Microsoft is reworking Recall after researchers point out its security problems

I feel for the hundreds of engineers at Microsoft who have been yelling about these security issues since day one, but cannot say "I told you so" because they'd get fired.

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I survived a similar incident, telling our CEO at the time "you know our product can't do that, right?" I had to show my receipts, present usability studies, and faced incredible pressure, but 2 CEOs later, I'm still here... :)

Document everything. Keep good notes. You never know when it will be useful.

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- Sure but at Microsoft they fire people based on dice rolls
  
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This is exactly what I was thinking. There are plenty of smart people that work there that would have said something before release. They were told to not rock the boat by the yes men and now Microsoft has to backpedal and pretend no one there thought about THOSE implications.

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Go easy on them, they're only a 3 trillion dollar company. It's hard for them to get the resources to build well thought out and secure software.

Pathetic, so glad I've been on Linux for years. I don't miss Micro$oft one bit.

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Right? Before they even officially rolled it out, there are already python scripts on github that can extract your entire recall database. They need to just stop.

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- Wild for sure. It's pretty clear that M$ isn't interested in making their OS anything more than a portal for their cloud products.
  
  The overall percentage of revenue that Windows produces for them directly has been steadily shrinking for years while their Azure and cloud services/licensing has grown dramatically.
  
  I guess it makes sense from that perspective. Call me old fashioned, but I still prefer my OS to be a platform for me to compute locally on and use as I see fit. Not be a bloated ad-ridden portal to a walled garden of proprietary web software.
  
  Windows has gotten so bad in the last year or so, that I've actually started telling people, "Try Linux, but if that doesn't work for you, just go with Apple."
  
  Both are scummy, evil mega corps that try to lock you into their platform forever. But at least with Apple, the cage is 24K gold with a little cushion, and you're fed avocado toast & kombucha.
  
  Windows is a rusty, filthy prison cell where the guards randomly come in to rough you up and you're fed a steady diet of stale bread heels and gruel.
  
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I'm pissed off I have to use Windows for work.

My job is almost entirely SSH-ing onto 40 different Linux servers, and doing some networking/bash script stuff, and sending emails.

It makes zero sense for my workplace to force me to use Windows, but they do. And my god, the laptop is slow. I keep thinking damn I have a laptop 10yrs older than this running Fedora just fine, and Fedora isn't even pegged as a lightweight distro.

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The fact that it took people not involved with Microsoft to point out and initiate internal change should be everything anyone needs to know.

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To be fair I think they mentioned a button to temporarily disable the spying. Either for a time or blacklist an entire application.

Still highly recommended people move away from windows.

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- Right, but the problem is users should be able to use the feature and be confident it's secure. It most assuredly is not as multiple people with access to the pilot program have demonstrated.
  
  I bet some lower level folks within MS knew this would be an issue and screamed into the void about it.
  
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You're right, nobody should ever rely on external feedback for anything. 🙄

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- It should never have gotten to the external feedback stage because internal feedback should have been sufficient to kill the idea before it even got a name due to it being such a security and privacy risk. The fact that it didn't is worrying from a management perspective.
  
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- Not storing this shit unencrypted was pretty fucking obvious dude.
  
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- You shouldn't need external feedback to know that putting security cameras inside bathroom stalls is completely deranged.
  
  This is that level.
  
  14
- Derp a derp
  
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I'm pretty sure the main picture on the article is what the revised opt in/out message looks like. Previously it was opt-out with just a message describing the feature with a check box to have it open Settings when you were finished with the out of box experience so that you can look at the options later.

Edit: Fixed mention of opt-in to opt-out, thanks tal.

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- That's how this works, isn't it? Nobody reads past the headline. Everybody feels about it super strongly, just not strongly enough to actually read about it.
  
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- It was opt out before, not opt in, and you made the changes subsequent to install.
  
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they needed researchers to tell them that?

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Well . . . the smart people they ignored when CoPilot was first proposed.

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It's PR bullshit to give an excuse for backtracking basically

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Internally people probably talked about how there were huge issues. Others probably said those issues are over stated and it's no big deal. They decided to release it and the press says there are issues. Then, the company decides there are issues. That simple.

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- Having been the guy in an org shouting not to do something only for it to come back to us this way, the finger-pointing that begins is nuts. Often the people who tried to stop the "feature" from rolling out are the first to get blamed for it being shit.
  
  Classic CYA, make sure everything you said is in writing somewhere.
  
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That's just what we call people spending some time to figure something out. Security research is basically just trying to learn the technology and then trying to break it.

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- it did not take me long to figure out that maybe spyware that takes screenshots of what you're doing is a bad idea
  
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Opt in just like Microsoft accounts...right

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Something something cake day.

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I can never again log into my email or other private account on someone else's computer.

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I mean, it could always have been compromised and had some kind of keylogger or something installed.

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- But with Windows 11, you are sure it's compromised.
  
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- Yes, but now it definitely does
  
  12

Too fucking late. I've already installed Bluefin on two machines and Bazzite on my gaming machine. I'm not going back.

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Already installed Bazzite on my Legion go with my laptop and desktop next. No reason for me not to continue putting it on my devices just because they are going to rework it. Recall is always going to be a major security risk despite a few extra measures. They have definitely shown they can't think about these things. At least there was a heads up on this one for people to point out obvious issues, but that won't always be the case.

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still dont understand why you would ever want to save screenshots of your desktop and also waste disk space

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To get the idea of always being watched into your head !

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- Literally 1984. No, like, literally literally.
  
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The AI scans all those screenshots visually and tags them for search later so, for example, an artist could open a file they don't remember the location of from thousands of folders by typing text describing it. That's actually awesome. I imagine lots of people could come up with really useful ways to use something like that. I mean, if it wasn't an Orwellian nightmare.

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- Features like this can almost never be privacy-friendly because they're developed expressly to violate your privacy. The value it provides you , as cool as that could be, is just how it's sold.
  
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- Yeah, it sounds like it might actually be a useful feature if it wasn't impossible to do it securely and in a privacy respecting way.
  
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I can definitely see the utility in the feature, it's just that it, conceptually, is such a security risk that it's simply not worth it, even ignoring the data harvesting/storage penalty.

You enter a discussion and you need to refer to an article you know you've read but can't find? Now you can find it. You want a backpack and remember seeing one you liked but can't remember where you saw it? Ask it to show backpacks you looked at - great now you've tracked it down in seconds rather than spending half an hour.

But yeah, the security and privacy implications of this are so bad that it's really not worth the tradeoff.

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Bullshit.

This whole endeavour is looking like a careful plan to implement a smaller, slightly less horrible idea in Win11, and then creep forward from there.

Remember the model to move the goal line, folks:

Overreach
Capitulate publicly and fall back to your true target
Repeat

Best of all, these large steps can be supplemented by nudging things forward with 'adjusttments.'

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They'll probably come to the "logical conclusion" that storing the data locally on the machine poses "too much risk" and just move the storage to their servers "for your safety"...

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The damage to their reputation is already done.

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Don't be so sure. This forum is a bubble, 99% of Windows users have never heard of this feature in the first place let alone any of the details about how it works.

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- Normies noticed when MS took away the start menu in W8, but didn’t notice when W10 shipped with a ton of spyware “features”.
  
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- 99% of windows users don’t update anyway.
  
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With that in mind we are announcing updates that will go into effect before Recall (preview) ships to customers on June 18.

I doubt they can do much with last-minute changes. It being opt-in is better, at least.

our review units of the new Surface hardware are being delayed by a week or so, presumably so Microsoft can update them.

GROAAAAAAAN. I just want to see proper benchmarks of Qualcomm's new chips and they keep delaying it despite the laptops releasing later this month.

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Yeah, right? The biggest bummer of this entire stupid thing that should never have existed is that it's overshadowing perhaps the most exciting hardware launch on Windowsland since the original Surface. I am VERY interested in seeing if Windows on ARM is viable this time, and as a longtime Windows 2-in-1 user I am incredibly excited about the prospect of a similarly performant version that doesn't need to be plugged in basically at all times.

But because MS can't come up with a feature without shooting itself in the foot with a bazooka we're all here talking about the stopgap they had to implement to save face while they wait to be able to quietly kill this dumb thing for good. I swear, they are incredibly bad at this.

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- The average person doesn't even know that new hardware is coming because the only thing MS is advertising is "AI AI AI AI AI AI AI". Is that seriously more appealing than saying "hey our new laptops have better performance and 2x more battery life than older laptops"? Because I'm feeling the latter is what they should've leaned on.
  
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So, between the inherent security nightmare that is this feature and the myriad of other things in Windows that push ads, steal user data, and generally make the simple act of using the computer less secure, when do we give Microsoft an APT designation and start treating them as the world's largest vendor of malware on the planet?

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I think you should take a calm and sober look at what Microsoft actually does.

You may be right, I don't know, but what I do know is any time I ask people for facts I get "read the end user license agreement" which is typically the furthest from factual a lawyers will get (it's filled with claims that are designed to not hold up, but give a legal leg to stand on for other moves) or "remember candy crush!?!?" But few things in the realm of concrete facts.

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- The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I'm sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on "accidentally" after some updates.
  
  They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it's impossible to actually do that in practice.
  
  That's just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don't give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn't even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.
  
  They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.
  
  Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.
  
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Oh boy, sunk cost fallacy time! They'll now waste millions of dollars to salvage this popularly unwanted nightmare in an effort to make it juuust acceptable to shove it down everyone's throats.

Either that or they'll spend all that money and then pinky-promise that they've made it acceptable, only for all their work to be immediately overcome by bad actors (criminals, corporations, governments, law enforcement, is there even a difference) and be the exact same nightmare anyway.

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Why would anyone opt in to this? What is the point of it?

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So that you can find that one porn video you watched six months ago that really got you off but you don't remember how you found it.

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It's like an automated tipofmytongue but for everything you do on your computer.

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Sounds more like a way to push Microsoft accounts and Windows Hello than consumer oriented.

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The Microsoft accounts are already required (without resorting to increasingly convoluted methods) and I think the hardware for Hello might be too now for OEM built computers, I'm not sure.

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- I mean, technically Windows Hello also includes signing in with a PIN or passkey. It doesn't require biometrics, although it does support them.
  
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Oh, yeah, thanks for these researchers to have provided insightful feedback such as "don't record private activity", "don't store data in a plaintext user-accessible sqlite database", and "don't do that automatically to everyone elligible, what are you thinking no stop". No way anyone could ever figure these out beforehand. Microsoft was totally stumped when these showed up and most certainly is very honest when they say they're reworking it now, and not at all abusing the PR outrage to slip us something as bad in the meantime.

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Best Solution is to not use Microsoft, i just setup an old Laptop with Linux Mint to see if it can work for my requirements.

If all goes well ill just use that for my main pc.

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Good luck! If you need any help typically there's a stackoverflow somewhere out there with the answer to your problem and if not, linux communities are typically decent about helping these days. Welcome to the club!

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Anyone who trusts Microsoft for anything anymore will get what they deserve.

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