Technology

There ain't no way windows could ever be a secure OS because it does everything wrong, deliberately, so it can not be linux.

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.

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?

And you’ll probably need Windows Pro to be able to disable it. The average user isn’t digging through a registry so it will stay on for most users.

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.

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 is the best summary I could come up with:

This, as many users in infosec communities on social media immediately pointed out, sounds like a potential security nightmare.

Copilot+ PCs are required to have a fast neural processing unit (NPU) so that processing can be performed locally rather than sending data to the cloud; local snapshots are protected at rest by Windows’ disk encryption technologies, which are generally on by default if you’ve signed into a Microsoft account; neither Microsoft nor other users on the PC are supposed to be able to access any particular user’s Recall snapshots; and users can choose to exclude apps or (in most browsers) individual websites to exclude from Recall’s snapshots.

This all sounds good in theory, but some users are beginning to use Recall now that the Windows 11 24H2 update is available in preview form, and the actual implementation has serious problems.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont, first in a thread on Mastodon and later in a more detailed blog post, has written about some of the potential implementation issues after enabling Recall on an unsupported system (which is currently the only way to try Recall since Copilot+ PCs that officially support the feature won’t ship until later this month).

The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity.

Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion feature to work.

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