I recently saw a reddit thread that was a repost, and every comment was a bot reposting the comments from the last time it was posted. And in the middle of that, there was like a single human commenting on it, not realizing he was intruding on a karma farming circle jerk filled with bots.
I’ll try embedding the image, if it’s too compressed to read I can upload it somewhere else:
A bank I used for a mortgage has mandatory text message 2fa if they think you’re on a new device (won’t allow google auth/etc). And web browsers like firefox/brave block enough cookies/etc that it requires the “new device” authentication everytime I log in.
Problem is, for a couple months there was some delay with their text messages. It would take 10-20 minutes to send your 2fa code, and the code would expire after 5 min, meaning that by the time you got the code it was always expired and unusable.
Made it completely impossible to log in to pay my mortgage payments. Led to some really frustrating talks on the phone about how I didn’t want to pay with a credit card over the phone, I wanted them to fix their damn system so I could log in and pay via bank transfer like usual.
Many new PCs (generally the cheaper priced ones) come in S mode now, where you can only install Microsoft store apps. You can turn this off to allow regular PC programs too, but they require you to set up the Microsoft store before you can disable it.
If you’re trying to set up a new PC without a Microsoft account (which is getting increasingly hard), you can’t disable S mode. There was a workaround that involved booting into recovery mode and running some commands/registry edits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has blocked that too by now.
This is also the biggest reason Valve supports Linux and ChromeOS. Microsoft really wants full control over what software people can use on Windows, and Valve is worried about getting pushed off the platform.
Yes I’ve seen it before. Once Microsoft even updated their virus definitions to auto-delete the chrome installer when downloaded. Thankfully they reversed that one pretty quickly, but I had to completely disable all Windows virus protection to install chrome for a relative.
Yeah, I’m fine with it.
They probably don’t mind repost bots. Reposted content is still content, and can be used to attract new users. And the repost bots specifically target popular content, meaning their reposts often do really well.