Shameless plug: My products (FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit) can filter all types of potentially unwanted traffic from your Windows PC to Microsoft cloud: namely, Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and many more — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools (e.g. various GitHub scripts) can’t achieve.
https://www.prime-expert.com/
I admire your effort to increase user privacy but it's very difficult to argue that allowing a piece of proprietary closed-source software to make fundamental changes to your operating system is a good idea.
For starters, it doesn't explain what exactly it does. This is all I could see on the info page:
> Privacy Enablement Center: Politely ask already installed Windows 10/11 to phone home less, or add Privacy Enhancing DNS Proxy to already installed Windows, in order to block Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and other types of potentially unwanted Windows network activity — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools can’t achieve.
That sounds an awful lot like using the hosts file or a firewall such as Portmaster[1] to block known tracking domains, no?
Pure hosts file solution won't cut it for several reasons:
1) certain domains (the most offensive privacy infringers) are whitelisted by Microsoft's DNSAPI.DLL to always bypass hosts file lookup (DNSAPI.DLL is a place where hosts file parser lives on Windows, so this parser just ignores hosts file records which don't align well with data vaccuming purpose of modern Windows versions)
2) hosts file can't blacklist domain hierarchies (domain + all subdomains), it can blacklist only apex domains
3) some domains to block are not quite domains, rather domain names regexps (set of domain names to block is not finite)
So, I would say it's rather list of regexps to block than list of domains to block (in our product it's compiled to highly efficient finite state machine in C, plus a user-friendly list of categories to choose blocking preferences from); but in principle you are right: all of it currently boils down to DNS packet interception.
Shameless plug: I've developed and maintain a couple of tools to control Windows 10/11 updates, telemetry and other potentially unwanted network traffic: FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit. Using these tools you can make Windows 10/11 completely silent online if you want to (akin to Windows 7 or Windows XP).
There's WinAeroTweaker, Win11Debloat, FlyOOBE, ChrisTitus App, and dozens more that don't cost a thing because they're basically a collection of powershell scripts and a wrapper.
It's a valid question. What does a paid app offer that these free and easier to get alternatives do not?
Microsoft has dropped 16-bit application support via builtin emulator (NTVDM) from 64-bit builds of Windows, whether it happens to be Windows 10 or earlier version of Windows, depends on user (in my case, it was Windows Vista). However, you can still run 16-bit apps on 64-bit builds of Windows via third party emulators, such as DOSBox and NTVDMx64.
It does, if you use an old enough version of windows that SUA is available :). I never managed to get fontconfig working so text overlapped its dialogue boxes and the like, but it was good enough to run what I needed.
True, but at this point you're basically doing Windows-on-Linux-on-Windows. But why not anyway... applications will anyway run way faster than on the hardware they were originally thought for.
I maintain a software to aid in installation of Windows 7 to new PCs (FlashBoot Pro): https://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/ . Recently there was a reduction in sales. You are welcome.
Could you please provide more info on this topic, e.g. a link? I intended to buy EV code signing certificate as a sole proprietor to fix long-standing problem with my software when Windows Defender pops up every time I release a new version. Is EV code signing certificate no longer a viable solution to this problem? Is there no longer a difference between EV and non-EV code signing certificate?
After Microsoft's March 2024 update, EV Code signing certs don't offer instant Microsoft Defender reputation. Now, OV and EV both code signing certificates can be installed and stored on FIPS 140 Level 2 or Common Criteria EAL 4+ certified HSM, tokens, or cloud HSMs. So, you can consider EV Code Signing as higher security and higher validation with no more difference. If u want to buy code signing at affordable cost, I recommend: https://signmycode.com/cheap-code-signing-certificates
This remind me of when everybody and his dog was shoehorning blockchain into everything. Blockchain-based pet platforms, pet owners earning tokens for participating in community, pet care services fueled by smart contracts, and the like.
Both GNU assembler and LLVM integrate assembler parse and match instructions only once.
hey then store an internal representation in memory and perform fixed-point iteration.
The section/fragment representation gives a lot of flexibility.
In contrast, nasm parses and matches instructions multiple times depending on the optimization level. It also assigns addresses during parsing and uses an ad-hoc method for JMP/JCC instructions. The end conditions of the fixed-point iteration algorithm (global_offset_changed and stall_count) seem unconventional.
-O0 does not "relax all" short jumps to near jumps.
My idea of getting one step ahead of similar backdoors is to wrap sshd traffic into a spiped tunnel. Spiped is compiled from source and linked statically (last stable version from 2021).
I still want sshd updated by my OS package manager. Statically linked spiped, which is out of scope of my OS package manager, is just a second line of defense.
