There are some tools to ensure Recall is fully un-installed and blocked. Group Policy will definitely prevent it from ever running, and LTSC is a Pro version, so Group Policy functions properly.
Borrowing from something I saw elsewhere: Set up a task / cron job / whatever it is on your OS that takes a full screenshot every minute and then sends it to Microsoft's AI team.
Or save it to a drive or something, I'm not the boss here. And neither is Microsoft.
I think you misunderstand what Recall actually does. It takes images of your screen and then you can query it. Images, text, graphs, etc.
"Hey, I was working on an automation for my home assistant and it stopped working. I had an automation that worked about 6 months ago. Can you pull that automation up and show me"
"My boss showed me a slide about a month ago talking about the TPS report, can you pull that up and show me that slide deck?"
Outside of the "Microsoft bad" comments, this is a prime example of why big tech companies need to stop promoting AI leads to a position where they are able to have influence over initiatives outside of AI.
The worst thing to happen to basically every product/service in tech right now is AI. It's made Google unreliable in the eyes of normal people for the first time in decades, it's destroying trust in Amazon content across reviews and Kindle, it's adding features to Facebook that no one ever wanted, etc.
And the annoying thing is, this tech can be exceptionally useful when it's actually been implemented thoughtfully.
Effortlessly cleaning up audio recordings using AI tooling is incredible, for example. There are audio recordings that I've been able to make sound great that previously would've required me to make some calls and ask for a bunch of re-recordings and added days of delays to a project.
AI in image recognition to vastly speed up medical imaging diagnosis, or analysing lab work? Amazing. Asking unpaid medical students to laboriously pore over thousands of images sounds like a nightmare.
Better offline translation? Sign me the fuck up.
Image description for the visually impaired, like my sister? Genuinely life changing. A lot of content online isn't properly tagged, or has zero attention placed on accessibility.
The list goes on. Unfortunately, with big tech being as they are, their first thoughts turn to "which implementations of AI will aid us the most in scraping userdata and showing ads?"
The list goes on. Unfortunately, with big tech being as they are, their first thoughts turn to “which implementations of AI will aid us the most in scraping userdata and showing ads?”
Don't forget making sure the peons can squeeze out more productivity for the 1%.
A couple years ago it wasn't thoroughly and transparently sucking off every bit of personal data it could get, and gearing up to put adds on the desktop on top of that.
Microsoft has built a number of safety features into Windows Recall to ensure that the service can't run secretly in the background. When Windows Recall is enabled, it places a permanent visual indicator icon on the Taskbar to let the user know that Windows Recall is capturing data. This icon cannot be hidden or moved.
File search is really awful on windows for no reason at all. Your complaints about commandline utilities is not accurate though.
Windows has native powershell equivalents to both grepand tail. You use Select-String instead of grep and Get-Content -Wait instead of tail.
Nobody ever accused powershell of being concise. Its uses a completely different philosophy, object oriented rather than string based. This makes powershell nicer to write scripts in but also makes it worse at bash style one-liner commands.
Get everything: https://www.voidtools.com/ (the alpha version can also index the content of files). It's search is instant. As in < 1 second for any file on any of your harddisks (even ones not connected right now).
For base linux cmdline tools I just install Git for Windows it includes tail, sed, grep, tee, iconv, less, scp and tons more. I need git anyways so win-win.
I do small business support. Everytime I do a windows install I do a ninite install of a bunch of things. Everything is always in the set. The fucntionality should have been in windows since NTFS was introduced
Ninite and Chocolatey helps a bit. But then you get to the point where there is no automation for a start menu entry for some packages. It's a bit of a mess.
A colleague installed Python from the MS Store on Windows 11 it messed up all python software, PyCharm, the other python versions and some file associations. Quite a mess.
You can do a commandline "dir /s *.log" to search an entire directory it works better than the normal file search generally. Unless I misunderstand what you're asking.
Oh, perhaps not. I may've just understood how you're using the search. /s is just a straight search if the directory, I don't know that it can be used to generate dynamic results like that. Go figure.
Yeah bur for the non tech oriented user it's still difficult . Most devices bought come with OEM install.
Even for a regular user it's going to sound like There is a virus that reads and remembers everything on your computer but you can turn it off and trust us it would be off.
Even for PCs that come with Windows preinstalled, there's still the need to set it up at the first start (account, privacy and such), so I think that the option to enable Recall will be there.
I guess if you want to verify the truth of this statement, look at Unity. They walked back their per-install system, but the indie community still moved away from them because it seemed clear they might try to do that at some point in the future.
It's what they should have done from the beginning, there must be a horde of MSFT employees holding back the urge of saying "told you so" to their boss right now lol
I really hope the damage is done. They need to be knocked down a peg. This all should have been done first. Whoever thought this was a good idea is horrible.
Windows Recall, part of Microsoft's new Copilot+ PC initiative, has sparked major privacy and security concerns.
The feature uses AI to capture and store screen data locally, allowing users to search for past activities using natural language.
Despite assurances that data is not uploaded to the cloud or used by Microsoft, user trust is lacking.
Microsoft has a history of practices that have eroded user trust, including obtrusive ads, ignoring user preferences, and requiring Microsoft Accounts.
Users are skeptical, fearing future misuse of the collected data for advertising or AI training.
Windows Recall reportedly stores data unencrypted, making it vulnerable to access by third-party apps and potential malware.
The open nature of Windows amplifies these risks, unlike more secure systems like iOS and Android.
Users have compared Windows Recall to spyware, with many threatening to switch to other operating systems like Linux or Mac.
Microsoft's attempts to keep the development of Windows Recall secret did not help build trust.
Windows Recall will only be available on new Copilot+ PCs, requiring specific hardware not present in existing PCs.
Users will have the option to disable the feature, but there are concerns about it being enabled by default.
Despite security issues, the feature is effective in helping users find lost or forgotten data.
It could improve productivity if trust and security concerns are resolved.
Windows Recall does NOT require NPU hardware to run. Currently Recall has been tested on Windows 11 with only a CPU and it seems to be fully operational. Of course performance is not as good as with an NPU. I believe Microsoft will try to push AI to local computing by only enabling on computers with NPUs to begin with. In the future it will most likely be able to be enabled on PCs which does not have an NPU but with a warning of bad performance in front of it.
This raises an excellent point not considered. This goes for all texts as well if the other person uses the "your phone" app. Discord, matrix, signal, telegram etc are all compromised by this existing on a system.
Will my browser's "private mode" be respected or it is going to store every inappropriate thing I search?
Are password managers safe? How about bank security questions? How often are those actaully obfuscated. The last 4 digits of social security numbers are usually unobfuscated, which is also what a lot of intuitions (stupidly) use to verify your ID over the phone. What if I want to look at the PDF of my tax documents?
What if my HR manager has this enabled and starts viewing PDFs containing private information about employees, payroll data, finances and whatever else is sellable on the dark web.
How about govermnet data? Sure maybe the pentagon IT staff will completely block it, but what about local gov committee ABC that's collecting voter information?
That type of data is valuable enough that it will be targeted regardless of what protection MS attempts. Based on the fact they didnt bother encytping the data from the start, my faith is low.
MacOS is a highly mature, stable, and user-friendly OS that, at least for now, Apple does not meddle with in the same ways that MS has been doing with Windows. It has its problems, yes, but to say "any circumstance" is extreme. I don't like or agree with everything that Apple has done to MacOS but at least Apple isn't actively trashing it into the ground with forced bloat, ads, malware, etc like MS is doing.
They are definitely are starting to trash it with ads for their own services, user hostile behavior/dark patterns (try turning off Bluetooth and applying a software update, it will be magically back on), and have ruined the UI slowly turning it in to iOS.
I have used a Mac since 2007 (almost exclusively for work) and many of Apple's services during that time. I have not experienced any ads as you describe. As for Bluetooth magically turning back on after a software update, of course I do not know for certain, but that screams incompetence more than it screams intent. Apple most definitely has problems (where they build their hardware, policies they tried to enact and then backtracked, etc). And I'm not advocating for them like I am for Linux and other open source solutions. But if a normal user doesn't want to deal with some of the lingering complexities that Linux still has (which is a dwindling number), then a Mac is a relatively viable alternative and it does not come anywhere near as close to the privacy nightmare that Microsoft has become.
I am not tribal at all with respect to any of these entities. I have used all three OSes for the better part of 25 years. I have watched the ebbs and flows of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Canonical, Red Hat, and various FOSS solutions such as Linux, for a very long time. And I have had a front row seat seeing Apple's mistakes, Microsoft's mistakes, Canonical's mistakes, and so forth. And I feel I can judge with some semblance of realism and objectivity -- Microsoft has failed so hard with Recall and they are so out of touch with what users want, they deserve every bit of ire they are getting, and they deserve to have their market share diminish because of it. Aside from perhaps Google, and now Adobe, I haven't seen a technology company be so blatantly and willfully aggressive (and one could say, stupid) when it comes to these actions and topics.
The Bluetooth issue also happens on iOS, so I think it is an explicit choice, as Apple wants as many devices contributing to their Find My Network. It’s also the reason they changed control center on iOS to no longer turn off Wifi and Bluetooth, but to disconnect the current connections.
I don't even care if it's opt-in. I don't want dormant malware on my PC either.
To be clear. I actually like Windows 11. I don't care about the general telemetry, though I disabled the typing data crap. Most of the things in the last few months about ads in Windows, about blocking apps, etc have been overblown and aren't actually big problems in isolation. Even this is a little overblown right now as it requires an NPU which the vast majority of systems don't have. But, this is just so tone-deaf and an obviously terrible idea that it needs to be put down hard.
Most of the things in the last few months about ads in Windows, about blocking apps, etc have been overblown and aren't actually big problems in isolation.
Any telemetry sent without a very clearly informed opt in is malicious. Any ad in an OS is malicious. There is no valid justification for either.
I figured on my gaming and VR rig that I’d begrudgingly upgrade it to W11 when W10 stopped receiving security updates and support but at this point the recall feature (which will be used to train LLMs regardless of what Microsoft promises or guarantees) has ensured that I never install that kind of spyware as an operating system.
I’d rather spend forever troubleshooting and getting my Valve Index to work with Ubuntu than deal with a giant backdoor.
I would also suggest not Ubuntu, and instead say you should give Bazzite a try. They are specifically interested in gaming with Steam (they even have a spin for running on Steam Deck). They might have already put in the work troubleshooting the distro with your VR gear.
Sweet! I was just being funny with my GIF, but I do honestly love the OS ecosystem, and think that everyone will like it more than Windows if only they'd give it the proper opportunity.
Im running a manjaro+openbox disto called MABOX linux on my chromebook. It’s fantastic for the low spec nonsense machine. But def considering fedora for the surface. Its come a long way apparently.
I'm actually having issues with fedora silverblue not updating. It's pretty frustrating, but a risk I knew going into immutable. I don't have time right now to figure out a fix. Regardless, I would totally do fedora again and recommend it to nonbeginners. It's an awesome variant, even coming into it from debian-based distros with only cursory knowledge of dnf.
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