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.
Yet another reminder that alternatives, where your privacy is not for sale, and your hardware belongs to you, actually exist in 2024
I wish they would do a much better job of distinguishing corporate workstation versions of Windows and Home versions of Windows. Put all this MS ecosystem garbage on the workstation version, and make the Home version a stripped down to the essentials OS. Which is what most of us try to do with tools like ShutUp10, anyway.
i’ll do you one better: all PCs at my job are running win10 LTSC, which was meant for specific use cases like running neon signs and shit
How long before there’s a discovery request for all recall data for a time period and companies start screaming about the risks with recall?
Agreed - if I were evil, I would use this data to look for long periods of static/unchanging desktop screenshots to look for inactivity and employees lying about being there or away.
Honestly this is just an arms race. If the above happens (and if I can come up with that use case think about what will come up when someone actually smart thinks about it.)
The response? I’d make a tool that presses alt-tab every 15 seconds a random number of times - to both keep the computer alive and change the desktop view, maybe move the windows around a bit for variety. A usb rubber ducky would be perfect for this.
That’s a really good summary of the degradation of software throughout time and the path to recreate software for the people. Thanks for sharing.
Elementary is a very polished and user friendly linux distribution designed to familiar to MacOS users.
Any decent laptop for hardware. ElementaryOS for the OS, if you really want the look/feel of macos.
Pop!_OS won’t use GNOME for much longer. They’re currently developing their own desktop called COSMIC.
A lot of the laptops made by Huawei and Xiaomi are MacBook-like in design at least. Framework is much more repairable though as are business laptops from HP or Dell. Dell in particular has made some quite long battery life laptops in the past like the Latitude 7410 and 7400, though those aren’t particularly new they are at least cheap when bought second hand.
In terms of OS you got to go with some Linux flavor as they offer various DEs some of which are mac like. Obviously macOS and Linux terminals are somewhat similar anyway. PopOS is a great option.
I would not, in good conscience, ever recommend a Dell machine to anyone anymore. Not only the design and build quality have gone down catastrophically, but Dell would take literally every opportunity they have to fuck you over.
XPS machines in particular have a solid history of being good on paper, but a nightmare, once you ever need to contact them about issues
Not until Linux comes pre-deployed on gaming laptops for sale. That’s my market.
Before you ask, I don’t have the know-how to boot into Linux, and I need the portability of a laptop. As well as enjoying gaming to an extent. Pretty niche.
We already have the Steam deck, and SteamOS just got official support for third-party hardware. I don’t think it will take that long until we see gaming laptops or mini PCs preloaded with SteamOS.
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.
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.
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
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?
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”.
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.
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.
I am keeping Win 10 until I can’t safely anymore then Linux may be my next stop. Been looking at CachyOS for gaming.
Just some performance I’ve seen people get from it and the nvidia bits. Still need to research before I decide though.
Never heard about it. Couldn’t find what makes it different from the others.
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…
“has enough time passed that we won’t get bad press for this?”
