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

191–200 of 238 posts

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#191

Post by sunaookami »

wvenable wrote: post #82
sunaookami wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directed at you but I find it funny that people (rightfully!) complain about Microsoft spyware and then run some dubious scripts from who-knows-where. With the added side effects that these scripts always disable/remove waaaay too much and break the install which then lead to users cursing Microsoft for things that the user has broken without knowing.

I find it funny that on website called hacker news, it's still assumed that anyone who customizes their system must also be an idiot that knows nothing about being safe online.

Those that describe themselves as "pro users" or "hackers" are mostly the users that don't actually know better. It's kinda cringy reading blatant false information from tech people and then people not in tech believe this "misinformation" and it spreads like wildfire and can never be contained.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#192

Post by Wowfunhappy »

BadHumans wrote: post #181
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if no C++ compiler existed for your operating system. Even if most of the code you write is Rust, would you be able to use this operating system?

I don't understand this analogy because every tool touted as a photoshop replacement supports PSD.

IME it doesn't work well enough for professional use.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#193

Post by wvenable »

sunaookami wrote: post #191
wvenable wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it funny that on website called hacker news, it's still assumed that anyone who customizes their system must also be an idiot that knows nothing about being safe online.

Those that describe themselves as "pro users" or "hackers" are mostly the users that don't actually know better. It's kinda cringy reading blatant false information from tech people and then people not in tech believe this "misinformation" and it spreads like wildfire and can never be contained.

There is misinformation out there, for sure, but I fail to see your point. People will happily recommend installing Linux over Windows but then suggest you shouldn't dare to touch the registry! That makes no sense.

Windows 10 basically unusable on my GPD Pocket 1 without about as many tweaks as I can make to it. However, once properly tweaked it's actually pretty usable for pretty heavy coding tasks. It has a good amount of RAM but a pretty slow drive.

I don't bother tweaking my Windows 11 machine so heavily except to turn off everything that makes sense to turn off. These are all settings that Microsoft provides themselves but are only available via group policy or registry keys. Thankfully there are tools that not only make it easy to change but also explain the consequences and provide recommendations.

If I were to describe myself as "Pro user" or "hacker" would you assume I don't actually know better? That seems pretty uncharitable.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#194

Post by somat »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #55
imbusy111 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience, it's still not a 100% replacement. For example, there are no drivers for a pretty common steering wheel (Logitech G923). There is a driver for an older version of the wheel that kind of works, but no TRUEFORCE support. And even then, you have to mess with some low level details to make it work, send magic values to the hardware on plugging it in. I also noticed that games from Steam end up taking…

> 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…

A question about the shader cache. what is it?

My steam system is somewhat questionable. it is netbooted, everything is nfs. This... well, it sort of sucks, I would not recommend it. But I love having the "one good drive" my NAS and then using that for everything, I am patient So I am sticking with it. But the "rebuilding shader cache". what is it doing? why does it take so long? why does it do it every time a launch a game? why am I offered a choice to skip it? why do I not notice any difference if I skip it?

I have a 10G connection to my nas but things are still much slower than I think they should be. I think it is related to poor interaction between nfs and a lot of small files. Otherwise, linux and proton are working great for games. When running games on windows I used iscsi for my games, and that worked well, I should probably do that on linux but I like having a filesystem on the far side instead of an opaque block device so I thought I would try nfs.

There are some weird artifacts in the system, I have to start steam twice, The first time it fails to connect to the webhelper, once everything is cached, it starts faster and thus works the second time, the shader cache takes forever and a day to rebuild, I can manually empty it which helps the next rebuild, I suspect many small files, having to check and replace them one by one, but I don't know, nfs tuning is somewhat of a dark art. Steam does not get along with my favorite tiling window manger(spectrwm) so I thought I would try that other openbsd floating window manager(CWM), steam is happier, but still has a few artifacts with menus, I suspect the CWM zero sized borders are the cause.

Overall, The experience is much worse than on windows, but that is because I made it that way, and so I am much happier than when I am on windows.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#195

Post by freitasm »

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…

Activity History has existed for years. It's not new.

New is extra data collection and Copilot "understanding" your activities based on those records.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#196

Post by pino82 »

golf1052 wrote: post #128
noncoml wrote: post #60

I thought I make a generic reply instead of replying at every comment below: People don't use Windows over Linux because they prefer the Windows environment/experience. They use it because of the applications, and to some degree the drivers, that are not available in Linux.

To the shock of some people as well, some people use Windows because they prefer it over other operating systems.

Probably yes. Depending on your requirements (e.g. if cloud, spying, etc is all fine), it can indeed make sense. Windows has its strengths.

But what I suspect: A much bigger cohort is people saying "I'm not forced, I just explicitly prefer it" although this is actually a lie. Some of them are aware of that, some not. Being forced to sth is not great. Not everyone is honest (or even aware) enough to admit it.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#197

Post by RajT88 »

tandr wrote: post #142
RajT88 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought for sure somebody was complaining about explorer.exe not loading if it cannot find recall.DLL or something. The thread describes a much more minimal kind of dependency. More like the dark pattern variety which is hard to turn off.

would it be possible to make a stub for recall.dll, that does nothing? Or it HAS to be signed?

Doesn't matter - they are not talking about that. AFAIK, there's no recall.dll.

But assuming they do this, you can enable unsigned driver installation (there's a valid use case for that), but I'm not sure you can get explorer.exe to load unsigned libraries. Maybe! Explorer.exe is a user mode process, so it's way less bad than other system processes.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#198

Post by blibble »

smileybarry wrote: post #187
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.

Windows Recall doesn’t use OpenAI or any online API. The indexing and OCR is done by a local model, in a Secure Enclave powered by VBS and encrypted with the system TPM. AKA: a virtualization-separated process with storage inaccessible to the OS (all lookup etc. is done over RPC). Source: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/09/27/updat...

given Microsoft's excellent security record how long do you think that'll take to break into?

an hour? maybe two?

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#199

Post by pino82 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #177
bee_rider wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would just switch to Linux so they’d shut up about it. I use Linux every day, I love it, but it is a community project with rough edges and no customer service. Pretty small rough edges nowadays. But they are still there, and there’s no customer service. Always happy to see people join Linux, but slightly confused at the folks advertising it. Are they implicitly signing up to be the customer service for…

>Are they implicitly signing up to be the customer service for these folks who are used to an OS-as-a-product type setup? I mean first off, yes most people using Linux have no problem with helping people out, my guess is linux users are probably 100x more active on support platforms than anyone else. (if not more) But also, who on earth has Microsoft customer service? Big businesses sure, but do you think most Window…

One of the most disappointing aspects of the Linux ecosystem is the 'community'. The self-proclaimed experts in forums who try to help people. I'm using Linux only since >20 years. I usually don't need them. And I learned soon to not involve them. Whenever I did, it was a pure waste of time.

Re: Microsoft Recall is now an explorer.exe dependency

#200

Post by altruios »

hypeatei wrote: post #183
mistermann wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not possible for you to know how hard to contain it is. The commonality of strange beliefs like this makes me seriously wonder if there is an initiative on social media to teach this form of thinking as being correct, because it is certainly the default. Try defecting from the game for a month and watch the other players from the sidelines, and see if you don't see what I'm talking about.

Generally the more people you tell, the harder it is to keep a secret. I don't what makes that a "strange belief" but okay.

Well: it's the generalization that a large corporation is communicating with an agency as a whole entity - thousands of employees aware, top to bottom - as opposed to just 1 or 2 people at the top receiving secret orders.

It is strange because that's exactly the opposite of how a corporation operates. If every employee (or even too many) employees are aware of the decision making process, that process stalls out.

The default view should be: the person at the top is being the one contacted, and the employees are not in the know.

Post reply on HN