If you thought that Microsoft was done with Recall after its catastrophic reveal as the main feature of Copilot+ PCs, you are mistaken.
Microsoft wants to bring it back this October 2024. Good news is that the company plans to introduce it in test builds of the Windows 11 operating system in October. In other words: do not expect the feature to hit stable Windows 11 PCs before 2025 at the earliest.
While Recall may have sounded great on paper and on work-related PCs, users and experts alike expressed concern. Users expressed fears that malware could steal Recall data to know exactly what they did in the past couple of months.
Others did not trust Microsoft to keep the data secure. We suggested to make Recall opt-in, instead of opt-out, to make sure that users knew what they were getting into when enabling it.
Microsoft pulled the Recall feature shortly after its announcement and published information about its future in June. There, Microsoft said that it would make Recall opt-in by default. It also wanted to improve security by enrolling in Windows Hello and other features.
So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.
Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.
Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.
They should just market to the blackmail fetish community at this point.
And this just about sums up all of Microsoft’s creativity.
Linux is just as bad though —
.zsh_historyrecords every command you run!(/s, obviously…)
Actually no… well for zsh I don’t know but for bash at least if you start the command with a space it won’t be added to history. So not every command, you still get to (conveniently IMHO) decide that too!
That’s so cool, how have I never discovered that after so many years of using Linux?..
Iirc you can also just disable it with
unset HISTFILE. This will reset when you open a new session unless you put it in the.zshrcor something.Right, you can control that behavior in bash with the
HISTCONTROLvariable, and in zsh withsetopt HIST_IGNORE_SPACE:)
this is gonna get people to either switch to macos or linux
The whole idea of windows 11 made me switch to Linux, already unhappy with windows 10 but that was bearable for me.
Sucks that I work in windows though.
atleast windows 10 is actually good and has good app support but it has some spyware
Their feature may come back to their OS but their OS isn’t coming back to my hardware.
Not a problem for me, since I plan to stop using Windows in 2025.
Much like Chrome forced me to Firefox, Windows will force me to Linux. It is inevitable.
I recommend at least dual booting before then, so you can get a feel for what the alternative is capable of. You don’t want to switch, run into a hiccup, then have to decide whether to push through whatever incompatibility that is, or switch to something terrible. Work through those problems at your own pace in a dual-boot setup, and once you’re ready to ditch Windows, everything is already ready.
Yeah, that’s what I actually did on my secondary computer (laptop), where I dual booted Windows 10 and openSUSE Tumbleweed, before switching entirely to openSUSE.
I am planning to do the same for my main PC, but instead of doing different partitions for each OS, I will most likely give Linux (probably openSUSE as well, but I might try Fedora Atomic this time) an entire SSD for it’s use.
Yeah, on my desktop, I have a separate disk for Windows and Linux, and since I haven’t booted into Windows in over a year, I’ll probably repurpose it as a data drive or something (or maybe upgrade my NAS boot drive).
This tool stinks of management requesting a better way to spy the employees. It has little to no benefits for the user.
I’m not sure any company wants to have recordings of their employees screens feed to Microsoft servers. It could never happen at my company because of the amount of private information we deal with. Privacy laws, NDAs, you name it. There’s no way we could enable this without a shit storm of risk.
I can see the use case, and that some people might find this useful (not to mention many agencies and ad companies). But enough was enough, for me at least. Linux Mint rocks. Can’t see myself going back to Windows.
They never said they were doing away with it. It’s a feature literally no one asked for, it’s insecure, it’s invasive, a privacy nightmare any way you look at it.
And people who willingly use it will deserve all the shit that it is. And meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying my privacy-respecting Linux operating system.
M$ is like a boyfriend - you tell him “No, don’t touch me there!”
and an hour later his hands are wandering the same direction again…
An abusive boyfriend perhaps and you should definitely leave that relationship
I am keeping Win 10 until I can’t safely anymore then Linux may be my next stop. Been looking at CachyOS for gaming.
My gaming Linux of choice right now is Garuda.
It’s another contender for sure.
Why cachy?
Never heard about it. Couldn’t find what makes it different from the others.
Just some performance I’ve seen people get from it and the nvidia bits. Still need to research before I decide though.
Thing with cachy is that it doesnt do anything better than other distros when it comes to nvidia drivers, its entire focus is giving you like maybe 5% better performance at the cost of worse stability, so i really would not recommend it to new users.
I’d say use something like bazzite or pop_os! instead.
Feel free to dm me if you want help.
Thanks! My cousin used pop and was a fan tbf. I do like stability but also hoping, as I don’t work on my personal PC, that some instability would revitalise my enjoyment of tinkering. I have become used to the comforts of stability as I’ve aged. Haven’t really played with Linux since the Red Hat 7 days…! I used to use Unix back then for FORTRAN but yeah of late just forgotten everything.
How does using avx instructions reduce stability?
source? or did you mean arch is unstable?
Well, i just meant that all the changes cachy does (on top of being arch based) means it just isnt as stable as some other options
In this case, PopOS and Bazzite are also less stable because they add things on top of Ubuntu and Fedora
I also would love to know why cachy
IDK why they want to but to me the name seems pretty catchy
I’m guessing maybe the scheduler? Its the only real difference I see versus the other gaming distros.
The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is here again. They really do need to squeeze those dollars out
Who thought they were abandoning it?
I doubt they secured it particularly well either, because the nature of proper security is building it from the ground up with security as a core principle, but it was always coming back.
They delayed because “oh shit, people noticed we didn’t even bother with security theater” and to let the backlash die down. They still consider it a major selling point.
They did abandon it but it backed itself up
By the comments I’ve seen, it seems like no one read their previous announcement where they said they were delaying the feature while they continued work on it. We already knew they were still going to ship it.
Just having it disabled by default is a massive improvement. It’s crazy that they initially considered releasing it with no encryption and it on by default.
It’s less bad for sure. And I can understand, theoretically, the value of “that one think I saw that one time”. I’ve definitely spent way longer than I’d want looking for some random reference I’d seen in the past, and I’m in the process of trying to catalogue all the references in my past nonfiction reading after the fact, and it’s definitely a lot of work.
But man, other users on your PC could trivially see everything you did on your system unless you used the dumpster fire that’s edge in private browsing mode, and the people on the project thought that was OK. There’s no way people with that level of lack of awareness managed to adapt the project to not be a sieve.
MS: Here’s a cool new feature!
Users: That is spyware bullshit, fuck off!
MS: But muh ecosystem!
Users: Nobody fucking wants any of that. Now STFU and run my games, grandpa.
MS: sniffs This isn’t over, you little shits.While Recall may have sounded great on paper and on work-related PCs,
Ah yes, all those IT people were probably thrilled with the prospect of Microsoft getting sent constant screenshots of their employees’ machines, with all those company secrets, sensitive information, and everything
The crazy part to me is a local solution (shadow copy) has been around for ever. Why this is even a thing at all is just insane to me.
Shadow copy is a completely different thing. Shadow copy creates snapshots(used for version history, among other uses) of files. Recall is a screen recording software, that includes OCR and maybe some AI stuff. At this time, at least, it too is all local. It just isn’t secure in the least.
And functionaly pointless other then spying on users (and there is also software for that).
My point is, like a lot of things today, this is a solution looking for a problem.
I’m not diagreening with that. Although it could be useful, I often forget where I saved things, and something that let’s my search my worn history would be rad, but there’s zero chance this won’t be abused by a large list of people, including but not limited to Microsoft, spouses, bosses, malware, governments, every random application, Facebook, and Microsoft.
And is just as useful as a functioning search tool…
Boy howdy I’m just imagining HIPAA with this.
Also data retention and security it’s a nightmare for Title IX and FERPA as well.
Another thing is Microsoft hasn’t been talking about compression either, how large are these files? What does it do with networked drives? How do we know metadata collection isn’t being expanded?
It never sounded great on paper to me…
Hear me out, I actually had a similar concept in mind, but only for files, emails, calendar entries, bookmarks, that kind of stuff. Things that I actually saved on my computer, not random screenshots of what I’m looking at. This is a huge difference IMO. What I look at should never be saved. Only when I specifically save something, should it persist. I would actually love a FOSS, local and private AI solution that would allow me to simply query anything I’ve ever saved on my computer with a simple search request, without having to waste time on naming my files. Even better if it would understand the context and stuff. This would especially be useful with photos, as they never have proper filenames, just some generic random stuff. Or with code, if the AI search could understand the context of my code and I could just pull it up using a search terms like “the function for handling DNS over TLS requests a few years ago” or whatever, and it would just pull out that one function from the project. Even better if this could be integrated with a separate, generative AI model, that could make small changes to my already existing stuff. I don’t know, e.g. “refactor the function to use LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL TLS library”.
Another day I’m thankful I don’t work for a company that uses microshit anymore
It is funny how they think this product useful to so many people. I believe they only do it because they have to use AI in any way but could not come up with something better.
