> It seems our completely untethered tumble into the world of 1984 led by Big Brother and every all-seeing eye on the planet, with Microsoft pushing us through a new window and into a new era with Windows 11.
Ah yes, that's absolutely what it is, not an attempt to match what is already standard on every Apple laptop.
Most of the consumers are not making informed purchasing decisions. In the face of that, setting some minimal standards for OEMs is a reasonable step for Microsoft to protect and improve their brand.
Average people don't generally attribute the quality of the products to Dell, Acer, Lenovo, etc, they generally just lump it all together as "Windows" or "PCs". When they go out shopping purely on price and buy a $400 laptop only to get it home and find out a few months later they can't video call with their kids with their "new" laptop, they don't think "Wow, that's on me for buying such a cheap laptop!" or "I can't believe Dell sold me something that doesn't even have a webcam!". They think "Wow PCs suck maybe my friend was right and I should just buy an Apple."
People consistently compare a $400 Windows laptop to a $2500 MBP to say "PCs suck!" or a $300 Android to a $1400 iPhone to say "Androids suck!". Ensuring some minimum baseline of quality there is generally going to help Microsoft's brand and, frankly, the average uninformed consumer.
There's nothing stopping OEMs still shipping absolute garbage hardware and just putting Ubuntu on it so everyone can complain that Linux sucks instead. There's nothing stopping you from taking that and putting Windows on it yourself. There's nothing stopping you just putting a piece of tape over the webcam.
> a reasonable step for Microsoft to protect and improve their brand.
That MS chose to mandate cameras instead of hardware off-switches or disabled Management Engine backdoors to "protect their brand" should tell you everything.
That the vast majority of consumers care whether they can video chat with their family, and not whether there's some non-free microcode running in their computer?
Several models have shutters for the camera. There have been a few generations of Thinkpads where the entire camera slides inside the bezel. No physical microphone switch but there is a firmware level mic mute keyboard combination and associated LED.
If that green LED is physically connected with the power to the camera then that's plenty good enough for me. How could it possibly be bypassed with software? Even if a physical switch was added I'd still want them to keep the LED for the convenience of it.
I do agree though that a physical hardware switch is better, especially for the microphone. I see no real reason why Apple couldn't put a parts bin iPhone mute toggle switch on the side of a MacBook. I don't think it would look out of place.
To really trust the LED we should open the screen and check if the LED is actually connected to the power line of the camera. Of course we should check the hardware switch too.
It's a matter of principle. Yes, the majority of laptops do have a front facing camera and that probably won't be an issue for the majority of consumers.
This is just an opening to put more and more biometric stuff into the OS itself. How will Windows 11 behave if I disable the camera via software? Will it just turn it back on? Will it throw an error or refuse to work if I tape over it? These implications are what actually concern me.
Don't worry. There will always be people in your Jitsi/Zoom/Teams/Meat/Whatever who will hurt your ears (or be nearly inaudible), drop out randomly despite nobody else having any issues at all, or have really crappy video. Or, any combination of the aforementioned.
It's some kind of fundamental law of digital meetings.
It depends on what you mean by a significant share, right before the pandemic Asus came out with a gamer laptop that was based on AMD and was both cheaper and better than most of its competitors but, sadly, sold out almost everywhere.
Most laptops do. Most PC's don't. No idea how that plays out for PC's. Not sure why this is specific to laptops unless the goal is to treat them like cell phones.
There are some really security conscious places where you can’t bring in any device with a camera. So you have to leave your smartphone in the locker and the company provides its users with cameraless laptops.
I really like working with Windows10 and would also be very happy to use Windows11, but all this telemtry stuff(which I understand partially why they are doing some of it) and strange decisions like this are making it really hard not to switch to Linux.
Many corporate laptop models build a physical camera cover into the laptop lid now. Microsoft clearly wants to ensure everyone with a laptop has the option to join video calls, which makes sense, but it's getting easier on new models to block this when intended.
Most Windows laptops sold today already have a front facing camera, and I expect camera covers to become as standard as cameras are.
Are you implying that even a microphone is too much of an invasion of privacy? There’s a trade off between security and usability, and while that balance is different for every user, this one seems a bit of an outlier.
How would this even work in practice? I’m assuming a switch to disable the mic isn’t viable since if you can’t trust the mic, you can’t trust a switch. I’m not even sure a mic cover would actually work. The only solution seems to be to create a laptop without a microphone and just use an external mic. Is there a market for that? It seems inconvenient enough to lose the mainstream market. Video chatting is a common enough use case for the corporate market that this just seems infeasible.
There is no reason to assume that you can't trust a switch. A microphone is, essentially, available to every program installed on the computer at any time without the switch.
Plus adding a physical switch is not hard or expensive. You can even integrate it with a switch for the webcam.
A hardware switch is something that can be trusted. However a software microphone switch can't.
Having a physical, visible, mute button for a laptop would be an incredible boon to video conferencing. Rather than having to shuffle through all the awful, terrible, hard to decipher button for "mute" on the plethora of poor visual designs of video conference UIs, a clear and physical button on the laptop would be sooo helpful. No more finding the mouse cursor, navigating it to the button and clicking, you can just move your finger directly to the button on the keyboard that controls whether people can hear you.
Given the huge number of audio faux pas from mute buttons, I'm surprised nobody has added one of these yet...
For that huge number of audio fax pas that happens today, why would a physical switch have stopped it when clearly they already aren't using the mute button that already exists on their machine? Most laptops already ship with a button that mutes the built-in mic input and yet people seem to ignore/forget/not realize its there. IMO making that switch physical wouldn't affect most consumers because most consumers still wouldn't end up using it.
On Thinkpad keyboards, the mic mute button is usually Fn+F4 or around there. It usually includes a little red LED to show if the mute is active or not.
On HP Elitebooks, its usually Fn+F10 or thereabouts.
I've seen a few Dell's with that feature but it has been pretty rare.
I guess looking around at models for sale these days the mic mute option is somewhat rare. I'm mostly used to Thinkpads and the recent non-Thinkpads I've owned have had it, so I kind of assumed it was a common feature these days. Interesting its more rare than I originally thought.
I do have an external USB mic which is much better quality than the internal one. Of course I very rarely carry the USB mic with me when I'm not at home so I still use the internal mic sometimes. The old headsets with a 3.5 mm jack with mic and speaker were the best. I didn't see any laptop with that kind of mic plug since many years ago. The jack is only for speakers.
A free and a little crazy idea for any laptop designer reading these comments: how about a detachable mic? Maybe USB C, maybe even a non standard plug. The advantage is that it's self evident when it's off, no need to inspect the hardware switch. The problem is that it could be lost. A solution would be a small safety strap, maybe transparent plastic.
I'm far more concerned by what a microphone could overhear than what a camera could see. There's very little actionable visual information in an office compared to the aural information.
My point is mostly that Microsoft probably isn't pushing a method to spy on people, so much as it's establishing that since most people need videoconferencing these days, they don't want any budget hardware vendors cutting out the front-facing camera to save $5 in parts. Most laptops already have them.
> It seems our completely untethered tumble into the world of 1984 led by Big Brother and every all-seeing eye on the planet, with Microsoft pushing us through a new window and into a new era with Windows 11.
What a load of hyperbolic junk this is. Microsoft is trying to ensure consistency for people that buy Windows laptops. We can debate whether that is a smart move or not, but descending into 1984 fear-baiting is just nonsense.
blue or green masking tape works great - dirt cheap and designed to pull off cleanly. I've had some on my macbook camera for going on 8 years now - pulls off for zoom calls and then goes straight back on.
Until they require face-ID. Then another percentage of people will not bother to block the camera.
For those calling the 1984 references over the top fear mongering, I'd just ask one question: Why does Microsoft even care about users having a camera? When you answer that, I'd probably respond with "Nope, not a strong enough reason to be a requirement for Windows, try again." Rinse and and repeat. It's happening in China, it's happening at Amazon...
It is very unlikely to be W11 as an OS demanding that. It will be the OEM licensing agreement for pre-installing a cheap license on a laptop.
This kind of thing is absolutely mandatory in this day and age. If you don't let commodity OS makers set any limits on the hardware to ensure a consistent experience, it will be very hard for them to compete with integrated solutions.
If there was some kind of a suggestion of MS self-dealing here, then maybe the concerns would make sense. E.g. requiring the laptop to have a MS-manufactured camera. But there isn't. It is clearly just an attempt to set a consistent minimum bar on the UX.
My concern is that as other comments mentioned in this post, the majority of recent laptops already have webcams without OEM licensing pressure. Webcam is also a piece of hardware that doesn't require one to be tech literate to figure out - someone getting a laptop without a webcam very likely knows what they will get, unlike the slightly comfusing intel CPU namings etc. Additionally, the differentiation factor between W11 PCs and mac at the moment doesn't seem to be the prescence of webcams; a bunch of mac iterations actually had awful webcams, and I've never heard of anyone ditching mac just because of them.
Combining these three factors, the direction W11 is heading to does not look as genuine as they describe it. And if so, the descend from OEM requirement to OS requirement could happen sooner or later. I wholeheartedly hope they do not though.
Majority but not all is kind of the worst case. If 95% of laptops have a webcam, people will not think to look at whether the laptop has one. I certainly haven't checked the webcam / microphone specs of any laptop I've bought in the last 10 years, but just assumed they would be there.
Windows 11 as an OS won’t require a camera. It’s a requirement for vendors to be allowed by Microsoft to put a "Designed for Windows 11" sticker on the hardware.
> What a load of hyperbolic junk this is. Microsoft is trying to ensure consistency for people that buy Windows laptops. We can debate whether that is a smart move or not, but descending into 1984 fear-baiting is just nonsense.
Over the past few years we've seen Microsoft adopt increasingly user-hostile practices when it comes to privacy. It's not unreasonable to be concerned that this initiative will morph into something nefarious.
We went from "you need to have a network interface so you can activate the OS" to "Track all the things and phone home" in less than a decade.
How does Windows track all the things? What of the information they do collect doesn't have an opt-in/out? The opt-in/out is part of the setup process (in the cases I've seen) so it's not hidden away.
I'm not a Windows fan or anything like that. Don't even use Windows as one of my main systems. I'm just dealing with it so I've seen some of these things.
Browsing data, devices connected to the system, what you type, or transcribe via text or ink (speech to text, handwriting to text etc), what applications you're running and for how long.
> The opt-in/out is part of the setup process (in the cases I've seen) so it's not hidden away.
It gets reset _literally_ every time they push out a larger update. They prompt you with a modal form that defaults to tracking turned on (even though I had it turned off to begin with). Guess someone at Microsoft figured out that the tech-literate among us were turning that setting off as soon as our non-tech-literate family/friends took their PCs out of the box around the Christmas tree.
> It's not unreasonable to be concerned that this initiative will morph into something nefarious.
It kind of is, though. It's a classic slippery slope fallacy. Collecting user telemetry and spying on users via webcams you force hardware manufacturers to install in machines are miles, miles, miles apart from each other. I'm not trying to defend MS's telemetry collection here, I don't like it either. But the extrapolation is hyperbolic.
Yes.. and they weren't requiring a network interface in order to collect telemetry. They were requiring a network interface in order for Windows laptop purchasers to know that they'd be able to connect to the internet.
>The company has developed a way to track your gaze to make sure you're actually looking at the PreShow commercial. The app also places a green border around the edges of your screen to confirm that it sees you. If you look away for too long, or leave your seat, the ad automatically pauses and you'll get a red border around your screen.
This horrific shit is all ready to go, I think there is no hyperbole or irrational slippery slope at all
This is also the Microsoft that IMO has the best, most user-friendly approach to keeping the computer as the user wants it, while allowing the changes the user wants.
Debian didn't impress me when I upgraded my main workstation recently. A long list of important prompts and not so important prompts, enough to make me click "ok, whatever, get on with it". (Oh, and even Debian also requires a network interface and contains a phone-home package. Getting security fixes without a normal network interface is a Challenge, and security fixes aren't really optional these day.)
> Oh, and even Debian also requires a network interface and contains a phone-home package. Getting security fixes without a normal network interface is a Challenge, and security fixes aren't really optional these day.
I’d say security fixes are rather optional these days if you have no network interface.
Certainly, but does that matter at all? Can you even buy one?
You certainly can buy a new laptop on Amazon, open it, remove the WLAN antenna, glue the USB plug(s) and need no security fixes. But at that point you're far from the mainstream. And I am impressed by how Microsoft manages to provide decent security in a user-friendly way, one that expects little unrealistic behaviour and doesn't restrict the term "user" to people far from the mainstream.
I'm still unsure where exactly Microsoft documented the requirement for OEMs to add a front-facing camera from 2023. Did they publish a system requirements doc or something?
IMO the author overindexed on making vague allusions to telescreens ("1984-style future [...] laptops, desktop PCs, TVs") and criticising Microsoft for its "Productivity Score" (a different discussion entirely).
Yeah seriously. Try and find a Windows laptop with no front-facing camera nowadays; they don't exist. Maybe some OEM white-box bargain bin hardware. Even System76, the ultra-privacy respecting Linux laptop vendor, sells precisely zero laptops w/o front-facing cameras.
Even the argument for consistency is tenuous; its already consistent. Microsoft says that all laptops must have DDR memory, at least 4gb. Its the same thing; you don't need memory, technically, to run an OS. Its just better that its there, and operating systems can be more sophisticated knowing that you've got it.
Probably because it would be an unpopular move. I have a friend who had the Zephyrus GA502, a quite successful gaming laptop, and he hated not having a front facing camera.
Hardware shutters is what people should push for imo
I wonder how that's going to work for government security agencies. I remember at one point touring the Pentagon (many years ago) and them saying how they explicitly disallowed devices with cameras in certain areas. No idea if that's changed, but I could see Microsoft needing to have a separate security-version of the OS, or losing a lot of government clients.
It hasn't changed, and while it may not be common in high-security, but unclassified facilities, in classified facilities you're not allowed to even bring in any sort of recording devices, audio or video, nor anything radio-enabled. Exceptions are made for secure teleconferencing, obviously, but that is never enabled in a general-purpose computer. To participate in a meeting remotely, you either need to use a secure phone or a single-purpose teleconferencing device in a dedicated meeting room, not a video and voice recorder at your personal workstation.
Disabling and removing any recording capability at the hardware level is a requirement before you can even bring a laptop into the facility. Microsoft is well aware of this, and whatever this requirement actually is will definitely not apply to enterprise versions of Windows for this reason.
It is possible to get some exceptions to policy. My wife has hearing aids with radio capability, for instance. But they needed to be audited, and she had to prove they were 1) medically necessary for her job, and 2) the radio protocol only worked with the vendor's own devices and couldn't call out to something like a Bluetooth or WiFi receiver.
I am still on Win7 because I hate Win10 telemetry (MS tried to shove in 7 too, but in 7 it can be removed entirely, not just disabled).
Windows 11 is shaping itself to be extra-special regarding that, unless my workplace requires it I believe I will just stick with Linux after whatever reason happens force me to stop using Win7. My wife computer is already Linux-only, no dual-boot.
How is using Win 7 which hasn't got any security updates since 2020 January better? I mean might as well switch to Linux now because basically you are just cutting the tree under yourself
I mean... is this a requirement for "Windows logo certified" laptops (they used to be a thing some years back, not sure if that is still the case), or will it be a requirement for the successful installation and functioning of Windows 11 on any laptop?
If the former, then I don't see the big fuss, but if the latter, then no thanks. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It'll be a requirement for OEMs, not for consumers. OEMs already have a list of requirements they have to meet in order to sell Windows devices. For example, for the last several years it's been a requirement that OEMs include a TPM in devices.
Yeah a few gaming laptops don't have them on, reviews of them usually comment that it's unusual as streaming games these days is popular, but there you have it.
It's ludicrous to imagine that Windows 11, at the operating system level, requires a webcam. Obviously Windows 11 is going to be installed on desktops and workstations, and it's going to be installed on VMs.
Microsoft mandating that hardware OEMs not ship garbage laptops that don't have webcams makes a lot of sense. Otherwise there are going to be complaints that the integrated Teams video calling they're advertising as a big feature doesn't work.
Oh please. Microsoft is trying to ensure a base level of functionality. If they didn’t ship with cameras, mac fanboys would mock them as they did in the old “switch” commercial when they taped a camera to the top of a computer.
While it's true that almost all recent laptops have built-in webcam and most of the time they don't break themselves out of blue, I'd rather have the OS to not care about whether I do have one. None of microsoft's business if I can't/don't need to join a zoom or whatever on my pc.
W11 and Microsoft is kinda interchangeble in this conversaion imo, since no other party could pose direct influence on the W11 roll out. If this term stays in OEM realm then all is good, webcams are already everywhere. However W10 hasn't been pleasant in terms of tracking and telemetry and I find it hard to have good faith in W11.
Agreed, I couched my correction with "so far" because it wouldn't surprise me a bit if the OS eventually begins enforcing it, or if it already does and they've been misleading.
If I'm following this correctly, this isn't about the OS requiring a camera, it's about microsoft not letting laptop manufacturers sell "substandard" machines with windows. You can almost certainly install the OS on a laptop without a camera, or a desktop, yourself.
Makes sense to me. People bundle their hardware experience with what they consider a windows machine vs. an apple machine.
Macs used to have crappy webcams and most people did not care though. Webcam is hardly a differenciating factor and recent laptops already include them anyway.
Can a manufacturer use "duck typing" for this? Something like an electronic component that looks like a front facing camera to the OS but is completely blind.
While this is pretty meh compared to the other requirements, it clearly shows that MS can disregard all reason and consideration and just YOLO it. This is what lack of competition leads to. They can literally come up with the most absurd and contrived things their brains they can think of while on acid and the ones on the receiving end can only shrug it.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadAh yes, that's absolutely what it is, not an attempt to match what is already standard on every Apple laptop.
Average people don't generally attribute the quality of the products to Dell, Acer, Lenovo, etc, they generally just lump it all together as "Windows" or "PCs". When they go out shopping purely on price and buy a $400 laptop only to get it home and find out a few months later they can't video call with their kids with their "new" laptop, they don't think "Wow, that's on me for buying such a cheap laptop!" or "I can't believe Dell sold me something that doesn't even have a webcam!". They think "Wow PCs suck maybe my friend was right and I should just buy an Apple."
People consistently compare a $400 Windows laptop to a $2500 MBP to say "PCs suck!" or a $300 Android to a $1400 iPhone to say "Androids suck!". Ensuring some minimum baseline of quality there is generally going to help Microsoft's brand and, frankly, the average uninformed consumer.
There's nothing stopping OEMs still shipping absolute garbage hardware and just putting Ubuntu on it so everyone can complain that Linux sucks instead. There's nothing stopping you from taking that and putting Windows on it yourself. There's nothing stopping you just putting a piece of tape over the webcam.
That MS chose to mandate cameras instead of hardware off-switches or disabled Management Engine backdoors to "protect their brand" should tell you everything.
I would assume that is self-evident.
A green dot next to the camera is not good enough.
is not secure. Must have physical switch, not software.
I do agree though that a physical hardware switch is better, especially for the microphone. I see no real reason why Apple couldn't put a parts bin iPhone mute toggle switch on the side of a MacBook. I don't think it would look out of place.
I haven't seen a single laptop manufactured in the past 15 years that doesn't have a webcam built-in.
The actual good news is requiring it to be HD, so the days of potato quality video calls are soon over.
Besides, a lot of manufacturers are now shipping cameras with physical covers, I expect that trend to continue
This is just an opening to put more and more biometric stuff into the OS itself. How will Windows 11 behave if I disable the camera via software? Will it just turn it back on? Will it throw an error or refuse to work if I tape over it? These implications are what actually concern me.
It's some kind of fundamental law of digital meetings.
It also didn't have camera.
Not a large list of current ones, but several of note. Quite a few current Asus Zephyrus models.
Most Windows laptops sold today already have a front facing camera, and I expect camera covers to become as standard as cameras are.
How would this even work in practice? I’m assuming a switch to disable the mic isn’t viable since if you can’t trust the mic, you can’t trust a switch. I’m not even sure a mic cover would actually work. The only solution seems to be to create a laptop without a microphone and just use an external mic. Is there a market for that? It seems inconvenient enough to lose the mainstream market. Video chatting is a common enough use case for the corporate market that this just seems infeasible.
Plus adding a physical switch is not hard or expensive. You can even integrate it with a switch for the webcam.
Having a physical, visible, mute button for a laptop would be an incredible boon to video conferencing. Rather than having to shuffle through all the awful, terrible, hard to decipher button for "mute" on the plethora of poor visual designs of video conference UIs, a clear and physical button on the laptop would be sooo helpful. No more finding the mouse cursor, navigating it to the button and clicking, you can just move your finger directly to the button on the keyboard that controls whether people can hear you.
Given the huge number of audio faux pas from mute buttons, I'm surprised nobody has added one of these yet...
On HP Elitebooks, its usually Fn+F10 or thereabouts.
I've seen a few Dell's with that feature but it has been pretty rare.
I guess looking around at models for sale these days the mic mute option is somewhat rare. I'm mostly used to Thinkpads and the recent non-Thinkpads I've owned have had it, so I kind of assumed it was a common feature these days. Interesting its more rare than I originally thought.
A free and a little crazy idea for any laptop designer reading these comments: how about a detachable mic? Maybe USB C, maybe even a non standard plug. The advantage is that it's self evident when it's off, no need to inspect the hardware switch. The problem is that it could be lost. A solution would be a small safety strap, maybe transparent plastic.
My point is mostly that Microsoft probably isn't pushing a method to spy on people, so much as it's establishing that since most people need videoconferencing these days, they don't want any budget hardware vendors cutting out the front-facing camera to save $5 in parts. Most laptops already have them.
What a load of hyperbolic junk this is. Microsoft is trying to ensure consistency for people that buy Windows laptops. We can debate whether that is a smart move or not, but descending into 1984 fear-baiting is just nonsense.
Putting tape on camera's leaves residue and we all get stuck in Zoom calls these days.
Put a small piece of clean paper over the lens to protect it, then tape over that.
For those calling the 1984 references over the top fear mongering, I'd just ask one question: Why does Microsoft even care about users having a camera? When you answer that, I'd probably respond with "Nope, not a strong enough reason to be a requirement for Windows, try again." Rinse and and repeat. It's happening in China, it's happening at Amazon...
That's the next logical step, for "security", of course.
This kind of thing is absolutely mandatory in this day and age. If you don't let commodity OS makers set any limits on the hardware to ensure a consistent experience, it will be very hard for them to compete with integrated solutions.
If there was some kind of a suggestion of MS self-dealing here, then maybe the concerns would make sense. E.g. requiring the laptop to have a MS-manufactured camera. But there isn't. It is clearly just an attempt to set a consistent minimum bar on the UX.
Combining these three factors, the direction W11 is heading to does not look as genuine as they describe it. And if so, the descend from OEM requirement to OS requirement could happen sooner or later. I wholeheartedly hope they do not though.
Over the past few years we've seen Microsoft adopt increasingly user-hostile practices when it comes to privacy. It's not unreasonable to be concerned that this initiative will morph into something nefarious.
We went from "you need to have a network interface so you can activate the OS" to "Track all the things and phone home" in less than a decade.
I'm not a Windows fan or anything like that. Don't even use Windows as one of my main systems. I'm just dealing with it so I've seen some of these things.
Goes into more detail as to what they collect.
Browsing data, devices connected to the system, what you type, or transcribe via text or ink (speech to text, handwriting to text etc), what applications you're running and for how long.
> The opt-in/out is part of the setup process (in the cases I've seen) so it's not hidden away.
It gets reset _literally_ every time they push out a larger update. They prompt you with a modal form that defaults to tracking turned on (even though I had it turned off to begin with). Guess someone at Microsoft figured out that the tech-literate among us were turning that setting off as soon as our non-tech-literate family/friends took their PCs out of the box around the Christmas tree.
It kind of is, though. It's a classic slippery slope fallacy. Collecting user telemetry and spying on users via webcams you force hardware manufacturers to install in machines are miles, miles, miles apart from each other. I'm not trying to defend MS's telemetry collection here, I don't like it either. But the extrapolation is hyperbolic.
>The company has developed a way to track your gaze to make sure you're actually looking at the PreShow commercial. The app also places a green border around the edges of your screen to confirm that it sees you. If you look away for too long, or leave your seat, the ad automatically pauses and you'll get a red border around your screen.
This horrific shit is all ready to go, I think there is no hyperbole or irrational slippery slope at all
Debian didn't impress me when I upgraded my main workstation recently. A long list of important prompts and not so important prompts, enough to make me click "ok, whatever, get on with it". (Oh, and even Debian also requires a network interface and contains a phone-home package. Getting security fixes without a normal network interface is a Challenge, and security fixes aren't really optional these day.)
I’d say security fixes are rather optional these days if you have no network interface.
You certainly can buy a new laptop on Amazon, open it, remove the WLAN antenna, glue the USB plug(s) and need no security fixes. But at that point you're far from the mainstream. And I am impressed by how Microsoft manages to provide decent security in a user-friendly way, one that expects little unrealistic behaviour and doesn't restrict the term "user" to people far from the mainstream.
IMO the author overindexed on making vague allusions to telescreens ("1984-style future [...] laptops, desktop PCs, TVs") and criticising Microsoft for its "Productivity Score" (a different discussion entirely).
Even the argument for consistency is tenuous; its already consistent. Microsoft says that all laptops must have DDR memory, at least 4gb. Its the same thing; you don't need memory, technically, to run an OS. Its just better that its there, and operating systems can be more sophisticated knowing that you've got it.
Hardware shutters is what people should push for imo
Disabling and removing any recording capability at the hardware level is a requirement before you can even bring a laptop into the facility. Microsoft is well aware of this, and whatever this requirement actually is will definitely not apply to enterprise versions of Windows for this reason.
It is possible to get some exceptions to policy. My wife has hearing aids with radio capability, for instance. But they needed to be audited, and she had to prove they were 1) medically necessary for her job, and 2) the radio protocol only worked with the vendor's own devices and couldn't call out to something like a Bluetooth or WiFi receiver.
Windows 11 is shaping itself to be extra-special regarding that, unless my workplace requires it I believe I will just stick with Linux after whatever reason happens force me to stop using Win7. My wife computer is already Linux-only, no dual-boot.
Security updates do not prevent software from running.
If the former, then I don't see the big fuss, but if the latter, then no thanks. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Can't recall seeing any
Microsoft mandating that hardware OEMs not ship garbage laptops that don't have webcams makes a lot of sense. Otherwise there are going to be complaints that the integrated Teams video calling they're advertising as a big feature doesn't work.
This is just a concession that must be made before you're permitted to pre-install Windows for your customers.
Makes sense to me. People bundle their hardware experience with what they consider a windows machine vs. an apple machine.
There are so many of them on Amazon, searching for laptop camera cover slide.
And I don't even use Windows. I run Ubuntu but I want to be sure that the camera doesn't see anything when it's supposed to be off.
So I still unplug it when not in use.
well, seems like someone didn't understand, what a TPM module can actually do and what it's used for.