Microsoft Windows Recall, remember to disable it

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WelshBloke

WelshBloke

Lifer
Jan 12, 2005
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Microsoft seems all in on cramming AI into Windows. It's going to be interesting to see the backtracking when they realise that that's not what people want in an OS!
 
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ch33zw1z

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
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mikeymikec said:
It requires a particular ARM processor from what I've read, so it's not going to be relevant to most people as yet.

arstechnica.com

New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC

Recall uses AI features “to take images of your active screen every few seconds.”…
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
Click to expand...

There's a link in the article to this one speaking more about it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...uirements-are-embarrassing-for-intel-and-amd/

IMHO, it's only a matter of time.

But the biggest new requirement, and the blocker for virtually every Windows PC in use today, will be for an integrated neural processing unit, or NPU. Microsoft requires an NPU with performance rated at 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), a high-level performance figure that Microsoft, Qualcomm, Apple, and others use for NPU performance comparisons. Right now, that requirement can only be met by a single chip in the Windows PC ecosystem, one that isn't even quite available yet: Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, launching in the new Surface and a number of PCs from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, Acer, and other major PC OEMs in the next couple of months. All of those chips have NPUs capable of 45 TOPS, just a shade more than Microsoft's minimum requirement.

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The problem for Intel and AMD is that none of their current-generation chips come anywhere close to meeting this requirement, even the ones that have NPUs in the first place—Intel's Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra NPUs top out (ha) at 10 TOPS, and a handful of AMD's Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 8000 desktop and laptop processors with NPUs offer between 12 and 16 TOPS. This is particularly embarrassing for Intel, which for decades has been so synonymous with Windows PCs that their portmanteau has a fairly thorough Wikipedia entry.


Both Intel and AMD have products on their roadmap that will boost NPU performance to the level that Microsoft is asking for with Copilot+ PCs, but none of the hundreds of millions of active x86-based Windows PCs, up to and including models you can buy today, will qualify for the label.
Click to expand...
 
mikeymikec

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
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www.pcworld.com

Microsoft Edge will start blocking screenshots on the job

Microsoft Edge for Business will begin blocking the ability to take screenshots of web pages your IT department deems off limits.
www.pcworld.com www.pcworld.com

Hum, it turns out that screenshot-taking might be bad.

How did Recall ever get to the stage of releasing information publicly about it? It seems to me at face value that MS hasn't got beyond the theoretical "is this a good plan" stage. I'm wondering if the whole Recall thing is a red herring (e.g. stockmarket manipulation) to give the impression that MS is all about this AI stuff.
 
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ch33zw1z

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
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Yep, all aboard the AI train. I’m very curious where copilot recall falls the GDPR meter.
 
mikeymikec

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
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Microsoft really makes me laugh/cry sometimes though - only Microsoft would come up with a "general web browser BUT FOR BUSINESS!"... it's a web browser dude. Talk about reinventing the wheel.
 
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WelshBloke

WelshBloke

Lifer
Jan 12, 2005
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mikeymikec said:
Microsoft really makes me laugh/cry sometimes though - only Microsoft would come up with a "general web browser BUT FOR BUSINESS!"... it's a web browser dude. Talk about reinventing the wheel.
Click to expand...
I'm guessing that it's because their regular browser uploads way too much data to Microsofts servers to be compliant with data protection laws for businesses.
Which kinda puts me off using any of Microsofts browsers. Or software in general but windows is hard to avoid.
 
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mindless1

mindless1

Diamond Member
Aug 11, 2001
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Something very wrong when the OS sets the standard for the hardware instead of the other way around.

You want AI? That should be an app you add, NOT built into the OS.

MS is claiming the default allocation for a 256GB volume is 25GB and it will use that up every 3 months? If something is incessantly taking screenshots and eating up my storage, that is a virus I want off my system.

I'll stick with making automated full partition backups rather than going further down the rabbit hole. If windows craps itself, why would I trust windows to fix itself? Historically that has never worked well so let's make it even more convoluted? Yeah, no.

There will be a way to disable it, I have no doubts about that.
 
mikeymikec

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
19,920
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arstechnica.com

Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned

Op-ed: The risks to Recall are way too high for security to be secondary.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

Has any big tech company earned trust lately?

igor_kavinski said:
www.techspot.com

Researcher says Microsoft's Windows Recall has security gaps "you can fly a plane through"

Windows Recall stirred up controversy the moment Microsoft announced it, and with good reason. The feature is rolling out with the upcoming Copilot+ PCs and will constantly...
www.techspot.com www.techspot.com

Yep. Microsoft being Microsoft.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure that this is quite the glaring security hole as the article/researchers claim, simply because if an attacker has achieved the level of privs as the current user, the attacker can glean the information they want anyway, drop their screen-stealing software, keylogger etc. Does Recall really make this easier? It seems to me that it would give the attacker a tonne of data to sift through which isn't really to the attacker's advantage.

If Recall's primary purpose was to specifically record security-sensitive data then it would be an attacker's dream come true or if Recall was easy to connect to (e.g. connect to a user's OneDrive account and it's all there), then I'd completely agree with the general point of the article.

Don't get me wrong guys, I think Recall is a bad idea for a number of reasons, but unless Microsoft makes Recall data easier to access than unauthorised user privs on a Windows box, I'm really failing to see what the problem is.

IMO the biggest problem with Recall is that it doesn't have a specific scenario that most people want addressing. Let's take the example on the official Recall page... :

Retrace your steps with Recall - Microsoft Support

support.microsoft.com support.microsoft.com

... Being finding that recipe you were looking at earlier. I would just open up my browser history and use the search button. Recall is allegedly so much better because I open up a different page and use the search button. It's a universal search button I guess? Who are they planning to pitch this to exactly, a person with such a feeble memory that they can't remember that they were looking at a web page, an e-mail or an office document? Really?

Let's say a reasonable reason why this person can't even vaguely remember where they saw this recipe is that this person deals with recipes all day long. Isn't the system therefore going to come up with too many results? How does the user deal with that? Does the user remember how long ago they looked at this recipe? How much data will the user have to trawl through?

If the user could do something completely intuitive like use their finger to draw a ring around say a piece of text, then do a flicking action or pick up with their hand Tony Stark hologram style and throw it in the corner which would instruct the system to disregard the bit of information they just highlighted then maybe that's something that could be useful.

I wonder how much work has gone into attempting an interface like Tony Stark's hologram system or the system in Minority Report, and how easily a user can "un-bin" an item that they inadvertently marked as junk :) I'm just imagining an inept user having to dig through a holographic recycle bin to find the inadvertently dumped item that they spent the last three hours working on :D
 
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I

igor_kavinski

Lifer
Jul 27, 2020
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mikeymikec said:
the system in Minority Report
Click to expand...
That could never work for all day working. It would result in muscle fatigue. It's either using some special controller (Tobii eye tracking along with a VR controller) or a brain implant to "free" your mind and let it do whatever you want in the digital confines of your computing device.
 
M

manly

Lifer
Jan 25, 2000
12,856
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Sounds familiar, no?

Question - Killer software for Apple Silicon (Rewind AI)

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/11/new-mac-app-wants-to-record-everything-you-do-so-you-can-rewind-it-later/ This should be a real game changer. Almost overnight, it could result in a massive surge in M1/M2 sales.
forums.anandtech.com forums.anandtech.com

Anyone switching their desktop OS to Windows 10 IoT LTSC?
Imagine how high Linux's desktop market share will be in 3 years! :tearsofjoy:
 
mikeymikec

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
19,920
14,163
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The OS that's basically a browser needs a recall feature too! All aboard the hype train!

tech.slashdot.org

Google Is Working On a Recall-Like Feature For Chromebooks, Too - Slashdot

In an interview with PCWorld's Mark Hachman, Google's ChromeOS chief said the company is cautiously exploring a Recall-like feature for Chromebooks, dubbed "memory." Microsoft's AI-powered Recall feature for Windows 11 was unveiled at the company's Build 2024 conference last month. The feature...
tech.slashdot.org
 
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I

igor_kavinski

Lifer
Jul 27, 2020
24,044
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Wow. Microsoft leading the industry in pioneering a cheesy AI feature!

Microsoft: Recall

Google: Memory

Apple: Remember

Meta: Recollect

Now human brains will evolve to rely on digital assistance for remembering and everything will be new again! No more looking back in time and reminiscing about the good old days coz brains will simply start discarding that information.
 
mikeymikec

mikeymikec

Lifer
May 19, 2011
19,920
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I realise it's very easy to ask of any "AI" implementation, "is this really AI?", but I really think it's warranted in the case of Recall.

AFAIK it does three things:

1 - Takes regular screenshots
2 - OCR's the screen contents and sticks those words in a database
3 - Provides a search box and results UI so the db is searchable

According to wiki, OCR has been around for approximately 100 years, and neither of the other two features are anything remotely new either. How is this AI? What's being done here that's even remotely intelligent? The "similar word" search makes things more complicated than I'm used to providing basic search functions for with my basic development skills, but Google at least has been providing such a function for about 20 years?
 
ch33zw1z

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
39,040
19,731
146
Can’t wait for AI to just turn my pgs subs to srt, with 99.99% accuracy. That’s where I’ll submit lol
 
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ch33zw1z

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
39,040
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146
mikeymikec said:
What's PGS about? I've encountered the acronym when BR ripping.
Click to expand...
Picture graphic subtitles, a graphical version of subtitles. OCR software can turn it to a text based file like SRT. If your into media collection and home streaming, you’ll find SRT is preferable as it doesn’t require resources to render into the screen, so your server isn’t getting crushed transcoding 4k to (and maybe BR if your server is old) to put the subs onto the screen.

It’s just that the OCR software can be less than accurate. Spending hours pouring thru a text file to fix all the incorrect recognition is tedious at best
 
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