Remember Microsoft’s Recall? The first implementation was never released and was met with strong criticism from privacy advocates and the infosec/security community. Guess what? Microsoft has doubled down, and its controversial Recall scraper is finally entering the public preview stage. If you care about privacy, please think twice before using this on your AI-enabled PCs (Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs) https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2024/11/22/previewing-recall-with-click-to-do-on-copilot-pcs-with-windows-insiders-in-the-dev-channel/
#privacy #infosec #security #windows11 #DoNotWant
@nixCraft@mastodon.social I love Recall. It was the final straw that caused me to permanently uninstall Windows and move to Linux full time!
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It is prudent to just avoid Windows in the first place.
@nixCraft@mastodon.social It’s not just Snapdragon PCs anymore. Both Intel Core Ultra 200-series (Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake) as well as some AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors now come with NPUs that are expected to be Copilot+ rated sometime this month. (Microsoft is probably waiting on this to happen for the production launch.)
At least you can uninstall it now.
@nixCraft@mastodon.social Yea ! I switched to #Fedora #Linux. What the hell is even #Microsoft ?
@nixCraft@mastodon.social i have to run Windows sometimes for work, so i run it in a docker container
works a trick and allows me to sandbox
@nixCraft@mastodon.social Wait, you have a choice about using it? At least that’s an improvement I guess. I figured the best thing for now was to tell everyone not to buy a Copilot+ PC
@trantion@masto.ai It gets enabled every update tho and MS hope that you will forget about it ;) LOL
@nixCraft@mastodon.social @trantion@masto.ai yes that’s the trick. If it can do something dangerous, it IS dangerous, even if disabled or carefully tweaked. My second point is: everytime we tolerate a new feature, we allow it to become something ordinary. It’s not a problem if something simply useless becomes the norm. It is a problem if it’s not just useless but dangerous. That’s what happened with food delivery.
Repeat after me: Snapdragon-based PCs (or laptops) are only safe with Linux or BSD operating systems. They are unsafe with Windows 11 and its Recall feature, even for gaming or other purposes.
@nixCraft@mastodon.social With that said, I suspect they make pretty great Linux machines.
@nixCraft@mastodon.social why are they unsafe?
@nixCraft@mastodon.social Does Recall require special hardware that Snapdragon brand computers have?
@nixCraft@mastodon.social this made me switch to a Linux system
@nixCraft@mastodon.social how unsafe?
@nixCraft@mastodon.social I have a sweet system76 rig which I play starfield while running an Oracle database
@nixCraft@mastodon.social Why? And what does ‘unsafe’ mean in the context of gaming?
@nixCraft@mastodon.social The Windows operating system itself is a form of malware, perpetually infecting and compromising computers…
@nixCraft@mastodon.social I honestly knew that they were not going to back down from this
@nixCraft@mastodon.social The first thing I’ll do is disable this thing. Thie thing is a huge liability, for Microsoft hoarding my data and 3rd party apps accessing snapshots.
@nixCraft@mastodon.social There was never a better time for the general public to start using #Linux!
Recall takes a screenshot of a user’s desktop every few seconds and then uses on-device AI models to allow a user to retrieve items and information that had previously been on their screen. This caused controversy, with experts warning that the feature could be a “disaster” for security and privacy. Yet, it is now rolling out. I guess there will be no hack or bugs that will leak this info on screen. Right? LOL.
@nixCraft@mastodon.social I find it really worrying that this breaks the assumption that there is no security risk showing sensitive information onscreen to a fully authorized user.
(Plus the computational inefficiency of taking screenshots and turning them back into text.)deleted by creator
@nixCraft@mastodon.social can’t it be disabled though? Like opt out? I wouldn’t want it sifting through my files. Well, not so much of an issue for me, on a Mac right now, main computers are Linux but for work I do have a Windows machine so I guess its works problem, not mine.
@nixCraft@mastodon.social Honestly, we’ve needed a tool like this for ages now, it’s not like anyone’s web browser has a “history” tab of some sort… oh, wait
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