Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

mashable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 249 posts

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#111

Post by Foobar8568 »

imposterr wrote: post #100
dartharva wrote: post #48

The Enterprise/IoT LTSC versions of Windows 10 with extended support up to 2032 are available with commercial Visual Studio licenses iirc. If you can't somehow get hold of an ISO from your office's IT admin you can always sail the high seas :) You can evaluate it here: https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-windows-10-enterprise....

Getting an unverifiable iso for Windows seems like a bigger security risk than Recall tbh. Does MS publish hashes for the LTSC versions to at least let you ensure what you have hasn't been altered?

They used to publish them on msdn download page, which was accessible with only an account.

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#112

Post by dartharva »

imposterr wrote: post #100
dartharva wrote: post #48

The Enterprise/IoT LTSC versions of Windows 10 with extended support up to 2032 are available with commercial Visual Studio licenses iirc. If you can't somehow get hold of an ISO from your office's IT admin you can always sail the high seas :) You can evaluate it here: https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-windows-10-enterprise....

Getting an unverifiable iso for Windows seems like a bigger security risk than Recall tbh. Does MS publish hashes for the LTSC versions to at least let you ensure what you have hasn't been altered?

Yes, yes it does. The MVS portal provides checksums for each download.

There are also unofficial MVS dumps like here: https://awuctl.github.io/mvs/

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#113

Post by shiroiushi »

kubb wrote: post #22

Is this the enshittification everyone keeps talking about?

Arguably, but I'm not sure. Usually, enshittification is when something starts out really good, but then the management tries to squeeze more "value" out of it by making it worse and worse in ways that make the company more profit, but makes the experience worse for the users. In the case of Windows, personally I don't remember it ever being "really good" in the first place; it's always been shitty, just in different ways. In the past, it wasn't shitty in this particular way, but it was shitty in other ways. They fixed some of the really shitty stuff (blue-screens all the time, bad vendor-provided drivers, etc.), but every time they fixed one shitty thing they added a new shitty thing.

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#114

Post by Dalewyn »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #21

Literally no one wants this “feature”. Microsoft has lost their collective minds.

>Literally no one

I can see most people, and by that I mean the rest of the world outside Techiestan and Hacker News, will want or perhaps even need this feature.

Having the computer literally show you what you were doing is super duper handy for Joe Average who doesn't computer and certainly doesn't care about learning to computer.

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#115

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #94
beart wrote: post #63

These are the system requirements for recall according to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/retrace-your-ste... System requirements for Recall Your PC needs the following minimum system requirements for Recall: A Copilot+ PC 16 GB RAM 8 logical processors 256 GB storage capacity To enable Recall, you’ll need at least 50 GB of storage space free Saving screenshots automatically pauses once the device has les…

I was thinking you keep around a dedicated temp file you resize as required.

doing this would destroy your file system performance (almost as much as using Windows). SSDs are much faster when not close to full since it let's them do things like use the unfilled capacity as an SLC write cache.

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#116

Post by Dalewyn »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #41
Spivak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is a bit of rage-bait. You can already disable it via Group Policy and users can turn it off. They're trying to get clicks because they're trying to make it seems like uninstalling it is some meaningful difference. If you don't trust that the settings on your computer work what in gods name are you using windows for.

I don't trust them not to turn it back on (as happens to all sorts of features after a Windows update), and continue to install garbage I don't need or even wanted. I'm happy on POP_OS! and I'm not going back. Been on POP since January 18th of this year. I gave up on Microsoft when I realized Windows Defender will send over files to Microsoft it thinks are suspicious, and there's 0 audit trail for the files. For all…

>I don't trust them not to turn it back on

Microsoft respects Group Policy because enterprise uses Group Policy.

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#117

Post by tbrownaw »

cmcaleer wrote: post #95

Unfortunate. Luckily, Windows itself can be removed. It's incredible how much Microsoft is resting on their laurels in terms of seeing Windows as insurmountable and so consumers must take whatever Microsoft decide to dish out. I would have been totally resigned to this fact a decade ago, but middle-school+ kids these days don't use Windows - they use Chromebooks. A huge minority of them use iPhones. Familiarity with…

Using Chromebooks and iPhones is supposed to make people less tolerant of vendor overreach??

.

The big shortcoming that windows had was fixed with powershell and windows terminal. Now it's just got mildly annoying UI defaults.

The big things it has are:

* Outlook and the rest of Office * Visual Studio * Active Directory * Tons and tons of industry-specific applications

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#118

Post by Dalewyn »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #59
userbinator wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the sort of brainwashing I was referring to. Security depends entirely on your threat model. Look up the CVE stats by OS and you'll see the truth.

> Look up the CVE stats by OS 2024: https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php?year=2024 9 of 10 are Windows branded operating systems. 3,276 across all of these platforms. Of these, over 1,000 are different versions of Windows 10. Compared to 1799 on the Linux kernel, which is actively developed and will be actively developed for the foreseeable future. Are you arguing that Windows doesn't continuously get CVE e…

>9 of 10 are Windows branded operating systems. 3,276 across all of these platforms. Of these, over 1,000 are different versions of Windows 10. Compared to 1799 on the Linux kernel, which is actively developed and will be actively developed for the foreseeable future.

How many of those CVEs actually affect you in a tangible way as to disturb your sleep at night?

If you are not considering your threat model to discern which threats you should actually care about, you are doing computer security wrong.

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#119

Post by bragh »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #98
yoyohello13 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re on to something. There is no way they would be pushing this so hard if they didn’t get something out of it, and collecting mass amounts of training data seems like a plausible explanation.

How much more is there left to collect? They already own Outlook, Edge, Bing, One Drive, Sharepoint, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc. Thanks to numerous dark patterns, Microsoft is already getting a ton of telemetry about everything users are doing. You have to fight the OS to not let OneDrive slurp up every byte of data. The only avenue really free from their clutches is mobile, but this does nothing to alleviate that.

But that's the thing: they do not have the data on things and usage patterns that exist outside the Microsoft ecosystem and/or on-premises/private clouds, such as work done within Atlassian stack, ERPs, desktop software and so on.

Re: Microsoft's 'Recall' feature can't be uninstalled after all

#120

Post by spartanatreyu »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #41
Spivak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is a bit of rage-bait. You can already disable it via Group Policy and users can turn it off. They're trying to get clicks because they're trying to make it seems like uninstalling it is some meaningful difference. If you don't trust that the settings on your computer work what in gods name are you using windows for.

I don't trust them not to turn it back on (as happens to all sorts of features after a Windows update), and continue to install garbage I don't need or even wanted. I'm happy on POP_OS! and I'm not going back. Been on POP since January 18th of this year. I gave up on Microsoft when I realized Windows Defender will send over files to Microsoft it thinks are suspicious, and there's 0 audit trail for the files. For all…

I was with you right up until you said you didn't like Windows Defender sending a file to Microsoft.

I want my file system to have metadata that (along with things like name, last edited, checksum, etc...) puts all files into one of three buckets:

1. Pre-installed

2. User generated

3. External sources (e.g. Downloaded, transferred from network, transferred from device)

If a file from an external source becomes executable then starts affecting my pre-installed/user-generated files and it's checksum isn't already on microsoft's whitelist, then I want microsoft to quarantine that executable and look inside it to figure out what the heck it's doing to my computer.

Consider this:

No one is uploading your personal files, they don't do anything and trying to look into them wouldn't help anyone avoid viruses.

Only executables are worth looking at.

Every single executable that was generated from an external source has been checked by microsoft. That is how microsoft, apple, google, and every anti-virus provider out there gets new virus definitions added to their virus lists.

If those executables weren't sent, then every single virus definition would be empty.

Post reply on HN