this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I'll legitimately be moving to Linux today. This just broke the camel's back for me.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

If you are new to Linux I would recommend buying a second drive or dual-booting for a bit just to ease into it. It has helped me persist with the transition because I always have the option of booting into Windows for a few hours if there's something that I'm just too tired/frustrated to deal with at that given moment. Over time I've found myself booting into Windows less and less, to the extent that I'll be able to drop it completely later this year without the big learning curve/wave of troubleshooting that I encountered the first time I tried to switch cold turkey.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can second this! For me it meant that I could finish my game of modded fallout new vegas, and connect to my work's microsoft vpn nonsense (IT support didn't fancy trying it on Mint but that's another story!)

I now have a personal OS that I like, and a windows partition for those few things that I can't be bothered to troubleshoot.

So far the list is just those things and the Unity Engine as Visual Studio debugs better than code in my experience. :)

Having the option to flick back is great :) In the XP days, I loved the WUBI(?) tool that let you install ubuntu dual boot as an exe, but I think that's not a thing these days., :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Currently playing fallout New Vegas modded on Linux! Of course if you already did it, remodding and transferring the saves would be frustrating, but it is actually pretty simple once you learn how to use Steam Tinker Launch.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Awesome! There are so many good communities on Lemmy for Linux noobs and enthusiasts! Be patient, and take snapshots!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

@Onii-Chan @UngodlyAudrey I suggest starting with Mint Linux and see how it goes. Or Kubuntu.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Your comment inspired me and I just finished moving over. So thx.

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm curious whether the increasingly invasive telemetry of modern Windows will have legal implications surrounding patient privacy here in the US. I work IT in the healthcare field, and one of our key missions is HIPAA compliance. What, then, will be the impact if Microsoft starts storing more and more in-depth data offsite? Will keyboard entries into our EHR be tracked and stored in Microsoft's servers? Will we subsequently be held liable if a breach at Microsoft causes this information to leak, or if Microsoft just straight-up starts selling it to advertisers? Windows is our one-and-only option for endpoint devices, so it's not like we can just switch.

I genuinely don't have the answers to these questions right now, but it may start to become a serious conversation for our department in the future if things continue at the trajectory they're going at. Or, maybe I'm just old and paranoid and everything will be okie dokie.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

I guess it will be like it was before, that there is a different version of windows for these use cases. Like Windows LTSC.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like most of Microsoft's more odious features, this one can be turned off through GPO/Intune policy across an organization. As such, the liability will mostly fall on the organization to make sure it's off. The privacy and security impacts will be felt by individuals and small businesses.

They claim that the data is only stored locally, so far. We'll see, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Sadly a lot of the privacy switches are exclusive to enterprise and education users, but our endpoints are running Pro (we have our previous supervisor to thank for that). I guess I'll hope this is one of the ones we can just toggle off without any fuss.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That closing quote is ominous:

"Recall is currently in preview status," Microsoft says on its website. "During this phase, we will collect customer feedback, develop more controls for enterprise customers to manage and govern Recall data, and improve the overall experience for users."

I read "so, yeah, we built in all the telemetry connections we swear we'll never use ... just for testing, ya know?"

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

more controls for enterprise customers to manage and govern Recall data

ahh ok so this is employee monitoring software

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Probably more what MangoKangoroo and B0rax talked about, that enterprises can opt out of this telemetry, due to compliance or Intellectual Property protection.

So only the commoners get mandatory full-scale surveillance, Ehm I mean "ai enhancement"

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago

Despite the privacy concerns, Microsoft says that the Recall index remains local and private on-device, encrypted in a way that is linked to a particular user's account.

Just like how Microsoft domain-bound emails were stored locally on machines running Outlook, right? Or how purchasing and downloading music, movies, and video games meant that we owned them, right?

I don’t believe for a fucking second that this “feature” will remain locally encrypted forever. Fuck Microsoft, fuck the AI bubble.

“Don’t be evil!

wait, you say you’ll pay me to be evil? Well fuck that changes everything!”

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have to believe at this point that a serious generation gap exists if there is an audience for this sort of constant monitoring. Because that's what it is.

Where it goes and whether Microsoft can be trusted are of course very valid concerns, but Jesus tap-dancing Christ, this is surveillance before the data go anywhere. Add that to your AI assistant that works best with the camera on, et voila!

No doubt Google is going to say "hold my beer," and there's no pure Linux offramp on the overwhelming majority of Android hardware, so even if you've told Microsoft to fuck off ...

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As you might imagine, all this snapshot recording comes at a hardware penalty. To use Recall, users will need to purchase one of the new "Copilot Plus PCs" powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, which include the necessary neural processing unit (NPU). There are also minimum storage requirements for running Recall, with a minimum of 256GB of hard drive space and 50GB of available space. The default allocation for Recall on a 256GB device is 25GB, which can store approximately three months of snapshots. Users can adjust the allocation in their PC settings, with old snapshots being deleted once the allocated storage is full.

Oh no my computer doesn't meet the hardware requirements whatever shall I do

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

"Recall screenshots are only linked to a specific user profile and Recall does not share them with other users, make them available for Microsoft to view, or use them for targeting advertisements. Screenshots are only available to the person whose profile was used to sign in to the device," Microsoft says.

It's conspicuous that this statement talks only about the raw screenshots, not any data derived from them (such as aggregated data, inferred data, or even just slightly reprocessed data). So Microsoft could do any minor reworking of the data and send it off to the cloud for their own purposes, while technically complying with the above.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

How does this work with local laws regarding 2 party recording? If you're on a video call and this records the other party without their permission, that is AFAIU illegal in many states in the US. I'm sure in parts of Europe as well.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

on your PC

*on Microsofts PC.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

A lawsuit waiting to happen... someone needs to class action MS for systemic breaches of privacy. Think of all the critical infrastructure, government, medical, policing, etc. systems processing sensitive, private, and in some cases classified, information.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is great, I can show all my 4k porn collection to my managers doing Teams screen sharing!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I read this as "40k porn" and was like...wtf mate.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Warhammer 40k Porn?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a wtf for you? You must be new to the internet then

[–] And009 3 points 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I open windows and it starts recording: opens Plex, plays Mash for 13 hours straight, PC closed down.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Good news , it is just on their Copilot+ computers for now. For now is likely doing some heavy lifting there, though.

I threw Mint on a partition to test moving away from Windows, and sadly does not play well with my 2080ti. This makes me want to put more effort into getting it to work...

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

NOPE!

You cannot pay me to use Windows 11.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I mean, no thanks.

But they did this already, right? Their "Timeline" feature in Windows 10 recorded a log of your activities to display it in your Win+Tab menu screen. I switched it off immediately, but the point is this is a new approach to an old feature they have done in the past.

Everybody must have turned it off, though, because it hadn't been present in Win 11 until now. It's still a dumb idea.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well, so, you use password generator, the password screenshot is saved.

This makes most password generators useless because they show the password for user feedback. You can turn this MS AI off, but I will have no idea if there was a bug.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In light of the recent forays by AI projects/products into the reason of coding assistants, from copilot to Devin, this reads to me as a sign that they've finally accepted that you can't make an ai assistant that provides actual value from an LLM purely trained on text.

This is Microsoft copying Google's captcha homework. We trained their OCR for gBooks, we trained their image recognition on traffic lights and buses and so signs.

Now we get to train their ai assistant on how to click around a windows OS.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summaryAt a Build conference event on Monday, Microsoft revealed a new AI-powered feature called "Recall" for Copilot+ PCs that will allow Windows 11 users to search and retrieve their past activities on their PC.

To make it work, Recall records everything users do on their PC, including activities in apps, communications in live meetings, and websites visited for research.

By performing a Recall action, users can access a snapshot from a specific time period, providing context for the event or moment they are searching for.

For example, someone with access to your Windows account could potentially use Recall to see everything you've been doing recently on your PC, which might extend beyond the embarrassing implications of pornography viewing and actually threaten the lives of journalists or perceived enemies of the state.

Despite the privacy concerns, Microsoft says that the Recall index remains local and private on-device, encrypted in a way that is linked to a particular user's account.

To use Recall, users will need to purchase one of the new "Copilot Plus PCs" powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chips, which include the necessary neural processing unit (NPU).


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