As a Linux user, I'll defend Microsoft here and say that I'd rather suspect it's a sign of Windows' prevalence than Windows' (un)safety. Around the Snowden leaks I had a different opinion but nowadays I feel like those calling the shots at Microsoft realised it's no longer an optional component or that security is merely a marketing story
> I dunno, if [they've been saying it for 25 years], yet they still don't actually seem to act like it
That's what I'm saying though: from my point of view, they've started to act like it in the last ~20 years. If you've got evidence to the contrary, feel free to share it.
From my pov, they're about as perfect as the average other for-profit, which is not very security-in-depth at all but it's not just a marketing sham anymore either the way that it used to be. From Bitlocker to Defender to their security patching and presumably secure coding practices, it's not the same company that it was when they launched XP. A lot of the market seems to have grown up and, at least among our customers, we're finding fewer trivial issues
At any rate, this subthread started by saying this standard Windows setup shouldn't be used in the first place. I'm all for not using closed software, but then the question rather becomes: who do you think is deserving of your trust in this scenario?
Speaking of Snowden, and since we're at the State actor level, both Windows and Intel CPUs (and maybe also Ryzen CPUs) have to be assumed to be backdoored by the NSA.
Whether that is a threat worth dealing with for the concerned embassies is another question of course.
