Microsoft is Putting AI Actions Into the Windows File Explorer (theverge.com) 60
Microsoft is starting to integrate AI shortcuts, or what it calls AI actions, into the File Explorer in Windows 11. From a report: These shortcuts let you right-click on a file and quickly get to Windows AI features like blurring the background of a photo, erasing objects, or even summarizing content from Office files.
Four image actions are currently being tested in the latest Dev Channel builds of Windows 11, including Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, the blur background and erase objects features found in the Photos app, and the remove background option in Paint. Similar AI actions will soon be tested with Office files, The Verge added.
Four image actions are currently being tested in the latest Dev Channel builds of Windows 11, including Bing visual search to find similar images on the web, the blur background and erase objects features found in the Photos app, and the remove background option in Paint. Similar AI actions will soon be tested with Office files, The Verge added.
and how exactly does it summarise that doc (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly, they'd have to run a cloud analysis on it, which means they would need to collect and store your data.
The analaysis feature is only for files on OneDrive / Sharepoint. The files are already on their cloud. AI has nothing to do with this.
Re:and how exactly does it summarise that doc (Score:5, Insightful)
by sending it off to a server someplace for 'analysis'?
You forgot the most important step for Microsoft. The analysis data is then sold to the highest bidder.
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by sending it off to a server someplace for 'analysis'? just fix the godam search!
*sigh*. This is what Slashdot has become. An equal part complaint that consumer hardware is coming with AI acceleration, that software makers are tying their software to specific hardware, that software is getting large because companies are including AI several GB large models in the package, and all the while thinking that their conspiracy that the entire document is sent to another machine somehow remotely makes sense.
No kiddo, most AI stuff is not sent anywhere else for processing. Generative stuff may
Why not fix the basics? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to search to work reasonably, be able to sort by date--including files within directories and get total size of directories for a start.
I'm not sure i need ai to look thru directories.
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I'd just like it not to become unresponsive for no apparent reason. I've been seeing this happen fairly regularly on multiple machines since Win 10. Extremely annoying.
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It's almost impossible to figure out a solution without knowing more about your system specs. Now, the Intel chips from 12th generation and newer have that big.little approach, with Performance Cores and Efficiency Cores. By nature, this causes many programs to not respond well when you hit an efficiency core.
Re:Why not fix the basics? (Score:4, Funny)
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They should put a physical button on your pc's case that lets you toggle between the two modes. They could label it something simple, like "turbo"...
What's old is new again!
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I'd just like it not to become unresponsive for no apparent reason.
When I still used windows I found larges numbers of files in MyDocuments or Downloads caused this. Move most files elsewhere and don't auto set background virus scanning on them.
Windows will just keep fucking with you no matter what you do. I was spending more time undoing update damage than getting work done.
Re:Why not fix the basics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look... they spent BILLIONS developing "A.I." solutions, and come hell or high water they WILL find a problem to solve even if they have to make one!
=Smidge=
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they WILL find a problem to solve even if they have to make one!
They could use an AI for that... :-)
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There are multiple groups of people within Microsoft, it's not just one big mass of developers.
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There are multiple groups of people within Microsoft, it's not just one big mass of developers.
Yes, that is true. So what are all of these "multiple groups of people" doing? They certainly aren't trying to make **ANYTHING** better.
I can sort of understand them putting stupid AI shit in Microsoft Office. They need to keep coming up with new gimmicks so they can sell more copies of Office. But Windows is a guaranteed money maker. Every year more than 200 million computers are sold and most of them have Windows pre-installed. I don't know what the price is today but several years ago OEMs were
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I use this program multiple times daily on all my machines. https://www.voidtools.com/ [voidtools.com]
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And I open a command prompt and type "dir /s ..."
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I would love to use an alternate search tool on Windows, but the only place I am still using it is on work hardware where I'm not allowed to install software. As such, I have no alternative to hopes and prayers that Microsoft will improve Windows if I want things like search to make sense.
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Good lord, they've reinvented "find"! Only not as powerful.
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I'm a big fan of VoidTools Everything. As far as I can tell Everything just makes an index of filenames and allows you to search it in both simple search terms and things like path-based search and regex. No shade on VoidTools, but it doesn't seem like a particularly difficult thing to create if you are willing to keep the use case simple and straightforward.
Every time I get a new Windows machine or a OS update I check if they have managed to make it possible to do what Everything does, and the answer is al
Re:Why not fix the basics? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they cannot fix the basics. They have heaped technological debt on technological debt and probably fired anybody that could still navigate the maze...
It is rather striking how MS has ignored basic problems for years now and always brings new features (that nobody asked for) instead. Looks to me like they want to misdirect away from a massive problem ...
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It's completely anecdotal, but the amount of bloat between Windows 10 and Windows 11 is kind of astonishing.
I've got an older ThinkPad Carbon X1 that came with Windows 10, that ran perfectly fine on it. After upgrading it to Windows 11 it won't run for more than a few minutes without throttling itself down to the point that it's unusable. I thought maybe something didn't upgrade properly, so I reinstalled Windows 11 from scratch, same issue. So I thought maybe I needed to put new thermal paste on the CPU si
There is nothing AI can't do! (Score:3)
It's an all the time, every time companion! It'll replace your friends! It'll be better than family! It can drive your car! It can spy on you while you're sleeping! It's a breakfast cereal!
Re:There is nothing AI can't do! (Score:4, Funny)
It's What Plants Crave
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Really? It's got electrolytes? If it's green, I'm in!!
The Year of Linux (Score:1)
KDE Neon is what I settled on. It has a crazy amount of bugs, just like Fedora, but so does Windows these days. Have you tried using High Contrast mode in Windows 11? It's just impossible.
My only remaining issue is that I can't do Blazor development in VS Codium, so I'll have to keep a Windows 11 (ugh!) VM around for VS 2022.
Re: The Year of Linux (Score:3)
Every time I reboot Windows it acts like it forgot what brightness I want for the laptop panel. But then I go into display settings and the fucking slider is right where I left it. If I click on it carefully enough that it doesn't move, nothing happens. If I drag it even one pixel then it "wakes up" and the brightness is set to match the slider position.
As you say, lots of bugs in the alternatives, but that's not different from Windows. It's just a clown show. Windows 7 generally worked pretty well and had
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Windows can't fix broken drivers or crap hardware. That fart noise is inside your head, seems there is mostly hot air in there.
The problem is in Windows, since a) the hardware works fine when told what to do correctly by windows and b) this is a regression, this equipment didn't always do this.
Here comes Super Clippy (Score:2)
https://postimg.cc/v4k2p3Tx [postimg.cc]
Let's just skip ahead (Score:1)
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Re: Let's just skip ahead (Score:2)
...and then the things you've disabled become re-enables without your consent with the next update when the post-update setup restores the defaults.
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You need to remove powershell to be safe.
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Please clap (Score:2)
They have AI. Please clap.
No Security Concerns Here (Score:3)
I'd rather trust the toothless hooker down the street from the office with my wallet.
This will be a nightmare for companies trying to compartmentalize information within their networks.
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Indeed. MS has to be classified as a malicious actor more and more.
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There's an app for that (Score:3)
Fortunately, there's plenty of 3rd party utilities you can use instead of File Explorer.
MS has invested so much in AI that it's gonna have to stuff it into everything to justify the investment to shareholders, even though customers are lukewarm at best, and often downright hostile (like me).
Looks like I will need a replacement then (Score:4, Insightful)
Sad times when the OS maker has to be considered an enemy and attacker...
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Sad times indeed, but it's been true at least since they started shoving telemetry into the OS, and it's been double true since they started shoving it into their old OSes.
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Indeed. But things are getting _worse_.
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Microsoft will monitor users in the new Windows 9 Operating System in order to determine how the new OS is used, thus decide what tweaks and changes are need to be made. During Windows 8 testing, Microsoft said that they had data showing Start Menu usage had dropped, but it seems that the tools they were using at the time weren't as evolved as the new 'Asimov' monitor. The new system is codenamed 'Asimov' and will provide a near real-time view of what is happening on users' machines. Rest assured, the data is going to be obscured and aggregated, but intelligible enough to allow Microsoft to get detailed insights into user interactions with the OS. Mary Jo Foley says that the system was originally built by the Xbox Team and now is being used by the Windows team. Users who will download the technical preview of Windows 9, which is said to get unveiled today, will become 'power users' who will utilize the platform in unique scenarios. This will help Microsoft identify any odd bugs ahead of the final release. https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
Last week came the warning, now comes the roll out. One of the most most controversial aspects of Windows 10 is coming to Windows 7 and 8. Microsoft has released upgrades which enable the company to track what a user is doing. The updates – KB3075249, KB3080149 and KB3068708 – all add "customer experience and diagnostic telemetry" to the older versions. gHacks points out that the updates will ignore any previous user preferences reporting: "These four updates ignore existing user preferences stored in Windows 7 and Windows 8 (including any edits made to the Hosts file) and immediately starts exchanging user data with vortex-win.data.microsoft.com and settings-win.data.microsoft.com." https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
The Verge has a piece on Windows 10 privacy that presents actual passages from the EULA and privacy policy that suggest what the OS is capturing and sending back to Microsoft. The piece takes a Microsoft-friendly point of view, arguing that all Microsoft is doing is either helpful or already being done either by Google or older releases of Windows, and also touches on how to shut things off (which is also explained here). But the quoted passages from the EULA and the privacy policy are interesting to review, particularly if you look out for legal weasel words that are open to Microsoft's interpretation, such as "various types (of data)", diagnostic data "vital" to the operation of Windows (cannot be turned off), sharing personal data "as necessary" and "to protect the rights or property of Microsoft". And while their explanations following the quotes may attempt an overly friendly spin, the article may be right about one thing: "In all, only a handful of these new features, and the privacy concerns they bring, are actually in fact new... Most people have just been either unaware or just did not care of their existence in past operating systems and software." https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
According to Ars Technica, Windows 10 will still send telemetry and other data to Microsoft-owned domains — no matter how tightly you crank down the privacy settings. Even with everything buttoned down, Cortana, OneDrive, and Web Search from the Start Menu disabled, the OS still phones home, using a random system ID that persists across reboots. It apparently also tries to bypass proxies to do it. "Some of the traffic looks harmless but feels like it shouldn't be happening. For example, even with no Live tiles pinned to Start (and hence no obvious need to poll for new tile data), Windows 10 seems to download new tile info from MSN's network from time to time, using unencrypted HTTP to do so. ... Other traffic looks a little more troublesome. Windows 10 will periodically send data to a Microsoft server named ssw.live.com. ... The exact nature of the information being sent isn't clear—it appears to be referencing telemetry settings—and again, it's not clear why any data is being sent at all. We disabled telemetry on our test machine using group policies." https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Slippery slope.
As expected, Windows Update dropped off several packages of security and reliability fixes for Windows 7 earlier this week, part of the normal Patch Tuesday delivery cycle for every version of Windows. But some hawk-eyed observers noted a surprise in one of those Windows 7 packages. What was surprising about this month's Security-only update, formally titled the "July 9, 2019 -- KB4507456 (Security-only update)," is that it bundled the Compatibility Appraiser, KB2952664, which is designed to identify issues that could prevent a Windows 7 PC from updating to Windows 10.
Among the fierce corps of Windows Update skeptics, the Compatibility Appraiser tool is to be shunned aggressively. The concern is that these components are being used to prepare for another round of forced updates or to spy on individual PCs. The word telemetry appears in at least one file, and for some observers it's a short step from seemingly innocuous data collection to outright spyware. [...] I strongly suspect that some part of the Appraiser component on Windows 7 SP1 had a security issue of its own. If that's the case, then the updates indisputably belong in a Security-only update. And if they happen to get installed on systems where administrators had taken special precautions not to install those components, Microsoft's reaction seems to be, "Well ... tough." https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
A new editorial by BetaNews columnist Mark Wilson argues that Windows 10 isn't an operating system -- it's "a vehicle for ads". An anonymous reader quotes their report: They appear in the Start menu, in the taskbar, in the Action Center, in Explorer, in the Ink Workspace, on the Lock Screen, in the Share tool, in the Windows Store and even in File Explorer.
Microsoft has lost its grip on what is acceptable, and even goes as far as pretending that these ads serve users more than the company -- "these are suggestions", "this is a promoted app", "we thought you'd like to know that Edge uses less battery than Chrome", "playable ads let you try out apps without installing". But if we're honest, the company is doing nothing more than abusing its position, using Windows 10 to promote its own tools and services, or those with which it has marketing arrangements. https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
To help with the smooth running of Windows 10, and to get an idea of how users interact with the operating system, Microsoft collects telemetry data, which includes information on the device Windows 10 is running on, a list of installed apps, crash dumps, and more. Telemetry data recorded by Windows 10 is, in a nutshell, just technical information about the device the OS is on, and how Windows and any installed software is performing, but it can occasionally include personal information. If you're worried about that, the news that Microsoft is sharing telemetry data with third parties might concern you. Microsoft recently struck a deal with security firm FireEye to provide access to Windows 10 telemetry data, in exchange for having FireEye's iSIGHT Threat Intelligence technology included in its Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection service. WDATP is an enterprise security product that helps enterprises detect, investigate, and respond to advanced attacks on their networks and is different from the free version of Windows Defender. The upsides of the deal are obvious for both Microsoft and FireEye, and enterprise customers will certainly benefit from the partnership. It's not known exactly what data Microsoft has made available to FireEye, but in a detailed TechNet article on its telemetry gathering the software giant originally said: "Microsoft may share business reports with OEMs and third party partners that include aggregated and anonymized telemetry information. Data-sharing decisions are made by an internal team including privacy, legal, and data management." https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
France's National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) has ordered Microsoft to "stop collecting excessive data and tracking browsing by users without consent," adding that Microsoft must comply with the French Data Protection Act within next three months. BetaNews reports: In addition to this, the chair of CNIL has notified Microsoft that it needs to take "satisfactory measures to ensure the security and confidentiality of user data." The notice comes after numerous complaints about Windows 10, and a series of investigations by French authorities which revealed a number of failings on Microsoft's part. Microsoft is accused of not only gathering excessive data about users, but also irrelevant data. The CNIL points to Windows 10's telemetry service which gathers information about the apps users have installed and how long each is used for. The complaint is that "these data are not necessary for the operation of the service." https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
According to the PC Security Channel (via TechSpot), Microsoft's Windows 11 sends data not only to the Redmond, Washington-based software giant, but also to multiple third parties. To analyze DNS traffic generated by a freshly installed copy of Windows 11 on a brand-new notebook, the PC Security Channel used the Wireshark network protocol analyzer that reveals precisely what is happening on a network. The results were astounding enough for the YouTube channel to call Microsoft's Windows 11 "spyware."
As it turned out, an all-new Windows 11 PC that was never used to browse the Internet contacted not only Windows Update, MSN and Bing servers, but also Steam, McAfee, geo.prod.do, and Comscore ScorecardResearch.com. Apparently, the latest operating system from Microsoft collected and sent telemetry data to various market research companies, advertising services, and the like. https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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If that's how you see Microsoft, you shouldn't be using Windows.
What software vendor *isn't* an enemy and attacker?
What a Shit Show (Score:3)
They break the context menu with the tiny indecipherable icons replacing copy and paste and now they want to crowd the context menu with this fucking crap? What a shit show.
Pfft File Explore (Score:2)
I stick to good old Directory Opus [gpsoft.com.au]
Well worth the cost!
Beats the PANTS off of File Explorer any day of the week.
Hey, Alex.. (Score:2)
I'll take "Things Nobody Asked For" for $800.
Oooh, I can hardly wait... (Score:2)
To start using something other than the file explorer.
Useful Feature, Bad Implementation (Score:2)
That actually sounds useful. However how it's being implemented is not. If this was plug-in based so when you've finally gotten around to organizing your family photos you can load a bunch of related plugins and complete the task more efficiently, that would be awesome. Instead it looks like Microsoft is forcing their preferred AI options on you and they're always there. So Microsoft has to decide what is important enough to everyone (and their bottom line) and only clutter the menu with those options.