Advent Information Systems, L.L.C.

If anyone is in need of a Windows license, Windows 11 Pro is available here for about $23.00, which is a pretty good deal for the Pro version of the operating system. Install it alongside WindowsSpyBlocker and a few other Group Policy settings to mitigate Microsoft's keyloggin and image hoovering spyware to use Windows as safely as possible.

As always, it simply cannot be as secure as any Linux flavor (we recommend Linux Mint), but we understand that application compatibility and usability are key aspects of computing for our users.

Microsoft Windows 11 Pro | StackSocial Upgrade Your Windows OS & Enjoy Enhanced UI, Better Multitasking, and Improved Security

Man, you really get a VIEW of just how much data these companies are collecting on you when you're getting down into the weeds to disable all of these "features" to protect your personal and/or business information.

It doesn't actually take that much to describe what they're taking. If you use Google Chrome or Windows 8 or above (but ESPECIALLY Windows 10 and above)... they're basically taking every single button you press. Every keystroke, and very likely quite a few mouse movements and UI buttons clicked. If you use Microsoft 365 (and likely any recent version of Office newer than, say, 2010), same same, except they also upload every photo you put in an Excel (???), PowerPoint, and Word document.

I'm not sure how to appropriately convey that when I say everything, I quite literally mean that they vacuum up EVERYTHING: Every keystroke, every picture. You ever typed your credit card number into Microsoft Edge to buy something? Of course not, you're not a savage, you use Google Chrome like a civilized person! Yeah, Chrome does that too - and if you're running Chrome on Windows... well, Windows will help itself to your credit card number before dutifully passing it off to Chrome. Do you use the built-in Windows Mail client? Great, that's all of your email correspondence that they feed into their All-Mind in the cloud.

Of course they have lovely innocuous explanations of how they're of course VERY VERY SERIOUS about protecting your data (everything you type, potentially useful images of proprietary business information) and all that jazz, and in theory why, you silly geese this is just for spell-checking and improving accessibility via AI-generated alt-text for your pictures in non-web files like Office documents!

In limited cases, this is an understandable method of figuring out how users use software so that developers can improve it - do you keep maintaining features that users next to never use? Do you keep UI elements front and center when users seldom use them? Etc. That's all fine and dandy.

If they were upfront and transparent about it. They aren't. They've just figured out "ways" that they can - quite literally - send every keystroke you type up to their mothership, to build a virtual soul of you with which to sell to advertisers and god knows what else.

Moral of the story?

Well, the easiest thing to do would be to run a solution I've found called WindowsSpyBlocker: It's a solution that blocks hundreds, maybe THOUSANDS of various Microsoftian mothership URLs that relate to their data collection using Windows' built-in firewall. (link: https://github.com/crazy-max/WindowsSpyBlocker)

There's also a smorgasbord of Local and Domain Group Policies that administrators (and users, if you're the administrator of your computer) can tick off to ostensibly blunt some of this firehose of your data. This might be over the heads of most users, however, which is why I'm building a .reg file that will make it significantly easier to simply import the settings necessary without needing to be a diode-head like me.

But at the end of the day, we're still at the behest of TRUSTING them that that's what they're doing and nothing else - because we can't verify that that's what the code is actually doing (it's proprietary, closed-source software, after all) and of course, for-profit, private corporations have never had a long and storied track record of not giving a s**t about consumer rights or anti-competitive behavior or anything. Also? This is an arms race: Microsoft and Google and all of the rest are aware of these measures to improve user privacy, and they are actively working on countermeasures around them. The only REAL way we start making headway is by using well-vetted, actively- and professionally-developed, open-source solutions.

Make open-source a feature that you compromise on only in the rarest of circumstances. Donate to your favorite open-source products.

Use Chrome? Don't. Use Brave, Chromium, or ideally, Firefox. Firefox even has a nice little plugin called "Facebook Container," which boxes Facebook (and it's properties like Instagram and Whatsapp) into their own neat little tab groups, and forbids data leakage to or from those tabs.

The harder part is getting away from using Windows and Microsoft Office, which users are loathe to do - but they're taking the data YOU generate, effectively without asking, and using it to rake in wild profits. You get none of that - and you PAY for the software that does it to you. Using flavors of Linux, switching to OnlyOffice or LibreOffice is the only way we escape this.

For more wonderful corporate spying, check out these links (warning, some get fairly technical but vindicate the notion that your Windows-based computer has like eight or nine keyloggers on it, installed courtesy of Microsoft):

https://www.otto-js.com/news/article/chrome-and-edge-enhanced-spellcheck-features-expose-pii-even-your-passwords

https://office-watch.com/2017/new-privacy-leakage-office-2016-windows/

https://www.ghacks.net/2022/09/19/dont-use-chromes-and-edges-enhanced-spellcheck-features/

For all you le artists out there doing your good work with Free (as in Freedom) and Open Source Software, rejoice! Linux distributions now have an excellent color picker tool similar to MacOS Pick and Windows 10 PowerToys Color Picker.

It is, creatively, called Pick - and until recently it was only available on the Snap store. It has since moved into the future, and is available as a Flatpak now, and works great.

Pick: a colour picker for Ubuntu Pick A colour picker for Ubuntu and other Linux OSes. see video About Pick Pick lets you pick colours from anywhere on your screen. Choose the colour you want and Pick remembers it, names it, and shows you a screenshot so you can remember where you got it from. Zoom all the way in to pixels to pick....