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Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall feature is coming back in October (www.ghacks.net)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

198 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you thought that Microsoft was done with Recall after its catastrophic reveal as the main feature of Copilot+ PCs, you are mistaken.

Microsoft wants to bring it back this October 2024. Good news is that the company plans to introduce it in test builds of the Windows 11 operating system in October. In other words: do not expect the feature to hit stable Windows 11 PCs before 2025 at the earliest.

While Recall may have sounded great on paper and on work-related PCs, users and experts alike expressed concern. Users expressed fears that malware could steal Recall data to know exactly what they did in the past couple of months.

Others did not trust Microsoft to keep the data secure. We suggested to make Recall opt-in, instead of opt-out, to make sure that users knew what they were getting into when enabling it.

Microsoft pulled the Recall feature shortly after its announcement and published information about its future in June. There, Microsoft said that it would make Recall opt-in by default. It also wanted to improve security by enrolling in Windows Hello and other features.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. And that's not helpful for your average Windows user. If your average Windows user calls tech support, they'll get a simple answer. If they instead walk into a tech support room, they'll get multiple answers, with the techs trying to one-up each other because that's how they work.

So if you're a novice in an area, talk one-on-one, don't ask a crowd.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If your average Windows user calls tech support, they’ll get a simple answer

They'll get a simple answer alright. In fact, they'll be lucky if they get any answer at all that is not reboot, retry, reinstall or some other cargo cult nonsense from some on-paper "MCSA" in a third world country.

And sorry for going on a rant here, but Windows tech support forums are truly the shit tier of all tech support forums, because very few people actually have the skill to properly diagnose problems in Windows when something outside of the realm of expected behavior occurs. It's all learned behaviorisms instead of understanding: reinstall your drivers! defrag your hard drive! run ipconfig /renew! clean your cache folder! delete your cookies! Never: "look in the system eventlog for an error event coming from this source, and tell me what the error code says"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

they’ll be lucky if they get any answer at all that is not reboot, retry, reinstall or some other

And 90% of the time, that'll solve the problem.

The other 10% of the time, hopefully you have a decent IT dept at your work or school. I worked at one, and we occasionally had a weird one where we needed to actually check the event logs and figure out what was going on (usually it's faulty HW).

If I was bored, I'd even look at people's personal equipment, provided they asked nicely and they were okay with my upfront "no guarantees" spiel. At that point, I had already switched to Linux 100% on my personal devices (and my work machine was Linux w/ Windows in a VM), though my job was Windows tech support. However, when anyone came in, there would always be a host of "did you try X?" and whatnot, where X is some relatively obscure cli-only tool (e.g. flushing the DNS cache) or some BIOS setting. Nerds love a puzzle, and a visitor bringing a problem is a much more exciting puzzle than whatever is in the ticket queue, and they want to impress the guest with their knowledge (but more often than not, the guest just ignores everything they say).

That lone person will give you a simple answer. It may not be the best answer, but it'll probably solve the problem, though it may cost you more (e.g. you may need to buy some new hardware or spend time reinstalling). But it'll be simpler and probably not overwhelming.