[flyinghamster]

Maybe I'm overly paranoid (but considering Microsoft's behavior over the past twenty years, it would be in character), I can't help but think that WSL is a stalking horse for forbidding Linux from bare metal booting on consumer PCs. Revoke the Linux distro UEFI keys for "reasons" and there you have it.

[coliveira]

That's not paranoid at all. MS goal is to declare Linux a "legacy" environment, like they tried to do with UNIX in the 80s (the so called POSIX subsystem).

[taeric]

The part that really pains on this, is it is a common pattern in our entire industry. :(

[raxxorrax]

Secure boot could be a good feature, but it can be severely abused. Some people really put effort in it to make it more secure. But the usual problems of certificate logistics leads to the case the Microsoft basically owns secure boot.

Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.

[somehnguy]

>Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.

Which is completely absurd. Within minutes of Netflix/anyone releasing anything new I can download it via Usenet or torrents. Nothing anyone does will change that reality. They just continue to make it more difficult for the average user to access content via player requirements for various DRM schemes. Which funny enough pushes people back to pirating to avoid all the nonsense.

It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.

[errantspark]

> It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.

I can't imagine doing this, to be honest if I were asked to implement DRM I would quit, or try to make sure there are fundamental flaws in the scheme, it's the only moral thing to do if you're put in that situation imo.

EDIT: To those upvoting me, software as a service is usually DRM, so maybe hold your upvote if you're complicit.

[mschuster91]

> Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.

They already do on Android. Root your device and either play cat and mouse with Magisk and Universal SafetyNet fix, or get downgraded to L3. And even then, it's uncertain how long the USN hack will last, given that all it does is pretend the device doesn't have hardware attestation - once Google decides to mandate HA for all Android 12 and above devices (as all SoCs capable of running that should have some form of secure element), it's game over.

We need legislative action against anti-rooting measures and other shit that takes away control of devices from users, and that fast, but it doesn't look like it's high on the priority list for the next year of the Biden admin, and after that we will likely see, once again, a gridlocked Congress and in 2024 the Rise of the Sith again.

[marcosdumay]

> Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.

Well, as soon as they do that they become useless for me and I'll unsubscribe.

I don't know how many people are on the same boat, but between badly developed smart tvs and top boxes there are probably a large number.

[jacquesm]

Bye, Netflix.

[Animats]

I think of Windows as a legacy environment, having abandoned it when Windows 7 ended. That's when Microsoft exited the operating system business and entered the ad business.

[tomnipotent]

> MS goal is to declare Linux a "legacy" environment

Your information is a decade out of date. More than half of Azure instances run Linux, and it's a huge source of income for MS now. Billions huge.

[geofft]

Microsoft is a very large company. Anyone who's worked at a company even a tenth the size of Microsoft knows how hard it is to get the company to pick a direction.

The only real direction you can get everyone to agree on is "profit," and the nice thing about the existence of Azure as one of their major profit centers is that Microsoft now has a bunch of business that depends on Linux running well. A company mostly running Linux is already looking at them as third place behind Amazon and Google - if Microsoft risks making kernel developers unable to run Linux, they risk making kernel developers unwilling to accept patches to make Azure (or WSL) run Linux well. I'm not saying they're never going to try it, since the Azure org doesn't control the UEFI signing program, but I am saying there's a significant part of the company that will say that it threatens their profits to a scale much larger than the lost Windows licenses on consumer PCs.

Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). The only thing harder than getting a company the size of Microsoft to agree on something is to get the rest of the industry to go along with it too. The few cases where they've succeeded (e.g., the thing from the 1980s where they made OEMs pay them even for machines that didn't ship with MS-DOS) were when they had a sufficiently technically superior product they could use to bully people. They don't have that power anymore.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.).

You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor.

Netscape is dead (and Firefox is dying), all the historical competitors to MS Office are dead or have negligible market share, Java never got enough market share to make it easy for people to switch away from Windows, AIM/ICQ/whatever are all dead (and worse, nobody really uses XMPP or other open protocols), hardly anybody runs their own email server anymore, etc.

They successfully destroyed all of the independent versions of these things, so that now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

It's also kind of disingenuous to say "IE is dead" and "MSN Messenger is dead" and ignore Edge and Skype and Teams etc.

[0x0nyandesu]

Windows market share is the lowest it's ever been. Haven't used windows myself since March 2020 and nothing is making me want to change that.

[lotsofpulp]

As far as I am concerned, the whole future of Microsoft is Azure and extracting rent from Office.

[Tozen]

Well, until the LibreOffice Foundation gets a bit smarter or greater business support from some heavy hitters. Microsoft relying on Office is on shaky ground.

People arguably use MS Office out of habit and since it's a forced de facto standard at work. But, there is no reason they can't switch to LibreOffice for 95% plus of what people are doing.

[lotsofpulp]

Leaders of large organizations need someone outside the organization to blame when things go wrong. You cannot do that with Libre Office.

[jacquesm]

And they can't even get those right, between Skype and Teams it would be hard to pick the bigger failure.

[ta3567367]

Underestimating the JVM there a bit. Sucks that Oracle tried to monster it, but it's a solid workhorse. Also, down with MS, leopards don't change their stripes so easily, a change of helm won't turn a company with greed so deeply entrenched in their DNA. *Spots not stripes. Or tigers.

[AnthonyMouse]

So this requires some context.

Java was released by Sun Microsystems, a Unix vendor with their own hardware architecture. The big feature was "write once, run anywhere." Write the program once and it would run on Windows/Intel as well as Solaris/SPARC.

The Java language wasn't horrible and WORA was a big advantage in the days when there were half a dozen Unix vendors plus Mac and Windows and Novell Netware etc. So it was becoming popular, and every app the developer decided to write in Java was one that wasn't tied to the Win32 API and therefore Windows.

It's also possible to compile other languages to Java bytecode as along as they didn't use OS-specific APIs -- and Java provided platform-independent ones. So there was a real risk that everything would end up running on a platform-independent JVM. Which Microsoft successfully prevented from happening for long enough for Sun to run out of money and get consumed by Oracle.

[com2kid]

It is hard to remember, or for younger developers to believe, but there was a time in the mid 90s when:

1. Most programing languages sucked

2. Java was fresh and new

Java had a lot going for it. It was free, with a functioning IDE that had a working graphical debugger! MS had just about finished killing Delphi (which also cost $$) and over in *nix land the GUI libraries were fighting amongst themselves and Linux wasn't something even an average developer was going to install.

So you had Perl, raw C, the horrors that were DSLs and frameworks written in the c++ of the time, then Java came along.

Applets failed, sure. And back then everyone wanted their GUIs to look like the platform native UI (how times have changed!) but Swing was super easy to write UIs in.

I'd wager the majority of programmers, outside of ex-LISP folks, didn't know what closures were, and functions as first class objects wasn't on anyone's mind.

So all of Java's shortcomings didn't seem like a big deal. It "compiled" fast, had actual packages you could distribute and import easily, and the compiler errors made sense.

So yeah Java was a fresh breath when it came out.

Then c# came out a bit later and was basically better in a million small ways from day 1, except it wasn't open source so a community never built up around it in the same way.

Now days we are spoiled for languages to choose from.

[stickfigure]

None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"? And they're misleading at best.

Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system. That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality (see: every other OS). Just imagine shipping a computing device today without a browser! Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode. The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.

Java was never a Windows replacement. And as a platform it is doing just fine.

Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. It's not like everyone is using Skype (which MS bought, not built, and long after the IM dust had settled).

Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach. It requires professional knowledge to get email delivered these days.

[nitrogen]

None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"?

They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser.

That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality

That's what BG said in his deposition, but MS was the only company who embedded IE into the OS to make ActiveDesktop and put VBScript and ActiveX into IE.

Java was never a Windows replacement.

AWT and Swing and browser applets were Windows replacements.

Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.

You're talking about things that happened ten years later. There was a time when one app would connect to every network.

Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail.

MS Exchange dominates email.

[dralley]

>They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser.

All of those efforts failed miserably. They have nothing to do with the actual reasons why Netscape died, why Firefox is trending down, why Java never became dominant, why Open/LibreOffice never replaced MS Office, why open chat protocols were replaced by chat services from Google, Facebook, Discord and Slack, why Java applets never caught on, etc.

[nitrogen]

All of those efforts failed miserably.

The grandparent comment is right on the money with "You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor."

MS bought at least 10-15 years of dominance with EEE, vaporware, and other anticompetitive practices.

Just like Google killed RSS with Reader.

Just like Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to avoid them potentially growing into replacements for Facebook.

The goal was to kill or delay an upstart that would distract users away from their core products, not to produce a successful competitor to the upstart.

Netscape

Netscape no doubt had its own problems, but MS deeply embedding IE into Windows 98 was a huge part of them.

Java

Actually Java was pretty dominant. Interactive web was either Flash or Java. If it was for entertainment, it was Flash, if it was for work or computation, it was Java.

Open/LibreOffice

Have you forgotten WordPerfect?

[AnthonyMouse]

> All of those efforts failed miserably.

To this day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...

There was a period in the early 2000s where that was everywhere, and that was when Netscape died.

Causing intentional problems with non-Microsoft Office products on Microsoft operating systems is what caused everyone to get locked into Microsoft Office file formats.

Microsoft successfully suppressed Java for long enough for Sun to die.

You can't just say "no it isn't" and make it otherwise.

[mcguire]

"MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java."

You mean C#?

[nitrogen]

C# was part of what survived all of that, but I mean MS's original forays into Java.

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun's_litigatio...

[selectodude]

>Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Dropbox, which has also been falling apart trying to become a product.

[letitbeirie]

> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system

It's hard to decouple the fate of Netscape from their catastrophic decision to rewrite their entire codebase from scratch:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[mixmastamyk]

That was the final nail in the coffin, but they had been pushed aside before that. Hence the final "hail mary."

[AnthonyMouse]

> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system.

You're ignoring the actual EEE part.

Microsoft didn't just include a browser, they included a browser that didn't follow standards and had a bunch of its own extensions. Then since Windows was the largest platform, lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls and other IE-specific features on websites, and users had to switch to IE even if they preferred a different browser.

> Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.

Steve Jobs did the same thing. You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers to force developers into making native apps where Apple gets 30% of the developer's revenue and can exclude apps that compete with their own services.

> Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode.

The history of Office goes like this. There were many competitors and many users preferred the competitors, but Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems so that people would use Office instead.

Then, once Office had the most market share and everybody was locked into it because all their documents were in its proprietary format, they used the revenues they denied to competitors to make Office better. Now you say, look how good it is! But how did it get there and why is nobody else?

> The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.

now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

> Java was never a Windows replacement.

It wasn't supposed to be an operating system. It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems, which Microsoft successfully impaired.

> Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.

This is the one where they basically failed, because the network effect counterbalanced the leverage of the Windows monopoly. If your friends had ICQ then you installed ICQ even if you already had MSN Messenger installed as part of Windows.

But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE. If they'd succeeded in getting MSN Messenger into a dominant market position then they could discontinue or cripple the non-Windows clients and lock people into Windows with it.

> Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail.

Outlook.com has 400 million users.

> And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach.

Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach, by marking email from small email servers as spam even when it wasn't. Plausibly on purpose.

And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange. Gmail did that by offering 1GB free storage back when that was expensive and subsidizing it with Google Search revenues.

[mrtranscendence]

> You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers

This is not a serious take. Safari on iOS is a very capable browser and crazy things have been done with it. Where it does make it difficult to replace a dedicated app, this can be ascribed to security more easily than "Apple wants one of its major iOS features to be bad".

> Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems

This is not a serious take. I'd love to see proof of this. There are lots of reasons Office became dominant, some of them even anticompetitive; "MS made competitors crash" is probably not one of them.

> It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems

This is not a serious take. Java was never intended to make it easy for users to switch operating systems. Sun did not make "supplant Windows!" one of its KPIs, and the continued dominance of Windows is neither here nor there when evaluating whether Java was successful. Java's pitch was to make writing platform-independent code easier, but at best that's tangentially related to having users switch OS's.

> Outlook.com has 400 million users.

So?

> And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange.

You're replying to a comment about people who run their own web server, so talking about Exchange lock-in is neither here nor there.

[stickfigure]

> lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls

Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s

> The history of Office goes like this.

I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.

> Java

Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.

> But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE.

You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.

> Outlook.com has 400 million users.

"Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia

> Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach

Man where do you get this stuff? I wrote a mailing list server that had a brief moment of popularity, and the underlying (Java!) smtp library that lots of other folks use still today. I know a thing or two about smtp, and I gave up running my own email servers a long time ago. Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team. Barring some sort of massive change in the protocols, the home email server is dead dead dead. Microsoft and Google are the symptom, not the cause.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s

It did take over the web, for long enough to kill Netscape. Then they stopped caring because Netscape was already dead.

> I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.

You're denying that Microsoft caused intentional problems for companies making competing products on Microsoft operating systems?

> Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.

For Java to pose a threat to Windows it had to be a large enough proportion of software to allow people to switch away from Windows. To succeed they only needed to keep it below that threshold, not keep anyone from developing any Java applications at all.

> You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.

Explain Internet Explorer's market share circa 2004.

> "Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia

So a number of users larger than the population of the United States is to be disregarded because one other provider's is bigger?

now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.

> Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team.

The problem is completely the other way around. Receiving spam is a minor inconvenience. The biggest problem with running a small email server is that messages you send are marked as spam by large email providers even when they're not.

[mixmastamyk]

How odd… seem to have all the facts at your disposal, yet use them to support the argument of the person you are adamant that you disagree with. Not a combo I've seen.

MS did destroy whole swaths of the industry that threatened it—on purpose. A lot of the initiatives failed later, but I'm sure they cried all the way to the bank and their record-breaking yachts.

That a lot of their competitors stumbled on their own was simple fate. Every company stumbles once in a while. Unlike MS which was bolstered by monopoly, a single significant mistake meant the end of most competitors. MS on the other hand was heavily insured with a river of money after the IBM deal.

[shrimp_emoji]

>Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" ... is something that failed

And probably wasn't GPL-licensed. That part introduces a slight problem to the EEE process. ;p

[trulyme]

Not sure why you are being downvoted, you have a point. Though it'snot about license, but more about market position. I'm also afraid that MS still has plans for Linux, but they are on the first E atm.

[raxxorrax]

I have exactly the same fear. Trying to lock down boot on PC is pretty much exactly what they seem to be doing. Hello to shitty OS on PCs... (yes, every mobile OS is pretty bad)

[Mikeb85]

I think this is something MS could try.

However the whole computing paradigm has changed. Laptops/PCs are now 'trucks' and the 'cars' of the computing world are phones, tablets and consoles. Ie. Laptops and PCs are mainly used for work now, and lots of that work is being done on Linux. Lenovo ThinkPads can be shipped with RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu. Several Dell laptops (including the highest end workstations) can be shipped with Ubuntu. Framework and System76 of course are Linux friendly/default. And most other makers allow disabling UEFI from the BIOS menu.

Considering how much of MS' value is derived from Azure and that their main competitors are Linux-first (Amazon, Google), it'd be idiotic for them to try kill Linux again. You're right though, they'll probably try. I just have faith that enough hardware makers care about their users more than propping up WinTel like the old days (both Linux and AMD have made massive inroads).

[deepstack]

I wouldn't put anything pass these guys (MS). Don't think you are overly paranoid. With MS, they backdoors, one can NEVER be too paranoid.

[vbezhenar]

Those fears will be reasonable when most computers will not allow disabling Secure boot. Right now that's not the case for x86.

[skohan]

It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the measures being put in place which would make this possible, especially given MS's history.

To give an analogy, there might have been a time in East Berlin where people could have said: "It's fine that they check papers before crossing into West Germany. Your fears will be reasonable when they no longer permit entry."

[CursedUrn]

Secure Boot is about to become the consumer standard with Windows 11. Popular online games are already starting to require it. I wouldn't be surprised to see Netflix and other streaming services require it.

[marcosdumay]

Keep in mind that this is currently possible only because some governments were looking into persecuting MS for abuse of market power when Secure Boot was standardized.

[delusional]

It doesn't matter if that's the explicit goal. Given the opportunity MS would do it.

[pigbearpig]

Yeah, I think you're being overly paranoid.