I don't want to seem unduly cruel, but I strongly suggest examining whatever mislearnings led you to this point and get out and meet some people
- "iPhone's are generally more expensive, Android phones are generally cheaper", so having an iPhone signals financial "goodness". Same argument can be applied to lots of other products.
- "iPhones are generally better, so if you have Android you're compromising for some reason", e.g. lack of money to buy one, "weird" political/social/other beliefs, etc.
- Messaging systems are like accents; some people might prefer dating someone who speaks their language in a more similar accent, and others might prefer dating people who use the messaging system they prefer.
Also, a lot depends on your definition of "shallow".
The third point seems a little silly at first, but reflecting on my own musings on whether to go full Signal-only or not I guess I can imagine someone being iMessage only same as some people are Signal-only.
Thanks!
Every time I come on here the things I read get more and more fucking dumb.
Here in the UK I've literally never encountered it.
I have heard at least 10 women JOKE about my android. I'd say atleast 2 gfs in those years eventually made some snide remark.
Will you get dumped for having an android? No. Is it a small -1 mark for most women? I would say so.
And no these aren't totally brainless women. It's been doctors, MBA grads, women in tech, a writer.. I honestly think more regular woman are more sane about it actually and wouldn't care as much as 'fancier' women.
add "Launch in private mode"
On one level that's convenient, but on the other hand I'm not sure it's a very robust design.
A better solution would be to just pause the screen capture whenever incognito is open anywhere
This is already basically in place with DRM since the windows screenshot utility won't screencap most DRMed content on win apps like netflix or even on firefox nowadays.
What MS is adding on top of this is an API to check which tabs/web pages are visible and selectively black out web pages that are added to a given user level blacklist.
I dunno, and I say this as someone who works for a competitor and has no love for MS... a lot of the responses here seem really uncharitable. This isn't bad faith, it's just a rushed product with some poor planning. If Apple had rolled this same feature out with glitz and a giant slideshow about privacy and explained how everything was encrypted and never left the device, we'd all be crowing about how great it is even if it too was screenshotting incognito windows.
> Recall won’t save any content from your private browsing activity when you’re using Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, or other Chromium-based browsers.
Without a system-level incognito mode feature I could see apps allowing users to denote their windows as DRM content to avoid Recall.
0: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-cont...
That would prevent user-initiated screen captures as well. Not a good idea for browsers at least.
> nor should there be, obviously, as it would defeat the purpose
No it doesn't. Incognito mode is about leaving no trace on disk, that's all. Recall is the one defeating that purpose right now, if TFA is accurate.
[1] Not saying it's impossible. Only that I can't think of a straightforward solution in a pinch with my limited Windows experience and hacking skills.
It's not hard to support this functionality in the major browsers: it'd take me all of 15 minutes.
But it’s not the product people are criticizing, at all. Similar tools have existed for a long time and have not raised eyebrows except when it’s been forced by an employer or a school. It’s that it’s the OS putting an always on and enabled-by-default spyware on devices that are frequently shared by family members, when their average users who barely know what a web browser is and will just accept recommended defaults. Speaking of which, the whole spiel about Edge/IE is precisely their aggressive defaults. It’s the same here.
If you’re a startup building custom tools you can talk about rushed products and assume good intent. This software is built by a software company with some of the worlds best software engineers all the way up to the top. I mean, people trust them with everything from business secrets to payment details to mission critical services. This is clearly not a “rushed product oopsie”, it’s blatant disregard for privacy, and to a lesser extent, security.
I’m avoiding windows like the plague, but since seeing my mom get bombarded with “recommended Microsoft defaults” over the last decade or so, I’m convinced MS is deliberately exploiting uninformed users as much as they can get away with, while leaving hidden options for power users to disable the ads and the crapware so they don’t leave. This total recall debacle is probably a similar attempt at using their unknowing user base to train their new AI models, or similar. If it was a genuinely useful product it would not be enabled by default.
And I have to repeat: if Apple Computer had pushed the same product, but with a slide talking about how it was all locally encrypted and unextractable and tied to both the device and the user account, HN would be celebrating the attention to privacy even though macs too are "frequently shared". And the reasoning would be how strong the security engineering was around the process, because we love that stuff and we love macs.
MS doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt, and it leaks into the technical content of the argument, and that's wrong. And FWIW I'm mostly just handwaving the technical details. I mean, do we know for a fact that MS is *not* encrypting this with a TPM-managed key tied to the user account? I bet they are, honestly.
I don’t believe so, at least not if it’s enabled-by-default.
> MS doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt
Apple doesn’t rely on benefit of the doubt because they are very clear about how the privacy of new products work (say Touch and Face ID), and Microsoft is not. I mean just look at this very thread, it’s super unclear how it works and interacts with other windows feature (some of which are premium) like fde/bitlocker and whether there’s telemetry/training. That obviously contributes to the “harsh” response. As it should.
I agree with you, but that’s not great evidence for your point. Bring up any random Apple feature and people will be quick to warn you about their misunderstandings of it. “Face ID means Apple has all our pictures now!” “Apple Keychain shares all your passwords with them!” Etc.
Windows is actually pushing for bitlocker by default now. I believe new Windows 11 installs either are already or will soon start defaulting to enabling bitlocker across the board.
> telemetry/training
It's really just timer triggered screenshots + OCR + an SLM (small language model) running on device on a TPU/NPU, GPU, or other ONNX compatible device.
I'm generally super uncharitable about Microsoft since a lot of their stuff is a nasty black box with unclear security assumptions however with Recall, it seems like people are really jumping to conclusions without really even looking into what all it is.
This is a largely "unsophisticated" product made by bolting a bunch of more or less preassembled components and the bulk of which is open source.
- Screenshot + OCR is almost certainly Microsoft Powertoys Text Extractor (https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys)
- The DB is sqlite but the system is probably just kernel-memory which is a local .NET application: https://github.com/microsoft/kernel-memory
- The SLM is Phi-3 which is open and designed primarily to run locally https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-phi-3-red...
- The actual underlying tech stack is DirectML (https://github.com/microsoft/DirectML) and ONNX (https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime).
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So the data is intended to be encrypted at rest along with the rest of the OS, it's all run locally (which isn't a handwaivy thing, the tech is all very much capable of running locally) and if you don't have hardware capable of running it, it shouldn't be enabled in the first place.
My confusion with all of this is why Recall didn't start out as a PowerToys feature. It sounds like the exact type of internal "look at this cool little toy I built" thing that generally makes it into PowerToys but I'm assuming some exec ran with the opportunity and said "this is awesome, let's ship it with the OS and make it a highliner feature for our AI push" which is how we got here.
We are speed running into a neuromancer dystopia where tech companies control every facet of our lives. Why would I be ok with them making it easier to monitor my every keystroke?
It's Microsoft. There no reason to extend any charity whatsoever when talking about this company.
Not all of us, no.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/retrace-your-ste...
I'm saying that thankfully they are not using the threat of your guarded personal data being exposed because you want this feature but don't want to use Edge.
Personally I don't think people should actually allow this type of feature. It's too much of a risk. But my point stands on its own, that at least they aren't creating an even more perverse incentive to use Edge, which they absolutely could have done, and seems the MO of the Microsoft today who would sacrifice all else to be able to say there's 1 or 2 more Edge or Bing users.
What it actually is however is hastily slapped together, enabled by default, and secured about as much as any other random system file, so MS doesn’t get a pass here, but they’re not twirling their mustaches like some would believe.
Good god how more obvious could it be?
Anyone still using this software is a lost cause.
I think the tech community is responsible for keeping companies like MS in check and pushing back against literal spyware being normalised in operating systems.
Microsoft was the company that used to add bespoke code to Windows to maintain compatibility with old third party software, patch explorer.exe to stop third party customizations from crashing it, etc. While the whole Recall thing is a pretty bad idea for most users, the lack of care extended to the third party browser with overwhelming market share among their users is just sad. Are they counting on people switching to Edge because “PSA: you’ll be recorded if you watch pr0n in Chrome!”?