Technology

It's not gonna affect their bottom line though. Microsoft are doing it because they know they can get away with it and drag the bar so low that they'd make RealNetworks circa 1999 look like privacy-respecting saints.

Your average Joe cannot afford the second mortgage needed to finance a MacBook purchase, and they'd have an aneurysm if presented with a Linux terminal.

And don't even get me started on business and professional use. Many businesses rely on proprietary or even bespoke software that doesn't run well, sometimes not even at all on Linux. FOSS alternatives are often dogshit. And before you dispute me on that fact, can you name one web designer that would use Affinity Photo, GIMP or PDN over Photoshop? Or could you name one person that prefer AbiWord, OpenOffice or LibreOffice to Microsoft Word?

PC Gaming is one of those use-cases that has evolved by leaps and bounds... until you realize just how many multiplayer games rely on a form of anticheat. Many of these solutions are straight-up incompatible with Linux.

Forcing advanced keylogger to your system that anyone who has skills to break into your system can exploit freely does that

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.

They say this like anyone is going to do something...

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!

The average user is not even going to know this was a thing

Well, getting their OpenID Signing Key for Azure Active Directory stolen was magnitudes worse in my opinion.

https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/CSRB_Review_of_the_Summer_2023_MEO_Intrusion_Final_508c.pdf

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.

TIL: There are still people that trust Microsoft.

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?"
...