Satya Nadella's Microsoft is such a weird company. It's like there's one side of it that is running with Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things" and the other side is saying "wait, we're the most important software company in the world! Things can't break!"
This is a pretty insightful comment. That's exactly how it feels. The core of their technologies have never been more solid, including Windows. But then on top of that solid core is a bunch of "move fast and break things" and short-term profit choices that make the whole thing seem awful.
As far as I know, a long while ago, the Islamic Republic of Iran asked Cisco to develop a filtering solution to stop their citizens from accessing undesirable content. Cisco said no. Then US companies started asking for filters to stop their employees watching porn at work, Cisco invented a centralised domain/packet filtering solution for their routers, and Iran went "can we buy one of those, please?". My take is tha…
It seems weird that Cisco wouldn't help Iran when they were indispensable in the creation of China's firewall. Do you have more details on the reasoning? Was it due to sanctions or did they genuinely not want to help Iran?
I'm afraid my source for this is a half-remembered conference talk from someone who I believe worked for the TOR foundation. My best guess technically was that they didn't want to invest R&D effort into the form of Deep Packet Inspection that came out as a result, for a project that could get them bad press or hauled before congress.
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).
My take is more cynical. They actually want your soul. By collecting all the information that was ever used to train the neural network between your ears, they can create a synthetic version of you, to impersonate you, and some might even argue resurrect you, inside a computer, to torture you Clockwork Orange style with an endless display of ads, predicting what the fleshy version of you wants to buy, how to preempt your real life decisions, deny you the things you desire, and more.
I do not think it is cynical to assume that Microsoft would sell this to companies as a way to do constant surveillance of their employees with OCR and LLMs used to make it easier for a manager to sift through massive amounts of data. That's just an actual use case that their true customers would pay for, I think it's awful and should be illegal under any reasonable worker protections but why would they not advertise…
If that's the case, why don't they sell Teams activity data to companies? I mean, after you're idle for 5 minutes, Teams detects this and changes your status to "idle". Following your reasoning, they should be selling this data already.
You mean Viva Insights? (formerly Workplace Analytics)
In summary: the only customers that matter --corporations paying site licenses-- declared this to be an unacceptable business risk. Anyone who is still using windows in 2024 and isnt a multinational business or llc gets what they deserve.
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.
For anyone willing to try, the installers are exceedingly simple and Steam makes gaming a breeze. Getting away from that "it's for nerds" image you're referring to is exactly what Linux needs to do
I do not think it is cynical to assume that Microsoft would sell this to companies as a way to do constant surveillance of their employees with OCR and LLMs used to make it easier for a manager to sift through massive amounts of data. That's just an actual use case that their true customers would pay for, I think it's awful and should be illegal under any reasonable worker protections but why would they not advertise…
If that's the case, why don't they sell Teams activity data to companies? I mean, after you're idle for 5 minutes, Teams detects this and changes your status to "idle". Following your reasoning, they should be selling this data already.
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).
> I've not seen anything to make me think this feature is intended for surveillance as opposed to personal utility.
The previous commenter was attributing malicious intent to Microsoft and other parties, but in the long run, I'm not sure that anyone's immediate intentions are particularly relevant.
My concern is much less about how the creators of these tools currently intend for them to be used, and much more about how they will end up being used regardless. Well-intentioned people have often created things that were viciously abused by ill-intentioned others later, or created things that had negative unintended consequences.
Satya Nadella's Microsoft is such a weird company. It's like there's one side of it that is running with Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things" and the other side is saying "wait, we're the most important software company in the world! Things can't break!"
2 cultures? Doesn't sound too surprising to me... one that is feature oriented and another that is old guard trying to support legacy customers.
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
This is only the beginning of AI-centric offerings that were oversold and will be delayed or quietly abandoned. LLMs are nice for simple things, but they’ve already reached their limits. No amount of data will solve the iteration and complexity problems.
Nobody has argued that this feature doesn't work. In fact, it probably works really well which is why Microsoft has been pushing it so hard.