About 20 years ago microsoft demanded to know my birthday to let me into my hotmail account or something like that. There was no way I was going to tell them, so I said 1/1/2000 or something. Then a few years later we were playing a computer game and it demanded I log in with an email account, so I used my hotmail account. It said you are only 3 years old and this is an adult game, you need to get permission. We spent about half an hour trying to get rid of it and eventually made someone my parent.

Just now I tried to use microsoft edge to access this site, and when I went to the forum it said I need an adult's permission. I went to the family settings page and said the person we appointed 20 years ago is my family organiser. It is impossible to get rid of it now. After about half an hour of messing around, and signing out three different ways, I finally got access.

Lesson: Don't use edge it's just not worth the problems.

My commiserations to FD in the OP.

[smile]

Our real freedom and our personal agency can be more and more difficult to retain, whenever we are 'compelled' to engage online, with those who would like to discreetly 'guide' all of our 'life' choices.

I remember many years ago......when a few naive souls [on WWW forums] predicted that the WWW would become such a behemoth, and with so many diverse views, that no government [or government agency] could ever find a manageable way, interfere with the freedoms of those, who loved freedom and truth.

I haven't used an MS product (personally) for more than 15 years.

I wouldn't touch Windows with a barge pole.

UnSubRocky wrote on Jan 22^nd, 2024 at 5:01pm:


I keep an old Win 7 laptop that runs XP virtual machine.

AusGeoff wrote on Jan 23^rd, 2024 at 7:43am:


I don't know if it's still happening but when Chrome first appeared in 2008 it wasn't long before nearly every piece software you downloaded had Chrome included with it and always ticked to install by default.

It was even included in things like driver discs for PC motherboards.

Such was/is the marketing 'clout' (and deep pockets) of Google.

And, knowing how 99.9% of people never read software licence agreements or install screens and just 'click through' they never noticed Google Chrome ticked to install by default and 'hey presto', they had Chrome 'magically' installed on their PC's.

I've come across several people over the years who have asked me "what's this Google Chrome and how did it get on my PC?"

I've always said that if Mozilla had been able to do this and not Google then Firefox would probably be the #1 browser today.

UnSubRocky wrote on Jan 23^rd, 2024 at 1:59pm:


I couldn't either. The mouse works fine but it is now getting a bit slow and I don't know that I can rebuild if I lost the software for the VM.

I was working a contract back when EDGE was fairly new. Management wanted to go to EDGE as a compulsory browser they knew that the settings could more easily be managed in AD.

On about 3 different occasions I explained to them why it was a very bad idea. About 3 weeks before I left a new Manager came to me demanding that Edge be implemented again. Staff had been using Chrome or Firefox mainly.

When I tried to explain why it wasn't a good idea he told me that he didn't want to know about it as others had told him that I would convince him to not go to edge, he told me to just do it.

I had a project that week and told him I could build the package the following week and implement the change over the weekend. Unfortunately Friday was my last day. The most trusted team member was shown how to roll it back.

When I got home the following Monday I had about 40 misses messages and calls. I few weeks later I spoke to the guy who knew how to roll it back and he said that when I had left on the Friday he was called in and told it was also his last shift. Bad luck for them. The Problem was that the company used about 8 different production critical web apps that were not going to work on EDGE.