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Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

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Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#591

Post by xp84 »

nick486 wrote: post #400
ryandrake wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about modern Windows is coercive, or ends up being coercive. You can't even shut down your PC without it forcing you to update Windows. It lets you skip for a while, then after some time, the only options are to Update and Reboot or Update and Shutdown. Totally disrespectful of who the actual owner of the computer is. You have to yank the power plug out to shut down your computer safely.

>Update and Shutdown and if you pick that, there's a high chance that it will reboot and leave your pc running anyway.

I think they just finally fixed that one :)

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#592

Post by xp84 »

knowitnone3 wrote: post #54
xp84 wrote: post #45

> Instead of letting an agent act directly as you, Windows spins up this extra workspace, gives it limited access (like specific folders such as Documents or Desktop), and keeps its actions isolated and auditable. > Each agent can have its own workspace and access rules, so what one agent can see or do doesn’t automatically apply to others, and you stay in control of what they’re allowed to touch. This actually sound…

Are you kidding? This is pure theft. If I got into your computer and accessed your Documents and Desktop, I'd be in jail but its OK when Microsoft does it.

Microsoft is not giving themselves access to your Docs and Desktop. They're giving you a tool that allows you to give an Agent access to files when you want the agent to do things with those files. If you don't set out to use an agent, none of that even happens. They're not proposing to just add an agent that when you boot your computer scans all your files to come up with random ideas.

Normally, if you just open a random program you installed in Windows, the program also "can access" all the files in your home directory without even asking your permission. That doesn't make Photoshop, notepad or MSPaint malware. They'd be malware if they did bad things with them without your permission, but it's bad faith to assume that Microsoft plans to someday trick you into enabling this feature and using an agent that exfiltrates your files.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#593

Post by M95D »

fsflover wrote: post #426
M95D wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do use Gentoo currently, but it's so very hard to keep programs from monitoring what happens in the system via dbus and the only firewall for outgoing connections, OpenSnitch, hard-depends on it. Running every major program in a container is NOT a solution. So far Linus has kept these things outside the kernel, but he won't live forever.

This is why my daily driver is Qubes OS.

OMG, that's even worse than containers.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#594

Post by dspillett »

wtallis wrote: post #559
dspillett wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They put copilot in notepad. NOTEPAD. Every time I see a new CoPilot button, or a toast nagging me because I've not clicked any of them and they think I really should want to, a phrase crosses my mind… “Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation”

Don't play along by calling it "toast". It's a pop-up that's been re-branded to avoid the stigma of the old name, exactly like what companies do to themselves after causing a disaster like an oil spill.

You are conflating two similar but different UI elements.

A popup is a larger object, often a full window, that covers large parts of other elements or sometimes the entire screen. They are sometimes modal.

A toast is a smaller element, appearing (often by sliding into view upwards, hence the cutesy name) in or above a specific notification area of the application or the overall OS. These are much smaller, seldom modal and often convey useful notifications or warnings, unlike popups (especially modal ones) that are often either useless or actively, deliberately, in the way.

While it is correct to call then both popups if you wish, "toasts" are generally considered a specific subset.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#595

Post by satiric »

iamtedd wrote: post #342
Springtime wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this W11 version of Notepad takes longer to open than Sublime Text and about equal to Firefox. On NVMe. It used to be instant , which is something you really notice the difference with when it changes.

The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now, sometimes taking seconds to open. I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.

Only the Recommended section is react. The rest is WinUI.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#596

Post by a2128 »

kenjackson wrote: post #561
a2128 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you run apt upgrade or pacman -Syu that's exactly what you're doing. The files are replaced on your drive while everything else continues running. Generally it won't affect execution of existing software, because they're all already loaded into memory, but some software might crash or get weird behavior as they try to access their files on the drive and those files have been updated, and newly launched programs…

The immutable distro doesn't work for Windows most likely due to disk space. As someone who has informally supported a lot of Windows devices in enterprises it was surprising to me how many Windows problems are a result of running out of HD space and how often updates can't happen (the old fashion kind) simply because there isn't enough HD space for the update. I wouldn't be surprised if something like 5% of updates…

If disk space was the only thing preventing a much better update system, it would seem very trivial to just reserve a few extra gigabytes and do what Android does with compressed deltas that get applied which emulates A/B but with much less disk space usage (similar to non-A/B)

> Do you really think that Windows is like "naw, we could do zero reboot updates, but prefer not to because we are so dominant in the OS space"?

Microsoft has become complacent with Windows and I think there's no denying that. You need to look no further than the new right-click context menu they thought is acceptable to ship to a billion users. It's lacking half the functionality such as extensions, so they just decided to keep the old one behind "Show more options"? Or maybe no software engineer in the world could solve the infamous context menu 2.0 problem...

No operating system has fully solved every problem with updates, but many of them have solved many problems that Windows still continues to have. Zero reboot updates are probably impossible to do reliably but there are other ways to improve that aren't zero reboot updates. I don't claim to know the ins and outs of Windows and exactly how to implement better updates, but they could surely do better than what they're currently doing.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#597

Post by p_ing »

LooseMarmoset wrote: post #572
p_ing wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The serialized service startup is what caused the slowness. Disabling services would have improved boot times.

well it has been a couple years since I've used it ;)

Sometimes I question why I remember this stuff.

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#599

Post by fleroviumna »

larrybud wrote: post #488

Is ANYONE reading the article or going to the source prior to posting with outrage? Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/experimental-age... (the original article is not available at the moment due to the ongoing Cloudfare outage) What I see is that the AI agent is an optional, experimental off-by-default service that is configured to only have access to the folders you specifically choose. From the MS…

[dead]

Re: Windows 11 adds AI agent that runs in background with access to personal folders

#600

Post by EagnaIonat »

Arainach wrote: post #582
EagnaIonat wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It literally says in the article: "This feature is completely optional and is never turned on by default." Reading the full article this is just a power user feature and in beta at that. I can see where it could be useful and the fact it puts further restrictions on how each agent works mitigates security issues.

For now. Features that are opt-in in developer preview have a way of becoming defaults later. Fundamentally, having a model that makes it easy to give access to an entire library instead of requiring explicit tight scoping of access to individual files is dangerous and teaches people to make mistakes that can lead to data misuse and leaks.

> For now.

What evidence are you basing that on?

From what I read of the article if it was on by default, it does nothing.

When it's on you get the option to create an agent. That's when you need to be careful.

Even so, the current version is off, it has a big warning about the dangers of using it before and during switching it on.

> that makes it easy to give access to an entire library instead of requiring explicit tight scoping of access to individual files is dangerous

Again from the article, the user literally set the access rights of the agent.

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