| I work at an e-waste recycling company, and I have some thoughts: I've been seeing some interesting hardware that I wouldn't have otherwise. I have a Microsoft Surface Hub sitting around that I've yet to list. It's a 55" 1080p touchscreen videoconferencing monitor. It has an embedded PC (4th gen i5), but (if I recall) it was likely bricked several months ago by a firmware update that deleted the certificates it used to verify its bootloader. We don't have a Windows distribution license (and little willingness to provide support), so we can't install Windows on anything we sell. We usually install Linux, and it's cool to think we're helping to move the needle on Linux usage. If we can't sell something, we take the RAM and drives, because the AI rush drove up prices for those. The scrap gets sold to refiners who shred it and dissolve in acid to extract materials, like you would with mined ore. Microsoft has been fighting local accounts on Windows 11 very hard so MDM locking works more often. It locks a PC to a corporate domain, so when you install Windows, it forces you to login to a specific domain, and it won't let you get around it. Many of these machines we get are quite valuable otherwise (e.g. Dell Precision laptops with good GPUs), but we have buyers that will pay good money for them, even when MDM locked. > Sure the hardware vendors love it. And it's all spun up as "we're keeping you secure and better." Only for Microsoft to keep pushing AI harder and harder, and at some point your data will be stolen to train the model. (If they can't, they can unilaterally update the terms of use to allow it.) At least you can ask it for your credit card number. |