This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What I don't understand, is what I would need and use it for? Never in my life I thought "damn if only I had a screen recording of everything I did 1 week, 1 month or 1 year ago". Like I don't get the use case, ignoring anything else. There is no use case.
I can view my terminal history and my recently accessed files. I have version control with git where I want and need it.
There is no use case.
So you’ve never wanted to find an article/headline that you vaguely remember seeing? Or a product that you looked at? Or a picture that you looked at?
There absolutely is a use case for full reachability of everything you’ve done on your computer. Git commits and terminal history and “recent” files list don’t even come close to providing the same thing lol
This is just a thinly veiled ad for AdGuard.
The worst thing about it is, even if you switch to Linux for privacy yourself, you'll also need your friends to switch as well, otherwise if you message them on their desktop, they're a liability, as the damn recall will be there too, leaking your data.
It'll be hell for activists.
Funnily enough, Signal has circumvented the issue by marking their chat window as DRM content, making it invisible to Recall.
They used the invasion of privacy to destroy the invasion of privacy?
They didn’t circumvent the issue - they did what Microsoft tell developers to do in regards to their programs and recall lol.
Lol
The same has been true of email for years, but less bad. Activists will need to be even more careful in who they trust.
In what sense?
In general, if you don't trust the receiver, you shouldn't send sensitive information. Windows Recall doesn't change that, if they're competent, Windows Recall won't be enabled.
I think this is more an issue for less technical users instead of activists, because activists will be more careful about who they trust than a secretary or something for a powerful individual.
Of course it is. It's invasive by design. The "recent tweaks" were because of backlash, but now that's died down
I am surprised by how rabid the Recall backlash continues to be compared to similar features elsewhere. Apple's equivalent, in particular, seems to not be a concern to anybody. I don't have anything Apple, so I'm not sure if they ever rolled this out, but they sure announced it to a whole bunch of crickets.
Well:
In fairness they’re not the same thing - recall records everything you do making a nice single honeypot of all your actions. Apple’s thing is really just a search bar that can reach into apps like email, calendar, etc - it’s not recording your bank logins. Google Play Services tracks everything you do on Android and sells it to advertisers.
It's a centralized search that can dig through your activity cross-platform and parses it through a centralized AI. Whether the data is stored in a log or as screenshots is a difference, but not as big of a difference as people make it out to be. It just feels intuitively weirder because one is humanly readable and the other one isn't.
To be fair, that's my takeaway from a lot of AI backlash. A whole bunch of it is people finally getting an intuitive grasp on activities that big data has been doing for years or decades and it finally clicking into shock because they can anthropomorphise the inputs and outputs better.
No wonder the techbros have lost their intuititon for what will trigger backlash. In many cases they've been doing far worse than those things with zero awareness or pushback.
Don't worry, Microsoft is bringing semantic search to Windows too. That way you can have the worst of both worlds.
Access controls is the big difference. Apps with sensitive data can choose to hide stuff to a system wid search API. It can do so on an individual level, even. And even if it previously was accessible it can be drumroll recalled. Exposure happens when a search is made.
Microsoft Recall is all or nothing. Once it has been displayed Recall has it and you can't selectively erase stuff. Exposure is immediate. It's just purge the whole database, or leave it all in there. Apps can't retroactively flag stuff.
... But leaving AI summaries on by default was very stupid by Apple
I'd argue that this is way more nuance than the public in general puts into the issue. In fact, the goalposts have moved quite a bit. "The big difference" used to be the local encription of the data, but it became not it once Recall implemented that. Or the opt-in, which went the same way.
That's not to say I don't think it's a better idea to have per-app support (which is incidentally how Microsoft implemented the feature in Windows 8 the first time), but I will say that's not why people are mad at one and not the other.
I don't actually know if you can selectively erase specific screenshots from the database because I, again, can't find any traces of Recall on my supported PCs for the life of me. Coverage had made it seem that they could, since presumably the much criticised side effect of having a local, freely accessible database with just a bunch of pictures is that you could... you know, access those. Did they obscure it further in the reimplementation?
And also, I think people believe I'm being argumentative, but I'm not. Can somebody point me at the Recall opt-in and/or some explanation why my Copilot + device running 24H2 would not seem to have it available anywhere? I'm confused about the rollout here. I don't want it on, but I'd like to try it and see what the practical implementation is for myself (and be double sure I have it turned off once I'm done with that).
After the heavy criticism they changed it from default on to (opt out) to default off (opt in).
In theory you could modify it's database, but they did mention applying stricter security (but what good does that do when the frontdoor access remains via the prompts)
Yeah, and that didn't change the perception people have of it. That's the point I'm making.
And I'll get back to you on how easy it is to specifically remove specific data entries (and whether or not the prompts are handled locally or remotely) if and when I can get a hold of this mythical unicorn, because by how much people ignores my questions I'm assuming nobody here has actually tried it?
Interesting, I hadn't seen news about that Apple feature before... There seems to be a lot more press around Recall, which in turn amps up the amount of consumer attention and backlash.
That said (and I wouldn't want Apple's "semantic search" even if I had an Apple device), I'd still trust Apple more to manage the dataset securely compared to Microsoft. The Apple ecosystem is far more strictly controlled, whereas in Windows it's more of a free-for-all (most people just used XP as an administrator, the UAC could be easily disabled on Windows Vista and 7, etc.). Especially with Microsoft's move to put advertising in Windows 11 and complete lack of security measures in the initial version of Recall, it is very hard to trust Microsoft in this regard.
on purpose. they announce something absurd, so people get mad, and they step down to something they wanted anyway (and even pass the impression they are listening to their users opinions)
Um, the core feature is privacy invasion. It does what it says on the tin.
It's fine if some people want that functionality, as long as it's not enabled by default.
One could argue that it's a feature that could be done on-client without sending to a server. Or with its server component doing nothing more than syncing with E2E encryption.
Recall is done on-client.
I have zero interest in Recall, but I thought it was already done on-device? IIRC it always was that way, which is why it's only available on new computers containing dedicated "neural coprocessors" I believe was the term.
Now given that it's closed source, you have to trust that they aren't silently sending data back to themselves - which is where my problem lies, I don't trust them in the slightest.
You can verify that nothing is being sent back by watching network traffic. I guess they could hide it in update packets, but thats pretty unlikely.
I've disabled windows update completely so I can pick and manually dl updates. Never going to put that recall shit on my pc.
I've disabled Windows completely so I can be safe and sound. Never going to put that shit on my PC.
-- sorry, it seemed funnier in my head.
How'd you do that? I've made registry tweaks, group policy tweaks, etc and my windows machine still eventually hits a limit where it forces updates around the 12 week mark. Granted it's still longer than before, it isn't completely disabled.
At that point it's easier to install Linux.
I run Linux too, but I have to use windows for some contract jobs.
It was a combination of things between policies and taking over folder and file permissions. I can look up the specifics I used if you are looking to replicate it. It's a bitch to undo unless you write down everything you change.
around the 12 week mark.
Not all computers need to tell the date & time, just uninstall clock.exe
Part of why i knew so-called "digital rights management" was fucking bullshit was because very little software ever came out that empowered me to manage MY OWN rights in the digital space.
I need there to be FOSS applications that allow me to root-level BLOCK applications from perceiving what I'm doing, to just fucking SANDBOX ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING BY DEFAULT and let me whitelist what specific things are allowed to directly access the hardware.
Sadly I am not as tech savvy as I used to think I was. I might've been technologically clever twenty years ago but I hadn't managed to keep up... I think what I've described might be referred to as a "hypervisor"? And I'm told it's an overbearing, clumsy, heavy-handed overkill measure that would be difficult to implement and make everything a pain in the ass to do. So ... shit, man, I dunno... i'm just so damn tired of my hardware being bossed around by people I didn't authorize.
Write your own OS and software then. Your hardware is running someone else’s software otherwise, so no you don’t get to control every aspect of what it does.
Programs ran through Flatpak can only access permissions and directories that it has explicit permission for. This is perfect for a very small program that only does one thing, it can get rather awkward when you need it to access multiple storage volumes. For example, I wanted to have my Steam games stored on different hard drives, but they were never visible through Steam. I had to override the Flatpak permission to give access to my mounted disks for it to work.
A "hypervisor" is more applicable to servers than anything else, but I agree with you on everything else. That first sentence, man... Big companies get DRM for their property, so where's my DRM, y'know?
Fucking maddening.
Yes.
Worth it.
Honestly it's what drove me over the edge. I'm on endeavorOS and it has been great honestly. Would recommend 👍🏻
