MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond? • Hacker News Board

Re: MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond?

#11

Post by johnea » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 9:19 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #10

johnea wrote: post #6

I don't see why any response to M$ is required. Anyone who runs a free software operating system is free to implement any such recording system they desire. These developments should be driven by user requirements, not in response to some new M$ feature. By "community", it's implied that this is a diverse and disparate group of individuals and organizations. If any one of these desires to make or use a system, like t…

You're responding to the editorialized headline. The (too long to fit) link's title is: openrecall/openrecall: OpenRecall is a fully open-source, privacy-first alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft's Windows Recall. With OpenRecall, you can easily access your digital history, enhancing your memory and productivity without compromising your privacy.

You again fail to recognize the disticntion between free software and open source.

Does this make your reply also editorialized?

Re: MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond?

#12

Post by badsectoracula » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 9:20 PM UTC

allanrbo wrote: post #3

Been thinking... Why is AI even needed for a thing like this? Aren't there assistive tech API's for screen readers for people who are blind, that could be used to scrape all text from all windows, without resorting to OCR? Or maybe Electron apps break all of that...

Assistive APIs require active participation from all software - and said software to use them properly, thus it creates as many obstacles as the number of programs (or actually, UI elements) on a computer.

AI-based OCR does not, there is only a single obstacle and that is the AI OCR itself.

With the former you need every developer who ever contributed/will contribute to everything that ends up on your screen to participate properly. With the latter you only need the developers of AI OCR to participate and then it can work with anything exposed on screen regardless of if the program uses (or even can use) assistive APIs or not.

While the latter is obviously much harder, once (if) it works you get consistent results for everything and even if the results are consistently mediocre, they're better than consistently absent.

IMO even aside for things like recall etc, assistive software will be taking advantage of AI and OCR in the future so it can work regardless of what the individual programs do.

Re: MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond?

#13

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

allanrbo wrote: post #3

Been thinking... Why is AI even needed for a thing like this? Aren't there assistive tech API's for screen readers for people who are blind, that could be used to scrape all text from all windows, without resorting to OCR? Or maybe Electron apps break all of that...

Depending on how you mean "AI", I can see 2 uses:

* First, yes you can often use a11y APIs, but OCR is likely to be useful/needed for apps that don't play well with those for whatever reason.

* Once you have the text, I could potentially see value in AI/LLM fuzzy searching; it's easier to say "find something I saw about a new programming language yesterday" than "search for... oh what was the title of that page? Oh, I'll just search for 'language' and hope it was mentioned..."

Re: MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond?

#14

Post by jauntywundrkind » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 9:24 PM UTC

allanrbo wrote: post #3

Been thinking... Why is AI even needed for a thing like this? Aren't there assistive tech API's for screen readers for people who are blind, that could be used to scrape all text from all windows, without resorting to OCR? Or maybe Electron apps break all of that...

There's probably no body of works more impressive to me than Karli Coss's work to capture data from the various devices & systems they use. The map of infrastructure shows off the architecture here, what it takes to read your own systems: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html . The overall blog post/digital gardening plot on the topic is probably https://beepb00p.xyz/sad-infra.html .

There's something remarkably smart about OCR as a failsafe that gets around all technical problems. Karlicoss's work shows the extensiveness of reading out data, and even that will have various limitations with what the datastores choose to encode. Simply building super-agency stop the actual agency directly afforded us real humans, by dealing with the screen as interface, has a certain elegance to it (in a world gone mad with difficult unyielding technologies).

Re: MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond?

#15

Post by neilv » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

> OpenRecall is a fully open-source, privacy-first [...]

Depends what you mean by "privacy-first".

Much like the most privacy-respecting practices of a company might be not to capture certain user data at all, that also applies to data you let be captured on your own computer.

Just because it's initially only on your device, and is encrypted, doesn't mean you're the only one who can ever access it. There's hackers, disgruntled significant others, software bugs, interacting tech you don't understand, future tech, and various kinds of investigations.

When thinking about adopting new kinds of extreme self-surveillance, individuals should make informed choices about benefit vs. risk. Did you really need this, or do you need to capture information more selectively.

Maybe just wait a year, listening for other people's sobs of regret. Say, you could let "influencers", anxious to generate social media content about using all the latest shiny things, be your guinea pigs.

(Confession: In '97 or '98, I made a desktop program HTTP proxy called Webephant, which permitted future keyword search of every Web page you visited while it was running. I didn't think about privacy implications at the time, but I should've. These full desktop recall things are much more invasive.)

Re: MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond?

#16

Post by aaplok » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 9:39 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #9

philipkglass wrote: post #4

This editorialized title breaks the HN submission guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

The editorialized title is also seriously misleading; it's hard to square "how does the Linux community respond?" with what looks like a single-person project that's cross platform: > Cross-platform Support: OpenRecall works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, giving you the freedom to use it on your preferred operating system. (and https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall/commits/main/ to see the "community" - don't get m…

I agree with everything else, but I didn't interpret the HN title as you did. My reading of it was that the Linux community responded by developing a privacy-friendly alternative to MS invasive software.

So not only is the title clickbaity and not reflective of the actual content, it's also misleading enough that two completely opposite interpretations can be made.

Re: MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond?

#17

Post by compsciphd » Mon, Jun 10, 2024, 10:05 PM UTC

allanrbo wrote: post #3

Been thinking... Why is AI even needed for a thing like this? Aren't there assistive tech API's for screen readers for people who are blind, that could be used to scrape all text from all windows, without resorting to OCR? Or maybe Electron apps break all of that...

we actually patented that :)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8214367B2/en

"a context recorder that uses accessibility mechanisms to record context information derived independently of screen-images"

then again, we arguably patented much of what makes up recall.

Re: MS makes 1984-style monitoring, so how does the Linux community respond?

#18

Post by CRConrad » Thu, Jun 13, 2024, 12:58 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #15

> OpenRecall is a fully open-source, privacy-first [...] Depends what you mean by "privacy-first". Much like the most privacy-respecting practices of a company might be not to capture certain user data at all, that also applies to data you let be captured on your own computer. Just because it's initially only on your device, and is encrypted, doesn't mean you're the only one who can ever access it. There's hackers, d…

> Just because it's initially only on your device, and is encrypted, doesn't mean you're the only one who can ever access it. There's hackers, disgruntled significant others, software bugs, interacting tech you don't understand, future tech, and various kinds of investigations.

And thieves, who didn't originally want your data at all, but just a new laptop. But hey, it's 2028, and this new quantum algorithm can decrypt anything, so "Why not look through whatever happens to be on this computer I stole yesterday...?"