lemmydividebyzeroDark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation – OSnews
jordanlundWeird, I recently bought that same phone and did not have that problem. Why?
“Do you want to transfer your files from another device?”
No.
Just no. I don’t need your help, I can do this myself. Previous phone is backed up to my NAS, I can restore what I want from there.
I see a new phone as an opportunity to leave stuff behind. It’s on the NAS if I REALLY need it.
Very wise. I approve.
See…the “problem” with this is that it’s work.
Its not work to say no. Its work for all the stuff leading up to that. You had to think about how you want your files stored, organized, and backed up. You had to think about how you wanted to access it all and from where. Then you had to set all that stuff up to work.
The vast majority of people don’t do this. Partly for not knowing how to but mostly for not wanting to try to figure out a system that works for them.
They just want things to work when they need them and not think about it at any other time. Gee, I wonder what could ever go wrong with that mentality.
And I don’t want to blame the victim here, because the root of this particular story still doesn’t change.
But there is a little bit of self responsibility that needs to be had. If you give big tech all the controls, you are at their mercy to what they do. But to have any semblance of control yourself, you need to take it. Then you have the power to say no.
whalerossTL;dr New Samsung phone syncs 280GB of photos to OneDrive that in turn fills the laptop storage . At some point something has become corrupted with attempting to log in and change password when the laptop disk is full.
Yes, all of that happened but it happened because Samsung uploaded the photos without clear authorization and Microsoft downloaded all of the files without authorization after One Drive was automatically reinstalled after the user deliberately removed it.
The thing is you do get the choice to sync the account, it’s not automagic, so the writer saying “she didn’t authorize it” is actually false. Generalizing here but most non-tech literate people generally sort to just pressing “next next yes” on everything so it’s not unlikely she’s simply authorized it without actually realizing it. Same with Onedrive sync, it’s not automatic, you get the option but it’s very simple to opt out during OOBE or when prompted in Windows, but most people simply look at it and say “that sounds neat”.
That said the OOBE on new Samsungs is absolutely atrocious and I don’t blame her for ending up in this situation. It’s like a 20 step process on the S25 (I have one so I know what it’s like) and I’m definitely not defending the clusterfuck that Windows is. I feel for both of them. I’m just saying there are some inaccuracies.
IronKrillThats exactly what dark paterns are: asking „do you want to backup your files?“, instead of transparently asking if you want to „MOVE your files to OneDrive“. Then not providing clear „Yes“ and „No“ buttons. But showing a convenient „Continue“ (or similar) and a scary worded „dont backup“ (or similar). And there are so many times where I deliberately uninstalled Onedrive, Outlook(new) and others, only to find them back in the menu an hour later. Also hate these f**ing questions, where you have the big blue „Yes“ button and only a „ask me later“ to deny.
Or you have to find some blue words in the explaining text to click on, like when starting MS-Office on a local account the first time: Big „Login everywhere with MS-Account“ button, and „only MS-Apps“ just in the fine print (not even a way to say „only use MS-Account in Office“)
This same issue can happen if your bios is updated by Windows in some cases as the bios resets, security is considered changed so your pin is set as invalid… Despite it being Windows which caused the issue. AHH Microsoft, incompetence defined.
bleistift2As in Aaaaaahhh!!
It is comforting, in a dystopian way, to see that the world continues to operate as expected. Remember when Bill Gates started being cool and sending people Xboxes on Reddit ands everyone was like this guy is pretty cool for a mega-rich and those of us who have been around were like yeah this is really weird and I don’t trust it.
Then it turns out the guy was a sex pest and a friend of Epstein and we were all like… okay yeah this all makes sense again.
Similar thing.
turboSnailYikes! That was pretty messed up. Goes to show that you can’t really trust Microsoft or Samsungto handle things for you.
They weren’t using OneDrive either
RxBradI believe the last time I had to do a Windows re-install, I was nagged THREE times to enable OneDrive. Each time, the opt out button was increasingly difficult to locate, and the verbiage more & more resembling “you’re an idiot if you don’t enable this”.
Even after refusing to use it x3, once Windows was installed, OneDrive was still sitting down in the system tray, ready to fuck shit up.
You actually think you decide to use one drive or not when you use Windows? So naive.
Perfect opportunity to install linux instead of the joke that win11 is
This is also a case where EU still sleeps; that you have to agree to some end user agrerment and possibly log-in to some account to even start using your smartphone.
Dark patterns killed my wife
For unknown reasons, I stopped reading the headline at this point for about 3 seconds…
Yeah I did the same and thought I was about to read an extremely dark conspiracy theory blog post
svelteciderThat’s for OpenAI, not Microsoft
Damn me too!
The only course of action most Windows users would take at this point is a full reinstallation.
I think most users would either hire someone to reinstall Windows for them or would decide to buy a new laptop. The fun part is that as soon as they log into their MS account after a reload/purchase the sync would happen again and they would be right back where they started.
2025-09-18
What’s up with the old reposts today?
Well, I found some nice blogs and enjoyed reading a few articles today on my weekend and I though “maybe, others enjoy those, too”, so I shared 3 of them. They got around 900 upvotes in total, so I think, that was not a bad decision (for me, it’s not about internet points, but about discourse / seeing what others think).
I also couldn’t find past posts of this article in [email protected], so it shouldn’t be a duplicate -> reddthat.com/search?q=dark+patterns&type=All&list…
Lots of people miss posts and there’s always a main character who’s oh-so offended because if they’ve seen something before, obviously everyone else has too. Thanks for reposting(?) this.
Not offended in the slightest. Their response already allayed my worries that it was someone from Reddit thinking karma farming works here.
I’m a big fan of Xkcd #1053 myself. ;)
StarDreamerGrab your shovel, time to lucky 10000 some bash.org pages!
Ah, the good stuff. Too early in the day for my fix though :P
What’s up with the Gestapo investigation on the calendar?
Let me, for once, not mince words here: Windows 11 is a travesty, a loose collection of dark patterns and incompetence, run by people who have zero interest in lovingly crafting an operating system they can be proud of. Windows has become a vessel for subscriptions and ads, and cannot reasonably be considered anything other than a massive pile of user-hostile dark patterns designed to extract data, ad time, and subscription money from its users.
I ran into the same type of problem trying to reset the forgotten MS password for a friend. In her case she could log in to her PC with a PIN but not her password. Outlook was still accessible from the PC but not her phone.
Attempting to change the password resulted in an “SMS service not available” message 90% of the time over a period of days. The few times the service was available and it said we successfully changed the password, the new password would not work, even when we were positive it was entered correctly. The SSD wasn’t anywhere near full.
Microsoft then turned the days already wasted because of their incompetence into a week. As a last ditch effort we tried Microsoft’s 24 hour turn-around password reset questionnaire three times. After going through the process the new password was still rejected both on her PC and phone every single time.
We eventually had to give up. If her PC or her Outlook app ever asks for a password she’ll lose all access and that’s apparently just fine with Microsoft. When she does buy a new PC it’ll be an Apple.
When she does buy a new PC it’ll be an Apple.
an apple? Because of this? why? why is it not an option to use a computer without an online account?
Microsoft is making it impossible to use Windows PCs without an online account. Obviously there’s Linux, but I’m not willing to be her only source of tech support. That leaves Apple.
in the consumer versions, yes. but more generally that will still remain an option for some time at least.
for now, there’s windows 10 LTSC, updates until 2032. I would get her this. after that she could still use windows 11 LTSC releases, which don’t receive surprise function changes because businesses use it for critical things.
massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
same site also has an open source forever activation tool
I’ve used Massgrave, but that and the other things you mentioned are not options in this case.
A few years ago I helped a different friend when her printer quit working on Windows 10. What started as occasional help turned into near daily phone calls and demands for tech support to get the printer working again. Turned out her boyfriend was getting pissed off when he was playing a game and killing Windows with the power button on the PC.
Lesson learned.
I’m not willing to become anyone’s tech support rep. I’ll help this friend occasionally but won’t go further than that.
ok, but won’t they also demand tech support for the mac? and if others can’t give them help for windows, and you won’t either, who will for the mac?
Apple.
Gotta laugh at the downvotes. Maybe you’d like to be her tech support?
Sorry I wasn’t clear - I should have worded it differently. I meant to infer that I was referring to whomever did.
OS-X (they still use that, right? Not iOS desktop or somesuch nonsense, yet?) seemed pretty much a middle ground between Windows and Linux the last time I used it. Kinda slightly more polished and uniform presentation than Ubuntu-du-jour, a little less mysterious than Windows, but in the end: just as screwed up.
I tried enabling Home folder encryption. After about 3 days a hard power-off shutdown (needed due to a driver error in their walled-garden hardware MacBook Pro, it wouldn’t power off or restart any other way) then the encrypted home folder was toast, unretrievable - laptop wouldn’t boot. Tech support was very nice, reassuring that they knew what was going on, and their best solution? Reinstall the OS from physical media, start over fresh, your files are so secure that not you or anybody else on the planet will ever see them again.
that’s ridiculous. not even linux is that secure, unless you only store the luks keys on ramdisk haha
Well, the home folder was encrypted, and the hard shutdown had borked the headers in such a way that the decryption was failing. I suppose a few hundred hours of technical analysis might have retrieved the files, but luckily it was a new PC and I only had about 100 hours of work on it to start with.
no matter how difficult you think linux is to use, can it really be that difficult compared to windows? At least with linux any problems can be solved one way or another and with varying levels of effort. With windows, you just have to deal with the ever increasing levels of bullshit. And if you dont need to do anything complicated and use pc just for browsing, email and other simple stuff, why would you put yourself through using windows to do it? People should really consider if the mental models they have in their heads about different operating systems are actually based on reality.
People should really consider if the mental models they have in their heads about different operating systems are actually based on reality.
These people’s reality is: they are familiar with Windows, and anything else is scary and perceived as even more difficult to learn to use. 20 years ago a colleague asked me about changing to Linux, I told him he could do all the same things he was doing, just use Open Office instead of MS Word and Excel, GIMP instead of Photoshop - he didn’t even dive as deep as the differences between GIMP and Photoshop usage, his response was: “You mean I’ll have to learn all new icons and names for my software?” “Well, yeah, that’s part of moving.” “In that case I don’t think Linux is for me.” “I have to agree with you there.”
I use Linux and Mac and windows and Linux is definitely the “hardest” to use for most people day to day. I think most people on this site are in tech so they underestimate just how tech illiterate the average person is.
It “can” be … it’s just what people are more familiar with sometimes and new terms that seem native like: “control panel” “command prompt” “regedit” can be strange to people that haven’t. It’s not that they can’t learn it, it’s just a bit of an uphill battle.
Hell, Bazzite confused me for a bit because I didn’t know wtf an immutable distro was.
yeah, bazzite is still somewhat confusing to me because its so different from other distros i have used. But whenever i dont know or understand something i just search for guides and explanations or if nothing else works or i feel lazy i might even cave in to ask llm for info. Idea of not looking up information is just something that doesnt even occur to me, its like refusing to be autonomous.
Hugging StarsWith Windows you simply have much less problems to solve. Normal people don’t care about jumping through hoops to create local accounts, they’ll just register.
Windows interfaces are designed for easy learning and backed by real telemetry data from millions of systems, like Ribbon menus. On Linux power users run the show so even blatant violations of basic principles tend to stick since the development version is the shipped version and is what they are used to.
Though when you do encounter problems in windows, they will likely be something that just cant be solved or its unnecessarily big hassle. Or bad stuff will happen that was mostly out of your hands in the first place, like what happened with the article.
But yeah, there should be a distro that is specificially aimed for tech illiterate people that is nice and easy to use and also safe. But then again, if majority started using linux it might also draw more attention from malicious parties like criminals and corporations. Its just that for me, once you have linux set up and automated, you dont need to do anything complicated with it if you dont want to. At least i havent had to on mint. I understand that basic users can’t do that on their own, but I bet there are tons of people who have skills to do so and could do it for a reasonable pay or even as a favor to friend.
Ah, Windows and OneDrive. A match made in hell.
I’ve despised them ever since I built a Win11 PC, it was enabled without my consent, immediately stopped me from adding any new files to my Desktop+Documents once it ran out of the pitiful 5 free gigabytes, and promptly deleted all of my data from those folders when I deactivated the “feature”.
That miserable experience, combined with every third update putting me through a setup that employed dark patterns to try to trick me into turning it back on (not to mention my fears that they’d pull the same crap with Recall), was the main thing that caused me to ditch Windows. I don’t like feeling dread every time there’s a new update, assholes.