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Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#361

Post by brookst »

ekidd wrote: post #171
brookst wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has TPM been a net positive or negative for users / enterprises / the industry?

TPM protects against two main threat models: 1. You don't trust people with physical access to the computer. For the average home user, this means you consider the hardware owner a threat. 2. You want to protect against malware that has already taken complete control over the OS at runtime, and that wants to write itself to disk or the BIOS so that it survives a reboot. At this point, the attacker has already won, so…

Interesting perspective. While I know secure boot has some downsides, on the whole I think it’s a pretty good thing.

I guess you’re looking at it as a freedom for gramps to dual boot a homebrew OS, and I’m looking at it as taking away gramps’ freedom to install persistent malware that requires buying new hardware to get rid of.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#362

Post by lotsoweiners »

kstrauser wrote: post #319
roody15 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain the personal utility here... Ohh I cannot find that one website I visited but I know I had found it a couple weeks back? Really. The personal utility use case looks pretty weak IMO.

I disagree. I think having an easy to search database of everything I've looked at would be very useful. And if I ever want such a thing, I'll be happy to go and find one and install it myself. I don't want it anywhere near my computer unless I deliberately select and acquire it myself.

lol I definitely don’t want that. That is the reason I already use incognito mode for everything.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#363

Post by jjcm »

plopilop wrote: post #249
jjcm wrote: post #187

Recall suffered from a classic Microsoft mistake they've made time and again, but never learned from - how to correctly market and package your feature. Microsoft always tends to "go big" with their integrations, often to their detriment, in order to increase adoption of new features. One notable time was with Windows 8. They really, REALLY wanted people to try out the new Metro UI, so they deeply integrated it into…

How is this objectively a great feature? This is a spyware that stores screenshots unencrypted (and thus accessible to any other spyware). I am also not convinced that the AI tools would have been offline, thus effectively sharing your whole data with Microsoft (even more than before). From a privacy perspective, this feature is an abomination

I'd caution us to separate out the feature from the implementation.

The feature provides the ability to search through all of the previous things you've done and gain context in an instant, in a way that can be queried with natural language. I think we can agree what it aims to achieve is beneficial.

The implementation is what you're debating. I see these are two separate things, but they play hand in hand. If you get the implementation wrong, it can easily tank the feature.

Still, the documentation for this seems to disagree with what you're saying.

> This is a spyware that stores screenshots unencrypted

This page[1] states "Snapshots are encrypted by Device Encryption or BitLocker". They suggest that things aren't shared with Microsoft, though I totally understand the skepticism there.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-cont...

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#364

Post by okanat »

Gormo wrote: post #271
hnpolicestate wrote: post #123

You know what would be catastrophically bad? A Recall AI feature being baked into Android. Like most people don't actually use personal computers anymore, even laptops aren't common among demos younger than millennials. I can tolerate switching to Linux or buying a steam deck. But if this became a hard coded feature of android or iOS I'd have to give up smartphones entirely.

I'm sure Lineage, Graphene et al would immediately remove it. Something like that would likely also motivate a surge of interest in pure Linux phones, like the Librem or PinePhone, which would accelerate their development, and might be a net positive.

Graphene maybe but it has a very limited set of devices it works on. Lineage may not be actually. They rarely go against what Google does.

Developing any normal user facing OS with lots of bells and whistles so it has a useful and modern closed-source friendly app ecosystem is insanely hard. It is the huge software stack that Google put in Android that makes it nicer for many app developers to make apps for it. Those basically un-Linux the Linux parts of it to provide stable interfaces.

I don't think this will change in the open source world in the next 3 decades and with increasing hardware complexity I expect even less success from independent Linux phone projects.

If such a project wants to be successful it has to do many things against the usual Linux. I don't see that happening without any corporate support.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#365

Post by lotsoweiners »

creata wrote: post #162
999900000999 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you can't afford a Mac, and you're not technically literate enough to install Ubuntu ? Speaking for myself, I dual boot mint and windows because I really like playing games and making music. Both of those are absolutely subpar on Linux. Outside of our nerd bubble, most normal people don't really want to run desktop Linux. Macs are great, but I can't really game on them.

If someone isn't technically literate enough to install Linux, they have three options: 1. Become technically literate enough to install Linux. Distros like Fedora are very easy to set up imo. 2. Ask someone else (relatives, local computer store, etc.) to set it up for you. 3. Continue using Windows.

Most people don’t even know what Linux is.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#366

Post by Sir_Twist »

tmpz22 wrote: post #115
wruza wrote: post #88

Recall uses local AI models built into Windows 11 to screenshot mostly everything you see or do on your computer and then give you the ability to search and retrieve items you’ve seen. An explorable timeline lets you scroll through these snapshots to look back on what you did on a particular day on your PC. Everything in Recall is designed to remain local and private on-device, so no data is used to train Microsoft’s…

Newer Apple Intelligence features will require 16gb ram and new M-series chips to run on-device. How is Microsoft able to release wide-spread features on device when there is a much diverse ecosystem of lower-powered, low-cost, windows devices??

Apple Intelligence works 8 gigs because of the phone's ram limit, no?

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#367

Post by consumer451 »

Bognar wrote: post #349
consumer451 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, sorry, I had diverged upthread into the part where the CCP read the USA's gov emails. I can't get over that little tidbit.

Per Microsoft's write-up: > Storm-0558 acquired an inactive MSA consumer signing key and used it to forge authentication tokens for Azure AD enterprise and MSA consumer to access OWA and Outlook.com. All MSA keys active prior to the incident – including the actor-acquired MSA signing key – have been invalidated. Azure AD keys were not impacted. The method by which the actor acquired the key is a matter of ongoing inv…

Thank you so much, this really closed the gaps in my understanding of what really happened.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#368

Post by xnx »

digging wrote: post #55

This is confusing and vague to me, which I believe is exactly the intent. It focuses on security, reiterates that security is their top priority (and we know that this is untrue). What were the security problems? They don't even allude to the existence or detection of any specific security problems. It sounds to me like they're figuring out a new marketing approach, or they're softening the blow by "listening to user…

People should not get over this (but probably will). There was an uproar (decades ago) about GMail "reading all your email". This was overblown, but Microsoft building the infrastructure to view a history of everything on your screen is much much worse. There's a lot more private things that get displayed on a screen (and of course all of your email would be a subset) that no one has a right to see.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#369

Post by beefnugs »

simonw wrote: post #90
segasaturn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway is that Microsoft has been trying to boil the frog, but slipped and turned the temperature up too quickly. They're retreating for now, but make no mistake that Recall will slowly trickle back into Windows under another name. Every major power broker wants something like Recall to become the norm - bosses to spy on their employees, governments to spy on their citizens/enemies, and tech CEO's to collect tra…

This is a very cynical take. I've not seen anything to make me think this feature is intended for surveillance as opposed to personal utility. The personal utility benefits are very clear to me - the problem is the ease with which malicious attackers might steal the data (if they can breach the system).

If this was released out of the blue (and not on by default) after maybe windows 7 era: sure microsoft is just putting some new untested feature out in the wild.

But Microsoft has made loud clear reputation destroying moves in the last few years by putting ads into the BASE OPERATING SYSTEM. And also forcing online account linking into the BASE OPERATING SYSTEM. They are yelling out into the world that they can no longer be trusted because they dont understand what an operating system is suppose to be anymore. What kind of deep trust is required to be that layer in a computer.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#370

Post by kstrauser »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #362
kstrauser wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I think having an easy to search database of everything I've looked at would be very useful. And if I ever want such a thing, I'll be happy to go and find one and install it myself. I don't want it anywhere near my computer unless I deliberately select and acquire it myself.

lol I definitely don’t want that. That is the reason I already use incognito mode for everything.

Heh! I just mean it seems like a cool thing to have the ability to turn on when you want to use it, because you want it, not as an opt-out feature.
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