California (US), making Win9x great again!

[EliraFriesnan]

2 hours ago, awkduck said:

I honestly see Win98 as way more akin to a Ghost gun, than Linux.

Cut down by the year. Everything pre 2006-2007 is good, less traceable, much less. Good hardware completely ceased to exist in 2013, 2013 was the last good year.

Since 2005 (Circa) all mobos run their own OS to trace you. Since 2013-2014 all mobos run their own complex OS to trace you, no need for another OS to be installed.

Echelon style. The same for mobile phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

 

 

[awkduck]

9 hours ago, EliraFriesnan said:

Since 2005 (Circa) all mobos run their own OS to trace you.

Also, not as advanced, there was the "Processor Serial Number" from 1999-2000. It was removed, due to backlash; but later replaced with Protected Processor Identification Numbers. It is less specific (not your current user name and age), but CPU, mother board, BIOS, etc. finger printing has been around for awhile. Those, themselves, don't track you; and aren't useful, without remote access to your OS.

The old conspiracy joke, from late Windows (win3x) adopters, was that Windows looked well suited as a way to break in "Like the windows in you house". This was more of a business type mindset; it didn't really apply to general public consumers, until Win9x. In the Win9x era, the issue "mostly" came from really insecurely designed retail machine/OS packages. Due to poor default configurations people would come home to a running "and Internet connected (dial-up)" PC, that they had left turned off. From my recollection, this didn't seem a common occurrence. As you could guess, since the machines were activated remotely, there were theories about government involvement. Alternatively, devious teenage hackers and hacker groups where also fingered, as likely culprits. In the broader community, these kind of issues arose from the consumer's use of the machine (still relevant today). This was related to hygiene in both Internet habbits and software choice (also still relevant today).

Despite all of that, I still completely agree with EliraFriesnan. Hardware wise, 2005 is a good cut of date.

I'm not concerned with Government entities finding out, what is one my machines.

[EliraFriesnan]

People need to stop buying the post cut off period H/W.

Having «oh who cares» attitude is really going to have dire consequences for future generations.

[EliraFriesnan]

On 3/5/2026 at 2:50 PM, awkduck said:

I'm not concerned with Government entities finding out, what is one my machines.

Boring.