Ironically, the use of the wording “the personalization trap” in the article makes me think Gemini likely assisted in the writing. Gemini loves calling things traps.

It’s a difficult time for anyone who loves innovation and technology but also cares about the world’s wellbeing. I feel like I’m in a bit of a dead end in my own job, which is “tech” but not “tech sector,” and I love the idea of being able to do actual R&D for a living, but the thought of joining any one of the major tech corps makes me want to throw up.

Well, best of luck. I guess worst case, if you can’t figure out any other options, you could always try running a windows vm just for the remote access piece. You’ve got to hold onto that WFH while you’ve got it.

If this is an expected method of access, maybe just reach out to support about it. Let them solve it for you.

Probably doesn’t need to be said, but make sure doing this won’t get you in trouble at work. Most enterprises would likely consider this a security issue, and most larger ones actively monitor what software is installed on workstations.
Edit: I see now you say this is commonplace where you work.

Just want to point out, the EFF provides a convenient method of sending your senator your opinion on this as part of this website. You can send a pre-written template if you prefer. Most politicians do at least assess public sentiment before voting. It’s better than doing nothing.

When I was a kid in the 90s, my dad had a video tuning device that could change the color balance and make other adjustments on live video. It also had the “bonus” feature of stripping the copy protection from live video! He just put that between two VCRs, and we could copy pretty much anything. Being analog, there was still the occasional tape which wouldn’t work for some reason. Without stripping the protection, the second tape would just wind up with an unintelligible mess recorded on it. So I wouldn’t say it was super common, since most people didn’t know these devices were available or where to get them, but I also wouldn’t say it was super rare since it wasn’t particularly hard to set up or use.
As DVD became common, piracy became a lot easier, since everyone had a computer at that point, and you just needed the right free software to bypass the copy protection. My father in law built a huge movie library by ordering DVDs from Netflix (when they were still a DVD by mail business), ripping, and returning them. As for myself, I had gotten into filesharing by this time, so I never did much DVD ripping since the internet was doing the work for me.

Something this article glosses over is the fact that Microsoft knew all of the web URLs he was visiting. I don’t know if that’s because he was dumb enough to sign into Edge with his Microsoft account or if they were collecting that a different way, but the GDID wouldn’t have been nearly as useful without that info.

Hey Google, could you not dictate what I’m allowed to install on my own damn device for my “safety”? I don’t need a third parent, and if I had to pick one it wouldn’t be you.