Yesterday night, just before I was heading to bed, I closed the browser that I was using to watch a Twitch stream and suddenly found that I had no Desktop.
No Start Menu. No control of anything.
Just the image you see above. A full screen hijack of my computer that effectively amounts to Microsoft saying "This computer sucks and you better go buy a Surface Tablet, because we're dropping support for you".
I hadn't run Windows update. I hadn't installed anything. In fact, all I had done since powering on the computer last evening was navigate to a Twitch stream and watch it.
So this... thing downloaded and installed itself silently and without my permission.
Notice there's no way to close it other than "Sling Ads At Me Now" or "Sling Ads At Me Later". If I had been thinking more closely, I would've swapped to Process Explorer and figured out the source executable for this bullshit, but in the moment I was just panicked.
Because this isn't a PSA. This isn't information. This is a scare-tactic, and one that's barely differentiated from malware. This is scummy, low, and Microsoft should be ashamed (they never will be, though).
I fucking hate this bull crap!!!
