Technology

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?"
...

A lot of people here seem to be missing the nuance.

Sure, it’s problematic for their consumer market share, but you’re right that that’ll probably be forgotten by the mostly tech-illiterate populace over time. But that’s not the problem.

Step 0 of MS’s plan for this should have been “make sure there is an absolutely bulletproof and ironclad way to disable that stuff completely for enterprise customers”. And they didn’t do that. So now, enterprise IT writ large is going to… you know… just not buy any of these devices. Which is absolutely their right.

But the really frustrating bit is that MS may have significantly harmed the rollout of ARM-based laptops (as well as x86 chips with beefy NN-optimized tiles) with this, and additionally done real, massive harm to Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm by doing so. All three of those manufacturers have gone to ENORMOUS lengths to roll this tech out, largely at MS’s behest. They’re all going to take this on the chin if the rollout goes poorly. And the rollout is already going poorly.

But MS thought they could Apple-handwave away the details. And they can’t, because a lot of people who understand the absurd security implications of continuous capture and OCR and plaintext storage of the OCR output. It’s not something you can handwave away. It’s entirely a non-starter in the context of maintaining organizational security (as well as personal data security, but we’ve already talked about why that’s a bit of a moot point with the general public). But enterprise IT largely does try to take their job seriously, and they are collectively calling MS’s bluff.

The problem for the long term is that MS has pretty much proven to the IT industry with this stunt that they can’t be trusted to make software that conforms to their needs. That’s a stain that isn’t going to go away any time soon. It might even be the spark that finally triggers enterprise to move away from MS as a primary client OS. After all, Linux is WAY easier to manage from a security perspective.

It's the 1, 2, 3, 4 punch of

"Haha windows 10 EOL is soon and no your computer cannot upgrade 😏"

Followed by the

"We're thinking about.. no? Okay well anyways, we're gonna shove ads into the UX, even after backpedaling after backlash"

Then the

"Listen the security situation is p bad and we're not too sure what to do about it. Lots of internal accts have been compromised. Probably yours too, we don't really know. Shhh, we got big AI news soon."

And lastly the

"Unveiling, the biggest security nightmare tool in the history of connected devices. From the writers of Total Recall and the masterminds behind Ads in your OS comes: Recall!"

I don't care what windows does to rectify this. My parents next machines are either Linux or Chromebooks.

If windows 12 isn't FOSS, Microsoft can pound sand.

I know it's WindowsCentral but the article has some pretty naive takes. Given the propensity of threat actors to target Windows due to its market share it's impossible to not see a system that records user activity as a huge treasure trove for both malware and hackers.

It also doesn't mention that Microsoft claimed that it would be impossible to exfiltrate Recall data and of course researchers found it not only possible but trivial, with the data lacking even basic protections. Assurances that there are mechanisms to prevent Recall from secretly monitoring you mean nothing when prior assurances about safety have been found to be paper thin at best.

Further it ignores that telemetry gathered by Windows has dramatically increased in the last several years with methods to disable it being eliminated or undone by OS updates. Microsoft is hungry for user data and it would be absurdly naive to think that Recall won't be a tool they use to gain more of it. If not now, then definitely later.

The author does point out that Recall has been weirdly under wraps, avoiding the usual test bed for new feature rollout. Microsoft has been acting shady about the feature and then the feature itself does shady things (like record PII, credit card data, etc.), of course users are going to think the worst. At this point it's a survival tactic.

Microsoft doesn't have trust issues because of bad PR or a few missteps. Microsoft has trust issues because they have violated user trust repeatedly for decades. They have done nothing to make users feel like they care at all about keeping Windows secure and safe and they clearly have no regard for user privacy. This only question is whether this backlash will do anything to make Microsoft reconsider the way it treats its users. I predict they will learn all the wrong lessons from this.

Glad I switched from PC to Mac back in 2022 because I was pissed Microsoft was forcing me to upgrade hardware to switch to Windows 11 which I didn’t want. Apple to me is more private and will be more thoughtful with their AI tools to expand user functionality. Screw Microsoft. This is a user that had used PCs since the late 1980s…

Straw that broke the camel's back? Every vertebra in that camel's back has been smashed with a sledge hammer over the past 30 years.

Windows 95 was the last version I was excited about; Windows 98 SE was the last version of Windows I willingly purchased, and XP was the last one I willingly used. When they announced Win7, I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06, "Dapper Drake". Since then, Windows has only existed on my computers as pirated, virtual machines.

https://youtu.be/I5qAshY2jkw?t=27