"We once gave you commoners this power and you used it to fuck your computer up and then blamed us for it, so we learned you can't be trusted with this power. We hid it behind a kind of skill test, and you're failing that test."
Good luck with opening the subdirectories of C:\WindowsApps\. I ran Explorer as admin, gave myself R/W permissions, even recursively changed ownership of everything, followed all the online guides... Still denied access.
I prefer the answer of giving the giy the reins and letting him get it so riddled with viruses then when he calls for support replying "sorry, your property your problem. You have absolute dominion over it and thus we give no warranty as we have no responsibility."
My roommate for a couple years in college was pre-law, and did some internships after graduation but before gaining his own law degree. He mentioned at one point how absolutely and hilariously pervasive it was at the firm he was working for attorneys to just run screaming to IT every single time literally anything was even the slightest bit inconvenient or obtuse (to their understanding). Part of it was the logic of “I bill clients at $800/hr, I am not spending my time to resolve whatever this hiccup is”, but part of it was absolutely also some bullshit power dynamics.
Andrew is ignorant. He could learn the basics of computer literacy, which would answer all his questions, but I'll take a shot in the dark and say that Andrew doesn't want to do that and is perfectly happy being ignorant. And also angry.
True, his message doesn't exactly radiate happiness, but I can assure you he felt SO much better after writing this. Tech support also doubles as everyone's personal therapist, you see.
I don't run as root because I've always been told I shouldn't. I don't know enough about anything to be contradicting stuff like this. It has always seemed weird to me that we don't run as root and then just sudo everything, though.
In defense of Andrew, until windows 10 never had I ever installed a program that made it’s own files untouchable unless you did some real fuckery with permissions.
As soon as they introduced that little warning screen in program files it was clear shit was going downhill for power users.
I discovered basic versions of windows are even more restrictive when I was unable to install my favorite lightweight pdf reader in a friend's laptop because Windows home just said that for my safety I wasn't allowed. With no option to bypass this limitation being hinted at.
Ended up installing it anyways but had to run the installer from an admin terminal (luckily it was windows 7 so it was a local account with admin rights instead of a bullshit Microsoft one)
This has to be some sort of policy being enabled. I have seen that window, but there are ways to bypass it - though in hindsight, they are not as evident. For example, right-click then choose "Open."
Andrew complains, Microsoft makes a root mode so Andrew can have his way. Andrew breaks his computer the next second by deleting a system file and proceeds to call Microsoft support. :)
Most of the annoying stuff that Linux users hate about Windows are because Windows has to cater to even the least technologically knowledgeable users.
It is why Windows updates are forced, why so many files are locked behind SYSTEM user and can't easily be circumvented, why some settings are registry or Group Policy only, why some settings are opt out, ...
Without those, their support center would blow up.
So if Linux wants to become mainstream, it will have to cater to those users as well. And Linux will slowly turn into Windows.
His problem is he went to answers.microsoft.com That place is a cesspool of fuck you, but here's a copy paste of something from 2006 so I can get some karma
Stackoverflow or Superuser, where the answer will be "use the search bar you imbecile, locked."
Quora, where every question is blatant rage bait like "my 14 year old son got a B in his test. I took away his PS5 and chained him in the basement as punishment but his grades aren't improving. How can I make him better at math?"
Yahoo Answers which is dead, and was basically Quora before Quora was a thing.
Or Reddit, where you can't even post on 95% of subs without hitting a minimum karma threshold and where some basement dwelling mod will likely ban you for breaking hidden rule #263, then modmail mute you for 28 days without reply if you try to appeal.
...where people will definitely give helpful answers and not just dunk on them for not using Linux before diving into an extended argument about distros, sudo and run0
A while back I was tinkering with some website and installed some npm packages.
Then I tried to delete the nodes modules folder.... NOTHING worked... Safe mode, permissions change, command line deletion,... I spend like an hour googling and raging, it's my fucking computer I put the fucking file there, let me delete it!!!
I was ready to give up and finally stumbled on the answer on stack overflow. The npm folder that was created (I forget exactly what it was) had the ~ symbol in path name and that basically made the folder invincible.
Luckily the poster also posted the command line to nuke the fucker and I was finally able to delete it.
So yea, I kinda get it. Seeing that stupid you don't have permission to delete this file pop-up is rage inducing.
Yes, but on Linux, if I am root, I am God. I do whatever the fuck I want with my machine, for good, evil or stupidity. That's the poster's point. It seems like Windows doesn't allow you to do this, or at least not easily. So I guess people who want to have absolute control over their computer shouldn't be using Windows, I guess.
It’s quite common to login as admin on windows though (in home setups), you’ll still have to authenticate for administrative tasks (the UAC popups).
The issue here is mostly that the user has probably upgraded and windows changed their account, resulting in the files being owned by their old account.
In linux, that’s fixable with ‘sudo chmod -R’
In Windows, there’s no built-in way, you need the take ownership script.
There's an OS you might like. It has no UAC, no file permissions, no sudo nor chmod, as it has no multi-user support, no antivirus and no firewall, no protection rings, not even spectre/meltdown mitigations, and most of all - no guard-rails whatsoever: You can patch the kernel directly at runtime and it won't even give you a warn. And yet, it is perfectly safe to run. It's called TempleOS and it achieves such a flawless security by having no networking support whatsoever and barely any support for removable media. If you want a piece a software - you just code it in, manually. You don't have to check the code for backdoors if it's entirely written by you... only for CIA at your actual back door...
I think they just mean they should have control over the modem. They are all locked down and proprietary with known backdoors throughout history, effectively bypassing any OS level security.
A lot of phone modems ship with their own SoC (processor) running its own OS. It's much smaller and slower than the main phone SoC but, depending on its implementation, it can have full access to all of your main processor's memory through DMA.
Yeah, that guy's issue isnt a matter of "Microsoft has control over my PC!!!"; more like "I've been using a computer for years and never actually looked at how things work under the surface".
Simple permissions error, happens in Linux all the time as well.
People talking shit about Andrew but I've had seriously weird issues with Windows throwing out odd permissions errors on seemingly basic shit on files that are 0kb after restarting and doing all sorts of basic troubleshooting including CMD Prompt and Powershell guides only for none of them to work.
It reeked of virus but never was. Just weird stupid shit that wasn't easily explained, should've worked but didn't, or various other things that the allmighty Lemmings here think is just beyond a google apparently.
FWIW I'm pretty sure it was straight up related to corrupted files in weird shared folder spots.
You have to pretend they don't exist and never think about them again after hiding them then hopefully never remember or just reinstall because it's been a couple years and probably good to do anyway.
Pebkac. Gui equivalent of chown perfectly working on windows and supports recursing into directories. If the questioner doesn't know how to login as an admin they miss some absolute basic computer usage knowledge, and a general help forum thread wont help them.
Not to mention there is no admin anymore, it's essentially a sudo style with it popping up asking are you sure.
This though really reeks of their son dragged and dropped their old files onto a new computer and didn't set the NTFS permissions, and purposely set them up as a non admin so they wouldn't bother them with "I got a new virus". When I have an elderly relative ask for me to set up their computer I don't give them admin rights
I literally saw that kind of message very recently on a nixos based machine and I literally had to stand up and do a lap. What in God's green earth do you mean there's no 'sudo'??
Did I do something odd when I set up my windows 11 machine?
If Microsoft has something marked as admin access, it just presents me with a dialogue asking if I want to do whatever as admin
I mean it's not like I have open hardware so there's a whole lot of my machine I really have no practical access to, but everything this guy wants is there
Him saying he's the owner suggests a private machine, so no corporate lockout from system components. Do computer shops set up admin accounts and lock their customers out as low-privileged users?
As far as I remember the secret is to log in as admin and change the ownership of the files to yourself, then change permissions and then do whatever the f you want with the files.
I think what happened here is that something went wrong and messed up the permissions of some of the users files. MS help suggested that he login as an administrator and reatore the intended permissions.
I don't work with Windows boxes, but see a similar situation come up often enough on Linux boxes. Typically, the cause is that the user elevated to root (e.g. the administrator account) and did something that probably should have been done from their normal account. Now, root owns some user files and things are a big mess until you go back to root and restore the permissions.
It use to be that this type of thing was not an issue on single user machines, because the one user had full privileges. The industry has since settled on a model of a single user nachine where the user typically has limited privileges, but can elevate when needed. This protects against a lot of ways a user can accidentally destroy their system.
Having said that, my understanding of Windows is that in a typical single user setup, you can elevate a single program to admin privileges by right clicking and selecting "run as administrator", so the advice to login as an administrator may not have been nessasary.
On that last part, theres a difference between elevating a file to admin, and being an admin in Windows.
In a lot of cases the ui is GREATLY simplified when not an admin, to the point where you might only have like 20% of all available options.
For the standard user?
Great!
Not when you're messing around with permissions.
It's why you ALWAYS log in as Admin when setting up a windows server.
Iirc you can't even install tiles without actually being an admin, even if you have all logins.
From my experience with windows, your current guess is correct btw :D
The short version is that only the users granted permission to a given set of files can access those files. With NTFS permissions it's... Complicated. You can have explicit permission to a file, or implied permission via a group that you're a part of, or some combination of those things. You can also have read, but no write. You can have append but not create, you can have delete, but not list. It's a lot of very granular, very crazy permissions.
There's also deny permissions which overrule everything.
What has likely happened is that the posters user account doesn't have implied or explicit permission to the file, but if you sign in as an administrator, even if the administrator doesn't have permission to read/write/append/delete the file, the administrator has permission to take ownership of a file, and as owner, change the permissions of a file. Being owner doesn't mean you can open/read/write/append/delete anything, you can just change permissions and give yourself (or anyone else) permissions to the file.
Changing ownership is a right which, as far as I'm aware, cannot be revoked from admin level users. They can always change ownership. Owners of files cannot be denied the right to change the permissions of a file as far as I know. This will always result in some method by which administrative level accounts can recover access to files and folders.
In my experience, exceptions exist but are extremely rare (usually to do with kernel level stuff, and/or lockouts by security/AV software).
The poster might legally and physically own the device and all the data contained therein, and may have an administrative level account on that device, but the fact is, their NTFS permissions are not set to allow them access to the data. The post they're replying to is trying to let them know how to fix it by using an administrative level account and they're not tech-savvy enough to follow along.
I don't blame them. File permissions issues are challenging even for me, and I fully understand the problem.