Every new exploit, they clearly have a meeting and convince themselves “that’s gotta be the last of it, right?”
So the next day-after-patch-tuesday rolls around and lo and behold, this guy drops some more nukes on their reputation as far as their most important customer demographic are concerned (corporate IT)
Given this genuinely does seem to stem from Microsoft mishandling this guy, why the fuck do they keep escalating
Puts a lot of evidence towards his claims that Microsoft was behaving badly from the outset and the reason why he started doing this. They keep escalating. Its a war they started.
Very little seems to be beyond the incredulity of MS meetings, remember they had a meeting where someone suggested the OS take a screenshot every ten seconds of whatever the user was doing and upload it to MS servers and rather than everyone laughing they agreed to move it into development.
Publicly shame, actively blacklist them from ever working in any of their companies, and making sure everybody in the IT space knows this, would ruin this person’s ability to do any more damage and might be the upper limit? Well that or doing a Boeing… Take your pick.
Snapshots and the contextual information derived from them are saved and encrypted to your local hard drive. Recall does not share snapshots or associated data with Microsoft or third parties, nor is it shared between different Windows users on the same device. Windows will ask for your permission before saving snapshots. You are always in control of what apps and websites get saved in snapshots, and you can delete snapshots, pause or turn them off at any time. Any future options for the user to share data will require fully informed explicit action by the user.
Considering the thread we’re talking in, it’s up to you if you trust MS to implement this well, but they are not uploading the screenshots to the cloud.
Personally I think the idea of Recall is great if it works to help you and only you. The problem isn’t the idea, it’s the trust. If a reputable open source project or Linux distro made a feature like this I think it would be cool, because I know my privacy is going to be respected and the feature is designed solely to help me and nothing more. However, when MS suggests this I’m immediately cautious, skeptical, and concerned about how it could be used against me.
The statement you quoted is itself a lie. It talks about snapshots, when that’s not at all what Recall is about. It takes snapshots, true. But it does not matter to MS whether the snapshots themselves are saved, or where. “Recall does not share snapshots or associated data” is a reference solely to the snapshot itself, not the data Recall creates from it.
Here’s what really happens. Once a snapshot is taken, it is analyzed with AI as well as converted into text (if text is present) and all that content (including passwords, banking details, medical records, whatever passes the desktop when a snapshot is taken) plus its local AI analysis is kept in a local database. That shrinks its size to almost nothing, making it much easier for MS to collect. This secretive local database itself is inaccessible to you (even as admin), one you have zero rights to control or delete or edit or even view, one over which you are never given any permissions, and at regular intervals that database is scraped and sent back to MS to use in data aggregation and resale and AI training and whatever the fuck else they want to do with it. Sure, you can turn off Recall in the AI settings, but it has now been proven that any Windows update just turns it all back on again.
Knowing this, go back and reread their statement in regard to snapshots. The entire thing is a misdirection and never once addresses the real payload of Recall and why MS, even after they pinky swore they had dropped it, they continued partnering with hardware makers to deliver “Recall-ready” PCs that already have the requisite NPU on the motherboard, which are needed to do all that local data OCR and analysis on the snapshots that don’t even matter to MS once they’ve been scraped for content.
It’s also a big attack surface. Just like how a lot of malware looks for the browser password cache now, it doesn’t take much for a malware developer to just go for the recall store. The malware doesn’t need to pack in software to take screenshots, if the OS serves it up for them on a platter.
The location is known, and I seem to remember it being fairly simple to view the contents in the right system viewer with a bit of work, so yeah. I never considered that but you’re quite right: MS is packaging that shit up all nice and handy for whoever can grab it by whatever means.
Man, Microsoft just keeps footgunning this one.
Every new exploit, they clearly have a meeting and convince themselves “that’s gotta be the last of it, right?”
So the next day-after-patch-tuesday rolls around and lo and behold, this guy drops some more nukes on their reputation as far as their most important customer demographic are concerned (corporate IT)
Given this genuinely does seem to stem from Microsoft mishandling this guy, why the fuck do they keep escalating
Puts a lot of evidence towards his claims that Microsoft was behaving badly from the outset and the reason why he started doing this. They keep escalating. Its a war they started.
Very little seems to be beyond the incredulity of MS meetings, remember they had a meeting where someone suggested the OS take a screenshot every ten seconds of whatever the user was doing and upload it to MS servers and rather than everyone laughing they agreed to move it into development.
You misspelled “firing the authoritarian nutjob for cause,” which would’ve been the bare minimum of reasonable reactions.
if that’s bare minimum, what is the upper limit for reasonable reactions? Hang him?
Publicly shame, actively blacklist them from ever working in any of their companies, and making sure everybody in the IT space knows this, would ruin this person’s ability to do any more damage and might be the upper limit? Well that or doing a Boeing… Take your pick.
Considering the thread we’re talking in, it’s up to you if you trust MS to implement this well, but they are not uploading the screenshots to the cloud.
Personally I think the idea of Recall is great if it works to help you and only you. The problem isn’t the idea, it’s the trust. If a reputable open source project or Linux distro made a feature like this I think it would be cool, because I know my privacy is going to be respected and the feature is designed solely to help me and nothing more. However, when MS suggests this I’m immediately cautious, skeptical, and concerned about how it could be used against me.
The statement you quoted is itself a lie. It talks about snapshots, when that’s not at all what Recall is about. It takes snapshots, true. But it does not matter to MS whether the snapshots themselves are saved, or where. “Recall does not share snapshots or associated data” is a reference solely to the snapshot itself, not the data Recall creates from it.
Here’s what really happens. Once a snapshot is taken, it is analyzed with AI as well as converted into text (if text is present) and all that content (including passwords, banking details, medical records, whatever passes the desktop when a snapshot is taken) plus its local AI analysis is kept in a local database. That shrinks its size to almost nothing, making it much easier for MS to collect. This secretive local database itself is inaccessible to you (even as admin), one you have zero rights to control or delete or edit or even view, one over which you are never given any permissions, and at regular intervals that database is scraped and sent back to MS to use in data aggregation and resale and AI training and whatever the fuck else they want to do with it. Sure, you can turn off Recall in the AI settings, but it has now been proven that any Windows update just turns it all back on again.
Knowing this, go back and reread their statement in regard to snapshots. The entire thing is a misdirection and never once addresses the real payload of Recall and why MS, even after they pinky swore they had dropped it, they continued partnering with hardware makers to deliver “Recall-ready” PCs that already have the requisite NPU on the motherboard, which are needed to do all that local data OCR and analysis on the snapshots that don’t even matter to MS once they’ve been scraped for content.
It’s also a big attack surface. Just like how a lot of malware looks for the browser password cache now, it doesn’t take much for a malware developer to just go for the recall store. The malware doesn’t need to pack in software to take screenshots, if the OS serves it up for them on a platter.
The location is known, and I seem to remember it being fairly simple to view the contents in the right system viewer with a bit of work, so yeah. I never considered that but you’re quite right: MS is packaging that shit up all nice and handy for whoever can grab it by whatever means.
“Footgunning”?
A colloquial term equivalent to “shooting oneself in the foot”
A very clear answer
An explanatory sequence of words
Over-complication of ‘sentence’
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/footgun
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shoot_oneself_in_the_foot
AI loves to use the word. I never heard it regularly until AI started helping popularize it.
FWIW I’ve proudly been using it for years
Prove you haven’t been an Ai for years
You’re very right! There’s a lot of reasons to believe I might be an AI, such as:
The verdict? I may in fact be an AI
Did this one achieve some intense introspection just now?
Shit
Then you did not speak with programmers regularly, I learned this term probably back in 2008ish
I guess so. I’ve learned lots of words from the ones I know, but not this one.