It’s a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a new AI tool designed to remember everything you do on Windows. The feature that we never asked and never wanted it.
Microsoft, has done a lot to degrade the Windows user experience over the last few years. Everything from obtrusive advertisements to full-screen popups, ignoring app defaults, forcing a Microsoft Account, and more have eroded the trust relationship between Windows users and Microsoft.
It’s no surprise that users are already assuming that Microsoft will eventually end up collecting that data and using it to shape advertisements for you. That really would be a huge invasion of privacy, and people fully expect Microsoft to do it, and it’s those bad Windows practices that have led people to this conclusion.
The switch to Linux will have to come from the bottom up. Corporations will NOT switch until Microsoft costs them serious money.
I’m telling everyone I know it’s time to move to Linux, or worst case Mac.
Microsoft has already taken a step back: Microsoft implements drastic changes to Recall after criticism
- Recall needs to be enabled during installation
- Windows Hello is needed so that only the users can view it’s own screenshots
- Recall database will be encrypted
Microsoft has built a number of safety features into Windows Recall to ensure that the service can’t run secretly in the background. When Windows Recall is enabled, it places a permanent visual indicator icon on the Taskbar to let the user know that Windows Recall is capturing data. This icon cannot be hidden or moved.
Oh my, that one is really cute
This icon cannot be hidden or moved.
Or what? Your computer will take out a club and beat you to death?
You can’t convince me someone couldn’t do it with a simple registry edit, or even just replace the icon with something else by swapping an icon file somewhere in Windows/
Well find out in 10 years that that wasn’t true and that it did capture data when the icon wasn’t present whoopsies.
If chkCaptureData.checked then recall() bigNotify() Else recall() End
Malware will disable that icon. Law enforcement will buy thay malware.
Not really
For the retail market, most people just have phones not computers anymore. Microsoft has already lost The Battle of Windows phone.
For the Enterprise market none of this recent b******* is going to enterprise customers anyway, they would have group policies and volume licensing deals to avoid all the b*******.
For those poor retail customers who still run Windows, they suffer, but they’re minor, not significant
Why are you censoring yourself? Are you stupid?
Possibly. But I’m also definitely lazy, and my voice to text automatically censors. And I don’t feel like changing it. So f*** it
Bullshit
Just passing through and corrupting children.
O7
Thank you for your service!
Fuck yeah
For the majority of commercial users they literally don’t give a fuck either. It’s on techies that really care about his stuff sadly.
This is for the enterprise market more than anything. Large companies are already logging and mining everything. Slack, Teams chat, Teams voice, email, keystrokes…literally everything. Microsoft’s problem is that Enterprises are using third party products to do so. Recall solves that competitive issue for MS. I have no doubt that it will be tied to their cloud offerings, and I have no doubt that MS will retain the right to use it all of the data from the consumer side for AI training.
I’ve worked extensively in the Enterprise environment, and data exfiltration is a massive concern for any company with intellectual property, which is most of them.
Having data leak at all, another vector for exfiltration, is a huge huge risk.
Heck, I’d be surprised if Microsoft itself let its own developers run Total recall
As an infosec professional for way longer than I care to remember, you are preaching to the choir. That said, all of our clients are both large enterprise and critical infrastructure, and they all log (and mine) everything. Not only that, they are shipping this directly to third parties. It makes me break out into a cold sweat every time I think about it, but here we are.
PS: OK, all the US based ones. Our EU based client does not do this to my knowledge and I assume it has to do with EU regulations, but that’s just a wild guess.
Good point. But the companies are at least controlling the data pathway, being aware of it, signing off on it, doing it for their benefit.
And I imagine at least for the US companies, every company they exfiltrate data to, is contractually obligated to keep their data private
Bunter2
baloney
Ya, a PR nightmare for the next 15 minutes until the next unbelievable thing comes along and the ADD nature of people forgets windows is watching everything they do.
Oh please it’s not watching everything you do. It’s just taking screenshots 🙃
I agree with your point, but I think it’s important not to forget just how shitty tech media is a holding these companies to account. Half the shit most mainstream tech journalist publish borders on hagiography for these companies.
A lot of people would have huge bursts of negativity about this, but at the same time remain stubborn enough to not even consider evaluating alternatives. Microsoft and Apple spent decades making sure this would work
For now at least, I block as much telemetry at the network level (DNS level) using pihole.
Annoys my wife and kid at times. I try to explain why and what it means but convenience is king unfortunately.
My mom only really browses the web, writes emails, and edits and occasional document. I’ve given her my old XPS 9350, with Fedora installed on it, and she’s been very happy with it. Keeps saying that everything just makes sense, and when she needs something, it’s easy to find. She’s far from tech savvy, but not completely clueless either
Ok fine, I’ll repeat it again:
You’re right - many consumers will likely forget about it and just use it anyways. But enterprise customers absolutely, categorically will not. Even with their damage control, this is still going to hurt them a lot. Moreover, it’s going to hurt hardware sales from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm, all of which have dumped MASSIVE amounts of capital into this tech. This is going to slow the rollout of NN-optimized chip tiles, and that is going to directly hit their bottom line. Microsoft hurt themselves AND the three most important hardware partners they have.
That’s usually what I think too, but after watching how Twitter’s gone to shit since the two big user departures, I think this could legitimately affect Microsoft’s bottom line.
I believe the biggest thing that will hurt MS is moving to subscription. The vast majority of users aren’t gonna wanna have a forever fee when they buy a laptop/PC
That’s definitely going to be a problem for them, yes, because it’s also going to drive a ton of traffic to Linux and Linux is going to get even better.
That will rely on businesses moving away from Windows. That is where they make a ton of their money with Enterprise licenses and Office 365 subscriptions.
And businesses don’t give a shit about their employees’ privacy
If you look at sysadmin forums and groups it seems like most recommend disabling recall. Just about every enterprise will have confidentiality, security, or legislative requirements that recall is simply inconsistent with. It’s understandably been a hot topic.
We handle a lot of IP on our Windows PCs so it’s debatable. However, in recent years, Microsoft has taken over most of our services with SSO, office 360, teams, etc so who knows.
They do care about keeping their company secrets and proprietary info though. Recall could make corporate espionage a cake walk.
Yup. It’ll depend on how they handle Recall at the institutional level.
It’s a given that hospitals and law firms will have to turn it off, as they’re required by law to honor privilege. We’ll see what choices they make.
I find the nosedive in Twitter’s stock price these last few years encouraging. It seems for many there is a red line.
Twitter is a great example of the exact opposite being true. Are people upset? Absolutely. Did they leave the platform? Nope. Maybe a small percentage.
Respectfully, it’s not.
The user departures, and response to further enshittify, have driven their stock price into the ground.
What user departures? The platform has barely dipped. Stock prices are meaningless.
Number of users doesn’t matter because most people don’t close their accounts. Twitter’s actual usage and traffic is down by 20% since Elmo took over and their revenue is also massively down.
Who said anything about “number of users”? “Monthly Active Users” (MAU) is the industry standard.
Are you serious? The comment you replied to explicitly says “user departures”. And the article I linked is about active users.
Is this how you respond when you’re proven to be blatantly wrong about something? Totally pathetic.
X is the one telling the number of X users. Do you really trust Melon to tell the truth?
You’re assuming my source is Musk.
So far in this thread only one person has actually shared a source of any kind. Care to share with the class?
Twitter definitely lost a ton of users and tons continue to leave. That’s why advertisers have pulled out and their stock price has tanked. Twitter is a bad example
Twitter definitely lost a ton of users and tons continue to leave.
Define “tons”? As a percentage, it is miniscule, and it remains the place where politicians, companies and other entities make public announcements. It’s also, for some reason, the only platform supported for customer support from various companies.
lol, literally just making stuff up. Their number of active users dropped by 15-20% since Elmo took over: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/26/twitter-usage-in-us-fallen-by-a-fifth-since-elon-musks-takeover
It’s X.
Stop deadnaming X.
Anyone still clinging to the remnants of its former existence, please close your account. Stop kidding yourself.
I’ll never NOT call it Twitter, and you can’t make me.
You say that but deep down you know it’s Elon Musk’s X now. The dream is no more. You’re an X’er Harry!
What’s X? Is that the older version of Wayland or something?
It’s a shittier version of Mastodon but for right wing lunatics and russian bots.
I’ll stop deadnaming Twitter when Musk stops deadnaming his trans daughter.
And for the record, I’ve never used Twitter. It’s always kinda sucked. Now it really sucks.
Musk is a complete shithead and that’s not gonna happen.
Calling it Twitter is only going to accommodate the people that refuse to get off that nazi network.
Cause you know Musk gets off on the hate of people still calling it Twitter, exactly because how he treats deadnaming.
I’m swapping to Linux finally because of it. Few things are black and white but these things do have effects and some additional percentage of users are shifting over because of it.
I figured on my gaming and VR right that I’d begrudgingly upgrade it to W11 when W10 stopped receiving security updates and support but at this point the recall feature (which will be used to train LLMs regardless of what Microsoft promises or guarantees) has ensured that I never install that kind of spyware as an operating system.
I’d rather spend forever troubleshooting and getting my Valve Index to work with Ubuntu than deal with a giant backdoor.
I would also suggest not Ubuntu, and instead say you should give Bazzite a try. They are specifically interested in gaming with Steam (they even have a spin for running on Steam Deck). They might have already put in the work troubleshooting the distro with your VR gear.
better get W10 LTSC in VM and use it until EOL and beyond, it’ll be more privacy friendly this way
Using an internet connected OS past EOL is definitely not privacy friendly.
He said until EOL. Windows LTSC, the IoT version in particular is supported until 2032.
No, he said EOL and beyond
I wouldn’t go for Ubuntu. They are also run by a corporation that has done problematic things with the project. It also just doesn’t work that well anymore. Better off going for something Debian or Fedora based, or even an Ubuntu derivative like Pop OS.
Isn’t Ubuntu Debian based? Or is that no longer the case? I haven’t used it for about a decade.
Yes, it is, although there are many differences between both.
Many suggest Linux Mint (one of the best regarded beginner distro) as well, which has two versions, one based on Ubuntu and the other on Debian.
So, the three are like Debian’s most popular branch.
It’s debian-based, but such an outlier from the rest of the linux ecosystem that it might as well be its own beast.
It’s Debian-based, but Canonical has been really Microsofty about its development. They now have Snap as a universal packaging format, and have mandated that all official Ubuntu flavors (so X/K/Lubuntu and others, but not derivatives like Mint) must include Snap, and must not include Flatpak in the default installation. They’ve also fucked with APT where installing certain packages, like Firefox, would first install Snap and then the application’s Snap package. They’ve also had some controversy with Amazon ads in the search results, and advertising Ubuntu Pro in the fucking terminal.
I, and many others, recommend against Ubuntu. Linux Mint is the most commonly recommended “just works” distro. That being said, switching to Ubuntu, if able, is still preferable to staying on Windows.
I agree most of this is fucked up, though I don’t know what search results you mean. Also, I always find it funny that people refer to the Ubuntu pro thing as “ads”. Yes it technically is, but it is a fuck ton less shitty than what we’ve come to know as ads in literally every other context. It’s literally a couple lines of text about packages you can get premium updates and support for
The Unity desktop’s search would display Amazon ads based on the query. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Conformity_with_European_data_privacy_law
It’s like the “nazi bar” anecdote. It always starts small. You let in a bit of ads, a bit of self-promotion, then the revenue reaches a plateau. You let in a little more ads, maybe a pop-up saying that you could be more secure. Then a few years later you have a Recall situation. If you let one nazi drink at your bar, he’ll bring his friends, and you’ll be running a nazi bar.
I don’t trust Canonical to act with integrity.
IIRC: about decade ago Ubuntu (still with its own Unity DE) processed system search in a way it shoveled amazon ads to users in first places. Or something lime that.
Pop os is fantastic
It varies. I struggle with its interface personally. I also had to force it to switch to Wayland to get some things working reliably. The hybrid graphics mode has issues too using the GPU when it doesn’t need to. Other than that it works reasonably well out of the box, though you still occasionally have to deal with headaches from apt. A lot of the issues will hopefully be fixed when the cosmic desktop is ready. Some more can be fixed if they end up going immutable, which I believe they are working on right now. The Ubuntu version is also kinda old.
Personally I would rather be on NixOS or Fedora right now, or UBlue’s Aurora. I am probably not a good candidate to be running something like Pop OS though. I am too experienced and my needs and wants are too complex for the poor thing.
I am sure you’re right about at least most of this but I will say my experience hasn’t been very troublesome. Other than a driver issue I had after an update 2 years ago, I haven’t had much trouble. Since I switched to an amd GPU especially, since gaming is much smoother. I had a lot worse issues when I used Elementary OS. Stuff broke a ton. For example, I had a weird graphical issue in Firefox for months.
Elementary OS probably isn’t what I want either.
Are you talking about a desktop? I am on a laptop with Intel iGPU and Nvidia dGPU. The battery life in Windows isn’t great, but it actually seems worse in Pop OS. I did actually catching it using the dGPU when it shouldn’t be. Obviously Nvidia doesn’t help things, and I am glad it works as well as it does. Still it’s kind of sad. I might buy a second laptop just so I can have battery life that isn’t horrible.
Cosmic desktop from my understanding will have a better implementation of the hybrid graphics mode to stop this nonsense.
Yeah, desktops. I do think though that the Intel/Nvidia combo you have makes Linux in general a bit tougher than any setup more Linux friendly than that.
You could try win 10 iot ltsc 2021 out. It gets security support until 2032.
Lol! How incredibly detached from reality!
Nobody cares! Well a few people care that make a big fuss, but most people don’t ever think about their os. I bet a pretty big percentage don’t know what os they use and I bet more than half don’t know what version of the os they are using.
Nobody cares!
They don’t care, but their nephew that has to fix the PC is it acts up cares, and when the nephew says he’s not touching that thing with a 10 foot pole they’ll consider that for their next purchase.
And if in the news there is an article that thanks to copilot they could identify the culprit in a crime, they’ll look at any Windows version and their stroking material in a map on that drive a little different.
This. Normal users give zero shit, they neither understand nor care about any of this. If they can use a cool feature they will. How many use Facebook again? What do they care about privacy? Exactly.
They lost trust from some niche <10 %, that’s it, from which most use/want to use Linux anyway.
If we could tackle the idea that Privacy matters and get more common folk aware of what they are losing, then I would like that very much.
Sure, would be great. Like many other things, including far more important topics. But that is not the world we live in. The head line is simply nonsense and it will break absolutely for Microsoft.
Haha I thought I recognized that username. The same person arguing with me that recall was a brilliant move which will solidify Microsoft as the industry leader they’ve always been 😂
Ah, the asshole! I thought I blocked you already. Bye!
Hey block me too, you’re too dumb to exist in my space
Where are at point no where new features added to something (phone, OS, website, etc) are only to further monetize the user while providing a minimal benefit.
People are losing trust with technology providers.
If this technology existed back in Windows 95 days people, would have gone wild for it.
Why is Lemmy showing me news from the 00’s?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As CEO Satya Nadella described it, Windows now has a photographic memory that uses AI to triage and index everything you’ve ever done on your computer, enabling you to semantically search for things you’ve seen using natural language.
Your favorite web browser, video editor, or music streaming app of choice could release an update that begins scraping data from Windows Recall and uploading it to its own backend.
Many have already assumed the worst; that Windows Recall will eventually be used as a means to sell data to advertisers and train AI models, and that if it’s not happening today, it’s only a matter of time.
It’s a feature reserved exclusively for new PCs shipping under the Copilot+ umbrella, which means if you want to use it, you’ll have to buy a new device with a neural processing unit (NPU) that can output 40 TOPS of power first.
But there’s a very dark cloud hanging over this feature right now, and a lot of privacy conscious people are simply not going to be able to subscribe to the idea of Windows Recall in its current form.
I suspect this means we will see new features and capabilities added to Windows Recall over the coming months, along with updates to ensure the data it collects is secure on the device.
The original article contains 2,259 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Microsoft should go further and further with this so that windows becomes worse so that less people use it.
They say this like anyone is going to do something…
Perhaps if I wish really, really hard they will. I just will not hold my breath!
My dad is now pissed at both Microsoft and Adobe, and curious about Linux. If I can find a Lightroom alternative, he might actually switch.
I’ve heard that RawTherapee is good, but not quite on the same level.
Also one of the dumbest names ever.
Sounds like something from a kink brothel in Sedona.
RawTherapee and The GIMP
they knew.
Like darktable?
I haven’t found a suitable replacement yet. I know this is somewhat niche but nothing on Linux can do batch management of Keywords as well as Bridge or Lightroom. I wish I knew anything about C to contribute.
I employed imagemagick recently to batch edit some pics via CLI but I’m not sure if it’s a drop in replacement for bridge and lightroom.
Fun fact: I’ve heard the Adobe suite works fairly well in Linux, if you find yourself a version without DRM
I tried to install some PlayOnLinux Wine shit but it didn’t work.
Have you tried installing it via Lutris and using Proton-GE as runtime?
🫨
Did not work. :( TBF I am not very technically minded with Linux.
PlayOnLinux? When was this, 15 years ago?
I know of the GitHub script to install PhotoShop, but wasn’t aware that the rest of the suite worked.
I also just read that they would. Never tested it myself. I only use Adobe on my work mac.
Ah. I don’t use Adobe products, so not really willing to test myself.
Aside from the security nightmare, I’m really curious what havoc the LLM can cause by hallucinating stuff, based on how suggestive a question is asked.
Wife on husband’s account: “What dating sides did I visit this year?”
“Here are the 5 most popular dating sides you visited last year:…”“When was the last time employee X watched porn and on what side?”
…
