This is so bad that I’m going to intervene with my elderly parents next PC purchase. Setup a Kubuntu or Mint machine for the using some refurbed wiped former windows 10 machines for a quarter the price.
If you have elderly parents, I advise you all do the same. There are threat actors that want to nab your inheritance before your parents kick the bucket.
I advise Kubuntu or Mint because they’re basically Linux for windows users.
My dad is 78 years old, and refuses to go past Windows XP. Everytime I go to his house to fix some bullshit, its because he’s riddled with viruses.
He doesn’t understand windows xp. You think he’s going to understand linux???
The most popular stable Linux distros are no more difficult to understand than Windows to the average and below average user. If your dad still doesn’t understand XP, then he never will. Also, it means he is not a power user and can be shown where the internet button is on any OS.
The most popular stable Linux distros are no more difficult to understand than Windows to the average and below average user.
Especially The two that I recommended for this exact purpose
I once installed Ubuntu for an 80 year old Finnish woman who escaped the Nazis as a child running across a frozen lake. This was a decade ago. She took to it like a duck to water and said it was great because it made sense, she could easily install anything and it didn’t crash. Give your dad the chance at least.
Yes. My dad’s 74. I have no questions that hell have no problems.
My mom’s 71. Her last machine is a Chromebook because she asked me if there was a budget laptop she could get to just go on Facebook. She had no issues there.
“Hey pop, when you turn it on, it looks different until you get here. Just click chrome, you know chrome. Ok you’re good. If you need word, just click the search icon and type ‘word’.”
Also, if your dad is actually on the internet on Windows XP, you’ve failed already… Your inheritance is already stolen if it has any connection to the internet through that machine. Best of luck 🫡
No duh.
Fuck M$ and this push for pointless Ai integration. Make them do some actual useful shit instead of robbing jobs and creating knockoff art.
This isn’t even A.I., no matter what they call it. It’s OCR and an SQLite database. Honestly, they could have done it 25 years ago .
That data they’re collecting is more valuable now that it can be used to train A.I.s. A couple years from now they’ll push some update that lets them exfiltrate it (or its usable features.)
Can’t wait to ask gpt6 what my neighbor was doing on the 19th of October 2024 at 17:00
100% this is about generating more AI training data.
This is exactly it, they’re going to feed all this data into a model to try and get an AI to be able to perform operations in the OS like a human would.
Which on the surface of it sounds reasonable, but only if they actually paid people to generate that data for them. And this isn’t even touching the privacy aspects of a record of everything you do being generated and stored in plaintext.
The Ai part comes in when you search. Your not just doing keyword searches. You can use natural language and the Ai models “understand” what your looking for and will retrieve it. Also you need the AI for image recognition (what was that website I was looking at with the children’s book with a dog on the cover?)
Ah, OK. Thank you! I hadn’t thought of that.
Something I didn’t think about until I saw someone making a post about it on Mastodon is that you may not have to worry about just YOUR PC, but what happens when you are on a zoom call or using another screen sharing app and THEIR PC is taking screen shots?
Now you just can’t worry about your own machine, but every machine out there that might interact with you in that type of way could be capturing data. And if you accidentally have your email up or maybe a password manager, could their PC just be gobbling that up without you knowing?
Not to mention if you forget to wear pants and stand up during a meeting. Nobody wants this.
“forget”
There was a funny joke from the early 90’s, that went “When you connect your computer to another computer, you are connecting to every computer that computer ever connected with.” That was such a funny joke. Funny…
Hasn’t this always been a possibility? People could always record their screen or take screenshots during meetings or whatever
Sure but not built in where you can then do an OS search like “find me text from the call I was just on where it showed their password for a moment.”
Since the invention of traffic lights people could just ignore them… Now we know some AI “feature” will ignore them.
See the difference?
It is way too risky even if this feature was that revolutionary, which it isn’t. It is a security nightmare for workplaces and at home.
And for such small reward!
Oh yes, I can ask about a brown bag once saw and don’t remember… Or maybe I forgot if that document I created was in my “Documents” folder or not … Wow, the future is now
I tried to search for a file on my computer the other day using windows search.
Was absolutely incapable of doing it. Maybe if it walked away for a few hours it would have eventually found the file, but I didn’t have that sort of time.
It would be nice if Microsoft could make sure the features it currently has, actually work, before trying to add a bunch of stuff no one was asking for.
While initially all the screenshots will be stored locally (where people who own your computer through malware can access it), the time will come where Microsoft will deem it “necessary” to store them online, “for safety reasons”. Then the race is open: Will they fall prey to hackers and data leaks before they can happily exploit the data themselves?
Or they go the WhatsApp way and offer users a free “online backup” of the data, unencrypted, turned on by default.
Whatsapp is doing this? How do I turn it off?
edit:
Settings, Chat, Chat Backup
Was on me for me even though I never okayed it
Microsoft: our new windows comes with not only a key logger but and EVERYTHING logger. Isn’t that great?!?!
Users: WTF, we have antivirus for the sole purpose of keeping that shit off our computers!!!
Microsoft: too late, it’s integrated. What are ya gonna do? Switch to Linux? (Laughs maniacally)
The market is filled with products people hate.
Explain to me again how free markets and competition are supposed to work?
Honestly even if Microsoft were trustworthy this is too much power for anyone. I actually like the recall feature but it would require a fully open source code to trust.
Even with a fully open-source implementation, that thing tells on you more than normal system logs. I like it being called “privacy bomb” - waiting to give extra data to whoever gets into the computer.
I feel like even if it was open-source, it would still be too big of a target for malware and data exfiltration to ever be justified for most people.
It’s a national security risk https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2024/06/05/totalrecall-windows-recall-abuse/)
"During testing this with an off the shelf infostealer, I used Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — which detected the off the shelve infostealer — but by the time the automated remediation kicked in (which took over ten minutes) my Recall data was already long gone.”
Firstly, Microsoft has shown that it cannot refrainfrom abusing its access to private data when it’s not impartial. Microsoft has even threatened journalists.
Secondly, Microsoft doesn’t have a clean record of security, and data in the hands of Microsoft has been compromised to unauthorized hackers.
Thirdly, when US law enforcement asks Microsoft for your data without a warrant Microsoft rolls over like an attention starved puppy and yields everything without challenges. (same as Amazon and AT&T. Google required legal warrants ten years ago.)
Fourthly, ChatGPT4 has used access to external means to fulfill testing tasks and it is capable of willfully lying to third parties to achieve steps. When Microsoft’s AI offerings are smart enough, it will know who you are and everything about you (assuming Microsoft fails to mitigate for this eventuality).
I usually find reasons to keep using microsoft products, but right now it’s the first time I’m seriously considering ditching all my microsoft services for FOSS and move to linux.
It’s gonna take a lot of effort and time migrating everything I use, but taking literal screenshots of your PC sounds fucking creepy, no matter how they sugar coat it. It’s like someone else literally watching all you do.
Usually you know they get your data, but now they want exactly what you are seeing and exactly what you are doing, taking it right out of your screen. It’s literal and plain spyware.
I have degoogled for a few years already, now I guess it’s microsoft’s turn.
If you have degoogled, even if partially, I doubt you’d find moving to Linux hard
Probably the hardest part would be to chose a distro… Stick with the main ones (Debian, Fedora or Arch) to start (you can chose one of their derivatives but pick a famous one so you can have easier time finding documentation)
Does Linux do steam games? Can it easily find the movies I already downloaded? Complete noob.
Steam works very well on Linux. There is a setting in Steam to enable ‘proton’ for all games - this allows you to play Windows games on Linux without having to do anything else. It has worked flawlessly for every game I’ve tried.
As for your movies thing, I don’t know. I deliberately avoid software that automatically searches and catalogues stuff on my computer. So I’m not sure how easy it is to do what you are asking for. It’s something that I’d avoid rather than seek out.
Most games work well; some don’t yet, and a few probably never will (CoD, PUBG). The easiest way to check is to go here: https://protondb.com and either look up the games you actually play, or just give it your steam profile URL on the profile page and have it scan your library.
I have to use Windows at work. Fortunately I’m a domain admin. I’ll be disabling this shit with conventional methods, and also write a scheduled task script to whack the SQLite DB…or whatever it takes to nuke it from orbit.
For home users, there are tools like NTLite that let you create custom installation images for Windows. Hopefully those will be able to remove it completely.
For home users, most of you I’m sure are just using a web browser 99% of the time. For this, to beat a dead horse, there is Linux.
