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Windows 11's new AI feature makes it way too easy to steal everything you viewed or typed (www.neowin.net)

submitted 5 months ago by tigerjerusalem@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

58 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Oh, you're saying that Recall is a privacy nightmare and a sweet target for malware? Surprised_pikachu.jpg

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[–] yemmly@lemmy.world 85 points 5 months ago (2 children)

This has already been happening on the Web for quite some time. For example Microsoft Clarity records everything you do on those dodgy Web sites you visit. And they assign a universal identifier to you that can be correlated with the IDs Google and your device have already created and broadcast to profile you.

And you think “oh but I use x, y, and z to prevent tracking”. Guess what: They make your browser do nonsense tasks in the background to benchmark your hardware and then assign a UUID to you based on that.

The only thing that can help this situation is privacy legislation with real teeth.

[–] ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 47 points 5 months ago (4 children)

This is far far worse of a potential risk than a tracking identifier. Bank passwords, balances, social media pages, full text chat Windows, everything you ever view all OCRed and put in a neat searchable database for a hacker.

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[–] joewilliams007@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

nu. The people decide in this. We cant keep making new rules for the shit they come up with. I care. Thus i use firefox on linux with an open search. The people are stupid. Thats the problem. They want this comfort, they pay for it.

[–] granolabar@kbin.melroy.org 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Well currently the way legislation works, yea... They would get it turned somehow where user gets fucked even more.

It aint got to be like that. This comment is more about how pathetically failed the state is more than anything...

The state can't regulate the industry lol wtf

So much capture peasants are ready to go mad max style to survive their corpo owners.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 59 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Do you have a few minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, Linus Torvalds?

[–] theherk@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago

And Saint Ignucious, RMS, of course.

[–] exanime@lemmy.today 52 points 5 months ago

To me the worst is that this would only "solve" such a trivial problem that is clearly not worth the risk

It's equivalent to leaving your front door wide open just because once in the last 10 years you forgot your key and had to wait 1 hour for your partner to arrive and let you in

[–] yggstyle@lemmy.world 41 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I can't imagine why the windows 11 market share is dropping.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Is it? Even if it is, it's probably dropping in favour of win10, rather than Linux.

[–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Windows 11 market share has been going down, while Linux market share has been going up by a few percent. I doubt that people are going back to an older OS. But even if that's the case: These Windows 10 users will eventually have to find some other OS, as Win 10 won't get security updates after 2025. Sure, not all of them will switch to Linux, but I'm sure that a notable portion of them will.

[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 11 points 5 months ago

I wish I shared your optimism. Most likely most regular users won't care about not getting security updates, some of the ones that do will switch to Linux, but the majority (of the minority of people that care about getting security updates) will probably switch to win11, macOS, or ChromeOS (which might as well not be based on the Linux kernel seeing as it's so locked down).

[–] yggstyle@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Like others have mentioned it is dropping in favor of 10 but some who are knowledgeable are moving to Linux as well. Corporations are looking into shifting to alternatives (Linux) as windows 10 loses support... and becomes very expensive per user to keep after Microsoft drops it.

[–] MisterFrog@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago

I am dreading the day my company makes me "upgrade" my windows 10 laptop to 11. I really hope they're paying for legacy support for 10.

I right click, soooooo often when managing files at my job. I'm going to pull out my hair if I can't change the "see more" behaviour.

Also, I'm a top taskbar user (that's where programs put their tabs, it just makes sense!)

I don't know how they could fuck up windows this badly.

[–] Asafum@feddit.nl 5 points 5 months ago

"Hmmm. Why don't we release another operating system after promising 10 would be the last for a long time, pull the rug out from under those that bought 10 and threaten them with lack of security so we force them to upgrade, and require they buy all new hardware! It's not like the average person is struggling with the economy, I mean I just bought another yacht so I'm sure they're just as fine. We'll be drowning in money!"

[–] NutWrench@lemmy.world 32 points 5 months ago

This software is a security nightmare for any government that uses Windows. Absolutely no one is going to trust their nation's security to an operating system with such a blatant backdoor built into it.

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 31 points 5 months ago (12 children)

Jesus fucking Christ. This might be enough for me to actually attempt Linux on my laptop. My main reason for not doing so is because I've done Linux on a laptop before and it went horribly.

[–] uranibaba@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago

I switched to Linux on my laptop full time ~6 months ago. If had to reinstall my OS a few times since to fix issues, but pop_os (what I am using) has a nice feature that keeps the home folder. All my data is preserved and OS is refreshed (Windows has this as well)

[–] Diurnambule@jlai.lu 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Same, especially with Nvidia Drivers. You can't take any distro and not have trouble with Nvidia drivers. I switched to popOS because they support some computer with the same Graphic Card I use. And for now the experience is good. (I switched 2 month ago) I can still play Warframe, GW2 and Planetside 2 no PB

[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You can't take any distro and not have trouble with Nvidia drivers.

That may have been true over 10 years ago but that isn't the case anymore. There are plenty of distros that support it OOTB, there are also some helper scripts available as well if that's your thing.

Anecdotally, I've had more issues with AMD (performance and reliability).

[–] Diurnambule@jlai.lu 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

6-8 month ago I had problems with repeated freeze with Ubuntu and Nvidia. It was so bad i reswitched to Windows for 2 month before finding a better distribution

[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm not saying people don't have issues, just that as a blanket statement it isn't correct.

[–] Diurnambule@jlai.lu 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

My bad i tend do generalize. Thanks to remember to still work on it

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[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Do it!

[–] Lizardking13@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This feels like me. But I read somewhere that even if I am on windows 11 ,my current laptop won't have this feature. So I think I'm okay for now. Maybe my next one will be Linux.

I've used Linux before and I kind of hated it. It was fine for me when I had time to fuck around with every setting and go into rabbit holes. But I don't know if it'll work on a family device. I have 1 laptop in the house and myself, my wife, and kid all use it. Other than that, all devices are just tablets or phones.

We use the laptop for browsing, casting, document editing, and that's about it I think. So since it's that simple, I would hope Linux would "just work". But we'll see on my next device.

[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Linux Mint is real nice from the ‘it just works’ perspective. Common things like you mention are preinstalled and the default (cinnamon) UI feels very familiar coming from Windows.

[–] Lizardking13@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Good to know and thanks for the tip. This was back when I did more on a personal computer, but I remember spending hours just trying to get software to work. Again, this isn't something I need to worry about today, but getting Octave (free version of Matlab) to work on Linux was a nightmare.

[–] Lizardking13@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Back to this comment to report that I took the dive. I have a second laptop that wasn't getting used so I wiped it and installed Linux mint. Love it so far and no issues with any of the basics. Took me all of 1 hr to get up and running.

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[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 22 points 5 months ago

Why would they ever stop with their ridiculous bullshit? As far as I can tell they get no pushback from users because the masses just roll blissfully along, and the tech-knowledgeable who still use Windows just find out how to disable the things they don't like, shrug, and move along.

It's really clear by now that you are nothing but a datamine for MS if you are a home user, right?

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

The idea that a feature of this scope would only be gated by having access to your local account is so baffling to me. I've been around my share of bad corporate decisions, and even I genuinely have no idea what they were thinking or how it got this far into development without anybdoy raising a flag.

For now it's an obvious thing to turn off immediately and tell all your friends and relatives to turn off immediately. And yeah, it's a reason to avoid devices that support it out of the box, at least for less tech-savvy users.

[–] billiam0202@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I saw someone suggest that MS has thought about this, which is why they require a TPM chip for Win 11 and have recently started forcing Bitlocker enabled by default. Obviously, however, it's not nearly enough.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 23 points 5 months ago

But that's my point, though. You have to be completely detached from reality to think that securing the login to the local device means the local device is secure. People aren't going to get busted for this because they lack drive encryption, they're gonna get busted for this because some nice sounding gentleman on their phone is going to get them to give them remote access and have a mainline to every single thing they did for the past month. Or because their partner is going to use their shared password and find out some stuff they shouldn't have or whatever.

That's obvious to anybody who thinks about it for more than two seconds. How could it not be obvious to MS?

[–] aniki@lemm.ee 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Best avoid Microsoft all together in the future. There's nothing of value left.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's entirely unrealistic and not particularly helpful. I mean, if you can and want to, by all means, that solves most of this immediate issue. In practice, many people just don't want to move, especially if they're not tech-savvy, are locked into that ecosystem for work or have devices that only work well in Windows (hi, that's me).

So for now mitigations matter. Plus this is, on paper, an optional feature only coming to some devices (and that's assuming you believe they won't be forced to back down from this absolute trainwreck). At this point, I'd recommend explaining the issue to Windows users who woudn't be experienced enough to know. And hey, if you're in a position to do what you do in a computer on a different platform and want to go that way, that's also reasonable. That's just not going to be everybody, or even most people.

I personally moved some of my family members to an Android device for home computing years ago and have never looked back, but I do use Windows on multiple devices and on most I either can't or don't want to switch, so... yeah, mitigation is important for many of my use cases.

[–] Mrkawfee@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Out of interest, which devices do you have that only work well in Windows?

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[–] VicentAdultman@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Obviously there's a similar tool which is open source cross platform and available for years: https://github.com/dynobo/normcap Just in case sb liked the idea. This doesn't automatically ruh on your computer, if I understood it correctly.

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[–] fox2263@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

For anyone who still wants to use W11 but with its crap ripped out, ReviOS is your saviour.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 points 5 months ago

Yes we know

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