What.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

1. Do not do age verification.

Oh no I dropped my link, what a horrible thing! Sure hope this doesn't get reblogged until it reaches users from the UK and Brazil!

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

OP: We never found another phone this interesting after that. Let me show you the last glow of the millennium. (cr ETO数码)

When Chinese netizens talk about the millennium era, there’s always a lot of wistful reflection. In China, the so-called millennial generation (千禧一代qian xi yi dai)mostly refers to people born between 1985 and 1995. Their life experience differs greatly from Western Millennials, because China underwent lightning-fast leaps in society and technology while they were growing up. The shift hit them far harder on a personal level.

Specifically, their sense of time sets them apart from generations before and after. They spent their childhood fully immersed in the analog age—the kind of offline, street-side daily life you see in shows like Neighbour Ma Dajie. Back then, most families didn’t own computers or broadband. The urban-rural divide was massive. You waited for cartoons to air on fixed TV schedules, or bought DVDs if you didn’t want to wait. Music came from cassette tapes, CDs and MP3 players. Newspaper and magazines were the main sources of information. Waiting for things was simply normal.

Yet through their teens and young adulthood, they watched the digital explosion unfold right in front of them: the arrival of QQ, the rise of internet cafes, early blogs, campus forums and countless Flash mini-games. This shift didn’t creep up slowly; it was an abrupt jump. Their lifetimes span the full migration path of modern information civilization: physical books - television - desktop computers - the internet - smartphones - AI or LLM.

Within just over a decade, the world raced forward to mobile payments, global social platforms and e-commerce. Their formative years straddled two entirely separate worlds, two opposing rhythms of life, ways of socializing and accessing information. Both realities are etched into their memories, leaving them with two distinct ways of perceiving time.