadn’t added a menu of WiFi access points, yet I sat there wondering how our open source community built so much and took care of each other in collaboration. I understood they had to be careful to not get sued, but they also thrived in that world for competition rather than selling services.

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    17 hours ago

    “Megacorp learned nothing from Active Desktop being an utter fucking security disaster.” Yeah, no shit. Everything old is new again.

    • JWBananas@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Active Desktop was entirely ahead of its time. Let’s not forget that it was only around a decade later that JIT-compiled JavaScript engines like V8 paved the way for web apps, including the iPhone which at launch only supported third-party apps as web apps.