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

Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 238 posts

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#151

Post by hbn »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #125
thomasahle wrote: post #52

For those who don't know, Microsoft Recall is a system that screenshots what you do every few seconds, and uses OpenAI's vision api to allow search on eveything you did in the past. There's an article from Sep 27th where they promise you'll be able to uninstall Recall: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/27/24255721/microsoft-window... , not sure what that means for this explorer.exe dependency.

Is this why a new privacy setting quietly turned up called "Activity history"? > "Activity history: Jump back into what you were doing on your device by storing your activity history, including info about websites you browse and how you use apps and services. Review the Learn more and Privacy Statement to find out how Microsoft products and services use this data to personalize experiences while respecting your priva…

Copilot first appeared in my taskbar after an update as a pinned app, which I promptly I unpinned.

Another update not long after it appeared again in my taskbar, this time not as a pinned app icon, but it literally replaced my "show desktop" button in the bottom right corner! I had to search online for other confused people looking to restore a basic desktop navigation feature that's been around since like 2009, because they replaced it with the 17th ever-present option to jump into their preinstalled bloatware!

And just as a sidenote, Microsoft Copilot is by far the worst LLM I've tried to use, both in how dumb it is, but also in how infuriating it is when it gets stuff wrong while spamming a bunch of stupid emojis into every sentence like it's excited about how confidently stupid it is.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#152

Post by ZunarJ5 »

bee_rider wrote: post #121
wilsonnb3 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux makes it easy for you to be a developer, while other platforms fight you every step of the way I see this sentiment a lot but the developer experience on Windows is good to great in my experience. Much better than MacOS or linux if you are using Visual Studio and .NET, pretty equal if you are using another stack. What it isn't is posix/unix. A lot of the bad developer experience people have on windows is from…

I’m assuming it is easier to write code on the platform you want to deploy it to. So, server-first stuff: web dev, scientific computing, AI, all that sort of stuff is Linux-first. Writing Windows software, I’m sure, is easier on Windows. Happily Valve fixed the whole gaming issue, outside of niche DRM stuff that I don’t care about.

Chiming in here to drop

https://www.protondb.com/

This site shows how well games run on proton and people offer solutions to get them running if there's any snags.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#153

Post by olyjohn »

ZunarJ5 wrote: post #143

Is Ubuntu the best for a touchscreen? Is there a specific flavour people are happy with? I prefer to keep to Ubuntu if possible as I use it as my daily. I have a HP laptop I got a year or two ago with a pen. It's literally the only thing holding me back from switching on that machine. I have run debloat tools on it but Windows doesn't respect that with subsequent updates.

I ran Ubuntu on a Surface Pro 2 like 6 years ago. Touchscreen seems to work as well as Windows as far as I can tell.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#154

Post by olyjohn »

y2hhcmxlcw wrote: post #122

What about Attorneys and Doctors who have protected health information and client privileged information? Are they not to use Microsoft Products now? What about any company with Trade Secret information? Are they also not to use Microsoft Products now?

This is the same question people have been asking since Microsoft started including Telemetry in Windows.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#155

Post by Marsymars »

School-Cotton wrote: post #101
csdreamer7 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, there are no drivers for a pretty common steering wheel (Logitech G923). This is a nice, specific detail. Most of these comments are very vague. > There is a driver for an older version of the wheel that kind of works Do you mean an out of tree driver? Would you test this and post back? The 6.3 kernel they mentioned 3 months ago is very old and likely a forked kernel. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gam…

Anticheat is not some minor detail, lots of popular competitive games require it.

I wish anticheat/multiplayer was universally an option on install. I don't play multiplayer games online, and often I'd like to be able to cheat in single-player, because I'm time-constrained and would like to cut out some part of the game I find less fun. Anticheat only makes my experience worse.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#156

Post by tamask »

jampekka wrote: post #9
joshdavham wrote: post #4

I'm not a windows user myself, but I'm curious what you windows users think about this.

Surely they can't be thinking much about operating systems?

What a sarcastic comment. It may be true on average, but definitely not for everyone. I'm one of the counterexamples, because I think about it a lot, and I'm carefully considering my options and alternatives.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#157

Post by ZunarJ5 »

MiddleEndian wrote: post #132
sharpshadow wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop runs in the browser[0], maybe the whole suit will follow. 0. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/photoshop-web-faq.ht...

Seems like a downgrade, and I doubt it can handle Premiere. Honestly I'm looking to move off of Adobe stuff anyway, but I will have to do that before ditching Windows

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

?

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#158

Post by ZunarJ5 »

ryandrake wrote: post #92
delusional wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a pretty damning condemnation of Microsoft's current product strategy, at least in relation to the user segment that visits hacker news. People are willing to run highly privileged untrusted and unverified code in the personal computers, just for a chance to remove the stuff you're actively spending money and time developing.

Microsoft's software is now indistinguishable from malware. If I had to run Windows, I would have zero trust in it, which matches my level of trust in "Fast Eddie's Random Script". At least Fast Eddie says in the README file that his script is not attacking my computer. Microsoft readily admits to its status as an attacker, and calls the attacks "features."

This really hit home for me when trying to dual boot. Repeatedly I had to select the drive in the boot menu and rerun the script to get me back to my nice grub chosing screen. I gave up, it felt violating.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#159

Post by Marsymars »

OptionOfT wrote: post #109
brink wrote: post #3

Does anyone know any good "debloat" scripts to disable all these modern features of Windows 11 and bring me back to something that resembles the Windows I grew up with? I'm having a hard time keeping track of all of the registry keys and config settings I need to update to keep this crap at bay.

One of the things I've been trying to do since the advent of Windows 11 is ... get rid of 'Recommendations' on the Start Menu. It gives me the creeps to see stuff pop up there. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/... Whatever you do, the GPO / Registry key doesn't work on Non-Education / SE systems. If you apply it on an Education version, the StartMenuShellExperienceHost (you may need to shuf…

The "Recommendations" section is near-impossible to get rid of, but it's pretty easy to stop anything from displaying in that section.

Under Settings > Personalization > Start, I have "More pins" selected, and the various "Show whatever" options disabled, and my "Recommended" section is a single empty row at the bottom of the start menu that reads "To show your recent files and new apps, turn them on in the Settings."

Post reply on HN