[water-data-dude]

Regrettably, I have to use a windows machine for work. The other day I got one where the "fact" was an offer to help me pic out the right laptop or tablet to get the most out of copilot.

To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".

It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.

[ok123456]

Back when people customized screensavers, you would put the .scr file (a regular exe) in the Windows directory, and it would populate the list of screen savers? I'm guessing that's no longer a thing in the name of security theater.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Not so much security theater as a large number of exploits were disguised as .scr files as it was easy to trick a user into downloading one and then it would run with full system access

[ok123456]

Restrict .scr to run as an unprivileged user without network or filesystem access, that always launches the system login/unlock on exit?

This seems better than having a program that does random web requests to put ads on the lock screen.