Microsoft Says Its Recall Uninstall Option in Windows 11 is Just a Bug (theverge.com) 169
An anonymous reader shares a report: While the latest update to Windows 11 makes it look like the upcoming Recall feature can be easily removed by users, Microsoft tells us it's just a bug and a fix is coming. Deskmodder spotted the change last week in the latest 24H2 version of Windows 11, with KB5041865 seemingly delivering the ability to uninstall Recall from the Windows Features section. "We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the 'Turn Windows features on or off' dialog in Control Panel," says Windows senior product manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement to The Verge. "This will be fixed in an upcoming update."
Who here hasn't already switched? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Who here hasn't already switched? (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm done with Microsoft. My personal systems are Linux (Debian) and MacOS. At work, we still have to use Remote Desktop, but Remmina is a perfectly serviceable RDP client, so all the workstations are being replaced with Debian machines as Windows 10 EOL approaches. I'm hoping an upgrade to the critical web-based application that requires us to use Edge in IE mode will be transitioned to HTML 5 this fall, at which point my company can decide whether to walk away from MS as well (a lot depends on whether we c
Switch to what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gaming under Linux is very hit or miss. If you do any kind of content creation even as a hobby the tools available while functional and impressive still have compatibility issues and frankly usability issues too. And if you are a professional you're going to need software that just doesn't work under Linux. Music production is a bust too thanks to DRM and it's easy to say don't use DRM software but if you're making music you don't have a lot of options.
That leaves Apple but frankly they kind of suck right now. M3 laptops overheat and have terrible multi-mon support. The Mac mini and iMacs are both kind of garbage to short on RAM. I guess you could step up to a max studio or above but then you're looking at somewhere between 2000 and $5,000 for your computer. Fine if you've got that kind of money lying around.
The reason Microsoft can get away with this crap is they have a fuck ton of lock in. Ordinarily you solve problems like this with government action in the form of strict antitrust law enforcement. Yelling at people to switch to Linux isn't a solution.
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How is gaming under linux hit or miss? The list of games that don't work is very specific: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ [areweanticheatyet.com]
Note that only games that use anti cheat are listed. Everything else works.
Re:Switch to what? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Everything else works"
except when it doesn't. There are countless bugs present in many games that impact playability that doesn't cause the game to outright fail, and thus are listed as "working"
Here, I'll give you three for starters:
in Raid: Shadow Legends, rewards for events doesn't work, the screen never renders.
in Redfall, there are random, but severe lags between when you pull the trigger, and the gun fires. This is offline, solo mode.
in Armoured Warfare, the load screen is highly inconsistent. Sometimes it works, othertimes UI bugs render it impossible to load in to the game.
This is under Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with nVidia 535 driver.
So, no, everything doesn't "just work", not flawlessly anyway.
Has progress been made? Oh yes, by leaps and bounds, but every time a game is patched/updated by the dev, it's a gamble if it breaks something major, and there is little recourse except subit a report and hope the dev gives a damn about gaming in Linux.
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in Armoured Warfare, the load screen is highly inconsistent. Sometimes it works, othertimes UI bugs render it impossible to load in to the game.
They implemented some anticheat that broke the game on Linux. It just wouldn't load at all any more. Maybe they have progressed to a new stage of being broken but I just bailed out. Same for the star trek MMO. Luckily I am not stupid enough to spend cash money on one of those so I am not out anything except time, which I was wasting anyway.
So, no, everything doesn't "just work", not flawlessly anyway.
Same on Windows, where I've had problems with tons of games which used to work great.
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The reason Microsoft can get away with this crap is they have a fuck ton of lock in. Ordinarily you solve problems like this with government action in the form of strict antitrust law enforcement. Yelling at people to switch to Linux isn't a solution.
Indeed, they do. One instance I found teaching is that Linux crashes quite a few beamers, including one $40K large screen one (required a power-cycle via technician). It seems many beamers tell X11 that they can do some really large resolutions and X11 is happy to give them that. Then they crash. Hence not actually a Linux problem, but a problem with bad firmware. As I have different classrooms, I found it too tedious to spend an hour debugging for each new one and so my teaching laptop is Win10 and will be
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"Linux crashes quite a few beamers"
I hope nobody was hurt in those BMW crashes.
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Linux has a wide variety of issues as a primary operating system unless you're just using your computer for web browsing and programming.
Windows has a wide variety of issues as a primary operating system no matter what you are using it for.
Gaming under Linux is very hit or miss.
Gaming under Windows is very hit or miss.
If you do any kind of content creation even as a hobby the tools available while functional and impressive still have compatibility issues and frankly usability issues too.
If you do any kind of content creation even as a hobby the operating system is unreliable and performance is poor. There is no realtime windows and latency is all over the place due to services that you cannot stop without causing even more unreliability due to other parts of windows having a shit fit.
The reason Microsoft can get away with this crap is they have a fuck ton of lock in.
This part, at least, is true. Microsoft has engaged in every poss
I don't know what year you think this is (Score:2)
Windows is perfectly usable as long as you're willing to let Microsoft screw you over with their Monopoly. This is one of those cases where the better product is never going to win because good enough is good enough and even if it
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It's not just the lock-in, Linux is genuinely bad as a consumer oriented desktop OS. It breaks too easily, it has massive usability problems, software support is an absolute nightmare due to all the different distros...
Don't just take my word for it, even Linus Torvalds has commented on this. He pointed out that you build software once for Windows and it works on every version, probably back to at least 2000. He described being a repo maintainer for a Linux distro as a "waste of your time". Of course Linux
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Oh come on, Windows is so fragile that I kept a disk image of my Windows machines so I could do a full restore if updates went wrong. I've used Windows since the Windows 3.1 days, and while some versions were better than others, I have never seen a version of Windows that wasn't fully capable of crapping out for non-hardware reasons. All operating systems of any significant size or complexity run the risk of failures due to upgrades, multiple library version issues, faulty drivers, etc. In fact, most of the
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My experience of Windows is very different. I generally only re-install machines when I upgrade to the next version. In the old days, sure, re-installing Windows as common, but from about 7 onwards it's been quite robust.
Windows has now moved most drivers out of the kernel, so even poor quality ones can't really break the install. For example, your GPU driver or the GPU itself crashing is completely recoverable. The OS even tracks what was in GPU memory so it knows what it needs to set up again. A lot of st
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Linux is genuinely bad as a consumer oriented desktop OS. It breaks too easily, it has massive usability problems
HahaHaHaHaHA
You're telling us Windows doesn't have massive usability problems? It peaked either in Win2k or Win7 depending on who you asked, and they have not only been making it work dumber since then, they've been making it work more poorly. You can no longer even count on windows appearing on an active display and being visible in Windows 10. Many, many, many times per day I have to click the taskbar icon, right-click the window preview, and select "maximize" to get even Office application windows to app
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Windows has usability issues, but not to the level of basic stuff like the mouse wheel being broken, or the solution to 90% of problems being enter some cryptic command that probably isn't for your distro and which bricks the whole thing.
People moan about Microsoft screwing up the Windows settings app, but have you looked at what Linux desktops offer?
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All of the above?
Re:Who here hasn't already switched? (Score:4, Funny)
You know what's really ironic? Microsoft's original marketing materials, the stuff that put the final nails in Commodore's coffin, were all centered around how Windows was a better OS specifically because it was not designed for games. I'm sure you're too young to remember that though.
Re:Who here hasn't already switched? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I must have suppressed that memory. Obviously, Windows still is basically a single-user game-launcher with a lot of badly made add-ons. And that is what I am using it for. And my teaching laptop which needs teams. Anything else I do on Linux. MS does not get to see my personal email, for example.
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Microsoft's original marketing materials, the stuff that put the final nails in Commodore's coffin, were all centered around how Windows was a better OS specifically because it was not designed for games.
They ended that literally in NT4, when they redesigned the kernel for multimedia performance at the expense of security by merging the User and GDI memory spaces.
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I haven't been daily driving Linux in 10 years, but I surely will again by the time Windows 11 is mandated. I've already beat BG3 so I'm more interested in what the problem points would be nowadays. I just checked the next 3 games I'm considering playing and none of them support Linux. So I have some questions:
(1) Are video drivers still shitty, and what hardware should I be choosing to minimize those issues?
(2) Is gaming under WINE is still a crapshoot? (Yes.)
(3) What are the graphics-capable VM options no
Re: Who here hasn't already switched? (Score:2)
I also use Ubuntu for gaming these days.
Steam has its own bundled emulation layer called Proton that just works for a lot of Windows-only games. You can check "protondb" to see how well a game is supported.
It's not perfect but neither is Windows.
I'd say the biggest downside is Windows games that aren't on Steam, they are mostly too much trouble for me. For example I wanted to play Starcraft but battle.net was too much work to get running.
Re: Who here hasn't already switched? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to diminish Proton since Valve has put a lot of good work into it and accomplished a lot that I enjoy, but Proton is a Wine fork. It is basically still Wine, and improvements in Proton make their way back into Wine eventually. There are some other Wine forks that are its major and early beneficiaries (Like Wine-TKG and Wine-GE) which give similar or even sometimes superior results.
In addition to Steam there are also Lutris and PlayOnLinux. The latter is the least well supported and is basically on its way out, but it can still be convenient for some programs. Lutris supports all the popular Steam-like services (including Steam itself) and uses various Wine and/or Proton versions to run programs, generally depending on which versions work best. It also handles console emulators for you; I got nostalgic so I "installed" Simcity for SNES the other day and played a little bit of that. It installed the emulator for me and the game came right up.
You can also add other games installed on your system to Steam and use it as a launcher, but Lutris is easier to install games into and has some nice options Steam doesn't. I don't bother using it to launch games I have installed in Steam, but it will do that. Most recently I used it to install Fallout:London from GOG. I had to do one extra step to make it work, which was to symlink the FO4:GOTY directory from its winebottle to FO:London's, at which point the install worked and the game worked. (For stability, also manually install the FO4 high FPS physics fix, which fixes some important problems even if you aren't using over 60 fps.)
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Are video drivers still shitty, and what hardware should I be choosing to minimize those issues?
AMD binary drivers are still trash. Nvidia binary drivers are pretty good now, and AMD OSS drivers are great. What this means is that you should avoid the latest and greatest AMD video cards, because they have a high chance of not working correctly. The last-gen cards can be expected to work well. Nvidia cards from 10xx through current all work well, but there are some remaining issues which are unresolved that I'm aware of. However, only one is linux-specific; you cannot do multi-GPU SLI on a single displa
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Good to know. I still keep a Windows gaming PC, but I should probably try Steam on Linux again soon. Last time (few years back) it did not work so well, but I guess the Steam Deck was the final thing to make it viable.
My personal take is that Valve/Steam are actually preparing for Windows to fail or become mostly unusable for private users in the longer run. Hence all this effort on their side. They are essentially doing risk management to make sure they do not go down with the ship.
Re:Who here hasn't already switched? (Score:4, Insightful)
Valve's Linux-bolstering efforts cover two contingencies. One, what if Windows becomes so bad that it's no longer usable? Two, what if Windows goes all iPhone and you can only get Windows apps from the Windows Store, and all other app sources are prohibited, for "reasons" (excuses) related to security? And they have a nice side benefit which has now become a major part of their strategy, enabling devices which play Windows games which do not come with a Windows tax so they can sell Steam Decks.
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The second one (MS locking down software installs) is a valid concern as well, agreed.
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"But muuuuuuum"
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Re: Who here hasn't already switched? (Score:2)
Why would I do that? I said PS4 rather than XBox because I make a point of not purchasing things from Microsoft. If I went that route it would be Steam + Linux.
The guy I responded to made the claim that Microsoft is required for fun. That is bullshit.
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Why would I do that? I said PS4 rather than XBox because I make a point of not purchasing things from Microsoft.
Mate, you're not going to believe this but you can also connect a playstation pad to a pc. Almost any controller in fact. The more you know.
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So THAT is why I don't know what fun is....
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That just goes to show that many or even most people end up in a relationship with the wrong person. The right person is one who supports that the other person likes those other hobbies and friends, so doesn't stop the person they are with from having fun.
Recall made me leave Windows and MS for good. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's one thing to have mediocre ideas, but to actively create and sell a horrifying 1984 privacy nightmare as if it's a feature really bothers me beyond words. That anyone thought this was a good idea is genuinely mind boggling to me. The idea of having spyware like this anywhere near my computer (let alone built into my OS) makes me nauseous. The people who made this shouldn't be allowed to work in OS design.
Re:Recall made me leave Windows and MS for good. (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that anyone at Microsoft thought that anything like this was a desirable feature is what bothers me the most.
Or even useful -- for the user anyway.
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I can imagine scenarios when it would be useful. You could too, if you tried.
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True - so it should be an optional extra. But this is Microsoft, so you *have to have* their latest, greatest idea, whether you like it or not. It's great, after all, so why wouldn't you want it? If they make it removable, it might just show up that it's not actually that great, just like countless other crappy features they've added.
Sadly, a lot of people will buy laptops or whatever to do stuff at home, and this crapware will be on and enabled for them, and they probably won't know it. I'm sure in a coupl
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I can also imagine scenarios where it would be extremely detrimental, which is exactly why it should be possible to uninstall it if you don't want it.
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This feature could have been useful as a personal tech support mechanism. Would be especially useful for non-technical people. Could stand in for a tech-savvy person looking over someone's shoulder to help them know where to look and what to click on. Often times I try to help people over the phone and I know could fix it quickly if I could just see there screen for a second (remote desktop is very helpful). If the AI could do that, I think a lot of people would go for it. But this does not seem at all to
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Did you know anyone with a Gmail account can share their screen? Ask them to start a Google Meet session, invite the tech-savvy person, then they can share their screen. The tech-savvy person doesn't even need a Gmail account.
I've talked a few people through this procedure in the past, or I log into my Gmail account, start a Meet session, then send an invitation to the tech-lacking person. They don't even need a webcam - they just select the option to share their screen.
Much easier than trying to coach t
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Recall presently isn't even a supported feature on x86 PCs. Yeah, eventually this AI crap is going to worm its way into desktop hardware, but probably by that point it will be like every other unwanted change Microsoft has made to Windows - the bulk of the userbase will just shrug and accept it.
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The bulk of the userbase won't even know it exists until they run for political office and all of a sudden their perversions mysteriously become public knowledge.
Re:Recall made me leave Windows and MS for good. (Score:4, Informative)
When they think of "features" they think of what will appeal to manager and what will collect more data for their burgeoning advertising business. They don't care about what type of negative image this might create because they have never cared about that. Microsoft has long depended on a business model of making users feel like they're forced to purchase their products: you're forced because your employer uses Windows, you're forced because the software you need only runs on Windows, you're forced because if you go to a store that sells computers Windows PCs are the only option other than expensive Macs, you're forced because you genuinely don't know that alternatives exist, etc.
Competing on the merits of the products or the company has never even crossed their mind. This corporate culture is the true legacy of Bill Gates
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People who only have a vague perception of what an OS is would be pleased to "ask the computer" to, say, find and open a the file they were last working on, using questions like in an AI chatbot. I know people with PhDs that are competent in their field, who don't understand computers the slightest (and blindly trust Microsoft), whom I imagine would enjoy this feature.
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The feature is obviously desirable for many MS customers. Remember _you_, as the user, are an MS product now, not a customer.
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The fact that anyone at Microsoft thought that anything like this was a desirable feature is what bothers me the most. This "feature" got approved by multiple people and multiple levels of management. That more than anything makes me want to avoid the company like the plague. This is just about the worst thing I could think of in computer software, and it got approved as a feature by the people running Windows across the board. It's one thing to have mediocre ideas, but to actively create and sell a horrifying 1984 privacy nightmare as if it's a feature really bothers me beyond words. That anyone thought this was a good idea is genuinely mind boggling to me. The idea of having spyware like this anywhere near my computer (let alone built into my OS) makes me nauseous. The people who made this shouldn't be allowed to work in OS design.
You are less than 1% of their customer base actually bitching about it, and might even stop buying the product. If you actually paid money for it.
The other 99.9% of customers simply don’t give a shit. They’re too busy feeding their online addictions to notice. Apathy makes features to feed Greed now, not requests.
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I have no source, but like most of these features there will certainly be a way for it to be turned off via group policy, thus any medical practice etc will be safe unless they are idiots, and then they already likely have one drive with open sharing enabled so who cares...
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Re: Recall made me leave Windows and MS for good. (Score:2)
People aren't idiots for not having heard about the latest Microsoft idiotic misfeature, especially if they're not in the IT.
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And nobody destroys other people for fun like a capitalist...
fun ~ personal gain
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July 27, 1998- The industry is facing a year-end deadline to add a government-approved back door into network gear. Vendors that don't provide this access risk losing export privileges.
Cruising up and down Silicon Valley, NSA spooks from the agency's Fort Meade headquarters have been making pit stops at companies ranging from industry leaders Netscape Communications Corp. and Sun Microsystems, Inc. to start-ups such as VPNet Technologies, Inc. in order to get a peek at products still on the drawing board.
The NSA wants software vendors to make sure that any product with strong encryption have some way for the government to tap into the data. And because practically every commercial network application, router or switch these days includes encryption or an option for it, almost every vendor now has to answer to the NSA if it wants to export.
It's gotten to the point where no vendor hip to the NSA's power will even start building products without checking in with Fort Meade first. This includes even that supposed ruler of the software universe, Microsoft Corp. "It's inevitable that you design products with specific [encryption] algorithms and key lengths in mind," said Ira Rubenstein, Microsoft attorney and a top lieutenant to Bill Gates. By his own account, Rubenstein acts as a "filter" between the NSA and Microsoft's design teams in Redmond, Wash. "Any time that you're developing a new product, you will be working closely with the NSA," he noted.
When it comes to encryption, it's widely known that a 40-bit encryption key is easily breakable and hence rather useless. Until not long ago, this is what the U.S. government allowed for the export of software.
But the Clinton administration a year and a half ago said it would allow the export of products with stronger encryption keys by any vendor that agreed to add a "key-recovery" feature to its products by year-end - giving the government access to encrypted data without the end user's knowledge.
According to Bill Reinsche, Department of Commerce undersecretary for the Bureau of Export Controls, about 50 vendors have submitted plans for government-approved key-recovery, also called data-recovery. These companies, which include IBM, were rewarded with Key Management Infrastructure (KMI) export licenses to export products with 56-bit or stronger encryption until year-end.
But some companies are discovering that dealing with the Commerce Department for a KMI license means more involvement with the NSA.
The Bureau of Export Control is actually just a front for the NSA, said Alison Giacomelli, director of export compliance at VPNet Technologies, Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based vendor of IP-based encryption gateways. "The NSA has sign-off authority on these KMI licenses," Giacomelli said. In return for the KMI license, VPNet opened itself up for an NSA audit.
Others agree. "Everyone in Silicon Valley, including us, has to have specific staff - highly paid experts - to deal with them," said Chris Tolles, security group product manager at Sun. "Their job is to wrangle this from a policy standpoint."
Sun has had run-ins with the NSA in the past. Two years ago, the NSA objected to Sun including encryption in the exportable version of Java 1.1. The end result was that Sun stripped encryption out of Java 1.1 and the software was delayed by about six months. http://www.cnn.com/TECH/comput... [cnn.com]
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Love how user choice is a bug (Score:5, Insightful)
you dare uninstall something? Not on our operating system/advertising platform/information harvesting system!
Re:Love how user choice is a bug (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. They really have lost all restraint now. Decency or respect for their customers, MS never had...
Dumb question (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you go in and delete all these saves? They're just files, right? Or has/will Microsoft lock down this directory so you can see what's there but not touch them?
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That's why you log in as SYSTEM when you need to seriously f*ck with the operating system in windows.
Re: Dumb question (Score:2)
Or even better, start Windows Install or Recovery, start Command Prompt (Shift+F10 in Install) and delete the crappy files as you wish with max privileges.
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Well, you know that on typical Windows file systems deleted files stay around forever, because they use a LRU reuse strategy? So delete and then wipe free space. Or use a secure delete tool. A real hassle.
Dumb Answer (Score:2)
>> Can you go in and delete all these saves?
Yes, Absolutely.
1) Insert bootable LinuxMint USB drive.
2) reboot
3) Click Install
4) Enjoy.
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The best recommendation I've seen is let it install, find where it saves them, then block write access to that folder...
For the moment, MS still lets you have that control.
Showing their hand (Score:5, Insightful)
Making this more difficult to remove means this "feature" is (or will be) more for the benefit of Microsoft than the user. Otherwise, why would they care if it gets uninstalled. Being able to track everything done, even third-party applications, w/o having to add specific code, sounds like generalized/universal telemetry to me.
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Supposedly, you will not be able to uninstall it, however you will be able to disable it. The best reason I can think of for them to take this route is so that it can "accidentally" be enabled by a Windows update.
Which would be illegal in the EU, as this requires active and informed consent. In the US? You are screwed.
Hmm. One more use-case for VPN: Get the benefits of the GDPR-conforming settings in the EU? Does apply if you are in the EU, where you bought the license is immaterial. So of the machine thinks you are in the EU...
Windows 11 Recall is a good thing... (Score:3)
Career Decision (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are an attorney and you use this operating system with that feature installed, you will be (and should be) disbarred.
Privilege belongs to the client. Even if you violate it inadvertently, you're still responsible. This would be stupidity on the same level as forgetting your client's criminal case file at a donut shop.
So glad I escaped Windows.
Re:Career Decision (Score:5, Insightful)
Think the medical industry. Or psychiatry. Or anything else which involves HIPAA.
Think about all the corporate inside information which will now be more accessible to hackers.
Think about the financial system and all its privileged information.
This will be so fun to watch.
Re:Career Decision (Score:4, Informative)
If enabled, you have to start blacklisting all your online banking / credit card / shopping checkouts / stock trades / utility accounts / porn addiction.. Why would any sane person that cares about security want this?
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Why would any sane person that cares about security want this?
You answered your own question there: Most people do not care about security and whether the average person is sane is questionable. The Oxford dictionary defines "sanity" as "the fact of showing good judgment and understanding", which would indicate that the average person is not sane.
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I've said elsewhere business will likely be able to turn this off via group policy (everything else is turn-off-able, including things like the ads in start menu and windows store).
I don't say this to defend recall, only to say that any business who is rolling out windows corporately should have the knowledge to make this not an issue.
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The doctors I've talked to don't seem to have any idea about computer security. Are lawyers any better?
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This will be so fun to watch.
It will be. From the outside. In Europe, this must be default-off.
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If you are an attorney and you use this operating system with that feature installed, you will be (and should be) disbarred.
Privilege belongs to the client. Even if you violate it inadvertently, you're still responsible. This would be stupidity on the same level as forgetting your client's criminal case file at a donut shop.
So glad I escaped Windows.
More so Law Enforcement, (and yes many use Windows based networks) even if only in theory if evidence leaves the LE system, the chain of evidence has been broken. No matter if it's likely unaltered or not, it opens the door for a defense attorney to argue the point.
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If you are an attorney and you use this operating system with that feature installed, you will be (and should be) disbarred.
If you are a medical professional, this is a whole host of HIPAA violations wrapped up in pretty paper.
Indeed, if you are anyone handling confidential information other than your own, this is a major liability.
Ahh.. good (Score:2, Insightful)
Switched to Debian just in time.
Re: Ahh.. good (Score:2)
It doesn't think you're gay enough?
Have you reported this obvious bug?
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Guess you'd better stick with Windows, then.
Re: Ahh.. good (Score:2)
Real manly men use Slackware.
They don't call it Friend Markie (Score:2)
you GOT what I NEE-EED,
but you say it's just a bug
TL;DR (Score:3)
The world briefly thought MS made a good decision for once, but it's just another bug.
It is time. (Score:3)
If you do not like it, suffer for a bit. Within a year the software will follow the customers.
It's quite useful in certain scenarios (Score:3)
It's quite useful in certain scenarios or for certain users. I have it running (on macbook with parallels) and you can go back and skim through stuff when you forget something you may have discovered while doing some work or like discarded the file or website or even just to search n find some scanned document image etc.
Just like people take loads of screenshots on iOS or Android to keep a record of stuff or forward things to others etc, this does the same for your laptop automatically.
Actually, i would love to have this on my iPhone & Android phones too. If the screenshots were properly searchable (via text strings) it would be great. So many times I have to scroll like crazy to get at the screenshot of my ID or any document since neither iOS nor Android properly OCR the thousands of screenshots and images we keep on them (samsung has some options and there are apps but none work good atm)
For those who don't like it obviously they can disable it. I don't see any problem. In fact it doesn't even install on laptops with Intel/AMD CPUs, only the snapdragon or apple arm CPUs, though that will change in the future i guess.
Good old MicroCrap (Score:2)
They cannot even get the intrusive spying options right. What else is new?
Obviously, this thing will be hard to turn off and will turn itself back on at the first occasion. Also obviously, this is illegal under EU law because the data can be personal and can leave the computer and that means the GDPR says it _must_ be "default off". I guess MS needs another 500M fine to remind them that the law applies to them as well. Or maybe it will be default-off in the EU and "default creep" in the rest of the world.
Choice (Score:3)
It would be too easy to give the users the choice if they want it.
Re: (Score:2)
They will have to do that anyways. In Europe the GDPR forces this to be default-off. Whether the US gets that will be interesting to see.
"Sorry we accidentally gave you a choice." (Score:2)
"We promise it won't happen again."
Regulatory ShutDowns (Score:2)
Well...there goes my job. Our entire industry uses software that's Windows..and our regulatory compliance for data absolutely forbids this. There is no switching OS in this case.
We can't legally do our jobs and it's not our fault. It's crazy how we're at risk of massive fines for failing to protect data but MS gets to do stuff like this.
If you think customer service sucks now; just wait until all the call centers are shut down due to daily HIPPA fines.
Re:What about legal compliance? GDPR? (Score:4, Interesting)
That being said, it can be disabled through Group Policy Editor. At least for now. Most OS telemetry (but not all) can be disabled without any third-party software, and this falls well within the most category, especially since at present it requires express consent to install the appropriate model in the first place.
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, this very likely is a GDPR violation, as it records personal data without asking for informed consent first. Does not matter that the data stays local. The GDPR is smart enough to anticipate, for example, somebody stealing your device or you disposing of it without erasing that data. Hence in Europe, this must be "opt in" and it must be possible to operate Windows without it except for features that actually need this.
Incidentally, in Germany, this could be classified as a covert surveillance devi
Big, big problems (Score:3)
In terms of GDPR, yes, this feature creates major compliance issues except in personal home use
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, what I realized after doing some research, that this is a step to force everyone into renting cloud computer usage, so they can charge us even more for less, get us to invest in even faster internet connections, and mine our computer usage even more for a more detailed deep data profile, and of course to turn off our computers at will, if we do something the government or AI deems wrong.
Interesting idea. Of course, totally illegal in Europe, but not so much in the rest of the world.