Yes, I know they are update services; fair point you make, that those not technically-minded should probably leave them on.

However I personally do not appreciate OS updates, no matter their purported criticality, being installed without my express permission. I am aware of Group policies, but Win11 Home does not officially support them (though one can install gpedit.msc manually; however according to sources I researched, not all policies set will even be honoured by the Home edition).

I did consider scheduling it, just hadn’t gotten around to trying it out.

If could, I would wipe Win11 and use native Linux but this laptop is too new and support is poor on it; it’s gone as soon as practical :)

When I have to boot into Win11, I run this right after as a shortcut from my desktop (right-click and Run As Administrator):

net stop usosvc
sc config usosvc start=disabled
net stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start=disabled

… be sure to set your Wifi points as metered to block Update as well.

Note that anytime you go into certain Settings / Control Panel pages, Win11 silently re-enables the above services! Crazy. (Someone should really write a patch for that…)

Sad anyone has to put up with this BS but, we do what we gotta do.

Ah, good. I wonder why it isn’t used more often – this wouldn’t be such a huge problem then I would hope. (Let me guess – ‘convenience’, the archenemy of security.)

No idea! I have wondered that myself. In fact why doesn’t he do it now, he’s the ultimate lame duck prez, there’d be no consequences for him so he absolutely should a few days after the election – if he truly could (I don’t know enough about the details about how he could so do).

If your question is not just rhetorical, I totally agree, 100%.

In fact I wish he’d declare he’s dissolving SCOTUS completely, plus a few levels of courts below and appointing non-partisan judges across the board to clean house and reset the decades of theocratic-proto-fascists that appear to have infiltrated the system at all levels. He could, after all, do anything right? The SCOTUS ruled this summer that Presidents have ‘absolute immunity’, so why not? It would be the ultimate F*ck You to their corruption and would be a historically beautiful way to bow out.

EDIT: Oh look, I’m not the first to think of it

I don’t know much about NPM (having avoided JS as much as possible for my entire life), but golang seems to have a good solution: ‘vendoring’. One can choose to lock all external dependencies to local snapshots brought into a project, with no automatic updating, but with the option to manually update them when desired.

W.T.F.

The US needs to clean house, expand the SCOTUS to put these corrupt judges firmly in the minority so they’re ineffective for the rest of their miserable life-long-unelected-terms, if it can’t outright impeach them!

At what point can this menace be slapped with Barratry and barred from filing nuisance lawsuits? sheesh.

That’s what I ended up doing. A dumb monitor is just fine, as long as you don’t need a huuuge screen. The main thing is to find a good external speaker though that doesn’t auto-sleep in the middle of one’s show…

Heaven forbid journalists do… you know, their jobs?

Canada has always used paper, hand-counted ballots. Why anyone would trust their elections to machines which can be sabotaged is beyond me. Perhaps use them to check human-counted results, not the other way 'round.

Takes too long? Recruit more volunteers. Or, heaven forbid, pay them. Something this important deserves the resources to do it transparently and accurately.

Or, please consider Devuan as well, to ensure there are distros without hard dependencies on systemd, an expansive attempt to cement IBM/RedHat’s control over the direction of Linux through foundational changes to the init, filesystem, login, homedir, and other components…

Please don’t bother replying to change my mind… never gonna like systemd no matter what. If it works for you, fine. Some of us still find it wholly unnecessary.

I put on my robe and wizard hat

When our last TV which was ‘smart’ died, we just bought a big lcd monitor at the pawn shop. We already were only using Kodi on an Android box, so a monitor with external speaker is fine. (Seemed spyware free last time I checked, but beware no-name android media boxes on=from eBay etc., use a tiny or old spare PC instead if you wish).

One must ‘sail the high seas’ tovget content, of course…

Here I go once again with the e-mail / Every week I hope that it’s from a fe-male!

Too little, too late :(

As it should be! I hope in the long-term, that is proven to be true.

I would like to say, for the record, that I wrote that late at night, and my phrasing probably came across incorrectly.

It wasn’t my intention to call you personally ‘a peon’. I was trying more to adopt the voice, for argument’s sake, of what an imagined President, using this supposed absolute immunity, might say to their critics – ‘who are you (out there, the people) to question my power?’

My apologies for it coming out the way it did.

Good.

Exactly. The Democratic party needs to push the issue and make the GOP see that the Leopards can eat their face too.

Exactly. Maybe I didn’t propose the “right” action – the entire point is that if the SCOTUS won’t rule a president does not have absolute immunity, and is subject to the law of the land, then really ANYTHING is possible isn’t it?