Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs After temporarily shelving its controversial Windows Recall feature amid a wave of backlash, Microsoft is back at it - now quietly slipping the screenshotting app into the Windows 11 Release Preview channel for Copilot+ PCs, signaling its near-readiness for general availability. In May last year, at its Build developer …
"Jaime Teevan was wheeled out to pitch Recall as a necessity for the AI age"
No wonder She won the Borg Early Career Award (2014)!
Yeah, I too would have wheeled in a dozen full-on Daleks on that stage, and straight marched in a couple hundred Cybermen, to transparently promote the great Recall dystopiaclypse, with genuine enthusiasm ... I mean, real nice psirens with bios are a bit over the top for such PR purposes ... unless they wield a Javier Milei chainsaw of course, imho!
Yeah, I think the Borg is smart to avoid those given the current climate change (Wang) on infosec (Krebs) ... something famous JEDI fighters (Weiler) heed as we speak (it seems) promoting the dissolution of moderate FedRAMPs in a covert move to favor silent but deadly stealth gas giant cloud intrusions, in one's general direction, imho!
The borgborygmus is subtle but steadfastly resolute on that one ...
And see how many bother to install it and keep it beyond a 5' trial. Is M$ afraid to be deceived by how little interest this piece of code raises and realize users would rather see it spend time on fixing Windows bugs? Alas, just fixing code is less fun than writing new stuff, even if it's useless.
That's it. I'm done. I've already been using a Linux laptop as my daily driver for the past year anyway, but I still have Windows 10 on my desktop for gaming and a few other apps that don't play well on Linux. I'd been resigned to having to have a Windows machine no matter what, but this is the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had it with Redmond insisting my hardware is their playground. If there's still stuff that I can't get to run in WINE, I'll set up a fully sandboxed Win 10 VM with no networking so there's no security issues with it, and move everything else full Linux by October. I'll still have to use their crap at work, but I reckon I can convince the resident BOFH that this stuff is a massive security threat and get it disabled across the board, assuming they're not already on board with that opinion. Also going to move ahead with getting their cloud service needles out of my veins. I was already irked that they tried every trick in the book to make me pay for Copilot services neither me nor my family use, need or want - but this is ridiculous.
To me, this is just a nail-in-the-coffin reason to say "Oh hell no!" to anything and everything on the market with a supported or potentially supported in the future "New Pocket Unloader."
And if they try to use my Nvidia card to support "Recall EVERYTHING YOU DID on your favorite gambling, porn, chat, dating, banking, tax account, retirement portfolio, etc for easy access by LEO requests remotely from our always on, always connected, backdoored Windows Hello AI PC.", well then, it would just be time to shift back to LMDE 6 and say "Screw Satya and the USG three letter agencies!" for one final time...
Although I refuse to abide by American-led identification of the masses, I can certainly understand why the Pumpkin Fuhrer's Fascist/Nazi administration would want to identify and track the information and activities of all users, citizens or not, protected by US rights or not, but at the will of the second most petty and childish man on the planet next to his unelected South African buddy...
While i can somewhat understand the aversion against the trumpeltier (german:Trampeltier=Dromedar), the mumbling mummy and his cackling witch of the word salad were and are no better. Without wanting to defend any head(less) of state, i wouldnt blame a new inaugurated puppet for things that began under his predecessor(s).
On topic: Win7 was the last redmondish spyware i used and Win2K was the last windows where the administrator was actually an administrator, even able to delete the wuau*.* "i will ignore anything you forbid and do as i please anyway"-"update". Since WinXP you cannot even disable the wuau*.* tasks, the system will shut down immediately without any chance to avoid this. this means that since WinXP, i am doing everything important and privacy relevant on other OSes and abuse Redmond stuff only for irrelevant things like gaming.
Don't want to derail this, but strictly speaking, IIRC, a "Trampeltier" only applies to the Bactrian Camel (the one with 2 humps), not the Dromedary. Then again, with my German getting a little bit worse every year since I left, I may be misremembering.
I could be wrong but I think the Agent P is a reference to the cockwomble responsible for insidious systemd and the atrocious pulse audio.
I don’t know about the latter but system dunce is used by all Ubuntu-derived Linux distributions.
If you want to avoid systemd (and why would you not?) then there are alternative distributions. I have used void Linux for years for this reason and the fact that it odd generally lightweight - I can recommend it
""Recall EVERYTHING YOU DID on your favorite gambling, porn, chat, dating, banking, tax account, retirement portfolio, etc for easy access by LEO requests remotely from our always on, always connected, backdoored Windows Hello AI PC.""
As soon as there is a subpoena for information on your computer or you should reasonably know that it will be subpoenaed, if you delete it, it's a crime. Your best defense is to never have compiled and stored that info in the first place.
If you get in an accident and have a dashcam and know you screwed up, you want to rip it off and chuck it under the seat. At least under the seat if you can't stash it elsewhere as the files might be required. Of course, if you don't have a dashcam or They don't know about it, you won't be peaching on yourself. If you car has built in cameras that record, sucks to be you.
If you get in an accident and have a dashcam and know you screwed up, you want to rip it off and chuck it under the seat.
If you get in an accident and have a dashcam and know you screwed up, you want to be very careful the innocent party didn't spot that you had a dashcam, because you'll get subpoenaed. If you want to add destruction of evidence / perverting the course of justice to that dangerous driving charge, go right ahead.
"If you get in an accident and have a dashcam and know you screwed up, you want to be very careful the innocent party didn't spot that you had a dashcam,"
If it's your first move, I'll wager that it isn't noticed and you could always claim it was dislodged in the accident. If an investigator asks if you had/have one and you lie, that's a big issue. If they don't spot one and don't ask you directly, you might be able to sell the claim you forgot about it. Yes, if you were observed/recorded, that's a problem.
My bigger point is that it's a risk. In the case of a dashcam, it may hold more value to have one if you aren't a completely useless driver. Other sorts of self-installed surveillance gear can be more problematic.
"Your best defense is to never have compiled and stored that info in the first place"
Basic rules of personal data protection: only record the absolute minimum that you need to for the task in hand and delete it immediately it's no longer required. Recall seems to be the complete opposite.
> only record the absolute minimum that you need to for the task in hand and delete it immediately it's no longer required.
Which is the opposite of what Microsoft does: Record the maximum and probably store it forever and a day (just in case they can eventually find a way to somehow monetize that information)...
I really wonder who on earth would find a use for continuous screenshots of their own computer screen. I mean, I know what I did five minutes ago, I was there, looking at that screen... Jeez.
" Record the maximum and probably store it forever and a day"....
I suspect you overlooked the "AI" part, which means everything spied and stolen will constantly and forever be processed, correlated and mutilated.And of course phoned home in one way or another no matter what they claim. (Office 365 spell checker anyone ?)
Have fun trying to prove that anything digital has not been tampered with or that you are not in cahoots with any terrorist, criminal or people with the wrong opinion when "the AI" says that you might be.
"Have fun trying to prove that anything digital has not been tampered with or that you are not in cahoots with any terrorist, criminal or people with the wrong opinion when "the AI" says that you might be."
In the US, for a criminal charge, there's the need to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt". Most defenses try to insert as much reasonable doubt as possible. An AI asserting "might be" is not convincing proof. At least not at the moment when it's so easy to find examples of AI generated hallucinations to show a jury.
Guess I'll go for the horse piss icon instead, or just pretend it's really a lovely glass of whiskey.
This whole "you WILL buy new machines so we can use your equipment to better spy on you, you'd damn well better buy machines fast enough so that we don't have to waste our time waiting on you, and if we see something we don't like we'll rat you out to the plod" attitude is what drove me away. I'm not computer literate enough to try and keep ahead of them. I also do not have the time to keep going back and unassing the system every week after they force an update which also forces everything back to their default vacuum settings, except it also moves where those settings are so you have to do the entire tour every week to find where things are hidden this time. We all know the reason why, the harder they make it to unass the system, the more likely it is that you'll just give in and let them have the store.
Nope, I'm out. I closed the store, burned it to the ground and left the county. I'm just glad there's enough like-minded people to keep an alternative going. Quite frankly, if it was M$ or nothing these days I'd just go back to pre-computer living.
This is _Microsoft_ that we're talking about here. They'll fuck it up. It depends on WinHell... ah, that is, Windows Hello, which they just fucked up on Patch Tuesday. More of the same to follow.
Now, how do you create a stand-alone admin account again? No MS Account, no WinHell. No WinHell, no Recall.
Trust in MS incompetence. They haven't let us down about _that_ yet.
Speaking of Windows Hello, you've reminded me...
Earlier today, I got a (blue, small, fairly unobtrusive by Microsoft's standards) popup on my corporate-issued work laptop, inviting me to try logging in with Windows Hello facial recognition. "Try it! It's cool and fun and very 'now' and exciting!", that sort of cheery tone beloved of Microsoft.
Thinking - and surprised - that perhaps our IT dept had eased off their security paranoia, I went to Settings to try it.
Nope. "This setting is disabled by administrative policy" or words to that effect.
Oh, Microsoft. Left hand can't talk to right hand, even within the same product. Why advertise and urge me to try a feature that you (should) know is disabled by policy?
SMH, as the kids say.
The real problem is when you are suckered in to using a PIN and forget the password... until the day it updates and prompts you for your password
Used to have a piece of s/w like that... it would prompt you for your PIN after an update then would prompt for your username (which one did I use?) and password (which you have forgotten, natch) and then prompt for a 'new' PIN
That task is delegated to the Windows telemetry subsystem, nothing to do with Recall at at all.
Remember, the original story was "We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale" - and Microsoft always sticks to the word of PKD[1]
[1] The Thirty Three Stigmata of Windows Eleven?
Yeah but they can't monetize them if they stay on your computer, now can they. And that must be the ultimate purpose, because I really can't see another.
What's the point of Recall? Why would they spend so much money and so much time on it, if they didn't think it will earn them millions? Huh?
Well maybe its the "interest based ADnoyance" scam, this time from redmond instead one of the other data thieves.
If thats one of the far too many (ab)usecases i might be interested in seeing how that works. As far as i can tell from my android devices, the "interest based" Adnoyance might indeed be based on someones interests but usually not mine.
Well MS, what's the purpose then? Now don't give me that BS about it helping users to organise, there's something in it for you lot or you wouldn't have coded it and wouldn't have tried 17 times already to foist it on us!
I’d described this scenario before, here goes. If your A.I. is sophisticated enough you could invite it to read every gmail letter on the Google database, then query it some interesting questions:
-who in the world is getting murdered today?
-name the top 3 stocks I should buy today that are going up in value the most by next week?
-where are terrorists striking next?
Etc.
I have a feeling that Microsoft Outlook isn’t popular enough to have sufficient information to adequately answer these questions from Bill Gates, so he asked copilot “what minimal information do you need to collect from all Windows users to be able to accurately answer those questions?” and copilot came back with Microsoft Recall.
Oh sure, no human ever looks at your data. Humans aren’t fast enough nor smart enough!
If you were doing something last week and couldn't quite remember the details, you could pull it up and replay it using Recall.
If I wanted to remember the details of what I was doing last week, or a couple days ago, I'd check my git commit logs and project folder docs (which include relevant-meeting notes).
My work isn't organised or indexed by date; it's organised and indexed by project; I suspect that's true of most other people, too.
> My work isn't organised or indexed by date; it's organised and indexed by project; I suspect that's true of most other people, too.
Of course it is. The point of recall is to ask questions like, "what did I do on the x project last week" or, "what was the name of the library I researched for chicken sexing a few days ago.
You have to understand that most people struggle to remember what they're presently eating let alone what they did a week ago.
I know it's the slippery slope argument but I'm still predicting that six months will go by and you'll be able to get cloud copilot to "assist" and mine more before it becomes automatic opt out.
Non functional opt-out selectors along with reassuring fake messages are nothing new. You would need to have sysinternals file monitor or something similar running for a while to see if its really no longer recording. Or just take a look on the remaining disc capacity before and after coffee/lunch break.
GDPR might throw a few roadblock that will need to be sidestepped.
Maybe that's why the EEA (basically the EU + Norway, Switzerland and maybe UK) won't get the funstuff with the rest of the world and will have to wait.
[quote]"Recall (preview) will be available starting early 2025 in most markets, rolling out to the European Economic Area later this year. [/quote]
> most people struggle to remember what they're presently eating let alone what they did a week ago.
That's information triage: Unimportant information (AKA "background noise") gets filtered out and forgotten. If I had some famously good meal, I probably will remember. If I had some tasteless junk food I'd rather not remember it.
As for searching for details ("what exactly was the information I found last week"), I'm pretty sure Recall won't be able to give it to me. I think it would be way faster and safer to just reread that publication myself than to rely on what an AI understood about that topic.
Recall (or any other AI) is like having an assistant who doesn't know anything about your job. And an AI can't even make coffee... :-p
If I'm being charitable, I can only assume Microsoft execs have severe dementia and have no idea what they've been doing.
This kind of feature is utterly useless to domestic users - a gamer might want video clips and a few specific screenshots from a session, but only if actively selected (Ref: Twitch). A screenshot two seconds after "the cool thing" is useless.
Home (and education) users almost always share accounts, so...
Worse, an extensive record of activity is actively destructive for business - it'll store a huge amount of commercially sensitive data, making it an extremely valuable target for miscreants to steal.
Plus, of course when someone sues they can demand the full, decrypted database as part of discovery.
I’m sorry. This is a business environment we’re talking about? And only user names and passwords are sensitive? What about ALL the other business sensitive information on the screen all day long?
I can already see US border security wanting to replay the screens to see if you’ve been saying things the present administration doesn’t agree with.
On a related note, my sympathies to the recently dismissed commander of the US base on Greenland.
> my sympathies to the recently dismissed commander of the US base on Greenland.
Another step towards ensuring the Right Thinking Political Purity of the US Armed Forces; don't want to risk having anyone still around who might be loyal to the Constitution or, Heaven Forbid, the People, of The USA, when the time comes to put down the peaceful campaigners or, as they will be described, "this invasion of DC by militant banner wavers".
Two things are guaranteed in IT.
1) The continuing dominance of Microsoft
(because of)
2) No decent Linux desktop programme.
So for all the sound and fury vented here, I can predict in 5 years time - even *with* US goods being as popular as a fart in spacesuit - the primary desktop OS will be Windows of some sort.
We all run Linux at home. We get it. But we don't run corporate IT do we ?
With the US energetically alienating its friends it's a distinct possibility that the EU will have decided to look elsewhere PDQ at the level of the actual EU institutions with, very likely national governments following on. What if they then strt mandating Linux & FOSS applications in education? Too many Windows-only applications? If it looks like there might be a tipping point FOMO will do the rest.
> What if they then strt mandating Linux & FOSS applications in education? Too many Windows-only applications?
IIRC some big German city tried it already: They switched the whole administration to FOSS for a couple years, but eventually had to switch back to Microsoft because it didn't work out on the long term, too many things didn't work anymore (IIRC and AFAIK, I don't know the details). A pity.
That would be munich and they did suspiciously discover their special designed breed of *ixish stuff "didnt work" after microsoft made some decision for an investment in said city. Currently the federal state of schleswig-holstein claims to try anew, athoug i cannot discern if its genuine incompetence or malicious intent to show that Linux wont work.
At least i managed to give my wife a linux based desktop for her small business. All the stuff she needs simply works and the insecurities of unwanted, potentially destructive updates, warnings that the OS will "no longer be supported" as well as the strange phenomena Edge and microsofts unwanted insistance on bing and other crapware randomly generated are gone.
"but eventually had to switch back to Microsoft because it didn't work out on the long term, too many things didn't work anymore "
No, that's the official excuse: MS literally bribed them to switch back. I'm not wondering, they'd shit their pants if *government* would abandon Windows. Even a small one.
Not the first time either: MS bribed an 'open standard' consisting of Word documents in binary format and defined as "the way Word stores this".
"We all run Linux at home. We get it. But we don't run corporate IT do we ?"
And now that C-level plod have mostly been able to find the on switch for their computer, they won't stand for changing anything else as it would lose them. Those that have been chasing them up the ladder have grown up and gone through B school using Windows so changing would be too hard for them (or take another 15-20 years to learn).
I switch between Linux, Mac and Windows all day long with a sprinkling of bastard phone/tablet OS's. Other than with phones, the rest are similar enough that they are only different around the edges to use. For some drug-addled reason, people working on phone UI's decided that it would be better to break with most of the long established interface metaphors and install bottlenecks that route everything everybody does via two companies, Google and Apple. It's a pain to avoid that, but it's possible. My phone is de-Google'd. I do have other Android devices that aren't, but they don't get used on a daily basis.
"My phone is de-Google'd. I do have other Android devices that aren't, but they don't get used on a daily basis."
Exactly this. ADB command line witchcraft surely helps to get rid of some of the pestware like google assistant, "digital wellbeing" and annoying bloatware like livewallpaper that still sends notification although officially disabled and not having any permissions. Well its down the drain of pm uninstall --user 0 com.android.annoyingcrapware.... Digital wellbeing is a special case, you need to activate the adb command right after officially disabling it or it will covertly restart and block the uninstall command. And dont bother giving it the command to delete its stolen data and cache after you disabled notifications. Doing so will reenable notifications for this suspicious stuff.
This is no longer a game if it ever was. Everything is compromised and the amount of annoying hoops and loopholes you have to endure to make "your" devices at least mostly behave like you want is growing with every day and every orwellian atrocities the EUrocracy or the protofascist german government mess are spouting on a near daily basis.
"But we don't run corporate IT do we ?"
I do and it's a corporate policy that we use open source every time we can. Servers run Slackware and laptops Ubuntu.
Some W10 laptops for economy department as we haven't found good tools for bookkeeping yet.
It has needed some effort and custom software, but in the long term a lot cheaper.
The idea of filling our drives with snapshots of everything we have done is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. This is game over for me and MS. W11 is not a viable option. I can and will use Android apps for some things, retro for writing, and paper.
Recall is the worst piece of crap MS has ever shovelled.
On the plus side, a lot of politicians and corporates who will keep using Windows are going to be more comprehensively hacked than ever before.
MitM as service - the "new" Outlook
Keylogger/screenlogger as s service - Recall
The next one? Ransonware as a service? "Your Windows licence is expired. Data have been encrypted with our cloud quantum technology. Please send 10 bitcoins at nadella@microsoft.com" is you want to access your data again.
And you thought Balmmer was bad...
"Can you imagine the discovery requests coming for this data?"
I can imagine customs having all sort of fun at ports of entry. The people smart enough to not have texts on their phone about a job that aren't allowed to work in-country will have the agents searching their laptop storage to find mentions that will be a problem. Sure, you deleted those emails, but now they're back as snapshots.
It will require the trusted installer account to have permissions to the specific folder it saves in. There are ways to break into using the trusted installer account so you could potentially take its permissions away and then maybe recall will just not work because it can't save to its usual location.
This could work. I did something similar when the GWX-Annoyware infected Win7/8 machines with the constant nagging for a "free upgrade" even on machines that wouldnt be accepted due to hardware requirements. Some users kept getting the GWX mess, even though they had uninstalled GWX and disabled the respective KB update so i created an additonal user account, made it the owner and sole user able to change/delete within the folder that GWX was stored, deleted everything in it and then - after setting the usual flags like write protected etc. deleted the user account. Not even an error message after that.
I believe however that such innocent and simple things wont work as intended, instead i suspect something like the system shutdown when killing the wuau*.* update task in WinXP or even bigger problems. Protecting unwanted malware through system integration is not new for microsoft.
That worked soooo well with windows update, didnt it ?
Concerning the EUrocracy... Did you miss who was selected to go after the big data corporations ? She could only be avoided because she was not an EU citizen, much to von der Leyens anger this former employee of both google and microsoft couldnt be installed to check on the big bad data wolves.
and now for something completely not different:
https://netzpolitik.org/2024/drehtuereffekt-bei-eu-kommission-lobby-waechter-kritisieren-beamtenwechsel-zu-microsoft/
https://www.lobbycontrol.de/konzernmacht/seitenwechsel-zu-microsoft-beschwerde-bei-eu-eingereicht-117981/
https://www.dr-datenschutz.de/datenschutzwidrige-nutzung-von-ms365-durch-die-eu-kommission/
You know, honestly, if this were any other company I wouldn't much care about this. I'd note it as a "I'd never use that" feature and turn it off. Problem solved. However, it's Microsoft, who has a very, very bad habit of changing your settings (or more specifically, enabling things you've disabled, and doing so silently) during updates. So once they release it, is it really taking screenshots and logging keystrokes or not? The setting says "Disabled" where I disabled it, but is it really?
It strikes me that Microsoft's idiotic 'Recall' feature is the best advertisement for a move to macOS/Linux in years. Certainly since Vista and Windows 8... As to Microsoft's 'trust us' approach the security/privacy/etc issues associated with Recall; this comes from the company that now builds snoopware into their operating systems and gives users no option to opt-out of it - only a limited one to minimise the data snooping. I'd suggest that there is a potential market here for developers to created software designed to nobble Recall in the same way software is now avaliable to nobble Windows' current snooping.
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...And so continues the slow creep of where personnel management becomes less about managing people and projects, and more about looking at KPIs, and surveillance tech. Filling out paperwork to be put in the machine, now with AI(TM)!, where it churns out hiring quota and redundancies to protect shareholder's value.
This is the enshittifcation of management skills.
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