Mostly from Lemmy

Yeah, Lemmy is weird, especially the tech-related communities for some reason. It's like: "if it's not Linux and FOSS, it's literal cancer, unless it's Microsoft's, then it's literal radioactive and aggressive cancer".

I can totally understand the anti-AI fellows and their sentiment “Windows = AI”.

100% agreed. However, as with any other opinion, fundamentalism is bad, m'kay. I get why people are tired of AI (I'm in the same boat!) but there has to be rationality involved.

As far as I read, it’s partially true.

That's just ordinary standard click-bait from a tech site. They themselves mention that the rollout will be "to beta users", that means Insiders. Insider builds are very different from regular builds and many features are force-enabled in them.

Which makes sense: if you're making the very conscious decision of signing up to Windows Insider, after going through the warnings about the nature of the program, you should know full well about what it comes with.

I was reinstalling my wife's Windows recently and was asked if I want to enable Recall, with a very prominent "the feature is in preview" on the screen.

Not true, however, in cases when the PC was set up by someone other than you, e.g. in workplaces. If the company someone works to decides to enable Recall “to improve productivity”, anything done by the employee will be seen, not just by the employer, but by Microsoft too, not to mention hackers who will love to get their hands at this golden goose of private data.

Oof, there's a bit to unpack here.

1. If it's workplace, it's not the employee's device, it's the workplace's. Nothing the employee does is private, that's the whole point of managed devices. Nobody ever looks at what the employee does (unless their manager is completely fucking insane), because nobody has the time for that, but in case of, say, litigation, or such, the data is there. Recall isn't needed for that.

2. Microsoft has zero access to Recall data. It's 100% local (hence the "Copilot+ PC" requirement - these are the PCs that have CPUs with an "NPU", or "Neural Processing Unit", allowing them to run LLMs locally without killing performance).

3. For hackers to get to this data, they'd need to break the network security measures, the account security measures, anti-virus security measures AND BitLocker. Which is to say: a hacker getting access to Recall is the least of a workplace's worries, because it means they're effectively wide open to the Internet.

4. There's not much in Recall that you can't extract from the browser's cache. Many of these things are actually less useful, because even if you steal someone's password by scraping Recall data (and that's assuming something goes wrong and Recall doesn't redact it), you won't be able to sign in from a different device due to MFA. However, if you have such deep-level access to the device, you can, instead, steal the token used for logging in - that one usually already comes with the MFA token, so you can sign in anywhere.

Maybe. But the presence of the button, alongside the shortcuts for features “summarizing”, “auto-formatting text” and other AI-driven features, implies Copilot is a whole dependency on .dll/.exe related to Copilot, as well as potential unintended network comm with Microsoft servers.

Those features - to my knowledge - only work on the devices with the NPU, which is to say: they run locally. I haven't really looked into it, though. Either way: they are fully optional and dormant until the user clicks them.

Whenever I hear about how “users are dumb”, I can’t help but wonder how the so-called “dumb users” are allowed and able to drive a half-tonne car at 120kph

Check any news source for the road accident numbers. You start to see a trend now?

or, even worse, (it doesn’t even need a license) voting (allowed responsibility over everyone’s lives)!

Did you not notice who won in the US last year?

Maybe it’s because iThings aren’t socially pushed as Microsoft things are

How do you mean? The only difference I can think of is that Apple users are generally more enthusiastic towards Apple products than MS users. That being said, we've seen countless times that whatever Apple does is called "revolutionary", whereas when MS does, people don't care. First touch-screen phones: Microsoft. Best digital assistant: Microsoft. Best optimised mobile OS: Microsoft. Etc., etc.

And we've already seen that recently with Recall - Microsoft announced it, and people lost their shit, talking about how dangerous that is, how security is 100% compromised right now, and how everybody has to switch to MacOS or Linux.

Then, two weeks later, Apple announced it's identical but less secure version of Recall, and there was nothing overtly negative in the media about it. Some sceptical articles here and there.

Non-consensual relationship. Harassment. In this case, it’s software harassment disguised as dark patterns such as opt-off when it should be opt-in.

That's, unfortunately, not how it works. I agree that dark patters suck and people who use them should be banned from making any executive decisions regarding software ever, but most of the time when people are complaining about dark patterns these days, it's completely benign shit.

Like, come on, a button showing up with a new feature is now a "dark pattern"? Let's be real here.