Technology

It's encrypted; the author is pointing out that it has to be decrypted to be used, and then the data can be obtained.

Security and privacy concerns aside, I saw someone commenting on the use case, asking who would ever want something like this.

One problem I hadn't appreciated for a long time was that some people apparently have real problems with dealing with the Windows UI in terms of file access. They don't know where their data is being saved. This, in my opinion, is in significant part a Microsoft UI problem induced by various virtual interfaces being slapped on top of the filesystem ("Desktop", "My Documents", application save directories, etc) to try to patch over the issue that the filesystem layout was kinda organically-designed in a kind of cryptic way back in the day.

But if you can remember a snippet of text in what you were working on, you can find that thing again even if you have no idea where you stored it. Like, it's content-keyed file access.

That's not very useful to a techie. They know how to navigate their system's filesystem, and even if they lose track of a particular thing, they know how to use the system's filesystem search tools to search for filenames or content. They can search for recently-modified files. They know how to generally get ahold of stuff.

But for the people who can't do that, reducing their interface to a single search box might make file access more approachable.

Now, let me reiterate that I think that a whole lot of this is Microsoft repeatedly patching over UI problems they created in the past rather than fixing them. And they've done this before over the decades with stuff other than document access. It's hard to navigate the filesystem to find an installed program a la the MS-DOS era, so they stick stuff in a Start Menu to make it more accessible. That gets too crowded, installers start slapping shortcuts on the desktop. That gets too crowded, installers start adding system tray icons. That gets too crowded, the Start Menu becomes searchable. Each interface just becomes progressively less-usable and the solution each time is to stick a new interface in on top of the old one, which in turn contributes to the complexity of the system as a whole.

But that doesn't mean that they aren't trying to address a real problem.

I think that they'd do better with something like having a rapidly-accessible log of recently-accessed files (like, maybe have the filesystem maintain a time-based doubly-linked list of those) and be able to rapidly search the content of documents based on mod time so that recent stuff gets hit quickly, then trying to make their existing search tools more accessible. That doesn't replicate data across the system and produce some of the problems here. It also permits for fully-searching content, rather than just the stuff that was on a screen when the Recall system grabbed a screenshot and OCRed it. Maybe they've done something like that in recent years; I'm many years out-of-date on Windows.

I'd also add that I think that personal computer systems in general would benefit from giving users better control over where their data is replicated to. It's kind of confusing...you've got swap (well, encrypted swap probably helps somewhat with this). Browser history. Any clipboard manager's retention. Credentials stores. Application-saved copies of in-progress files. Various caches. If you use some kind of cloud-based storage, you're pushing data out to other computers. Backups. Just a lot of state that can be replicated all over the place and is hard to go back and track down and remove. That's even before stuff like issues with doing secure deletion on existing filesystems (which we had a conversation about the other day, everything from log-structured filesystems to wear-leveling on SSDs inducing data replication). If you want something definitely gone, be able to manage your data's lifetime, something that I think that a lot of people -- even non-techies -- would like, you really have to have a lot of technical knowledge of the system's internals as things stand today. This Recall thing is egregious, replicates data all over, but it's far from the first feature that makes it harder for people to understand and control the lifetime of data on their computer.

I don't think that the software world has done a great job of letting people control that data lifetime. And I think that it's something that a user should reasonably be able to expect out of their computer.

Being super smart and super evil are NOT mutually exclusive. Intelligence =|= morality.

Hardware controls are meaningless if an attacker gets you to click on a dodgy link in a phishing email or you fall for a social engineering scam when "Microsoft" calls you because your computer has a virus.

Umm, no. Just...yeah, no.

The main problem with this theory is that Microsoft is absolutely abysmal at user end security, and they always have been. Frankly, they do not understand the issue.

But, more to the point, the whole TPM/secure boot stuff is a compromise; originally (I think this was about the time of Vista), they partnered with OEMs to have them include a DRM chip that made it literally impossible to install any non-windows OS on your laptop. They've managed to still get an implementation of TPM that makes switching your OS too confusing/difficult for the average user.

Anyway, bottom line is they only care about money, and they neither care or even understand the security needs of the end user.

Because Windows not only encrypts the system disk (C:) but also all connected hard drives

And they're gonna just enable it without asking if i want all my hard drives encrypted first?

Nah dude. TPMs have always been about implementing DRMs. These companies hate that they can't control our PCs, they want to be sure we can only run their approved apps. Like it works in iOS and (to a lesser degree for now) in Android. And even there they are pushing hard for even more restrictive DRM.

For example, some years ago I worked with a SaaS that implemented and sold some security products. One of our customers was a big retailer (for specialized products, not going into more details to avoid doxxing) that was having a problem with scalpers buying all their inventory as soon as they released it. So they were trying to put a show for regulators about stopping scalpers because their customers were complaining. We suggested that the only real solution was to have some real life verification of purchases. But in the end they went with the awful attestation APIs offered by Apple and Google to "fix" this. And in case you are not familiar, these APIs are just TPM based DRMs. So now, if you have a rooted/jailbroken phone you can't even buy with this retailer anymore.

Note that this company wasn't trying to fuck customers directly, they were just lazy and incentivised to not really fix the problem (a sale is a sale, even if to a scalper). But even then the end result is that their customers got their digital freedom rights restricted. It's just a terrible technology IMO, the incentives from companies are all terrible. And that's before we start considering the real intentions of awful companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google. IMO they are actually pushing for techno feudalism, but that's my conspiracy theory hahaha.

So no, I doubt they were thinking about security with this recall bullshit. As other people have explained in their comments it doesn't really protect much in practice. Plus this whole AI push has just been a stupid scramble from these companies to grab a big piece of the stupid AI pie from other companies hahaha, there is no long term plan here, don't lie to yourself and us.

I follow Kevin on Mastodon. He’s the real deal and is absolutely not interested in the clicks or outrage. He’s trying to make it accessible.

Eh, they could have written it differently, each time hypothesizing that someone might wonder XYZ, but I appreciate the brevity of this format. And I do not think that the questions or answers are unreasonable.

Not just enterprise. Some organizations handle extremely sensitive information of victims of crimes, survivors of wars, potential political targets, just to name a few. A feature taking a screenshot and registering all of that data is a nonstarter. MS will have to prove that the feature doesn't run with certain gov clients, the privacy risk is way too high.

Enterprise will love it because it will allow them timestamped access to everything their employees are doing during the day.

They will have it set up to alert on a various things...

"So, Bob, you were playing Minesweeper from 9:45 to 9:53, was that a scheduled break for you?"

"Jane, your screen showed no substantive changes from 1:03 to 4:15, you weren't in a meeting, what were you doing?"

From The Verge’s obsequious article:

Recall won’t work with every Windows 11 computer. You’ll have to buy one of several fresh new “Copilot Plus PCs” powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips, which have the neural processing unit (NPU) required for Recall to work.

SteamOS is arch based and uses KDE Plasma as the default DE, so you could probably run Endeavour OS and be pretty darn close