That depends. There’s the original version from the opening post: Microsoft uses AI to target PCs that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 and then sabotage the drives with the most used programs, which is how the original poster’s rear drive got wiped and front drive got contaminated.
Now, in all his invective against mockery of this … let’s agree to call it a “theory”, regardless of whether it’s the right word. In all his invective against mockery of this theory, @Glurin has never once bothered to ask what’s wrong with it.
For those equally uninformed but less self-righteous, here’s an explanation.
First of all, if you really want to find out which of your users have computers that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 and determine what files they use most frequently, you don’t need an AI. Not in the traditional sense of “a complex logic algorithm to find the best approximate answer to a question that might be too complex for traditional programs”, not in the modern sense of “a neural network trained with deep learning”, not in the game industry sense of “computer-controlled player”.
The Windows operating system has several well-documented components that keep track of what files you access frequently on your filesystem, and whether your system can be upgraded to Windows 11 is a simple check to see whether your hardware meets the minimum specs. No AI in any capacity is needed for this.
Second, the use of words “front” and “rear” to refer to the drives is baffling. Sure, we might be talking about their physical locations inside the case, but no one who claims any degree of competence when it comes to understanding how computers work refers to drives that way.
Third, wiping a hard drive takes time. Pausing the normal functioning of the system to do so would be noticeable, and you can’t do it in the background while maintaining the illusion that your system is functioning normally. You could hide it by disguising it as one of those Windows updates that require you to restart your computer and make you wait while it’s “applying the update”, but that’s not what the opening post said. The claim was that they played in the morning and came after work to find that the “rear” hard rive had been wiped.
Fourth, what in the fresh hells does it mean that the front drive got “contaminated”? I would understand “corrupted”, but “contaminated”?
Now, all of those oddities might be explained by ignorance. After all, the whole thing sounds like a word salad my septuagenarian mom might have come up with to explain technology she doesn’t have a clue about, and I wouldn’t have mocked her, because nobody’s born knowing things, we all have to learn them.
Thing is, the original poster claimed knowledge and expertise: they did programming in the 80s and 90s, Y2K bugs in '99, have been a network engineer, and have built PCs since the 386. Worse, when challenged, they doubled down and presented themselves as expert who used to work at Microsoft for a while.
Hence the mockery.
Now, going back to your original question: what’s the theory here?
Here’s a “cleaned up” version of the original theory: Microsoft is targeting machines that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 and sabotaging their hardware.
This, at least, is plausible, but extremely unlikely.
Any half-competent forensic examination of a hard drive would uncover evidence of sabotage, which would open Microsoft to a nightmare of lawsuits and undo all of their efforts to clean up their image over the years. Worse, think of their enterprise customers and their reactions: many companies are so averse to risks that they have draconian rules about what kind of software you’re allowed to use. Imagine the damage from a stunt like this.
The risk has to be evaluated against the reward, and what’s the reward in this scenario? The original poster didn’t deign to specify. For them, this is a simple case of “malice” and that’s enough to explain everything.
If I had to speculate, I could come up with a plausible reason to do what the original poster claims is happening: planned obsolescence. True, Microsoft could wait until they sunset Windows 10 and pull the plug on the security updates, and the sales of Windows 11 would go sharply up from that point, but one could imagine – if one tried really hard – that the department in question wanted to drive the sales of Windows 11 before that date, due to some internal political struggles inside the company.
Again, extremely unlikely, but at least it’s theoretically plausible.
Things went downhill from there, because @Glurin started berating us all for… hmmm, let’s see… reacting without seeking any deeper understanding of the issue, clinging stubbornly to our preconceptions, and fabricating falsehoods to discredit the original poster.
He did so without seeking any deeper understanding of what’s wrong with the original theory, he clung stubbornly to his preconceptions about what we’re really saying, and he kept fabricating falsehoods to discredit us.
So yeah, really fun thread all around 