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Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

reuters.com

251–260 of 485 posts

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I expect it to emerge as an accessibility feature for cognitive memory loss. Imagine not remembering the name of your email client or the color of its icon, but Siri With Screenshots can pull up an important email thread.

Christ. I just went through this stuff with a loved one, for a few years.

“Hey Siri, what did mom do today?”

“Asked 214 times when you were getting back in town, because she has not seen you in a long time.”

“I’ve been back for two months and I saw her this morning.”

“That is what I told her, each time.”

“Ok. What else did she do?”

“Nothing.”

Yeesh. Some Black Mirror shit.

[edit] not to crap on how nice that really might be for a lot of people. Dementia’s just… well, pretty messed up and sad, I guess, and bringing machines into the mix can be weird.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#252
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TPM was met with resistance due to privacy concerns and Microsoft quietly re-introduced it anyway. The same will happen to Recall.

Has TPM been a net positive or negative for users / enterprises / the industry?

No

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#253

This is what happens when a 3 trillion dollar company moves fast and breaks things

It doesnt help that M$'s reputation is awful. How many different ad screens are on windows 11? How many privacy things did I need to check or uncheck for privacy? Why did the ads come back after I disabled it? Why did onedrive takeover my documents? Microsoft isnt trustworthy. I have begun my migration away. I only use Microsoft for programs my customers use. MSTeams(webapp isnt good enough for high stakes b2b), and…

> How many different ad screens are on windows 11?

How many are there? Admittedly I use a Start Menu replacement so I don't see ads there but I don't see any ads anywhere else.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#254
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to direct market reaction, they must be a bit red in the face considering that Apple just laid out a complex and well thought out implementation of "AI", which focused on privacy. As someone who grew up near Redmond, who still has an emotional soft-spot for Microsoft for some reason, I feel truly embarrassed for their implementation.

From all three major OS vendors on the consumer market, Microsoft is still the one that pushes more C and C++ into production on their OS, in detriment of .NET, despite all the security discussions. All the efforts from other teams to have .NET reach Swift, Java, Kotlin levels of adoption on Windows, have always hit a wall against WinDev culture. Also the 90's spirit from features over security hasn't yet gone away f…

It's too bad that the rest of the "90's spirit" -- consistent, well-organized UIs, users controlling their own computers, and software that runs locally without dependence on cloud servers -- seems to be receding at Microsoft, leaving everyone with the worst of both worlds.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#255
wonder how they managed to add all these security features so quickly to a product that they didn't think had security issues in the first place...

If you are vague enough, you can say you did something.

If you don't explicitly mention the issue(s), you don't have to mention what you changed, if anything.

Classic M$.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#256
If Apple did something like Recall, they'd run the whole thing on a separate secure chip somehow and encrypt the data with a (actual secure) enclave.

Microsoft are doing this the quick, dirty, lazy way by just embedding it into the OS. Lack of vertical integration is also haunting them.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#257
post #187

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…

What's funny is if they had marketed it as Apple does (and had as much credibility as Apple does among their fans) then everyone would love it. I seriously doubt they intend to do much different than "Apple Intelligence." I.e., local access to all your data and uploads of data you use on cloud apps.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When would this be useful? Microsoft's best examples are that the user forgot the location of a chinese food place your friend told you once.

Easy answer. It's a built in history. I use bash history all the time, I use my browser history all the time. To be able to use an OS history would be amazing. What was the name of the esoteric software i was using to program my lego robot, What was I working on last Thursday so I can fill out the government required SHRED report to get the Canadian RnD tax rebate. What was the song i was listening to that Spotify pl…

Which is fine because the browser has a private browsing mode, and the shell has the space trick (for example if a tool requires an SSH key as a command-line argument) as well as various "pinentry" things.

You'd need some API for applications to signal to Recall "the user has requested not to save this", and then every single program with a password input box would have to update to call this.

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#259
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every major power broker wants something like Recall to become the norm - bosses to spy on their employees... Isn't that already the norm, or at least very very common? It's just a 3rd party package totally focused on surveillance, not built into the OS and used for some user-accessible features. > ...governments to spy on their citizens/enemies, and tech CEO's to collect training data for AI and target more ads at…

>These applications would be novel, at least on a widespread basis in Western liberal democracies. How? We already know Google trains its AI on people's private emails and Five Eyes conducts mass surveillance on Western citizens (see: Snowden). You can be sure that the people behind the PRISM program are salivating at the thought of access to the unencrypted Recall databases, and that they'll be twisting Microsoft's…

> We already know Google trains its AI on people's private emails

Source?

Re: Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns

#260
post #63

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.

> What if you can't afford a Mac, and you're not technically literate enough to install Ubuntu ?

Problem: Uber is expensive, and you don't know how to drive, so getting around is a challenge.

Solution: Learn how to drive.

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