Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
Are Microsoft a big, evil company?
A. No, that’s insanely reductive. They’re super smart people, and sometimes super smart people make mistakes. What matters is what they do with knowledge of mistakes.
I have no doubt there are smart employees, but they don’t call the shots. Case in point.
Being super smart and super evil are NOT mutually exclusive. Intelligence =|= morality.
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It’s subpoenable information. Absolutely no one is addressing that aspect.
I’ve done quite a bit of work in IT within the sphere of investigative law enforcement and this sets off major alarm bells to me.
No major corp I’m aware of is excited about these changes. Legal especially would like there to be the minimum records retention required by law, and a months long AI searchable database of individual user actions on a PC is a nightmare scenario for them.
The fuck do you mean, everyone literally is addressing that fact
The article references family, domestic violence, employers, and fraudsters but doesn’t really focus on legal liability.
Oh no, they don’t focus on the specific implied legality
We should have let the government actually break up microsofts monopoly long ago. Now they will abuse it to force millions of Americans to use their spyware.
I cant believe they are including this in enterprise edition too.
They usually keep their dirty spyware out of the enterprise editions to avoid losing corporate clients who dont want their secrets easily pluckable.
My hospital will be freaking the fuck out about this right… about…. Now.
I get the security issues, sure, those are valid, but the privacy ones are even worse. Imagine a teenager trying to search information on being gay, or possible intrusive thoughts on their family computer, only for their super maga right wing parent to find it in the screenshots.
Or someone being abused at home and searching for support facilities, deleting history and being outed by recall.
Wait, how about credit card fraud as a result of EVERYONE who has access to this computer can read your cc data?
Or, my husband was looking at jewelry online yesterday and he hasn’t told me, he must be cheating, right? Oh sorry, I forgot, our anniversary is next week… Hahahaha, don’t be upset babe.
Best one ever though, imagine your search history, your porn watch history accessible to anyone with access to your computer? The fucking horrific existence of having an employer process this data at scale using fancy staff monitoring program 7, and run stats on the fact that you had a toilet break while working from home, and they want to know if it was a number 1, or a number 2 so they can work a mean time to shit metric into your KPA/scorecard.
Guys, whatever benefit you think this is. It’s not worth it.
They OCR the entire screen and store it in plaintext?! There is no way… I know it’s Microsoft we’re talking about, but are they really this stupid?
It’s encrypted; the author is pointing out that it has to be decrypted to be used, and then the data can be obtained.
Security and privacy concerns aside, I saw someone commenting on the use case, asking who would ever want something like this.
One problem I hadn’t appreciated for a long time was that some people apparently have real problems with dealing with the Windows UI in terms of file access. They don’t know where their data is being saved. This, in my opinion, is in significant part a Microsoft UI problem induced by various virtual interfaces being slapped on top of the filesystem (“Desktop”, “My Documents”, application save directories, etc) to try to patch over the issue that the filesystem layout was kinda organically-designed in a kind of cryptic way back in the day.
But if you can remember a snippet of text in what you were working on, you can find that thing again even if you have no idea where you stored it. Like, it’s content-keyed file access.
That’s not very useful to a techie. They know how to navigate their system’s filesystem, and even if they lose track of a particular thing, they know how to use the system’s filesystem search tools to search for filenames or content. They can search for recently-modified files. They know how to generally get ahold of stuff.
But for the people who can’t do that, reducing their interface to a single search box might make file access more approachable.
Now, let me reiterate that I think that a whole lot of this is Microsoft repeatedly patching over UI problems they created in the past rather than fixing them. And they’ve done this before over the decades with stuff other than document access. It’s hard to navigate the filesystem to find an installed program a la the MS-DOS era, so they stick stuff in a Start Menu to make it more accessible. That gets too crowded, installers start slapping shortcuts on the desktop. That gets too crowded, installers start adding system tray icons. That gets too crowded, the Start Menu becomes searchable. Each interface just becomes progressively less-usable and the solution each time is to stick a new interface in on top of the old one, which in turn contributes to the complexity of the system as a whole.
But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t trying to address a real problem.
I think that they’d do better with something like having a rapidly-accessible log of recently-accessed files (like, maybe have the filesystem maintain a time-based doubly-linked list of those) and be able to rapidly search the content of documents based on mod time so that recent stuff gets hit quickly, then trying to make their existing search tools more accessible. That doesn’t replicate data across the system and produce some of the problems here. It also permits for fully-searching content, rather than just the stuff that was on a screen when the Recall system grabbed a screenshot and OCRed it. Maybe they’ve done something like that in recent years; I’m many years out-of-date on Windows.
I’d also add that I think that personal computer systems in general would benefit from giving users better control over where their data is replicated to. It’s kind of confusing…you’ve got swap (well, encrypted swap probably helps somewhat with this). Browser history. Any clipboard manager’s retention. Credentials stores. Application-saved copies of in-progress files. Various caches. If you use some kind of cloud-based storage, you’re pushing data out to other computers. Backups. Just a lot of state that can be replicated all over the place and is hard to go back and track down and remove. That’s even before stuff like issues with doing secure deletion on existing filesystems (which we had a conversation about the other day, everything from log-structured filesystems to wear-leveling on SSDs inducing data replication). If you want something definitely gone, be able to manage your data’s lifetime, something that I think that a lot of people – even non-techies – would like, you really have to have a lot of technical knowledge of the system’s internals as things stand today. This Recall thing is egregious, replicates data all over, but it’s far from the first feature that makes it harder for people to understand and control the lifetime of data on their computer.
I don’t think that the software world has done a great job of letting people control that data lifetime. And I think that it’s something that a user should reasonably be able to expect out of their computer.
Do you really need screen snapshot to do fine grained search though? It sounds like you’re describing Spotlight in some way https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(Apple)
There was an article going around a while ago that was arguing most users these days, including the youth we often stereotype as “digital natives” who “get computers”, don’t understand file systems. They might not even know they exist as a concept.
Which makes sense if you’ve only ever really used modern UIs. You don’t have to know anything about files and folders. I bet a lot of people don’t even know they exist in any meaningful way.
Most users are shockingly ignorant, and a lot of them are not really paying enough attention or interested enough to learn much.
My daughter certainly doesn’t have a good understanding of file systems even though I’ve been trying to teach it to her.
I remember reading an article a few years back about physics undergraduates who didnt know how to use a computers file system. They could learn, but these are smart likely at least fairly tech inclined kids and they didnt know how to navigate folders on a computer at 18.
When I studied Computer Engineering, I met several other students who had a lot of trouble using the Windows file system, and navigating a file system through a terminal was a Herculean task for them.
Most people growing up now, and since over a decade ago, are only tech savvy in the sense they know how to use smartphones, tablets, and social media; none of those require any understanding of file systems, and even using desktops doesn’t really require it that much for most people.
I’m simply baffled that someone going into a computer engineering major at a university doesn’t understand a hierarchical file system as a matter of course. It’s a tree. The file system is a tree. A tree is one of the most basic computer science logical constructs. How exactly is a filesystem confusing? How is navigating directories from a terminal - any terminal, in any OS - a Herculean task?
Someone going into the subject may not have any pre-existing knowledge of the subject (like what a tree is) and may be intending to learn it from their classes. Unless we require everyone to take a class that covers it first, you can’t really guarantee that people have that knowledge. While people may have known it by necessity before, computers, for better or worse, have gotten easier to use for the average person and it’s no longer essential knowledge. Or they may not have even be using a traditional desktop/laptop OS that has those concepts.
As for how it’s confusing, have you seen the default UI for Google Docs/Sheets/Drive or Microsoft Office recently? Google’s products default to a file view listed in most recently used order with a search bar at the top, no folders. The Microsoft Office suite defaults to saving to OneDrive without any folders. If this is all people have needed to use when growing up, is it any wonder why they never learned about hierarchical folders in a filesystem?
I don’t think any of the UX problems you’re describing have been solved on any platform. If anything Windows is one of the better examples here, because I’ll be fucked if I can ever find a file on Android and don’t get me started with Linux.
Yeah this is why Apple has been slowly peeling away traditional file / folder features from front and center. The user doesn’t care where or how they get their files, they just want them at any given time. Spotlight being the most successful as obfuscating where anything is yet allowing access to everything. Microsoft that’s started to pick up on that and attempt to solve the same problems.
The bizarre thing is, they have solved it. PowerToys Run is the Spotlight omnibar of everything and they bizarrely haven’t chosen to bake it into Windows proper. I can’t use Windows without it now. Search files and folders everywhere faster than the start menu search, search running processes, execute commands, do maths, calculate hashes, open web pages. It’s fantastic.
They’re a surveillance capitalism corp first and foremost. All other considerations, including security, are secondary.
As reasonable the concerns are… it seems like there’s quite a bit of fearmongering over software and hardware that haven’t even really gotten into the mainstream yet.
Agreed that there is a bit of exgaerated dread… but honestly this has all the hallmarks of a monkey knife fight in an elevator, it’s hard to imagine how this won’t end in disaster
I’m just imagining a monkey knife fight in an elevator now… They are cartoon monkeys btw.
Unpopular Opinion: This is why Microsoft were such assholes about making sure Windows 11 required a modern TPM and this is also why they are forcefully rolling out Bitlocker encryption turned on by default on all Windows 11 PCs.
Is Recall still a fucking stupid idea? Yes, resoundingly so. But they’ve half-ass considered the risks, it seems. The forceful rollout of Bitlocker is dumb and short-sighted in its own right, and it wouldn’t make a person completely secure from outside attacks rooted in a Recall exposure.
Nah dude. TPMs have alwayd been about implementing DRMs. These companies hate that they can’t control our PCs, they want to be sure we can only run their approved apps. Like it works in iOS and (to a lesser degree for now) in Android. And even there they are pushing hard for even more restrictive DRM.
For example, some years ago I worked with a SaaS that implemented and sold some security products. One of our customers was a big retailer (for specialized products, not going into more details to avoid doxxing) that was having a problem with scalpers buying all their inventory as soon as they released it. So they were trying to put a show for regulators about stopping scalpers because their customers were complaining. We suggested that the only real solution was to have some real life verification of purchases. But in the end they went with the awful attestation APIs offered by Apple or Google to “fix” this. And in case you are not familiar, these APIs are just TPM based DRMs. So now, if you have a rooted/jailbroken phone you can’t even buy with this retailer anymore.
Note that this company wasn’t trying to fuck customers directly, they were just lazy and incentivised to not really fix the problem (a sale is a sale, even if to a scalper). But even then the end result is that their customers got their digital freedom rights restricted. It’s just a terrible technology IMO, the incentives from companies arr all terrible. And that’s before we start considering the real intentions of awful companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google. IMO they are actually pushing for techno feudalism, but that’s my conspiracy theory hahaha.
So no, I doubt they were thinking about security woth this recall bullshit. As other people have explained in their comments it doesn’t really protect much in practice. Plus this whole AI push has just just a stupid scramble from this companies to grab a big piece of the stupid AI pie from other companies hahaha, there is no long term plan here, don’t lie to yourself and us.
THIS IS NOT CURRENTLY RUNNING ON MY WINDOWS COMPUTER, right?
This obvious first question hasn’t been clarified (maybe by one comment in this thread, but not in the article)
From The Verge’s obsequious article:
Recall won’t work with every Windows 11 computer. You’ll have to buy one of several fresh new “Copilot Plus PCs” powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips, which have the neural processing unit (NPU) required for Recall to work.
And from the article in the OP:
I got ahold of the Copilot+ software and got it working on a system without an NPU about a week ago,
Couldn’t you use a separator to make it one line of code? That way it’d be even more dangerous
Are you… Are you saying EVERYTHING can be hacked with one line of code?
Ever since those Aliens brought us their ancient and mysterious line separator tech, we have all we need to do just that!
Independence day was indeed a great movie. Who would have thought they also use X86 architecture?
