[paulkrush]

Microsoft announced that you can extend Windows 10 support if you enroll in Microsoft Backup or purchase “Microsoft Points.” Just think if they get printer manufacturers in on this, just to keep your ink cartridges “authentic” and up to date, and you can keep using Windows 10. And so on...

It’s interesting/unsettling to extrapolate a dystopian future from these moves. Keiichi Matsuda’s short film “Hyper-Reality”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

[goosedragons]

You don't purchase Microsoft points. You can purchase extra support with 1000 Microsoft points that you can easily get for free in like a week clicking on some links on Bing.

[timewizard]

So help microsoft rip off it's advertising partners in exchange for the allowance to use software you're already using.

It's astonishing this corporation exists.

[mystified5016]

That's paying for them with your time. You'd be better off spending that time earning money for yourself instead of Microsoft's ad network

[goosedragons]

It's literally like 5 min a day. Not even. They just cap how many points you can earn in a day.

[discostrings]

For many, and hopefully increasingly more and more of us, time and attention can be more valuable than money.

Manipulating our behavior to develop familiarity with a product by seeding the habit of using it as an ad-clicking serf and nurturing that habit by drawing it out across a series of days as the means of acquiring security for our tools and information is a coercive and corrosive exchange.

It's designed to seem like such a small thing that it's benign, as if attention is worth infinitely less than money. By changing us, forming new and often bad habits, and extracting ongoing attention interest payments without us noticing, the cost can end up being far greater.

[_lvbh]

This sounds like a black mirror episode to me. I've briefly used Windows Server 2012 a while back but otherwise used Linux my whole life. The way people complain about needing to learn how to type 'sudo dnf install' is too much work when they have to either install a bunch of tweaks to fix win11 or remove bloat from win10… I can't tell if I'm the insane one

[fredfish]

I haven't heard of that absurd business model since the Internet 1.0 bubble popped.