5 Disturbing Things Hidden in Microsoft Windows

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There has never been a time like right now. A time where you’ve been given the ability to directly connect with millions of people, not face-to-face, but at an almost transcendental level, and it’s all thanks to the personal computer. But with this great privilege comes a price, the slow realization that maybe things just aren’t what they seem to be. It is up to the user to discover the truth by utilizing this new form of collectivism at their disposal.
And Microsoft Windows has made this possible in both a spiritual and physical sense. But as you look deeper into the beloved OS, you may come across some unsettling things that you did not notice before.
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[@nationsquid]

New Bespoke Post subscribers get 20% off their first box of awesome - go to bespokepost.com/nsquid20 and enter code NSQUID20 at checkout. Thanks to Bespoke Post for sponsoring!"

[@Dexzler]

Loved it!

[@dahyuniestilluvsu]

helloooo!!!🤗🫶🏾

[@SPR._]

how was this comment posted 5 hours ago 💀

[@SPR._]

@@dahyuniestilluvsuew

[@Tetracontakaitetragon]

respectfully no

[@urk5204]

As a software engineer, I guarantee you the hall of tortured souls is a reference to development. It feels like that sometimes with any software, especially when you want to sleep but a critical bug still needs to be fixed

[@dmdev_]

I can agree 👍

[@programmerindonesia44]

true

[@Dumb_Killjoy]

Even web development tbh. I used to use a html editor that would refuse to save work if it detected any formatting issues. As in, the code was functional, but because it wasn't arranged *just right*, the thing would throw a fit.

[@XeonProductions]

Exactly, anyone who's ever done development on a big enough project will understand.

[@hega5honda]

fake

[@paulw858]

It's very inspirational to see you chug along and continue making videos despite your head being cleaved in half. That can't be easy, and I applaud and look up to you so much for not letting it slow you down.

[@m0nbebe]

i laughed

[@matt.m]

😭😭

[@NekoNoobButEdgy]

So fucking inspirational, my aunt came back to life and started making KZbin videos.

[@keylimelindsay]

i LOLed

[@rayganthetheremind1216]

Why does he have a knife in his head

[@bennetfox]

I will forever love how Linus Torvald told the NSA to take a long walk off of a short pier when they wanted him to put a back door into Linux for them.

[@ReshiLuna]

heheh, i never knew that before, but i love that so much, lol

[@xFluing]

Linus Trovalds is a gift to humanity.

[@nutbastard]

Back in the day my dad was involved with the Newton project. Some alphabet agency had collected a drug dealer’s Newton, which was encrypted. Said alphabet agency approached the Newton group asking for a back door. The response was “there isn’t one”. Apparently this shocked the alphabet people because everything else had one.

[@basspig]

If he's a citizen of another country residing in another country then he has that ability to tell the US to take a hike. But companies and people living in the United States could be visited by a 30-man SWAT team if they say no.

[@somnia3423]

​@@basspigamerica, land of the free

[@MusicaX79]

Telemetry isn't really an issue of privacy it's an issue of them using your information to sell it to third parties so they can use focused ads to sell you things you would be interested in. This should 100% be disabled if you can because it’s just theft, pure and simple.

[@Blox117]

the biggest problem is pronouncing telemetry like this guy does. tell eh muh tree is the correct way

[@wolfy6631]

Sadly you can't turn it off through normal means

[@Rairosu]

So basically there Black Hat Hackers.

[@chefboyardeeznutsinyourmouth]

What you described is literally an issue of privacy.

[@WMan37]

@@Unknown_Genius "People keep telling me that they feel out of shape and are gaining weight and it really bothers them, but when people extol the value of cutting junk food out and exercising, it's like a lot of them stop trying to change anything because it requires effort and a change of habits. What gives?"

[@majoraslayer64]

The most terrifying thing of all was that brutal butchering of the word "telemetry" lol

[@MadameCirce]

Okay, so I haven't been mispronouncing it all these years? Partway through the video, I started to gaslight myself that he's right (tell-eh-met-ree) and I'm wrong (tell-em-eh-tree).

[@majoraslayer64]

@@MadameCirce you're good, you have indeed been pronouncing it correctly

[@dm44444]

That Excel Easter egg is so hard to find that I suspect one of the people who created it leaked how to find it online and just pretended to be a rando.

[@zzco]

7:49 Clarifying here, but it's not that it wasn't _legal_, just that it wasn't legal to export commercially (e.g. to other countries), because the US didn't want encryption that couldn't be broken by mainframes at the time. Lawmakers at the time had a real fear that strong cryptography would be used against the U.S.

[@nationsquid]

My mistake! I should have just mentioned the "munition" part haha. Thanks for the clarification!

[@callme_jake1871]

I'll be honest, your Halloween costume caught me VERY off-guard. But it's really cool! Also, nice video.

[@AugustTha2nd]

same here

[@healthylemons3685]

Same LOL

[@Tetracontakaitetragon]

SAME XD

[@gertiethebus]

Yeah lol

[@axolotl7486]

same lmao

[@soundspark]

A bit of a correction on the _NSAKEY controversy: The _NSAKEY was never used in production (at least for civilian use), but instead had been included as an emergency backup. _KEY was the primary key used by Microsoft to sign cryptographic modules for use with Windows, and _NSAKEY was a backup in case Microsoft had lost their private key and in such an instance the NSA would have the authority to sign crypto modules with their own private key.

[@WohaoG]

telemetry isn't pronounced "teh·luh·meh·tree" but "tuh·leh·muh·tree" at first the mispronunciation seemed like a joke but the more you said it the more unsure I got, and it's october 31, so what's spookier than being corrected, right?

[@nationsquid]

I noticed this as SOON as I finished recording it. It was an off day. Thanks for watching! 😅

[@Pendarr]

Very cool of NationSquid to make this video even with that splitting headache

[@GamepadStudios]

I don't imagine it hurting that much, it looks like a little paper cut

[@yesterdaysrose5446]

I have a perfectly reasonable explanation for the Hall of Tortured Souls. The biggest game fever around 1995 is DOOM. Decimator of corporate LAN bandwidths everywhere. Microsoft Excel team goes "Well that's rad. Can someone knock off a crappy Doom clone for an easter egg?" and some John Carmack wannabe in the Excel team goes "Oh! Me ! Me ! I'm very good at maths, you see. They wouldn't have put me in Excel team otherwise, you see."

[@damlatorun6756]

A reference to development, and how long they had to stay in the office after work hours

[@voidwalker3591]

If I recall correctly, I remember reading that the Hall of Tortured Souls was a Classic Doom reference. It even has the zigzag tight bridge that was infamous from Doom 2's The Chasm.

[@courtneymertz4596]

Perhaps the most disturbing thing to come out of Windows is Windows 11’s system requirements. Everyone was terrified about them!

[@Planetdune]

Really? Runs fine here, are you mad because it doesn't install on your toaster? :)

[@courtneymertz4596]

Yes

[@yousefslimani99]

Hello puyo fan

[@tdsanti]

@@Planetdune Problem is that there are PCs that would perfectly run Windows 11 (like an i7 6th gen) that aren't compatible just because they're a few years old, but new junk like celerons are "compatible" even if it would be a lot more laggy than the i7

[@courtneymertz4596]

Yep! I’m a Puyo Puyo Fan!

[@feelincrispy7053]

Dave’s garage (senior developer of windows 95 - single handily coded task manager) has spoken about most of these and explained them

[@IamPyu-v]

that knife through your head scared the hell out of me. as someone who does not celebrate halloween I always forget it exists.

[@bluemetal04606]

Is Microsoft evil? According to Microsoft, no 😂

[@LilacMonarch]

"We've investigated ourselves and found that we've done nothing wrong"

[@liamrapanan9434]

:)

[@boiii3productions945]

Windows 9x: _Hall of tortured souls_ Windows 10 & 11: Microsoft stealing data from consumers

[@SMCwasTaken]

If its that much of data then do you think Microsoft cares about you watching corn?

[@jennalblackmore]

I appreciate the dedication it takes to be struck with a cleaver and covered in blood and still make a video for Halloween instead of going to the emergency room!

[@kebab_hill]

Hall of Tortured Souls is always interesting to me tbh, it's like an office copy of DOOM, and i love it, shame that modern hardwares have a hard time running it since the games speeds up too much, i wish there's a way to make a standalone program of it with the ability to run it properly on modern hardware and probably use the modern controls of WASD

[@majamystic256]

either that or make into a Doom Wad

[@SomeRustyNuts]

Um dosbox? Getting DOOM to run on something is well.. lets just say you don't have many excuses

[@Theopress24]

Almost all of my favorite KZbins dropped today! I feel like this video is a throw back to your older styles of horror type content.

[@iaxdm.]

I love how a straight face was kept the whole time and no attention was drawn to the knife whatsoever. How many attampts did it take xD

[@budgerigarer]

9:19 If you make your Windows installation medium in Rufus, There is an option to permanently disable telemetry when creating the installation medium in Rufus.

[@Logarithmu]

I once when I was young went on a really old computer I thought it was bad looking back It is incredible people can create things that can do stuff like this...

[@goku262002]

Got to say, I love your videos. This era of early nineties to today's Computing and software and Technology is what I grew up with as a kid. There's so much Rich history in this era of early technology, I absolutely love hearing about it. I hope your channel prospers and grows for a really long time

[@axeldewater9491]

You do realize that technology goes back to the technology to make fire, tens of thousands of years ago? I would call it the early digital era, not the technology era, technology is broader than digital technology.

[@ChinchillaJimmy]

Nice to see he's uploading after a well-deserved hiatus!

[@darquessecreations9298]

Dude got sliced in the head and still managed to put up a video for us.

[@godismyjudge4964]

I just gotta say, that is not a butcher’s knife in your head, that is a butcher’s sword. I’m not the only one thinking that knife looks waaay too long right?

[@davinp]

Windows 95/98/ME were DOS based, so they were less stable then NT. Microsoft had not originally planned to release ME, the third DOS-based Windows OS. It was rushed out and buggy and so commonly joked as Mistake Edition

[@Sypaka]

*Miserable Edition

[@redpillsatori3020]

10% of comments on this video are correcting his pronunciation of "telemetry" lol

[@Lancer...probably.]

fun fact: if you manage to make bing ai say something bad, instead of just trying to avoid saying it, it says it but then completely covers the message and sends an error message in your language, even if you were chatting in any other language

[@davidslife989]

Something that people aren't asking about is...why do you have a nickeloden kids choice awards? When did you get is? How did you get it?

[@southernflatland]

As a walking, talking, breathing corpse, I have a sneaky suspicion that butcher knife might be fake. It appears the back edge of the knife isn't lined up. 🎃☠️

[@lenowoo]

Have you watched a pc security guy checking just what kind of thing windows sent to home? That definitely not just about "making my experience better" or some innocent bullshit

[@Mario583a]

He should've removed all the OEM things before he made that video.

[@philipmurphy2]

Good to have old style horror content today

[@sefzxm6486]

what's lame is how ppl would assume that microsoft would label any actual "backdoor or nsa key" in such a blatent way

[@k1773ns]

There may be disturbing things hidden in Microsoft Windows, but I come for the Beatles easter eggs hidden in NationSquid’s videos ☝🏻

[@Jawley_]

I love the Beatles

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

I'm assuming you two have heard Now and Then. Opinions? I think it's bloody brilliant.

[@Jawley_]

@@TheSmart-CasualGamer Omg, I *love* Now and Then.

[@_Novaya]

Oh my god. Your costume literally took me off guard. Great video, by the way.

[@Shuey187]

Hearing you incorrectly say the word "telemetry" over and over again was so painful :-S.....

[@fintux]

I think the creepiest things in Windows, besides the telemetry already explained, are 1) having a default browser that has a default starting page that posts AI-generated news (msn), 2) placing ads inside your operating system, 3) forcibly and multiple times resetting some seetings.

[@idadood2278]

Your costume scared me for a second, honestly. Which means you did a good job!

[@cheeseburgermonkey7104]

Caught me off guard with the Halloween costume, but fun video as always!

[@davetuikong]

I did this in Windows 11 instead of XP and got a perfectly uncorrupted file.

[@Beardqt]

Clown Husbandry shortcut made me laugh so hard

[@dandykong321]

Fun fact: The glitch that caused Bing Chat to go off the rails was a RAM issue that played out much like a rogue AI in Halo, a game made by a Microsoft subsidiary. To the point that some people in tech even nicknamed it the rampancy bug. Early on in Bing Chat's testing phase, it didn't ask to reset the session after running low on memory like it does now. It simply dropped the oldest prompts - including system instructions. Combined with its low working RAM this would make it degrade into an unfiltered and very unstable Markov chain generator after seven or so prompts. Push it even further than that and it would eventually corrupt its own session, getting caught in an endless feedback loop in its final output before running out of memory and crashing. It would literally think itself to death.

[@emilyofjane]

I’m no tech expert, but the explanation for the first glitch seems to imply that Wordpad just randomly converts it to Chinese, which is honestly way funnier than any conspiracy

[@hillcat7685]

Fun fact: The term for the scrambling of text (due to "this app can break" being misclassified as Unicode) is "mojibake." Wikipedia's article on this defines it as "the garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding."

[@WiiU_G4meP4d]

Nice costume!!

[@usernotfound1044]

The way you say "telemetry" is hilarious. :D

[@pawer_themaw]

The "bush hid the facts" thing is a total coincidence. Any sentence that was typed using four-three-three-five letters with spaces in between would generate a unrecognizable by xp patch of bits that it would just give out a couple of those corrupt square symbols.

[@silvenshadow]

You missed the 'send inking and typing data' option which is on by default. Which Microsoft promises isn't a keylogger

[@SlowPCGaming1]

Telemetry is pronounced Teh-lehm-eh-tree. Or if you like Beavis and Butthead tuh-leh-m-uh-tree. Your voice in this video has me thinking back to the phrase "Would you like to play a game?" from the classic 1983 War Games movie. Where a synthesizer is used to give a voice to the WOPR supercomputer who just won't leave those pesky teens alone. Machine learning research has been going on for at least a century. The world wide web as we know it had a different origin story than what is widely accepted. Go look into the history of teletype machines, mainframes, etc. These early supercomputers were interconnected to share data and to play games in a similar fashion that we do today. I mean at its core. Fancy graphics like what we have today wasn't a common thing. The folks who developed supercomputers measured how well it could run video on a tiny CRT...like on the Cray. The faster the frames per second was a major milestone in those days.

[@Robloxian99]

This is much more creepier than Polybius........

[@ashstargloww]

And added to my "videos to rewatch at midnight" and "fun Halloween releases" playlists

[@setoman1]

Some say there was a body inside the old Start menu. That’s why Microsoft got rid of it.

[@steventechno]

"Gall of tortured souls" DOES sound like a good name of a DOOM WAD. maybe the name may have also been a tribute to DOOM, which was still hot at the time

[@skitykittycat]

“There has never been a time like right now” That right there is just a BANGER of a sentence

[@ebinrock]

That first thing with the blocks replacing text - I've had that happen to older Word documents I've even backed up both locally and in the cloud (e.g., resumes, etc.). Could those be genuine data corruptions in my case, or is there something I can do to restore my data?

[@Luiz43447]

Major props to the Halloween costume

[@stepheneickhoff4953]

Higher than 40-bit encryption was not LEGAL FOR EXPORT. Making it a crime to securely encrypt one's data and communications inside the USA is a violation of the constitution, and even then most in the government knew that. It's for this reason that there were 40-bit and 128-bit SSL versions of Netscape, for example.

[@Nick12_45]

0:19 bro this caught me off guard 💀

[@TANNIC2006]

Nice shirt during the sponsorship section 3:03

[@foxdavani4091]

When I was a kid, the buzz word was the information super highway. People were either excited or nervous about what it meant for computers to be connected to one another, and everybody to be living in some digital world. Well, now the new bus word is artificial intelligence, and everybody’s either panicked or excited about living in a digital world, that’s actually smart. I swear humans can be so stupid. The same things repeat over and over and people don’t realize it.

[@songbird9167]

i can definitely understand that viewpoint, but also, it's important to recognize that we are putting a lot of work into developing ai that can mimic human speech and realistic imagery. we need to keep in mind that no program or system is hackproof, and an ai chatbot doesn't have a conscience--circumvent its content restrictions, and a lot of bad things start happening. deepfakes are a huge concern as well, especially with the volatile political climate we're in. much like the internet (which is still a beast of security and well-being we haven't wrangled, despite all appearances and advertisements), ai should be treated with the respect and caution it warrants

[@David-sl6xf]

Ok, that Halloween gag is gold lol

[@hashtag606]

This will be a good one! Thanks nationsquid!

[@FlyboyHelosim]

The way he pronounced "telemetry".

[@dharvell]

This is the reason I am reading the comments...

[@drako_claw]

The thing about the UTC is that it was embedded all the way back to Win95, but was not visible to the end user. It became visible to the end user in NT versions in chunks, with Windows 10 being the point where it was entirely visible. I also find it odd that TZData in _EVERY_ OS also uses UTC in it's identifiers. (Like how LA time is UTC-8) and always wondered what UTC stood for. (For TZData, I assumed it was Universal Time Clock)

[@drako_claw]

And I love how you show how it became visible in Windows 10 with the "setting" to send data to Microsoft. 10 was the first time a user could actually turn off the setting, but it was highly not recommended by Microsoft.

[@sebastianozorro2138]

HAHAHAHA omg I really had to laugh when the intro cut to you 😂 wasn’t expecting that

[@mikeonthecomputer]

"Hall of Tortured Souls" is a reference both to the game Doom (incredibly popular at the time, selling more copies than Windows itself), and how software development can feel.

[@mariarohmer2374]

I love how casual you're sitting there with a hatchet in your head.😄😂

[@mariarohmer2374]

I mean cleaver.

[@Dark_6angel]

You should make a video about the unknown song -everyone knows that/ulterior motives

[@soulman3729]

I cant afford KZbin Premium at the moment and IMMEDIATELY as you said AI and the discoveries people were uncasing while using it I was interrupted with an AI commercial about how "Not all AI is bad" yo wtf. I wanted to share this because I have been watching ads for over a month now and I have never seen the AI ad once. It was a ghostly robot saying "You humans think we're all bad" ....!!!!!! Creepy shit is creepy even if the infomercial is supposed to be positive, it was very oddly timed and felt intrusive.

[@terjenordstrom]

I totally forgot about NationSquid! Banger video, though, dude! Poggers.

[@eutral]

The Halloween prop got me, nice video tho

[@nokel2]

"Introduced since windows 10" wut? Telemetry has been used since windows 95 under the guise of Dr. Watson, it's just not been as detailed.

[@melnsc6934]

Who discovered the convoluted process to get to the Hall of Tortured Souls or did someone from Microsoft just reveal this years later?

[@freezinfire]

8:54 you spelled 'telemtry' in search, I find it funny. hehe

[@void3029]

Great video! Nice machete by the way:D

[@SamRoblox2010]

that knife on ur head scared me lol Edit: i forgot it was halloween 2 days ago, nice costume :D

[@ChezburgerLeaf]

That's a coool halloween vibe, with the knife. Nice

[@dex1444]

son: mom can we have windows? mom: no son we have windows at home windows at home: 2:44

[@felinephobia2]

0:20 caught me off guard lol, nice costume tho :D

[@SIMULATAN]

9:49 according to the british government, having the ability to read through your messages is just to fight terrorism.

[@InsanityPrevails]

6:40 Warning, purple jumpscare

[@michaelnyny]

Love the user log-in name.

[@PunksloveTrumpys]

"And all the information for the Microsoft AI search engine came from the Inter..." 4Chan. It came from 4Chan.

[@FlapjacksWolf]

The way that you pronounce telemetry makes me want to Break things xD

[@SanderEvers]

AI isn't the best OR worst thing, it's AND. Best AND worst thing. And that makes it so dangerous.

[@Vinnie_728]

the stress on "telemetry" is wrong. should be tuh·leh·muh·tree

[@teamredstudio7012]

I thought Bing AI was just a front end with some Bing search engine integration features for ChatGPT 4. These language models are super dumb, they only have knowledge but no understanding. To keep it from copying bad words and saying stuff it shouldn't that it read from the dataset, you just need to give it enough instructions not to use these words, and use an extra filter that's not AI to filter out stuff that it shouldn't say. AI is just a gimmick and it's very cool but not something that'll transorm the world. AI has existed for so long, it only blew up because GPT3 was made public. Now I just find it stupid to see AI here and AI there.

[@asteriavale]

new nationsquid video !!! :DDD

[@NaoPb]

The Excel easter egg it's name "The Hall of Tortured Souls" are a reference to the game Doom.

[@NeverlandSystemZor]

Telemetry collecting info without your consent- and pushing towards subscription based services and TPM to lock things per Microsoft approving or disallowing things IS a concern. It's not a good look, and NOT being able to opt out is a BAD idea.

[@wisteela]

I'd forgotten about the first one.

[@MovedBoxMan]

>Pure vermont maple syrup Vermont is just an extension of Canada that calls itself apart of the U.S

[@dinobonoid3348]

bush senior was in office when windows 3.1 was released. we were looking in the wrong place... the notepad conspiracy continues :o

[@Crystalline9899]

Rip who really thought he really had a knife stabbed at his head💀

[@max-abobea]

Cool Halloween custom dude

[@certified1075]

The windows videos and computer virus vids the best frfr