So, in exchange for a mind bogglingly crippling performance load I can let microsoft categorically remove even the vestiages of privacy from anything PC related. I'm absolutely being snarky here,...
So, in exchange for a mind bogglingly crippling performance load I can let microsoft categorically remove even the vestiages of privacy from anything PC related.
I'm absolutely being snarky here, but why in the world would anyone NOT on the vendor side of things think this is remotely something people actually want? Does anyone actually think "helping users remember what they did" remotely justifies that level of intrusion and glaring security risk?
As far as the privacy goes, we need to see what the actual implementation and controls are. Microsoft makes money by selling software subscriptions, unlike Google who mostly makes money...
As far as the privacy goes, we need to see what the actual implementation and controls are. Microsoft makes money by selling software subscriptions, unlike Google who mostly makes money commercializing your data. Microsoft is more incentivized to actually keep your private data private. But we will see.
As far as who would benefit? If it can automatically caption training videos made with screen capture, or use a generative model to create step by step documentation from actually doing the process (building or a wiki page on how to do the thing you recorded), etc, that could be pretty neat. How many times are people taking snips as they do a task, paste it into word with some notes, and then repeat on the next step, then clean up and publish? Like a lot. Anything that get us closer to automated process documentation, captioning, etc, are potentially huge productivity wins for some professionals.
Well, it's not as if Microsoft doesn't have an ad network of their own. They use the same auction system that Google does, and they only recently began allowing you to opt-out of personalization....
Microsoft makes money by selling software subscriptions, unlike Google who mostly makes money commercializing your data.
Well, it's not as if Microsoft doesn't have an ad network of their own. They use the same auction system that Google does, and they only recently began allowing you to opt-out of personalization. Microsoft makes money in exactly the same way Google does: enterprise, cloud, hardware, and ads.
Besides, Windows is full of telemetry, as are the software applications included or packaged separately (like VS Code). It's not a good sign of them being a privacy-respecting organization. And if you've never used their web tracking solution, Microsoft Clarity, let me say: I have never felt as creeped out working with analytics as I did when watching a recording of somebody's mouse movements browsing a website, all without their knowledge.
These companies have hundreds of different divisions, each with different goals and motivations. Most of those divisions have nothing to do with ads or tracking at all. Some do, and that's where you need to be mindful of your consent and privacy. In general though it does not make sense to distil a company down to "an ad company" or "a software company", because these giants are so big they do it all.
Regarding the Recall feature in particular, I see good reason to believe it will be truly local. It would have insane bandwidth and latency costs if done over a network, and there'd be little reason to require a specialized NPU to run inference otherwise. I don't know if I care for the specific implementation of using screenshots, but the feature definitely has merit and could be useful if properly implemented.
Addendum for future readers: To regain access to the much bigger, “official” extensions marketplace for ease of use, you can follow the steps documented for example here: and {"nameShort":"Visual...
Addendum for future readers: To regain access to the much bigger, “official” extensions marketplace for ease of use, you can follow the steps documented for example here:
on a Mac, create the file product.json in the folder $HOME/Library/Application Support/VSCodium
and
enter the following content:
{"nameShort":"Visual Studio Code","nameLong":"Visual Studio Code","extensionsGallery":{"serviceUrl":"https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery","cacheUrl":"https://vscode.blob.core.windows.net/gallery/index","itemUrl":"https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items"}}
Some extensions are available on the fully open alternative marketplace too, but many are not (yet?).
I was pretty clear about the need to see what actual protections are put in place. That said, all you need to do is look at Microsofts and Google's SEC fillings to see who is more motivated to...
I was pretty clear about the need to see what actual protections are put in place. That said, all you need to do is look at Microsofts and Google's SEC fillings to see who is more motivated to monetize your data as a proportion of total revenue. Microsofts search and advertising revenue is 6% of total revenue compared with alphabets 80%.
I'm not saying don't pay attention, and yes, these are large companies with many firms. But Microsoft has to maintain a reputation to keep customer data private for most of their services, unlike Google, where most of their services are ad funnels.
As someone who used to manage enterprise accounts with Microsoft, Google, AWS, etc, I hated dealing with our Microsoft reps, but I will say they never played fast and loose with the contractual commitments to keep our data private.
I keep seeing people invoking telemetry, but is there any evidence of them using that to push ads or snitch on media piracy or even pursue anti-competitive practices? I'd think they'd have a...
I keep seeing people invoking telemetry, but is there any evidence of them using that to push ads or snitch on media piracy or even pursue anti-competitive practices? I'd think they'd have a strong incentive to make good on privacy promises and not push the envelope in order to avoid destroying trust in Windows as a platform for business and personal use.
Even if they have the best intentions, it's fully possible for them to screw up. Except for open-source projects, I opt out of telemetry wherever possible. As far as I'm concerned, the...
Even if they have the best intentions, it's fully possible for them to screw up.
Except for open-source projects, I opt out of telemetry wherever possible. As far as I'm concerned, the relationship I have to any proprietary software is inherently adversarial, and I won't give them any more than I have to.
Yes and no. They do have personalized advertising, as I mentioned above, but it doesn't mean that every single bit of telemetry feeds into those profiles. Most of the time these features are to...
Yes and no. They do have personalized advertising, as I mentioned above, but it doesn't mean that every single bit of telemetry feeds into those profiles. Most of the time these features are to allow a deeper understand of how software their used, the hardware it runs on, and what went wrong when it crashes. Realistically, knowing that you use X feature of an application offers very little value in targeting more accurate ads to you. Instead, it helps them build and debug their software.
I care about privacy, but I am not an absolutist by any means. I won't argue that any amount of telemetry is over the line. I'm also a developer so I understand the value that these features can provide. Knowing that your app is consistently crashing from "audiolib-sdk6" specifically on Windows 8 is way easier to debug than collecting hundreds of bug reports over years.
With that said, privacy is a part of the contract when using services or software, and it's our job as consumers to understand what we're comfortable sharing. More often than not, the privacy policy of a program tells you exactly what data is being collected and how it's used. I try to give them a skim before agreeing to anything, making note of what data is collected and which partners it is shared with.
Microsoft is an odd case because marketers have been making a mess of Windows for years with hostile ads and upsells. However they still have a very talented engineering team making solid improvements in other areas like WSL2 and PowerShell. I expect Recall is going to fall into that latter category to enhance the experience and not be a tool for marketers, but until it's released I can only speculate.
Both Google and Microsoft offer different licensing for business users that offer much stricter privacy and security controls. They're good options if you're somebody that takes privacy very seriously. But of course, other alternatives also exist in all spaces. I'm always happy to see people using ProtonMail for email, LibreOffice for a desktop suite, or Linux for their OS. I've used and enjoy all three. But I also use a 1-user Google Workspace account on Windows for my day-to-day tasks because those offer me a lot of value.
I think it's important to know what you're comfortable sharing, and to understand that our interactions with companies are not so simple as "they scoop up all data to sell/advertise with". If you remain flexible and evaluate the tradeoffs, you'll have the best time of it.
From what I can tell, businesses are mostly in too deep or think they are, and the majority of personal use follows what's used at work. Honestly, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where...
... in order to avoid destroying trust in Windows as a platform for business and personal use.
From what I can tell, businesses are mostly in too deep or think they are, and the majority of personal use follows what's used at work. Honestly, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where privacy or security concerns tank MS's market share, short of maybe an outright sale to China, which is impossible.
I'm sure the historical data they will no doubt stea.. "collect for research purposes" will be used to create an AI that's capable of doing quite a bit for you. It'll probably starts out like...
I'm sure the historical data they will no doubt stea.. "collect for research purposes" will be used to create an AI that's capable of doing quite a bit for you. It'll probably starts out like Clippy, but slips in ads when it talks.
Edit: Oops forgot the important bit, they'll need to collect data to make useful AI's happen and AI's will no doubt require heavy intrusion to function correctly. We'll need some way to detect what software is sending out or people who can test what AI's are contained and safe.
The average user probably doesn't care. They don't know or care what's going on in their computers and phones now. But I can see some businesses and governments and the IT Security professionals...
The average user probably doesn't care. They don't know or care what's going on in their computers and phones now.
But I can see some businesses and governments and the IT Security professionals (and maybe even legal teams) within them caring. And obviously for Microsoft, that's a big chunk of their revenue stream. It'll be interesting to see how they market this to those businesses.
They already have it in some form with Viva Insights. I can see this feature being rolled up into that as an OS-wide tool in the never ending quest of business metrics, right on the employee's own...
They already have it in some form with Viva Insights.
I can see this feature being rolled up into that as an OS-wide tool in the never ending quest of business metrics, right on the employee's own work PCs.
This sounds kind of cool on paper but we'll see how it works in practice. There's are massive privacy concerns as it doesn't obfuscate sensitive information. It's apparently done all on-device but...
This sounds kind of cool on paper but we'll see how it works in practice. There's are massive privacy concerns as it doesn't obfuscate sensitive information. It's apparently done all on-device but I'm not sure how accurate that is.
It requires a computer with a neural processing chip, it seems likely it will be done on-device in that case. I still don't trust Microsoft or their telemetry, even if they pinky promise your data...
It requires a computer with a neural processing chip, it seems likely it will be done on-device in that case. I still don't trust Microsoft or their telemetry, even if they pinky promise your data is safe.
I think that's just because our data isn't safe when stored in one place, that's true for anything. If it's all stored in one place, the more you store the greater the value, the more eyes it...
I think that's just because our data isn't safe when stored in one place, that's true for anything. If it's all stored in one place, the more you store the greater the value, the more eyes it attracts. With the face of war continuing to transition to cyber, collecting this type of data on users would attract the kind of attacks we've seen on User Data stores. It becomes a question of when, not if.
I wonder when the treadmill will start. The device needs to spy on the user to catch pedophiles and terrorists Since you're scanning anyway, may as well look for copyright infringement and other...
I wonder when the treadmill will start.
The device needs to spy on the user to catch pedophiles and terrorists
Since you're scanning anyway, may as well look for copyright infringement and other minor crimes
Well, we're processing all this data, let's utilize our data assets for supplemental revenue (i.e. ad tracking)
"Recall" is an unfortunate name, particularly for something like an AI product, which people are already pretty nervous about. It brings to mind product recalls due to faulty or dangerous design.
"Recall" is an unfortunate name, particularly for something like an AI product, which people are already pretty nervous about. It brings to mind product recalls due to faulty or dangerous design.
My rule for windows PCs is to only buy every other version of Windows. Windows 10 was one of the good ones, so my advice is to plan to skip 11 if you can and expect another reliable baseline OS...
My rule for windows PCs is to only buy every other version of Windows. Windows 10 was one of the good ones, so my advice is to plan to skip 11 if you can and expect another reliable baseline OS for Windows 12/Kumquat/whatever they decide to call it.
My theory is that some group of product managers or VPs need to show progress to justify their existence even though the desktop is fine and nobody really needs or wants anything to change. But they are "revolutionizing the desktop experience", so you get something silly just for the sake of being different. It ends up on a bunch of consumer PCs, but the enterprise customers don't want it, so they stick on the old good version. When EOL starts approaching, Microsoft undoes all the silly stuff, keeps a few UI tweaks to justify it as different from the good old version, and releases a version that enterprise customers can use.
Wow, the correlation analysis is almost perfect! Except Ten was an absolute thumbs down for me, especially due to the introduction of forced telemetry and updates. I tried stopping them for a...
Wow, the correlation analysis is almost perfect!
Except Ten was an absolute thumbs down for me, especially due to the introduction of forced telemetry and updates. I tried stopping them for a while using registry and other hacks but eventually switched to Xubuntu for good.
I agree that stuff sucks. But the overhead / compatibility risk of running Linux for my daily driver is too high for what I have bandwidth to administer these days. I look at it as the cost of...
I agree that stuff sucks. But the overhead / compatibility risk of running Linux for my daily driver is too high for what I have bandwidth to administer these days. I look at it as the cost of living in late stage capitalism, and in the end, it is a very first world problem.
This breaks when you consider 8.1 as separate. And it might as well have been. 8.1 was truly good. Especially if ran in conjunction with Classic or OpenShell. Low overhead, compatibility out the...
This breaks when you consider 8.1 as separate. And it might as well have been.
8.1 was truly good. Especially if ran in conjunction with Classic or OpenShell.
Low overhead, compatibility out the wazoo, functional generic drivers (unlike 7 where you'd need network drivers ready on a flash drive to do anything at all), normal settings menus, and otherwise just no massive bloat.
10 is good, but it has way more bloat and tracking than 8.1 ever did. If it wasn't EOL I would've preferred it over 10... And even 7.
Another +1 for 8.1 from me. I ran that happily for years. I would actually say 8.1 was better than 10 was at launch. 10 has changed significantly since release, which many people forget. (Remember...
Another +1 for 8.1 from me. I ran that happily for years. I would actually say 8.1 was better than 10 was at launch. 10 has changed significantly since release, which many people forget. (Remember when Microsoft said 10 was going to be the last version of windows?)
I can imagine how useful this feature could be, but I simply do not trust Microsoft. Satya Nadella's done a lot of things right since he took the helm from Ballmer but the very fact that there was...
I can imagine how useful this feature could be, but I simply do not trust Microsoft. Satya Nadella's done a lot of things right since he took the helm from Ballmer but the very fact that there was no institutional rejection of running ads on Windows show me that there will be little to no rejection, barring no technological barriers, to show users tailored ads using the data gathered from this after a couple of bad quarters. They can claim, and it's probably the truth, that all compute is done on device but that's a statement for how things are in the present. Who is to say they don't change their mind in the future? Neither Microsoft nor, given the scale, its customers, are that sensitive to privacy to begin with so whatever backlash a reversal creates among people who are conscious tech consumers will simply be brushed off.
I wonder how much Microsoft is earning from their ads business on Windows because it's such a stain on their newly found reputation.
Interesting to see this now, after I found out an entire genre of similar projects just a month ago when Windrecorder released. If anyone is interested in the concept but not the dystopian-esque...
Interesting to see this now, after I found out an entire genre of similar projects just a month ago when Windrecorder released. If anyone is interested in the concept but not the dystopian-esque execution, do check out these open source projects! Some of these just index the screenshots with OCR'd text, while others also implement LLM capabilities if that's your thing.
At first blush, the privacy implications are horrifying. But this has got me thinking about how a privacy-respecting AI assistant could be implemented. Theoretically. We can't run the AI on-device...
At first blush, the privacy implications are horrifying. But this has got me thinking about how a privacy-respecting AI assistant could be implemented. Theoretically. We can't run the AI on-device in most cases, so that means everything's going to the cloud. But couldn't it receive the E2E encryption treatment? I'm not sure that training models on vast amounts of your user data necessarily has to mean monitoring or monetizing it, or leaving it susceptible to data breach. The whole training set could be scrambled at rest and undecipherable without the encryption key. No one but you would have access to your AI interactions or data.
Of course, that's almost certainly not Microsoft's angle here.
Privacy, security and computational overhead aside, I love this. It feels like something truly innovative in the space. A whole new paradigm for how you interact with your pc. I may not be fully...
Privacy, security and computational overhead aside, I love this. It feels like something truly innovative in the space. A whole new paradigm for how you interact with your pc. I may not be fully understanding the scope and ability of Recall but never in history could you say to your computer "Document what I just did for the next developer." or "Find me 20 good pictures that show off my last trip." or "That zoom meeting I had a week ago, can you summarize it and put and show me the dates mentioned?" or "Whats that program for editing this weird file type?"
Its a privacy nightmare but it feels like it will push computing and computational hardware in consumer electronics. I'm here for it.
I hate that I'm going to have to, but it's all but a certainty at this point. Probably before the year's out, I'm gonna have to sit there and bang my damn head against Google and Youtube for days,...
I hate that I'm going to have to, but it's all but a certainty at this point. Probably before the year's out, I'm gonna have to sit there and bang my damn head against Google and Youtube for days, but I'll get Linux up on my boxes.
I expect it'll suck, but I will be damned before I let Microsoft run full telemetry on my computers.
If anyone knows of an actual true hands-off Linux install, I'd love to hear about it. Truly hands-off. Click install, and maybe tell it what to name things and so on, but when it's done the computer is up, has network, lan, drives, printer, ready to use. Not "congrats, now you're in for days of command line prompts to make your computer usable."
Which is the main reason I'm still on Windows. The one time I seriously sat down to look at Linux, it became rapidly apparent I needed to be a full on Linux guy to get a desktop up and usable and I just wasn't interested in that at the time.
Most mainstream Linux distros can work this way (except the printer; that's a peripheral, and although good printers tend to be perfectly Linux-compatible, I can't promise anything). The key...
Truly hands-off. Click install, and maybe tell it what to name things and so on, but when it's done the computer is up, has network, lan, drives, printer, ready to use. Not "congrats, now you're in for days of command line prompts to make your computer usable."
Most mainstream Linux distros can work this way (except the printer; that's a peripheral, and although good printers tend to be perfectly Linux-compatible, I can't promise anything).
The key differentiator is not the distro, but your hardware. If you have a desktop PC, it will probably work just fine (with one possible significant exception: Nvidia GPUs). If you have a laptop, it's sort of a crapshoot. As a general rule, the "business" and "premium" lines of the major manufacturers are more likely to have good Linux compatibility. In particular, the Lenovo T- and X-series and the Dell Latitude and XPS lines tend to work well. Everything else is . . . well, let's just say I'd be reluctant buy a PC laptop from any major vendor except Dell or Lenovo. If you do, you want it to be as "boring" as possible.
Pop! OS is the distro I recommend to most people starting out now. It's an Ubuntu derivative that doesn't bring in the more more obnoxious stuff from Canonical (e.g. Snap), and it even has an...
Pop! OS is the distro I recommend to most people starting out now. It's an Ubuntu derivative that doesn't bring in the more more obnoxious stuff from Canonical (e.g. Snap), and it even has an installer that properly supports Nvidia GPUs out of the box.
You can't got wrong with Linux mint to dip your toes in. It's Debian based so it has a massive repository of available and compatible software. Its default desktop Cinnamon is windowsish and if...
You can't got wrong with Linux mint to dip your toes in. It's Debian based so it has a massive repository of available and compatible software. Its default desktop Cinnamon is windowsish and if you hardware isn't cutting edge there is a very high chance it will work flawlessly out of the box.
Linux mint is where I got my start and it holds a special place in my heart. Now I'm a NixOS person. If you want control, oh boy, Nix gives it to you.
There are more options but in going to give you my favorites, at least for desktop: openSUSE, honestly the installer is kinda easy, specially if you are going to use just one partition, installing...
There are more options but in going to give you my favorites, at least for desktop:
openSUSE, honestly the installer is kinda easy, specially if you are going to use just one partition, installing packages is kinda slow but overall I can say that the after install is easier that any other variant, you can use yast for almost anything.
Fedora, is just easy when you are used to Linux, doesn’t break easily to my knowledge.
Linux Mint, is like opensuse, but with more outdated packages.
And Debian, the installation process is not that hard, but the packages it has are old compared to some alternatives, overall I would prefer this one, but I also like to have my packages as current as possible.
In general most of the things should work out of the box, at least I didn’t have that much problems using something in Linux for the past five to six years.
In the same boat here. One of the big hurdles is access to some Windows only software, including games. Has the landscape changed for games, or is it still mostly limited to Emulation via Wine if...
In the same boat here.
One of the big hurdles is access to some Windows only software, including games. Has the landscape changed for games, or is it still mostly limited to Emulation via Wine if the game doesn't support Linux natively?
The several times that I have tried to use Linux on my computer, I would end up finding some weird quirk or bug that would need me to be versed in Linux to actually debug and fix it.
Are there any resources to help Windows users transition? I'm interested in tech but my Linux knowledge is limited, and it can be frustrating when you have to actively program/adjust things to get things going in Linux. I understand that it mostly works out of the box, but there is always that one little thing that requires extra configuration.
There is Proton these days (most easily accessed through Steam, but you can run it outside), which is Wine + DXVK + Valve's custom config for games + a stable set of runtime libraries. Which means...
There is Proton these days (most easily accessed through Steam, but you can run it outside), which is Wine + DXVK + Valve's custom config for games + a stable set of runtime libraries. Which means that for games, you can run pretty much everything except some games that use anti-cheat to specifically block Linux (mostly competitive multiplayer f2p games).
If you can manage with web apps and aren't anti-Google, I cannot recommend ChromeOS Flex enough. I've been using it as my daily driver for the past two months and it's honestly my favorite OS...
If you can manage with web apps and aren't anti-Google, I cannot recommend ChromeOS Flex enough.
I've been using it as my daily driver for the past two months and it's honestly my favorite OS ever. It's fast, clean, attractive, and comes with useful things even macOS lacks natively (clipboard manager, proper window management, etc.)
Give it a spin on your hardware and see if it's a good fit.
So, in exchange for a mind bogglingly crippling performance load I can let microsoft categorically remove even the vestiages of privacy from anything PC related.
I'm absolutely being snarky here, but why in the world would anyone NOT on the vendor side of things think this is remotely something people actually want? Does anyone actually think "helping users remember what they did" remotely justifies that level of intrusion and glaring security risk?
As far as the privacy goes, we need to see what the actual implementation and controls are. Microsoft makes money by selling software subscriptions, unlike Google who mostly makes money commercializing your data. Microsoft is more incentivized to actually keep your private data private. But we will see.
As far as who would benefit? If it can automatically caption training videos made with screen capture, or use a generative model to create step by step documentation from actually doing the process (building or a wiki page on how to do the thing you recorded), etc, that could be pretty neat. How many times are people taking snips as they do a task, paste it into word with some notes, and then repeat on the next step, then clean up and publish? Like a lot. Anything that get us closer to automated process documentation, captioning, etc, are potentially huge productivity wins for some professionals.
Well, it's not as if Microsoft doesn't have an ad network of their own. They use the same auction system that Google does, and they only recently began allowing you to opt-out of personalization. Microsoft makes money in exactly the same way Google does: enterprise, cloud, hardware, and ads.
Besides, Windows is full of telemetry, as are the software applications included or packaged separately (like VS Code). It's not a good sign of them being a privacy-respecting organization. And if you've never used their web tracking solution, Microsoft Clarity, let me say: I have never felt as creeped out working with analytics as I did when watching a recording of somebody's mouse movements browsing a website, all without their knowledge.
These companies have hundreds of different divisions, each with different goals and motivations. Most of those divisions have nothing to do with ads or tracking at all. Some do, and that's where you need to be mindful of your consent and privacy. In general though it does not make sense to distil a company down to "an ad company" or "a software company", because these giants are so big they do it all.
Regarding the Recall feature in particular, I see good reason to believe it will be truly local. It would have insane bandwidth and latency costs if done over a network, and there'd be little reason to require a specialized NPU to run inference otherwise. I don't know if I care for the specific implementation of using screenshots, but the feature definitely has merit and could be useful if properly implemented.
Obligatory shout-out to VSCodium, as far as I'm concerned it's the best IDE on the planet.
Addendum for future readers: To regain access to the much bigger, “official” extensions marketplace for ease of use, you can follow the steps documented for example here:
and
Some extensions are available on the fully open alternative marketplace too, but many are not (yet?).
Agree! Thank you for raising awareness.
TIL. Thanks for the shout-out
I was pretty clear about the need to see what actual protections are put in place. That said, all you need to do is look at Microsofts and Google's SEC fillings to see who is more motivated to monetize your data as a proportion of total revenue. Microsofts search and advertising revenue is 6% of total revenue compared with alphabets 80%.
I'm not saying don't pay attention, and yes, these are large companies with many firms. But Microsoft has to maintain a reputation to keep customer data private for most of their services, unlike Google, where most of their services are ad funnels.
As someone who used to manage enterprise accounts with Microsoft, Google, AWS, etc, I hated dealing with our Microsoft reps, but I will say they never played fast and loose with the contractual commitments to keep our data private.
I keep seeing people invoking telemetry, but is there any evidence of them using that to push ads or snitch on media piracy or even pursue anti-competitive practices? I'd think they'd have a strong incentive to make good on privacy promises and not push the envelope in order to avoid destroying trust in Windows as a platform for business and personal use.
Even if they have the best intentions, it's fully possible for them to screw up.
Except for open-source projects, I opt out of telemetry wherever possible. As far as I'm concerned, the relationship I have to any proprietary software is inherently adversarial, and I won't give them any more than I have to.
Yes and no. They do have personalized advertising, as I mentioned above, but it doesn't mean that every single bit of telemetry feeds into those profiles. Most of the time these features are to allow a deeper understand of how software their used, the hardware it runs on, and what went wrong when it crashes. Realistically, knowing that you use X feature of an application offers very little value in targeting more accurate ads to you. Instead, it helps them build and debug their software.
I care about privacy, but I am not an absolutist by any means. I won't argue that any amount of telemetry is over the line. I'm also a developer so I understand the value that these features can provide. Knowing that your app is consistently crashing from "audiolib-sdk6" specifically on Windows 8 is way easier to debug than collecting hundreds of bug reports over years.
With that said, privacy is a part of the contract when using services or software, and it's our job as consumers to understand what we're comfortable sharing. More often than not, the privacy policy of a program tells you exactly what data is being collected and how it's used. I try to give them a skim before agreeing to anything, making note of what data is collected and which partners it is shared with.
Microsoft is an odd case because marketers have been making a mess of Windows for years with hostile ads and upsells. However they still have a very talented engineering team making solid improvements in other areas like WSL2 and PowerShell. I expect Recall is going to fall into that latter category to enhance the experience and not be a tool for marketers, but until it's released I can only speculate.
Both Google and Microsoft offer different licensing for business users that offer much stricter privacy and security controls. They're good options if you're somebody that takes privacy very seriously. But of course, other alternatives also exist in all spaces. I'm always happy to see people using ProtonMail for email, LibreOffice for a desktop suite, or Linux for their OS. I've used and enjoy all three. But I also use a 1-user Google Workspace account on Windows for my day-to-day tasks because those offer me a lot of value.
I think it's important to know what you're comfortable sharing, and to understand that our interactions with companies are not so simple as "they scoop up all data to sell/advertise with". If you remain flexible and evaluate the tradeoffs, you'll have the best time of it.
From what I can tell, businesses are mostly in too deep or think they are, and the majority of personal use follows what's used at work. Honestly, it's difficult to imagine a scenario where privacy or security concerns tank MS's market share, short of maybe an outright sale to China, which is impossible.
I'm sure the historical data they will no doubt stea.. "collect for research purposes" will be used to create an AI that's capable of doing quite a bit for you. It'll probably starts out like Clippy, but slips in ads when it talks.
Edit: Oops forgot the important bit, they'll need to collect data to make useful AI's happen and AI's will no doubt require heavy intrusion to function correctly. We'll need some way to detect what software is sending out or people who can test what AI's are contained and safe.
It is a paid product for Mac already: https://www.rewind.ai/
The average user probably doesn't care. They don't know or care what's going on in their computers and phones now.
But I can see some businesses and governments and the IT Security professionals (and maybe even legal teams) within them caring. And obviously for Microsoft, that's a big chunk of their revenue stream. It'll be interesting to see how they market this to those businesses.
They already have it in some form with Viva Insights.
I can see this feature being rolled up into that as an OS-wide tool in the never ending quest of business metrics, right on the employee's own work PCs.
Actual article: https://www.windowslatest.com/2024/05/20/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-recall-ai-hardware-requirements/
Would really prefer the Tildes post be edited to this.
Done.
This sounds kind of cool on paper but we'll see how it works in practice. There's are massive privacy concerns as it doesn't obfuscate sensitive information. It's apparently done all on-device but I'm not sure how accurate that is.
It requires a computer with a neural processing chip, it seems likely it will be done on-device in that case. I still don't trust Microsoft or their telemetry, even if they pinky promise your data is safe.
I think that's just because our data isn't safe when stored in one place, that's true for anything. If it's all stored in one place, the more you store the greater the value, the more eyes it attracts. With the face of war continuing to transition to cyber, collecting this type of data on users would attract the kind of attacks we've seen on User Data stores. It becomes a question of when, not if.
I wonder when the treadmill will start.
Does it? I'd say this sounds terrible from the word go.
"Recall" is an unfortunate name, particularly for something like an AI product, which people are already pretty nervous about. It brings to mind product recalls due to faulty or dangerous design.
It's setting them up for the perfect storm
My rule for windows PCs is to only buy every other version of Windows. Windows 10 was one of the good ones, so my advice is to plan to skip 11 if you can and expect another reliable baseline OS for Windows 12/Kumquat/whatever they decide to call it.
My theory is that some group of product managers or VPs need to show progress to justify their existence even though the desktop is fine and nobody really needs or wants anything to change. But they are "revolutionizing the desktop experience", so you get something silly just for the sake of being different. It ends up on a bunch of consumer PCs, but the enterprise customers don't want it, so they stick on the old good version. When EOL starts approaching, Microsoft undoes all the silly stuff, keeps a few UI tweaks to justify it as different from the good old version, and releases a version that enterprise customers can use.
The complete list
95 👎
98👍
ME👎
XP/2000👍
Vista👎
7👍
8👎
10👍
11👎
Wow, the correlation analysis is almost perfect!
Except Ten was an absolute thumbs down for me, especially due to the introduction of forced telemetry and updates. I tried stopping them for a while using registry and other hacks but eventually switched to Xubuntu for good.
I agree that stuff sucks. But the overhead / compatibility risk of running Linux for my daily driver is too high for what I have bandwidth to administer these days. I look at it as the cost of living in late stage capitalism, and in the end, it is a very first world problem.
This breaks when you consider 8.1 as separate. And it might as well have been.
8.1 was truly good. Especially if ran in conjunction with Classic or OpenShell.
Low overhead, compatibility out the wazoo, functional generic drivers (unlike 7 where you'd need network drivers ready on a flash drive to do anything at all), normal settings menus, and otherwise just no massive bloat.
10 is good, but it has way more bloat and tracking than 8.1 ever did. If it wasn't EOL I would've preferred it over 10... And even 7.
Another +1 for 8.1 from me. I ran that happily for years. I would actually say 8.1 was better than 10 was at launch. 10 has changed significantly since release, which many people forget. (Remember when Microsoft said 10 was going to be the last version of windows?)
I can imagine how useful this feature could be, but I simply do not trust Microsoft. Satya Nadella's done a lot of things right since he took the helm from Ballmer but the very fact that there was no institutional rejection of running ads on Windows show me that there will be little to no rejection, barring no technological barriers, to show users tailored ads using the data gathered from this after a couple of bad quarters. They can claim, and it's probably the truth, that all compute is done on device but that's a statement for how things are in the present. Who is to say they don't change their mind in the future? Neither Microsoft nor, given the scale, its customers, are that sensitive to privacy to begin with so whatever backlash a reversal creates among people who are conscious tech consumers will simply be brushed off.
I wonder how much Microsoft is earning from their ads business on Windows because it's such a stain on their newly found reputation.
Interesting to see this now, after I found out an entire genre of similar projects just a month ago when Windrecorder released. If anyone is interested in the concept but not the dystopian-esque execution, do check out these open source projects! Some of these just index the screenshots with OCR'd text, while others also implement LLM capabilities if that's your thing.
Windrecorder (Windows)
rem (macOS)
Memento (Linux)
ActivityWatch (cross-platform)
At first blush, the privacy implications are horrifying. But this has got me thinking about how a privacy-respecting AI assistant could be implemented. Theoretically. We can't run the AI on-device in most cases, so that means everything's going to the cloud. But couldn't it receive the E2E encryption treatment? I'm not sure that training models on vast amounts of your user data necessarily has to mean monitoring or monetizing it, or leaving it susceptible to data breach. The whole training set could be scrambled at rest and undecipherable without the encryption key. No one but you would have access to your AI interactions or data.
Of course, that's almost certainly not Microsoft's angle here.
Privacy, security and computational overhead aside, I love this. It feels like something truly innovative in the space. A whole new paradigm for how you interact with your pc. I may not be fully understanding the scope and ability of Recall but never in history could you say to your computer "Document what I just did for the next developer." or "Find me 20 good pictures that show off my last trip." or "That zoom meeting I had a week ago, can you summarize it and put and show me the dates mentioned?" or "Whats that program for editing this weird file type?"
Its a privacy nightmare but it feels like it will push computing and computational hardware in consumer electronics. I'm here for it.
Wow, it’s so easy to install Linux and run it as your daily driver. Hopefully this will drive more people (and companies) to migrate to Linux.
I hate that I'm going to have to, but it's all but a certainty at this point. Probably before the year's out, I'm gonna have to sit there and bang my damn head against Google and Youtube for days, but I'll get Linux up on my boxes.
I expect it'll suck, but I will be damned before I let Microsoft run full telemetry on my computers.
If anyone knows of an actual true hands-off Linux install, I'd love to hear about it. Truly hands-off. Click install, and maybe tell it what to name things and so on, but when it's done the computer is up, has network, lan, drives, printer, ready to use. Not "congrats, now you're in for days of command line prompts to make your computer usable."
Which is the main reason I'm still on Windows. The one time I seriously sat down to look at Linux, it became rapidly apparent I needed to be a full on Linux guy to get a desktop up and usable and I just wasn't interested in that at the time.
Most mainstream Linux distros can work this way (except the printer; that's a peripheral, and although good printers tend to be perfectly Linux-compatible, I can't promise anything).
The key differentiator is not the distro, but your hardware. If you have a desktop PC, it will probably work just fine (with one possible significant exception: Nvidia GPUs). If you have a laptop, it's sort of a crapshoot. As a general rule, the "business" and "premium" lines of the major manufacturers are more likely to have good Linux compatibility. In particular, the Lenovo T- and X-series and the Dell Latitude and XPS lines tend to work well. Everything else is . . . well, let's just say I'd be reluctant buy a PC laptop from any major vendor except Dell or Lenovo. If you do, you want it to be as "boring" as possible.
Pop! OS is the distro I recommend to most people starting out now. It's an Ubuntu derivative that doesn't bring in the more more obnoxious stuff from Canonical (e.g. Snap), and it even has an installer that properly supports Nvidia GPUs out of the box.
You can't got wrong with Linux mint to dip your toes in. It's Debian based so it has a massive repository of available and compatible software. Its default desktop Cinnamon is windowsish and if you hardware isn't cutting edge there is a very high chance it will work flawlessly out of the box.
Linux mint is where I got my start and it holds a special place in my heart. Now I'm a NixOS person. If you want control, oh boy, Nix gives it to you.
There are more options but in going to give you my favorites, at least for desktop:
And Debian, the installation process is not that hard, but the packages it has are old compared to some alternatives, overall I would prefer this one, but I also like to have my packages as current as possible.
In general most of the things should work out of the box, at least I didn’t have that much problems using something in Linux for the past five to six years.
In the same boat here.
One of the big hurdles is access to some Windows only software, including games. Has the landscape changed for games, or is it still mostly limited to Emulation via Wine if the game doesn't support Linux natively?
The several times that I have tried to use Linux on my computer, I would end up finding some weird quirk or bug that would need me to be versed in Linux to actually debug and fix it.
Are there any resources to help Windows users transition? I'm interested in tech but my Linux knowledge is limited, and it can be frustrating when you have to actively program/adjust things to get things going in Linux. I understand that it mostly works out of the box, but there is always that one little thing that requires extra configuration.
There is Proton these days (most easily accessed through Steam, but you can run it outside), which is Wine + DXVK + Valve's custom config for games + a stable set of runtime libraries. Which means that for games, you can run pretty much everything except some games that use anti-cheat to specifically block Linux (mostly competitive multiplayer f2p games).
If you can manage with web apps and aren't anti-Google, I cannot recommend ChromeOS Flex enough.
I've been using it as my daily driver for the past two months and it's honestly my favorite OS ever. It's fast, clean, attractive, and comes with useful things even macOS lacks natively (clipboard manager, proper window management, etc.)
Give it a spin on your hardware and see if it's a good fit.
Install Instructions