this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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818
Not Total Recall (1990) (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Am I the only one who honestly thinks Recall is totally useless? I feel like everyone is acting like it's useful and the only thing to debate over is whether it's "worth the security risk". But I feel like it's not even worth anything at all. Even if there was no risk and I was 100% in control I don't think I would ever use such a feature.

Wouldn't you waste just as much (if not more) time looking through old screenshots, than to just go look up a solution the old fashioned way? Whatever you were looking at is probably still in your browser history too.

I know the point is it has some AI crap with it, but that still requires you to remember enough information about what you're looking for to filter them. And if you know that much information I think you could probably just find whatever you were looking for again normally.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

I've never heard a single good thing said about recall from anyone lol. Maybe my social media feed a bit of an echo chamber πŸ˜…

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

That's because you know how to find information in a computer quickly and precisely. Recalk is for clueless people. They can ask the computer in plain English.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah but to what end? Is a clueless person going to find answers to something by looking back through their past clueless behavior? Or maybe it's just so they have a record of what they screwed up so they can fix it? In that case I think some sort of changelog to all system wide settings that the user modifies, with timestamps, would be infinitely more useful than Recall.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I really can't understand why people would want it, given the added risks.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

The problem is, knowing Microsft, its gonna be turned on by default. And half the people who use Windows barely know how to turn the computer on and off. Let alone dive deep into some half baked settings app to figure out where to turn it off.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 3 months ago (2 children) 
*/1

Get out. You're fired.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The sysadmin version of

if(predicate) { return true; } else { return false; }

[–] [email protected] 62 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Oh does * mean every minute anyway.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago

You are learning which is great.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 months ago (1 children)

YES

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Believe it or not, jail.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

JAIL

Believe it or not.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Yes but why are you saying that to me?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Not understanding Parks And Rec memes? Also jail.

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I'm not. I was just telling you "what" they said.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (6 children)

That's not the worst idea ever. Say a screenshot is 10 mb. 10x60x 8 hours =4800mb per work day. 30 days is 150gb worst case scenario. I suppose you could check the previous screenshot and if it's the same, then don't write a new file. Combine that with OCR and a utility to scroll forward and backward through time, it might be a useful tool.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I suppose you could check the previous screenshot and if it’s the same

Hmmm... this gives me an idea... maybe we could even write a special algorithm that checks whether only certain parts of picture have changed, and store only those, while re-using the parts that haven't changed. It would be a specialized compression algorithm for Moving Pictures. But that sounds difficult, it would probably need a whole Group of Experts to implement. Maybe we can call it something like Moving Picture Experts Group, or MPEG for short : )

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Just use JPEG instead of PNG.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

I mean taking the screenshot is the easy part, getting reliable OCR on the other hand ...

In my experience (tesseract) current OCR works well for continuous text blocks but it has a hard time with tables, illustrations, graphs, gui widgets, etc.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

That's what recall is... It's literally screenshotring and. Ocr / ai parsing Combined with a sqllite database

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

If only MS used DuckDB then they wouldn't have such a huge PR disaster on their hands.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

I think it would be hugely useful.

But obviously I don't want a malware company like Microsoft doing that "for me" (actually the purpose is hyperspecific ads if not long term planning to exfiltrate the data).

Not sure if I even trust myself with the security that data would require.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Are you on 16k resolution or something?

When i take a screenshot of my 3440x1440 display it's 1MB big. I mean this doesn't change the issue in its core but dramatically downsizes it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I just chose a number haha. That makes it much more feasible then.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Also, 1MB on full resolution. You could also downscale the images dramatically after you OCR them. So let's say we shoot in full res, OCR and then downscale to 50%. Still enough so everything is human readable, combined with searchable OCR you're down to 7,5GB for a whole month.

Absolutely feasable. Let's say we're up to 8GB to include the OCR text and additional metadata and just reserve 10GB on your system for that to make double sure.

Now you have 10GB to track your whole 3440x1440 display.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

What's OCR?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Optical Character Recognition

Making a program read a text in image form and make it computer-readable / searchable / selectable

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Optical Character Recognition. Basically just extracting text from an image.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago

they're running 10 screens in parallel

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Running OCR every second sounds like a great way to choke your CPU

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

You could optimize it though.

As said one comment above, check if it's the same composition as before and don't take a screenshot if it didn't change. Make some rules to filter out video content so if you have a youtube video open it doesn't take a screenshot every second just because the video is running.

Or you could actually integrate this with your window manager. Only take a screenshot if you move / resize / open / close a window. Make a small extension for browsers that tell it to make a screenshot if you scroll / close / open a page. Then you don't have to make a screenshot and compare with the one before.

This wouldn't be as thorough as just forcing screenshots all the time and you would probably not catch stuff like writing a text in libreoffice as you don't change anything with the window. But it could be a resourceful way to do that.

And if for example no screenshot was taken for 1 minute because nothing called for that, you could just take one regardless. That way you have a minimum of one screenshot per minute or as often as window manager / browser calls for it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

That's why the new cpus have npus on board...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Once a minute, and only if the screen contents change. I imagine there's something lightweight enough.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

In order to be certified for running Recall, machines currently must have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit, basically an AI coprocessor). I assume that is what makes it practical to do by offloading the required computation from the CPU.

Apparently it IS possible to circumvent that requirement using a hack, which is what some of the researchers reporting on it have done, but I haven't read any reports on how that affects CPU usage in practice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Recall analyses each screenshot and uses AI or whatever to add tags to it. I'd assume that's what the NPU is used for.

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