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Microsoft knows that the addition of adds to Windows, Recall, data mining, etc are not suicide. As far as tech news goes, Lemmy really exists in an echo chamber. The vast majority of us at least have some interest in technology. For the majority of the population, though, this isn’t true. The typical person sees a computer as a tool to be used for other things. They’re not reading articles about the latest release of Windows, new CPU technology, the latest GPU, etc. They’re using their computer, and when it’s time for an upgrade, they buy whatever suits their needs.
If I was to ask any of my family, or most of my coworkers, about any of the latest “controversies” surrounding Microsoft, they would have no idea what I was talking about. Microsoft obviously thinks that the added profits gained by monetizing their customers will offset the loss of 1% of their users that switch to Linux. They’re probably right, too.
I like Windows, personally (well, Windows 10 at least). My unofficial rule has always been if it needs a GUI, then it runs Windows, otherwise, it runs Linux as a headless machine. Once Windows 10 is no longer a viable option, my unofficial rule will be “it runs Linux.” Most people will not make this switch.
But you’re ignoring the entire enterprise side of things. MS Recall + pervasive data mining and ad injections are things that the vast majority of IT departments are going to refuse to sign off on. These technologies meaningfully and fundamentally undermine organizational and system security, up to and including potential inadvertent exposure of cryptographic secrets, which the modern internet is basically built on top of.
Sure, consumers are likely going to acquiesce out of either laziness or ignorance. But IT orgs aren’t going to simply sign off on this - particularly if they’re operating in an industry where InfoSec really matters (basically, any regulated industry like medical, biotech, or aerospace).
There is a huge corporate insensitive that everyone is not realizing here. By screen recording + OCR, there is a possibility to start using this data to replace some labor intensive, but simple tasks of operating a business. If you can create RPA+ML+LLM that can rerun repetitive tasks, you have holy grail on your hands. I think this is one of the big reason why M$ is pushing this.
I assume to be down voted to oblivion, but I do business automation and integration for living, and at the same time I am scared and excited.
Absolutely. Corporations - at least, shitty ones (most of them) - are absolutely salivating at using this. They want to be able to see and easily summarize eeeeeeverything you’re doing.
Some are absolutely already using a form of this. It’s not a hypothetical - this is currently happening and many want way way more.
Lmao do you have any idea how quickly that’s going to go off the rails? They’re going to get into a hallucination feedback loop, which will destroy the integrity of their systems and processes, and they’ll richly deserve it.
At any rate, most highly-effective technical teams have already automated the shit out of all their rote operations without using ML.
Automation suites exist and they are very much tuned to the individual apps. It seems giving ML an OCR readout of a page is not enough for it to know what it should do (accurately). We have had a training set for “booking flights on a browser” for about 6 years now and no one has figured out how to have it disrupt automated testing: https://miniwob.farama.org/
I was thinking about this, but I don’t know what the plan us for annotating new flows with descriptions of the actions. There’s no point in learning how to send an email or open a webpage, that’s already easy. The value is in a database of uncommon interactions, but it’s only valuable if there is a description to train on.
They’ll just keep it shut off. It’s not a requirement.
Will they not have licenses with all of this shit stripped out? Maybe another way to force ITs to pay for proper licensing and stuff too 🧐
Perhaps, but at this point, the only ones who actually know the endgame strategy are product people at MS, and they’re almost certainly bound by NDAs on that topic.
Unfortunately most large organizations are running on enterprise releases that only lay down minimal software. Plus IT depts have heavily maintained images that immediately shuts off anything that sneaks in. Help desk is just going to disable the feature before slapping the company background image and VPN on it and giving it to standard users. They will make a ton of money in the short term and EOL the operating system when it’s no longer profitable and Linux is the default (decades from now). AOL is still out there
They didn’t have it set up to be easily disable-able, as far as I understand it.
Are they? Some IT departments are going to love the invasive nature of it.
Then those IT departments should be blackballed from the industry, because the nature of that invasive surveillance is WILDLY insecure.
That’s partially true. The non-tech-savvy friends and family though need us to fix their Windows machines more or less constantly, and at some point we’re not going to.
For me it was about 10 years ago when I forced everyone on to Mac at gunpoint just because I couldn’t do Windows any.more. And even then it was another 6 years of explaining the differences in macOS and troubleshooting “office”. Now when a friend’s co-worker has a “computer problem” (read: Windows) I just say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and I gotta tell ya it’s friggin sweet.
That’s always been my policy. I never used apples so I gave a big 'ol shrug if that’s what needed fixing.
Once I get more comfortable with Linux, I’ll be giving the same shrug to windows troubleshooting.
Daily use of Linux & MacOS is virtually identical. Same terminal commands. Similar file system standards. You have homebrew as a package manager on MacOS. You use whatever comes with your distro on Linux (dnf, apt-get, I forget the arch Linux one. Yaort? Yum?)
Really I see no reason for anyone to stay on Windows. You can play 99% of games on Linux these days. I’m not exaggerating, it’s very specific multi-player games that don’t work.
Maybe if you use specific software for a niche industry or purpose then it’s worth having Linux. But even in those cases, you can just use a VM.
That’s what I do on my MacBook pro. I have a VM with windows just to run a specific program a couple times a week.
On my desktop at home I just use Linux and have for the last 10 years or so
You wouldn’t tell that to your grandma in her late 80s, who, unlike some grandmas, is utterly computer-illiterate, can only click pictures in Windows, doesn’t understand even that TBH, and won’t in that age learn anything new.
Then there’s a question of whether you’ll tell that to a girl with warm smile, long brown hair and luminous eyes if the situation arises.
Then there’s that friend whose ‘computer problem’ prevents him from playing Factorio with you.
Life is more complex.
They’re using their computer, and when it’s time for an upgrade, they buy whatever suits their needs.
This always weirded me out - people who don’t have any investment into Windows in the form of understanding are the most reluctant to even think about switching. I understand “advanced users” with their trusty FAR or TC and in general workflow which didn’t change much in 20 years. But people who only use a browser?..
I think it’s actually a rhetorical problem on my side. There’s been a few cases where people (normies at that) who’d be utterly intolerant to the idea of leaving Windows switched to Linux on their own without my help in the periods where I wasn’t meeting them often. It’s as if my attempts to proselytize were counterproductive.
The problem with big companies like Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, etc is that once all the smart & creative people have gone, all you have left are the “line must always go up” business idiots, who have no idea what their company even does or how to fix it.
CoPilot / Recall is exactly the kind of End-stage, “let’s screw our customers to death” idea the CEOs come up with before just their company implodes. Seriously. No one at Microsoft has thought this through beyond “data mining our customers.”
How are other governments going to react to this? Will they trust their nation’s secrets to an OS with such a blatant backdoor built into it? How does this “feature” work with search warrant requests? How secure can a database connected to an always-on Internet connection possibly be?
I’ve thought this ever since Windows 8 (and when I went from dual-boot to Linux only). In retrospect, at least Ballmer treated Windows like a PC operating system.
Ever since Nadella took over, it seems like MS is trying to turn Windows into ChromeOS but for Microsoft’s cloud services. Pretty sure they want PCs to be thin clients tied to subscriptions. No fucking thanks.
You know it’s bad when ballmer seems to be the rational person
Oh, absolutely lol. Definitely one of those cases where you didn’t know what you had until it’s gone.
SQUEEEAL!111 DEVELOPERS-DEVELOPERS-DEVELOPERS
Windows 8! Haha! Ahh, I’d call it the “New Coke” of Windows but that probably wouldn’t help anyone who wasn’t there.
I’ve seen this over and over in corporate environments.
Suit A has a terrible idea but enough fawning bootlickers to get the process moving.
Worker A, an employee, knows this is a terrible idea but doesn’t say anything because they wanna keep their job.
Contractor B, obv a contractor, is there to make money and hopefully turn their stint into something more, so they speak up. And get canned.
What is it about Suits that they can’t listen to literally anyone but their own echo chambers? Oh yeah, they’re angling to jump into a bigger echo chamber. The 1%.
I’m Worker A, and I speak up when I get asked to implement something terrible. Sometimes it works, but usually they don’t care. At least I don’t lose my job over it.
I can’t imagine working in a place where you have to be in fear of speaking the truth. I have never suffered negative consequences at any company I’ve worked at for pointing out why a terrible idea is terrible, but I’ve seen plenty of people who are afraid to speak up. It puzzles me.
Where I work, doing it won’t end up in being fired, but it would certainly prevent promotions and payrises.
No they’re simply trying to emulate Google and Facebook by becoming data gatherers and hoarders. They’ve been jealous of how much data other companies have gathered about people, and then realized they could easily do the same.
I think you might be bit underestimating how much data Microsoft actually already has. They have just being better of keeping it to them self. MS from these three is the only one who is not an ad company, so they don’t have to sell the data to 3rd parties to be profitable. They can just hoard the data, bit like Amazon+AWS.
Yup. I’ve seen this lemming-like mindset before: “But if WE don’t implement <terrible idea> then Google might implement <terrible idea> FIRST!”
It doesn’t become a less-stupid idea just because some else is doing it.
The new Recall feature they’re trying to push is creepy as fuck. No thanks.
Glad I moved to linux a few years ago so I don’t have to worry about any of this trash.
The HIPAA concerns are very alarming. And I agree with the spirit if the article. However, I’m not sure the article is correct when it says Recall cannot be disabled. I’ve already seen other articles telling you how to turn it off. The fact that it’s opt-out and not opt-in is a huge issue, though.
Actually it is more than a local problem. Since Recall shipped with opt-out, means every computer will have this enabled. Even if you truned it off, the computer on the other end may still capture your data.
Say you said something here, regret about and delete it, but right before a user have Recall enabled see it and can just dig out your now deleted comment. Not good. This applies to HIPAA data or not.
This is essentailly a local search engine that index everything you see and others said in near real time, without repecting
robots.txt.Yes, that is also a big problem. In general you should be very aware in online meetings / screen sharing to be very cautious and deliberate with what you show. That problem has burned a streamer or two. :) Having a boring vanilla “work machine” for that sort of thing is always a good idea. Windows Recall definitely makes this problem worse! You could be doing 100% legit professional ‘work stuff’ and it could still grab things that it shouldn’t (HIPAA and many other potentially sensitive bits of corporate data).
If you disable it, make sure to check on it regularly, as MS loves to turn things back on “for you” after Windows updates run. I’ve already seen some sysadmins saying they will run a scheduled task to make sure it stays dead.
The problem with it isn’t that MS says it can be disabled, because like everything MS does it breaks its own rules constantly. I have worked in HIPAA environments and making systems block potential MS systems is a constant cat and mouse game only accomplished by firewall appliances that don’t have MS software in them
Who the fuck is making a Firewall appliance with windows software on it. Some *nix or BSD or custom bare metal kernel is what a firewall should be. You have to have very low level access to properly secure traffic on a network. Microsoft often breaks the OSINT Framework ffs, I’d never trust them as a firewall.
I guess you haven’t used Azure much?
Hopefully not
I’m referring to Fortigate inside of azure, basically it’s a Fortigate but it is a VM on the azure hosts in your virtual space inside the azure cloud. The MS global network that is the Azure cloud systems is pretty cool in lots of ways. Just MS is an evil empire and it sucks that they drive the world
Fortigate is not a windows kernel
How do you feel about companies that use windows server as a router and VPN solution?
Microsoft makes its money with Azure and M365 licenses for enterprise customers now.
Windows as a consumer operating system is a loss leader. The only reason it still exists is to breed familiarity with the MS ecosystem in all future employees.
This strategy works until a certain amount of really big businesses do the math and find out how many millions they can save each month by throwing their weight behind a Linux-based solution. Luckily for Microsoft, most CEOs and CTOs of these major corporations are forced by the shareholders to prioritize short term profit.
Rebuilding your infra and retraining your entire staff on a new ecosystem would be really expensive in the short term, even if it pays off in 5-10 years. And a high one-time cost is always harder to justify than a monthly amount that’s already budgeted into your operating costs and product prices.
So it’s still safer to stick to what you know, for now.By the way, MS hasn’t been fighting against Linux for a long time.
They’re among the top contributers to the kernel, integrated Linux into Windows as a subsystem, run their own Azure backend on Linux servers, and post help articles on how to install Linux.Microsoft has essentially forgotten what a desktop GUI is for. It’s a program launcher packaged with a set of libraries that make it easy for other programs to do complex things like displaying video in a uniform way, plus some system administration tools. Pack-ins not related to system administration should be limited to very basic software.
There may be something that Microsoft has added to Windows lately that isn’t bloat, or evil, or both, but damned if I know what it is.
They haven’t forgotten. They don’t care.
Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on “help the users get stuff done”. Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they’re asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it’s a truthful answer or not.
Hehehe.
There is no way this Recall feature doesn’t backfire or gets breached.
If couple reports are true, it is already breached and can be mined for info.
Edit: https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/
Corporations must generate growth to please their investors no matter what. If the CEO doesn’t do it the board members will replace him with someone who will.
Microsoft cannot significantly generate growth by increasing their user base by making a more attractive product anymore. They have maxed out their share of the market. So they must pursue other ways to generate “growth”, like data mining their customers to generate an additional source of income.
In this kind of situation you will see all sorts undesirable behaviors emerge from corporations like that, like lowering the quality of their products or cutting down on their workforce to “reduce cost” event though they are already turning a profit.
We will see this shit happen over and over again until we come up with a solution to this “infinite growth” problem.
until we come up with a solution to this “infinite growth” problem.
This is why cancer research is so important. But for now, we can try the old standbys of surgical removal and full-system poison.
No. Lots of normies will happily turn these new features on.
I feel like the headline and all these comments have WAAAAAYYYYY too much faith in the technical savvy and/or privacy concerns of the average pc user. They are not committing suicide. They know that a very small minority will be upset by recall and AI but the vast majority don’t know enough to care and definitely won’t take the time to learn about why they should care.
They are not committing suicide. They know that a very small minority will be upset by recall and AI but the vast majority don’t
run IT for big companies.
The small minority are those people. I do IT consulting and have contracts with several companies… We’re road-mapped to remove windows from everything possible, we deal in PII and cannot risk any facet of microsoft’s nonsense to collect it. And windows has a history of turning shit back on after being explicitly disabled. The business market is much larger than the general consumer market. And new workers who grow up in environments like businesses that work in Linux, will likely have had chromebooks in school. Meaning that Windows will not be defacto in those people’s lives at all. This is shooting themselves in the foot (or possibly face) indeed.
We’re road-mapped to remove windows from everything possible, we deal in PII and cannot risk any facet of microsoft’s nonsense to collect it.
Hey it only took til 2024 to get it on the roadmap! Hopefully complete by . . . 202. . . 7?
Hey it only took til 2024 to get it on the roadmap! Hopefully complete by . . . 202. . . 7?
By end of year outside of a handful of systems that are critical and cannot be replaced (My last count was literally a dozen). I spent a good chunk of last year ripping vmware and windows out of a lot of systems. I got halted this year because of SOC2 audits though… Gotta get back on the kill M$ train.
(Yay proxmox and whatever flavor of linux was easiest to support for a function [typically debian, sometimes alpine])
I work in healthcare IT. EHR clients and other necessary software that hold PHI (protected/private health information) run only on Windows. Recall seems to require a PC with a discrete 40 TOPs NPU so none of the current workstations. There is an opt-out already so I’m sure, though not positive, it can be turned off with a group policy.
I, optimistically, think this is a moot point for businesses. The goal is to get consumer data to sell not lose business purchases.
Cynically, I think it will be forced on consumers with, eventually, no option to turn it off.
I work in healthcare IT. EHR clients […] run only on Windows.
OpenEMR doesn’t. I also do some work in healthcare too for a small office. (Though admittedly not a lot at all). Paying a license (for support) to an opensource works for my client. It’s opensource so I know it’s not going away… and openemr is completely browser based as far as client goes.
Getting locked into these bullshit softwares is half the battle though when it comes to corporate shenanigans.
Edit:
I, optimistically, think this is a moot point for businesses. The goal is to get consumer data to sell not lose business purchases.
I dunno… Some of this shit is leaking into the business/server side. More and more stuff appears that nobody asked for.
OpenEMR doesn’t.
Also eClinicalWorks doesn’t either, as it’s also entirely cloud based. It does require (a user agent string that says) Chrome though.
And yes, I’m not worried about the computers I control; it’s the ones we connect to that I don’t which concern me.
A massive breach on the scale that recall facilitates tends to change such things.
Our previous experiences with companies being hacked and leaking personal information on the “dark web” with little consequence to the bottom line anecdotally proves otherwise.
Sometimes.
I do think there’s a big shift of business to Apple for this reason. In the cybersecurity world Windows is - no exaggeration - the reason for that industry’s existence.
I think they are preparing to go full cloud soon. You can make much more when customers have to pay something like 29$ a month to use the operating system. At home or work there will be just a thin client left. And this recall database will be worth much more to harvest data when you have to store it on azure. I am sure this will come eventually. Storing it local is just the first step. Once the backslash is over and everyone is using it they will move the stuff to the cloud. “You will own nothing and be happy”.
Agreed, I see signs of this with on-premises Sharepoint and Exchange moving to a “subscription edition” for the next release. And then at some point years later they’ll just say “we’re not renewing subscription edition licenses, migrate to the cloud or else”.
“It worked for Adobe” is all the $min/max$ers see.
