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Comment by raesene9 | Hacker News Reader

The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me.

Companies change leadership, direction and style and it seems odd to suggest that there's some underlying quality which means that, regardless of that, you can never trust them (or in reverse that you should always trust a company you once trusted)

There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same company they were in the 90's, but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff.

Is that to say that the Github acquisition will be an unalloyed good, no.

but I would say that people shouldn't automatically assume that it'll be a disaster...

View on HN

Windows 10 is really recent though.

That said, since I like controversy: I'm happier to see Microsoft buy Github than I would be to see Google or Facebook buy it.

And also! A big shoutout to Linus for helping to make source control distributed and open, which means swapping between git providers (for the code at least) is simple, easy and impossible to block. The amount of good Linus has done for the world is incredible.

Another recent example: lockdown of ARM-based Windows machines, preventing the installation of other operating systems.

You mean like Android or iOS?

Like iOS yes, and some, but not all, Android manufacturers/phones.

"Others do it too" is not a very good justification in my mind.

"Others do it too" is not a good justification of course. But his comment also fails to to explain how Microsoft is somehow more evil than the industry standard.

Bootloader lockdown was practically unheard of for the PC/laptop form factor before Microsoft started doing it for ARM laptops. And and it's not even really standard for phones. Plenty of Android phones have unlockable bootloaders (see LineageOS).

I don't think whether one is more evil than Apple/iOS in this regard is a good benchmark.

You mean unlike most other desktop/laptop OEMs/manufacturers?

(which would be the more apt point of reference)

Lockdown of consumer grade devices isn't really a new experience (e.g. iOS devices).

There's a trade-off to be had between security/reliability and flexibility.

If MS were selling those devices as general purpose computers and then refusing to allow other OS installation, I think that would be dishonest, however as far as I'm aware they're not making such claims.

I don't see the tradeoff honestly. Sure, make it a little difficult, show a big red scary warning, perhaps even require the use of a screwdriver to discourage "casual" users from being misled into compromising their machine's security.

But ultimately true ownership, recyclability/reusability (Linux on aging hardware..), and hardware-independent OS competition are norms with significant benefits that we shouldn't give up lightly.

Those may be norms for IT professionals, but the needs of IT professionals are very different from those of standard users.

Realistically most people (numerically) don't want a computer, they want a thing that lets them communicate, create and consume content.

Lockdown isn't a problem for them, and walled gardens like iOS are generally the best way for them to stay secure.

If you provide a method to escape the sandbox, it is likely that attackers will work out how to exploit that. For example try going to facebook.com and open the developers tools. They've had to put a warning in there to stop people from "self-XSS" ...

That's why I'm entirely OK with making it scary and a little difficult.

And it's not just IT professionals, but also their friends and family, especially those that can't afford to or don't want to get a new device that often. I think this is a pretty significant set of people.

So are you not ok with the concept that some people don't need that option and, as long as the vendor is clear about what is and isn't possible, having some devices that are more locked down that others is acceptable?

If I knew that to be the end-game and if I knew it to be an informed choice on the part of consumers, yes, I'd be OK with that.

My two reservations:

1. I think such a lockdown is a kind of hidden anti-competitive "dark pattern" that benefits the seller much more than it benefits the consumer by significantly lowering the the reuse/resale value of the device. One could argue it makes the device cheaper to begin with, but I have serious doubts about that. The anti-competitive effect seems more likely to increase the price instead. Hindering reuse also implies an environmental impact, though I'm not sure how significant that is.

2. If lockdown becomes the norm for >99% of devices/users and even we tech people start to accept it the way of things, some sufficiently bribed lawmakers will no doubt be inclined to make unsurveiled general purpose computing illegal because "security" and "copyright" and "pro-business" etc. Yes, it's a "slipper slope" argument, but when it comes to social norms, I think that's a valid form of argument.

I see a benefit to lockdown, which is improved safety/security for non-technical end users.

Security is a difficult topic, even for IT professionals, and it is easier to secure a locked down environment for non-technical users than an open one.

If you look at mobile platforms as an example, the prevalence of malware on Android compared to iOS is significant.

Now for many I'm sure that trade-off is worth it, but I also feel there is a place for more controlled environments.

If a significant number of Android security breaches indeed happen through misleading a user into unlocking their bootloader, that would be a convincing statistic to me.

But I'm under the impression that that is exceedingly rare and that Android has many way more pressing security concerns (e.g. the lack of driver security updates to even slightly old devices).

Access to root on the device is the pre-requisite of a lot of attacks, and this presents risks.

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/android-root-faq/17135/

Also the control which allows users to install sofware from different sources, leads in many cases to them installing malware masquerading as "free games" or similar.

Android malware is a much larger problem than malware in the more controlled iOS world.

so to me that's a real trade off. you have control of your device and the ability to install software from more locations, however your security risks increase.

For some people that risk will be entirely justifiable, for others, it makes sense to have an option of a more locked down environment.

Personally I like Linux for servers (I have control/responsibility) but for my smartphone I use iOS as it's easier to secure and I don't really want to use that device for "proper" computing.

That's fair, and those numbers for rooting are a bit higher than I expected. There's the caveat that rooting and complete OS replacement are somewhat different topics, but those stats are still relevant.

So clearly there's a significant demand (some of which I'm inclined to believe is very legitimate), and clearly there are significant dangers.

I guess in the end it comes down to the eternal debate of freedom vs safety. I find it very hard to side with the stance of protecting people from their own stupidity, beyond giving stern warnings. It feels sort of like giving up on cultural progress in humanity :/

And I think we could still do much more to mitigate this attack vector (Big flashy red lights with "probably a bad idea" in all-caps? Adding more fine-grained permissions so root is needed less?) before ceding yet more control to powerful organizations who are already, somehow, in a position to tax 30% of all software and IAP sales on most devices and reject apps that don't align with their interests.

> If MS were selling those devices as general purpose computers

They are computers, regardless of what sort of dress they wear, and users should have control over their own computing devices.

I really dislike how you get downvoted (your message is faded out) here. Do people really applaud removal of control of their own devices?

I think it's because Microsoft's reason for doing this is plausible and not as anti-competitive as that comment makes it seem - locking down the boot process has serious security benefits.

I admit I may be ignorant, but could you spell out the security benefits of going from "locked down but user-openable" to "not user-openable"?

(edit: specifically benefits that couldn't be effectively addressed by making it a little difficult and scary to open that lockdown?)

If it's openable it's not locked down. If I can't trust the kernel then every level above it is tainted (this is assuming you can trust the CPU and firmware, but at least ARM is better than Intel here).

OK, let me be more accurate: "user-openable" in the sense that the user is free to choose to trust any OS vendor they want. What's the unmitigatable harm?

A user that isn't the owner of the device - say a repair tech, but possibly a remote third party - installs an OS they trust, which scrapes all the device owners personal info and sends it to their server. The device owner may not ever become aware of this.

For the remote third party case, the option to unlock should be isolated from the OS so that it needs physical access (boot to bios/recovery mode). AIUI that's how it's typically implemented in Androids and in Secure Boot.

The point about attackers with physical access is fair, though significantly mitigated on Androids (and Chromebooks I think) by a warning (of varying severity) that the OS has been modified. On my Nexus 5, it's a subtle "unlocked" icon, on my Moto G it's an unmissable red triangle on white background with "warranty void" and other scary words.

It's still vulnerable to the user getting a prebooted device and only seeing the warning on next boot, so not perfect, but also not the only imaginable defense. One could e.g. move initial authentication to the locked down "bios" phase so either (a) the warning is visible there and/or (b) the OS isn't replaceable in the first place without authentication.

And we should bear in mind that a malicious repair tech can probably convince a fair portion of the population to give away their password :/

Yep. These are all fair points.

Well yes, Windows 10, finally a practically usable Windows in my opinion. Finally working, with a lot of polish and Dev tools available. (Like wsl)

I don't buy the usability argument of WSL. The thing isn't anywhere near a useful Linux environment other than for some noddy stuff that cygwin can already handle. Try running a background process, a service, use a serial port or drag some half decent performance out of it and you'll see.

It is ultimately backed with NTFS and NT's buffer cache. Running a VM is still several orders of magnitude more productive. And you can't fix NTFS and NT now. It's impossible.

That's… completely false. At least for me. You should really stop and think before accusing people to have noob workloads.

Even cronjobs work… The performance is sometimes better than on native linux, as a few of the syscalls are better implemented on windows. The file performance is abysmal, but that only hurts if you're using npm (and there you're in a world of pain already anyways).

The only thing lacking, is that some debuggers don't work, which is a pity, but then I just start a docker container and mount it on my filesystem.

I am using services on it too actually, everything works as expected. I can actually create windows bat files to redirect to linux binaries, which lets me do for example OCaml development, with the linux toolchain, on a system that actually works reliably. (my experience is, that as of windows 10, desktop linux environments crash way more often than windows ones)

Grep 150,000 source files on Linux and on WSL and come back to me. That's a pretty standard console load. It kills git operations, package managers, compilers, the lot. ALL the tools I use it for. Well USED it for.

Real data:

linux -> 1.3 seconds, all from buffer cache on a cranky old 10 year old HP desktop with 8 gig of RAM and bottom end SSD.

wsl -> over a minute on a 12 core i7 with high end m2 SSD, every time.

This is because of NTFS's awful performance on small files. The whole of Unix is file based and uses huge numbers of small files, as does source code generally so this is an end game scenario for the platform. It simply sucks!

This goes back to when we had SVN which would take 6-7 minutes to check a repo out onto NTFS versus 20-30 seconds onto ext4 on the same rust disks. SVN was treated like cancer by the organisation for what is fundamentally a platform limitation.

Source code files are small... but hardly a lot though. I've usually been doing extensive search on big files, and ripgrep is great for that (and available for windows).

  $ find ~/src | wc -l
  242341

Maybe, maybe not.

I just use `git grep` which isn't as fast as ripgrep (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep), but is still damn fast (on Windows).

As the maintainer of ripgrep, I pay attention to these sort of things. I will say that I noticed a similar performance problem in my tests as well, but further investigation revealed that Window's antimalware process was severely throttling file reads. Once I disabled that, performance on Windows is nowhere near an order of magnitude worse than Linux.

Thanks for commenting. I have disabled windows defender on the machine and tweaked the filesystem with fsutil and it is still running at over 40 seconds on the same workload.

Serial ports work fine with my Arduinos. I regularly flash stuff using ESP tools from WSL.

Is this a recent change with 1803?

I was attempting to use AVR-gcc toolchain and some SCPI over serial stuff with WSL unsuccessfully.

It was pushed down the throat of customers, using dark patterns and “better ask forgiveness than permission” ethics. It also took away choice from the vast majority of users, and started sending opaque and vaguely described telemetry.

The problem with Microsoft wasn’t that their software sucks (some does, some is great).

It is that they have been bullying users and companies for the past 30 years. Many people point to a “new Microsoft”, and the win10 rollout is a stark counter example to that claim.

Yea, the telemetry one was kind of shady at the beginning, when it got turned on again after every update. That's changed a while ago though, and you can actually look through all the telemetry you're sending.

And you still cannot properly turn it off. Weird and invasive things still happen with large updates (bundled so you cannot pick and choose which changes are appropriate for you, such as security fixes only). The whole OS is a few quality of life changes that make it palatable to most people to deal with all of their frankly offensively invasive practices.

> practically usable Windows

- forced updates (and forced restarts that go along with that)

- OS level advertisements (even though you are still paying for the OS)

- impossible to configure privacy settings

That alone makes it one of the shittiest OS's ever released.

I think MS made mis-steps on the Windows 10 privacy setup for sure, although they've largely fixed it in later releases with improved visibility of Privacy options and better docs on how to disable most of the telemetry stuff.

Personally I like Windows 10 as a general purpose client OS, WSL is great and stability for me across a number of devices has been very good.

> and better docs on how to disable most of the telemetry stuff.

How about disabling all of the "phone home" stuff, telemetry or whatever else? There is still only two options "Basic" and "Full" options without any "None" option and really most of the relevant options are scattered all over the place, making it a chore to disable them (and you need to redo that stuff every big update). This is either extremely dumb (which i doubt) or done with malicious intent so that people will miss stuff and/or get tired of them.

Unless they provide the means to completely stop all communication with their servers with a single switch, there is no reason to give them any benefit of the doubt.

Yeah but they reset your privacy settings with every update. Thats what we call dark patterns.

Realistically, out of all of the BigCorps who could have bought it (and who have deep enough pockets to sustain its bleeding,) Microsoft is one of the best of a bad bunch.

I'm not quite as cynical as the author of the OP when it comes to Microsoft's recent apparent change of direction, but who knows, that may just be naivety speaking.

the best out of a bad bunch... what does this even mean. They are killing a neutral force in the market space there is nothing good coming from it.

Better integration with Microsoft's existing ecosystem would be a good outcome (for developers working in that ecosystem) as well as more investment in general. As others have stated, VSTS is excellent so they definitely know what they are doing in this space.

"Nothing good coming from it" seems a bit of a stretch when we don't even know the terms of the deal yet - or indeed whether it's actually happening at all!

It seems like the alternative was GitHub running out of cash, so the main good coming from it is that GitHub will continue to exist.

What you say is worth considering, but I think you implicitly overstate two points: 1) their shenanigans aren't as old as you imply 2) these crimes happen over the course of years.

You talk about the 90s, but it was in 2004 that the EU ruled against them, and 2008 that they were fined for ignoring that ruling. It was in 2011 that Ireland and Spain started to investigate them for additional anticompetitive practices (though I can't seem to find what cam from this).

Much more recently, they've been rather litigious with respect to patents (Microsoft uses patents offensively).

Then there's the telemetry stuff in windows and Skype centralization, and probably more that I don't know because...

What _has_ changed, is Microsoft's relevance. They're still huge in some markets, but many business' and individuals barely interact directly with the Microsoft platform/ecosystem.

Personally I believe that the only difference is the marketing. There is little two way communication going which is the same old Microsoft. Are they listening to their customers complain about telemetry, enterprise licensing, support and product stability and dependability? No. They're blinding everyone in an attempt to cover up the decrease in privacy, data collection ramping, gouging of enterprises to force them into the cloud, the declining quality of support and declining product quality. Even targeting the platform is like hitting a moving target that is on fire.

But it's ok because someone said they're a new company and they have a new figurehead.

I don't buy it. I'd be an idiot to buy it. I've been around a long time and this is a typical corporate cycle. They run like the sunspot cycle. We're at a solar minima at the moment.

First, MS hasn't stop its bad behavior. When did you think it stopped ? They became better at PR (their teams even pop in HN, Reddit or ...Imgur, they are very good), and they can get away with less BS because they have better competition. They did not get better.

Secondly, with your point of view, as a society, you just promote abusing entities. Politicians, companies, anything with power really. They make a lot of bad things, on a lot of years, then benefit from it, and now boom, what ? Stairway to heaven, along with the loot they got from the misdeeds ?

This is how you end up with corrupted systems and unfair societies.

You don't have to punish them again and again for the crimes of yesterday. But yes, it's perfectly fair, and actually sane, to remember, and say you don't want to have more relationship with them now.

Tainted for the past? Did you see what happened with windows 10 or that they are not able to fix skype? To be honest there are screens popping up every day from one stupid mistake after another from ms. They have more dead products in their portfolio than anyone else they embraced change on the xbox to do a 360 afterwards. NO ONE and I mean NO ONE should put any hope into MS doing the right thing or be a reliable partner for a business. They just burned way to many bridges. Don't get me wrong if you are going for core business stuff like windows ltsb or azure you gonna be fine but never jump on anything new and hype from ms.

So a company that has a bad product launch or problems should be avoided?

Would you avoid all google products (and indeed most other tech. companies) on that basis as well? they've had their fair share of things gone wrong, products killed etc.

I don't see that as a strong argument against an MS acquisition of GH. Microsoft have had quite a good story in recent times in the developer tools arena (e.g. Code)

Well, google is in the same boat as ms with their 8 messaging apps killing of services left and right. As I said if you use to core products you are fine. MS and google left to many shit stains on the carpet to be trusted anymore. You have to be kidding me with the developer tools arena just because you are one of the hipsters falling for wsl and vscode doesn't mean they have done good for the general programming platform. Look at the UWP/win32 dilemma or the PWA "integration" or even .NET. If they don't fix their stack I am not gonna praise them for some gimmicks like you are.

> a bad product launch

So are you telling me that windows 10 has stopped forced updates (and the forced restarts that go along with that), stopped all OS-level advertisements, and made it easy to permanently turn off all telemetry on one settings page?

Or is their product still a flaming pile of shit?

> but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff.

Not disagreeing with your overall point, but culture can persist through employee and leadership turnover.

not only that but i would be more willing to accept the change as hones if it did not came out of the previous failed attempt at "Embrace, extend, and extinguish", but to me this honestly feels just as another attempt with different strategy, they are taking a play from googles book.

And the people who reached the top now are the ones who lived and worked happily in Toxic Microsoft of the past 20 years. I dont buy in their change of nature either.

> There seems to be a trope with Microsoft that they're still the same company they were in the 90's, but the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff.

Their senior leadership consists of people who were obviously OK with working for Microsoft when it was performing all those misdeeds. They may have changed as people perhaps, but at some point the very same people who are making the strategic decisions now decided that working for the 90's incarnation of Microsoft was a morally acceptable choice. I'm not sure why I should suddenly start trusting these people now?

> senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff.

This is largely irrelevant. Saying Microsoft makes a lot of money from hosting Linux workloads on Linux machines does not change the fact they'd make even more profit if Google and AWS were unable to compete. In that regard, open source is a tool to lure workloads into an environment Microsoft can control and shape to its will.

Microsoft's incentives are still aligned with harming the parts of the open-source ecosystem that don't run on Windows. That has not changed (and won't, as long as they make and sell proprietary software platforms).

> the senior leadership aren't the same people and I'd imagine neither are the staff.

And what about their clients/cash flows? Microsoft still sells to enterprises and governments, so their incentives are to keep adding backdoors and Orwellian telemetry to everything.

At least in the late nineties I felt that Microsoft was merely unfair to their competitors. Now they're openly hostile to their end-users as well.

Anyone with any morals would never want to be associated with the Microsoft name, so anyone who does is untrustworthy by default.

And besides, the current CEO was the one who went from Scroogled to mandatory telemetry, while focusing on renting out servers at a ridiculous markups. Don't forget the new focus on the Windows Store either. Or the locked-down ARM laptops.

So it's not like the current management is innocent either.

  Anyone with any morals would never want to be associated with the Microsoft name, so anyone who does is untrustworthy by default.

I'm not in the pro MS camp in this debate, but that sounds like a "no true scotsman" to me.

It's modus ponens, no logical fallacy here.

I disagree with you there. "Modus ponens" implies sound reasoning on the implication part, not ad-hoc claims and hyperbole.

As a thought experiment: Replace "Microsoft" with your favorite open source project and see if the argumentation still holds.

The biggest problem with the acquisition is that it's yet another core piece of infrastructure gobbled up by one of the big players.

Do we really want to move towards a world where there will be just one huge tech company that owns everything ? Because that's where we're heading.

I see no evidence that they are a better company.

They are currently embracing open source and Linux, very visibly.

Phases two and three will be along soon enough. (Extend, Extinguish)

I have been around since Microsoft's core product was Basic under CP/M. It was not so bad. Later, Microsoft had one of the best debuggers for Unix. I used it every day for years.

Then Microsoft became bigger and bigger and they did that by becoming increasingly Evil.

The problem with Microsoft today is not that all their technology is bad, sluggish and annoying. They still have some competent developers working there. The problem is that although they put on a lot of lipstick - they are still dead Evil. They want your data. They want to do all the bad things Amazon, Facebook and Google (data mining) Apple (exclusive sales of Windows applications trough their store - and forcing you to have their music, xbox and other crap installed on your computer).

The only reason Microsoft is not generally regarded as Evil today is share incompetence. They don't know how to make an instant messenger - so Skype is useless and people use other programs. They don't know how to make a large website - so Linkedin is just as useless as Skype. People leave.

Nokia is the best example of Microsoft's incompetence. They buy the most successful phone brand in the history of the world - and in just a few years it's over. The employees are fired, nobody wants the phones, and their appstore is a wasteland of useless crap nobody wants (that's what happens when quantity (number of 'apps') is the only measurement for 'success').

Microsoft wants your data. They want video-cameras in your home. They want to listen in to what you talk about in your bedroom. They want to sell that data to 'Partners', advertisers and law enforcement. They want to be Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook - but they have no idea about how to make anything that people actually wants. So they buy successful enterprises, redeploy their army of managers from hell there, and turns it into dirt. That happened to Nokia. That happened to Skype. I think that was what happened to Linkedin (I don't know the inside story, just that it quickly became useless). Now they want to do the same to github. So sad.

For developers, it's not a question about to leave or not to leave. It's just a question about when. No matter how much you love or hate Microsoft - they will for sure turn github into dirt - like everything they touch - and then at some point you will leave. Eventually you'll have to leave in 2 years when the shut it down.

"They still have some competent developers working there. The problem is that although they put on a lot of lipstick - they are still dead Evil."

The problem is that they have some competent developers working there, when realistically they need badass talent like Google and Apple has.

Whether or not a company is evil is subject to opinion on what you think a company is meant to do. A company is meant to be profitable.

The only thing I see in this acquisition is that Microsoft want's to improve it hiring abilities and to gain control on a few open source projects like Electron and Atom. Projects that they use for example in VS Code.

Like I wouldn't be surprised if Electron was their only interest because of Web Assembly being on the horizon and the fact that Windows is still the dominant desktop OS, but their web store doesn't deliver like Google or Apple stores because developers attention is already split between Android, IOS, and Web development.

Long story short, Microsoft has a lot to gain by integrating Electron into Windows because to develop for Web is essentially the same as developing for Windows. (in this regard they gain the same edge that ChromeOS has)

Plus the more Microsoft embraces open source the closer we get to a Linux based Windows OS. Which sounds horrifying until you consider that Linux shipping on every computer in the world means all these projects developed for Linux will get to actually see the light of day.

You know, I completely forgot about GitHub owning Electron. And I'm sure there are other GitHub projects that I've overlooked. Maybe MS didn't purchase GitHub for the repositories but for the support programs. Hmmm...

Their pattern of bad behaviour extended far beyond the 90s, and all the stuff that happened with Nokia gives me pause as well.

As was their OOXML, ISO-stacking shenanigans.

Microsoft have a history of bad behaviour, and repeatedly abusing monopoly positions. How many chances at goodwill should I give them?

Also don't forget that Microsoft Research has published an enormous amount of papers, whereas Apple Research ... (does it even exist?)

I can appreciate some of MS Research's papers and former personalities whilst still having zero trust in MS Corp.

Perhaps the whole concept of having trust in a company is flawed, as board members come and go, and shareholders keep pushing the company to the boundaries of what is desired/acceptable from a societal perspective.

Take a look at recent technologies they tried to push. UWP for example. I don't see any change in direction here, to be honest. They try to lock-in developers on every step.

Many devs are looking elsewhere, so they paint themselves as having changed. And they did, to an extend. But you if they ever get in a position where they could reign in developers, you can count on it that they will try.

> The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me.

That sounds odd because pretty much nobody has that idea. The alternative to looking too much at history is not to ignore history completely.

Considering your point, what has Microsoft done since the 90's to make you believe they had a change of heart/culture/orientation?

They're the largest corporate contributor to open source projects on GitHub :)

Taht means little to me. Is Facebook excused for their scandals because they open-sourced and maintain React?

It may mean little to you but you asked me what I saw, not what you saw :)

>The idea that some companies must be forever tainted by their misdeads in the past seems odd to me.

Are companies people?

>but I would say that people shouldn't automatically assume that it'll be a disaster...

Are you saying the purpose of this acquisition is to make GitHub better? If not, why would Microsoft be interested in buying it?

But companies dont change shareholders much. They are the real bosses in the end of the day.

Microsoft is pure evil

- they wanted to access my computer after I upgraded cpu and motherboard as Windows 10 deactivated. That is despite I have full retail version. It took three days so that they acknowledged they won't get remote access. They required me to run some weird binaries to activate Windows again. That was super creepy.

- Soon after I bought VS2015 pro, VS2017 was released. They didn't want to give me a refund so I would get VS2017 or didn't offer upgrade price. Consultants were rude.

Windows is a spy machine. I only run it for software that doesn't work on Linux.

I hope Microsoft dies.

I am in the process of moving my stuff off of GitHub.

> - they wanted to access my computer after I upgraded cpu and motherboard as Windows 10 deactivated. That is despite I have full retail version. It took three days so that they acknowledged they won't get remote access. They required me to run some weird binaries to activate Windows again. That was super creepy.

Are you sure that you were not scammed?

I am sure. That was via Microsoft Support chat and email.

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