Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
I’m really hoping valve does a public steamdeck OS release. I’d like to replace windows on my PC with Linux and have windows as a backup, but the Linux distro I’m the most familiar with is the steam deck’s distro, and that’s not available outside of steam decks yet.
Check out bazzite.gg
It is a very beginner friendly, gaming focused distro that essentially aims to be steamOS on PC. It even has rollback functionality if you accidentally break something.
SteamOS is arch based and uses KDE Plasma as the default DE, so you could probably run Endeavour OS and be pretty darn close
You’re gonna get lots of suggestions, lol.
I’d say look at Zorin. It’s a Ubuntu-based distro so it has lots of support, and also has several baked-in themes to customize your desktop the way you want it right out of the box. You can make it look like Windows 7/10/11 or macOS without any other apps or themes, which might help your transition.
Zorin is excellent!
Bazzite has been designed to be an out of the box SteamOS distro. It’s not based on Arch, so if that’s what you’re familiar with then that’s not the same, but give it a try.
thanks Microsoft
This is a feature hundreds of millions of people will use and very likely won’t cause any security issues. These doomsday scenarios every Linux user here is predicting is a bit much, don’t you think so?
very likely won’t cause any security issues.
Hahahahaha. Oh wait, you’re serious? Let me laugh even harder. HAHAHA
You are the clown with a sign: the end is nigh. You are being naive.
Are you braindead? Yes yes taking regular screenshots of the desktop can’t possibly be a security risk, right?
You can define almost anything as a security risk. But we aren’t children to play such stupid games.
We are talking about someone gaining that information and the probability of that happening without even knowing what security mesaures will be in place. I think the risk is negligible even today with the limited information about it that we have now. Other People here, presumably you as well are hysterical about it.
Thats what the discussion is. You actually believe Microsoft will launch this and then everybody will be hacked or something. I think that is… not smart.
No, I don’t think “everyone will get hacked or something”, don’t put words in my. I mouth for the sake of your argument.
What it is, and this is undeniable, is a massive fucking privacy and security hole if someone gains control of your computer.
I didn’t want to put words in your mouth, but wanted to clear up where each of us stand so there is no missunderstanding.
If somebody gains control of your computer today, that’s a massive privacy and security hole in itself.
Absolutely, but even with control of your computer, if you’re smart, other accounts etc will still be inaccessible by the attacker.
Not when they get access to the Windows built in desktop spy saving everything it sees.
Not if it’s encrypted and if sensitive information is not saved.
Main point is still that gaining control of someone’s computer against their will is practically impossible today. If someone manages to do it, they already have your files and all the sensitive information they could want. They won’t even bother with this recall. And if you are worried about it, you will be able to just turn it off.
Much ado about nothing.
“If sensitive information is not saved” is doing a lot of heavy lifting for you there. The issue is that it saves everything.
We’ve seen it before, it’s not idle speculation. Windows machines have been the hosts of the largest botnets in the world. Whenever a company does something stupid like this it invariably gets into the wrong hands. It’s not even a question of if it will happen just when it will happen.
Oh and it’s not “Linux users” saying it, it’s everybody with an ounce of technical common sense. We’re all here shouting at Microsoft “it’s a bad idea” and they won’t care and it will go exactly as badly as predicted.
Yes, we have seen it many times before. Much ado about nothing. New feature that will mean some new security measures. Everybody will move on and in a year nobody will remember how some people in the Linux community were panicking.
I will never find out exactly when your bank data is stolen because of this, so I’m just going to laugh about it now.
Go ahead laugh. Because you will indeed forget all about it and never remember your doubts and panic laughter as nothing will happen.
Oh and it’s not “Linux users” saying it, it’s everybody with an ounce of technical common sense.
Which kinda correlate with each other. Which allows for a certain bad faith argument to be made.
Did you read the article?
This system basically do a character recognition on EVERYTHING the user is displaying and save the results in a very small file not that well protected.
The data is very small (I guess because it’s basically text?), seems easy to find. That means the history of all you did on your computer (apparently only for the last three feays by default,but well…) can be stolen at once, in a minuscule file.
I’m not an IT specialist, but I don’t see in which world this can remotely be a good idea…
As I understand not everything will be read and stored, storage will be encrypted. We don’t even know what exactly will be stored and everybody here is losing their mind.
We already have a lot of sensitive information on our computers and nobody is panicking.
I guess it’s hard to get used to new stuff. Or maybe Linux users are afraid that their favourite system won’t be able to compete anymore.
Based on what Microsoft themselves said we know: everything will be stored (except edge private session…). They specifically say they don’t do content moderation: they log everything.
Did you read the article?
Q. Cool, so hackers and malware can’t access it, right?
A. No, they can.
Q. But it’s encrypted.
A. When you’re logged into a PC and run software, things are decrypted for you. Encryption at rest only helps if somebody comes to your house and physically steals your laptop — that isn’t what criminal hackers do.
As a windows user I’m not delighted by this.
Edit: at this point you must be trolling…
If you are so afraid, you can just turn it of. You are aware of this are you not?
OK if you think I’m trolling, why did you answer?
I give you the benefit of the doubt you are a reasonable person who can go beyond their emotions of a feature of an os. And the emotions this article stirred.
Encryption at rest is meaningless if you get infected with spyware.
Oh it WILL cause security issues. It’s just a tradeoff against if they are worth the benefits.
There likely won’t be anything major while 1. 4 billion people will benefit. Security measures will be adapted for this new feature.
This same thing happened before, a lot of panic for nothing.
Define “new security measures”
I don’t know. We will both be able to discover them when the features are deployed.
This is a senseless hysteria about how this is horrible and… I don’t even want to go into all the dumb shit I read.
It’s subpoenable information. Absolutely no one is addressing that aspect.
I’ve done quite a bit of work in IT within the sphere of investigative law enforcement and this sets off major alarm bells to me.
The damage is mitigated by the fact it only recalls last 3 days by default
Well driven by my 30 years in the industry, 25 of which I’ve been using Windows/MS software, I’m going to take that with some salt. If my laptop can’t avoid having an existential crisis when my default browser is not Edge I’m going to throw shade and cast doubt about a feature no one is asking for being foisted upon us that can have what appears to be very serious repercussions.
The fuck do you mean, everyone literally is addressing that fact
Can you elaborate on what “subpoenable information” means. Like I have a vague idea but im not super clear if thats like a legal term with special considerations or whatever. Elaboration would be helpful.
If you’re suspected of something and law enforcement can get a subpoena, you’ll have to hand over the contents of your microsoft keylogger, actually microsoft will hand over your contents from their keylogger.
It means it’s the kind of stuff that law enforcement would require a warrant in order to obtain.
Not OP but the scenario described is say… A company and a specific manager gets sued for harassment. The plaintiff can be entitled to discovery related to the complaint, and that could now include the searchable screenshot database from the managers computer showing all the clear evidence that he harassed the plaintiff. Nightmare scenario for legal departments of companies.
Insurance Companies have entered the chat …
On the other hand, this makes it much easier for a corporation to spy on its employees, so I think at least some of them are in favor of this.
If employees are using the corporate’s computers, they can already see everything the employees do, they don’t need this new window feature to do it
That is by no means necessarily the case. For example, if a notebook is taken into the field and is not on the LAN.
My work laptop is a brick until it establishes a VPN tunnel back to the home network. There are ways to ensure the device only works how the company wants it to.
Windows has some kind of built-in VPN feature that auto starts and will otherwise not give you any network access. Add on top of that some corporate firewall and you basically can’t sneeze around your laptop without IT knowing.
A lot of companies are implementing better VPN tech (like SD-WAN, Nebula by Slack, etc), or at the least Microsoft Intune to ensure your corporate laptop is reachable anytime it’s connected to the internet.
No major corp I’m aware of is excited about these changes. Legal especially would like there to be the minimum records retention required by law, and a months long AI searchable database of individual user actions on a PC is a nightmare scenario for them.
If the IT departments of any major corp allows anyone within their network to enable this feature, they and everyone the work for need a permanent waning label for idiocy and utter incompetence attached to their resume.
I don’t know, if I was IT decision-making and I worked for a company I didn’t particularly like I might install this for the executive stratosphere and hope for subpoenas.
Can I forward your comment to my IT team? Because they’ve done worse than that already :(
Couldn’t you use a separator to make it one line of code? That way it’d be even more dangerous
Are you… Are you saying EVERYTHING can be hacked with one line of code?
Ever since those Aliens brought us their ancient and mysterious line separator tech, we have all we need to do just that!
Independence day was indeed a great movie. Who would have thought they also use X86 architecture?
Does anyone yet know how to break stuff like Copilot?
I don’t have Win11, but I also never really trust that MS won’t surreptiously push this kind of thing in the background to legacy systems, and I don’t trust UI toggles within Windows to actually do anything.
Do we know if there are services or files that Co-pilot needs to function?
Do we know if there are services or files that Co-pilot needs to function?
Co-pilot requires windows. I’m going to try Linux Mint and see how that goes.
I get the security issues, sure, those are valid, but the privacy ones are even worse. Imagine a teenager trying to search information on being gay, or possible intrusive thoughts on their family computer, only for their super maga right wing parent to find it in the screenshots.
Or someone being abused at home and searching for support facilities, deleting history and being outed by recall.
Wait, how about credit card fraud as a result of EVERYONE who has access to this computer can read your cc data?
Or, my husband was looking at jewelry online yesterday and he hasn’t told me, he must be cheating, right? Oh sorry, I forgot, our anniversary is next week… Hahahaha, don’t be upset babe.
Best one ever though, imagine your search history, your porn watch history accessible to anyone with access to your computer? The fucking horrific existence of having an employer process this data at scale using fancy staff monitoring program 7, and run stats on the fact that you had a toilet break while working from home, and they want to know if it was a number 1, or a number 2 so they can work a mean time to shit metric into your KPA/scorecard.
Guys, whatever benefit you think this is. It’s not worth it.
Not that it solves the problem, but since I’m not the King of M$ this is about all I can do: you could easily get around all that by turning off secure boot and booting into a persistant live-usb containing a linux distro of your choice (Tails for extra privacy/ease, if you can use Tor) to do all your secret agent computing needs. The host PC can’t see shit of what happens on Tails.
Ultimately privacy is part of security so, if anything, everything you mentioned is just more reinforcements that this is a major security concern.
As someone that has been obsessed with tech since being a kid in the 90s I think the tech side of this is super cool and very exciting stuff. As a user, though, I only like this if I’m the one implementing and using it. I do not trust a mega corporation (or really any company) to “leave it locally on my computer and totally not use that data for other purposes”. Right now it’s supposed to be (as far as I last heard) only on your machine but we’ve seen EULAs and TOS’ etc change many times over the years but especially over more recent years as data continues to be king and data like this is a literal bottomless diamond mine.
I know this isn’t your point but it’s just worries I have in addition to your points. And let’s not even start about what this means for law enforcement abuse. No thanks, I’ll wait for a FOSS equivalent that at least gives me and the community the opportunity to evaluate how it works.
They OCR the entire screen and store it in plaintext?! There is no way… I know it’s Microsoft we’re talking about, but are they really this stupid?
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 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.
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 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. 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). If you want something definitely gone, be able to manage your data’s lifetime, something that I think that a lot of people 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, 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.
There was an article going around a while ago that was arguing most users these days, including the youth we often stereotype as “digital natives” who “get computers”, don’t understand file systems. They might not even know they exist as a concept.
Which makes sense if you’ve only ever really used modern UIs. You don’t have to know anything about files and folders. I bet a lot of people don’t even know they exist in any meaningful way.
Most users are shockingly ignorant, and a lot of them are not really paying enough attention or interested enough to learn much.
I remember reading an article a few years back about physics undergraduates who didnt know how to use a computers file system. They could learn, but these are smart likely at least fairly tech inclined kids and they didnt know how to navigate folders on a computer at 18.
When I studied Computer Engineering, I met several other students who had a lot of trouble using the Windows file system, and navigating a file system through a terminal was a Herculean task for them.
Most people growing up now, and since over a decade ago, are only tech savvy in the sense they know how to use smartphones, tablets, and social media; none of those require any understanding of file systems, and even using desktops doesn’t really require it that much for most people.
I’m simply baffled that someone going into a computer engineering major at a university doesn’t understand a hierarchical file system as a matter of course. It’s a tree. The file system is a tree. A tree is one of the most basic computer science logical constructs. How exactly is a filesystem confusing? How is navigating directories from a terminal - any terminal, in any OS - a Herculean task?
I can use file systems on terminal with my eyes closed, as long as it’s not windows because every release they change everything around. You’re victimising the victims.
My daughter certainly doesn’t have a good understanding of file systems even though I’ve been trying to teach it to her.
Yeah this is why Apple has been slowly peeling away traditional file / folder features from front and center. The user doesn’t care where or how they get their files, they just want them at any given time. Spotlight being the most successful as obfuscating where anything is yet allowing access to everything. Microsoft that’s started to pick up on that and attempt to solve the same problems.
The bizarre thing is, they have solved it. PowerToys Run is the Spotlight omnibar of everything and they bizarrely haven’t chosen to bake it into Windows proper. I can’t use Windows without it now. Search files and folders everywhere faster than the start menu search, search running processes, execute commands, do maths, calculate hashes, open web pages. It’s fantastic.
Do you use windows by choice or for work?
Both. I’m one of those weird people that uses Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS on a daily basis (Android probably less than daily now as I’m not travelling as much as I used to). My job necessitates it but also I just enjoy having mixed estates at home to stay fresh. I am, however, eager to stop using Windows at home as the overall security health and conscience of Microsoft these days seems to be trending downwards.
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.
That’s true.
I once thought about this, that maybe it’s a good idea to use a tagged and maybe log-style filesystem, where 1) every directory name in file path becomes a tag for it, other than the user-added tags (which can be searched separately), 2) there are temporary and permanent files, where temporary ones are deleted once their lifetime passes or that plus once the space is required, while permanent ones are stored indefinitely, 3) with hardlink functionality transparently available to the user, from the GUI, 4) the GUI itself should drop the bullshit and return to DOS times in the sense of control - with this thing I describe it may well be that the casual user won’t feel as lost as they do now.
Maybe (again, transparent and user-accessible) filesystem overlays for every application are a good idea too here, like with Docker, chroots, MacOS DMG images, etc.
In addition to that indexing file contents may make sense too, like you said.
Frankly there are so many good things one can do which haven’t been done, before just OCR`ing everything on the screen and storing it.
About “why MS chose this” - because they consistently choose the dumbest and ugliest way to deal with any problem. The heaviest artillery available, to look relevant.
Offtopic - the searchable start menu problem is what scares me off Gnome every time I try it. You just get that tablet-like one-level place with a search field and icons. A frigging lot of fscking icons for every dot-desktop file Gnome found. Then I panic and get back to FVWM.
I completely agree with this. I work as a User Experience researcher and I have been noticing this for some time. I’m not a traditional UX person, but work more at the intersection of UX and Programming. I think the core problem when it comes to discussion about any software product is the people talking about it, kind of assuming everyone else functions the same.
What you mentioned here as a techie, in simple terms is a person who uses or has to use the computer and file system everyday. They spend a huge amount of time with a computer and slowly they organise stuff. And most of the time they want more control over their stuff, and some of them end up in Linux based systems, and some find alternative ways.
There are two other kinds of people. One is a person who uses the computer everyday but is completely limited to their enterprise software. Even though they spend countless hours on the computer, they really don’t end up using the OS most of the time. A huge part of the service industry belongs to this group. Most of the time they have a dedicated IT department who will take care of any issue.
The third category is people who rarely use computers. Means they use it once or twice in a few days. Almost all the people with non-white collar jobs belong to this category. This category mainly uses phones to get daily stuff done.
If you look at the customer base of Microsoft, it’s never been the first. Microsoft tried really hard with .NET in the Balmer era, and even created a strong base at that time, but I am of the opinion that a huge shift happened with wide adoption of the Internet. In some forum I recently saw someone saying, TypeScript gave Microsoft some recognition and kept them relevant. They made some good contributions also.
So as I mentioned the customer base was always the second and third category. People in these categories focus only on getting stuff done. Bare minimum maintenance and get results by doing as little as possible. Most of them don’t really care about organising their files or even finding them. Many people just redownload stuff from email, message apps, or drives, whenever they need a file. Microsoft tried to address this by indexed search inside the OS, but it didn’t work out well because of the resource requirements and many bugs. For them a feature like Recall or Spotlight of Apple is really useful.
The way Apple and even Android are going forward is in this direction. Restricting the user to the surface of the product and making things easy to find and use through aggregating applications. The Gallery app is a good example. Microsoft knew this a long back. ‘Pictures’, ‘Documents’ and all other folders were just an example. They never ‘enforced’ it. In earlier days people used to have separate drives for their documents because, Windows did get corrupted easily and when reinstalling only the ‘C:’ drive needs to be formatted. Only after Microsoft started selling pre-installed Windows through OEMs, they were able to change this trend.
Windows is also pushing in this same direction. Limiting users to the surface, because the two categories I mentioned don’t really ‘maintain’ their system. Just like in the case of a car, some people like to maintain their own car, and many others let paid services to take care of it. But when it comes to ‘personal’ computers, with ‘personal’ files, a ‘paid’ service is not an option. So this lands on the shoulders of the OS companies as an opportunity. Whoever gives a better solution people will adopt it more.
Microsoft is going to land in many contradictions soon, because of their early widespread adoption of AI. Their net zero global emission target is a straightforward example of this.
They’re a surveillance capitalism corp first and foremost. All other considerations, including security, are secondary.
The full article is well worth reading. It’s good to find a lucid, logical deconstruction of why, precisely, this will be a complete disaster.
Even supposing I didn’t care about the security implications of this, why on earth would I want this functionality? I can barely keep up with all my activities in the present moment, let alone the past. It’s like a morbid and pathological unification of nostalgia and hoarding.
THIS IS NOT CURRENTLY RUNNING ON MY WINDOWS COMPUTER, right?
This obvious first question hasn’t been clarified (maybe by one comment in this thread, but not in the article)
You’ll have the icon on your taskbar if it is. You can also hit Meta+J to check
It’s been rolled out already eh? Gods…
I think that’s just regular Copilot (without the plus). This is a newer version, at least that’s what this quote from the article leads me to believe:
I got ahold [sic] of the Copilot+ software and got it working on a system without an NPU about a week ago
The regular Copilot (without the plus) that sits in the taskbar was rolled out in an update about a month or two ago.
Also, this part of the article gives a method to check if it’s running:
Q. How do you obtain the database files?
A. They’re just files in AppData, in the new CoreAIPlatform folder.
Unfortunately there are at least two AppData folders (three to be exact, but one of them is rarely used), and it doesn’t specify whether it’s
APPDATA%orLOCALAPPDATA%, but I just checked on my Windows machine (Win11 with all updates installed, including Copilot), and I can find no such folder in either of these paths.EDIT: the video in this toot clearly shows the location of the database folder, and it’s in
LOCALAPPDATA%, which makes sense given that it’s stuff that’s not supposed to leave your device.
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.
And from the article in the OP:
I got ahold of the Copilot+ software and got it working on a system without an NPU about a week ago,
What even is a NPU, if it’s not necessary for the software to work?
Nah…. Just… just nah. This will never fly in enterprise environments
It already exists in the corporate environment. Teams is a keystroke logger, it stores everything you do down to the microsecond in a plain txt on the C drive. This just expands that to everyone that uses Windows.
Windows is spyware now.
Just like telemetry, this can be disabled on enterprise version of their OS.
It won’t.
All the crap from MS only affects ignorant home users. (I say that with no criticism - home users often lack significant expertise in this stuff).
Corporate has an IT team dedicated to image building, based on requirements gathering, which is well documented and well tested before it’s deployed to even a small test group (usually us fellow IT geeks get to be Guinea pigs first).
Once it’s been certified, then they’ll deploy to a second, larger group, test and verify.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Plus they’ll probably start with new hires and anyone with a machine that is falling off lease/aging out. This gives them a little room, in that new hires don’t have any local data (no one should have much in the first place), and people with aging machines can hold onto the old machine for a couple weeks as a fallback, just in case.
I’ve seen it several times, been part of deployment and upgrade teams.
Additionally, they deploy policies to redirect any MS network services to their own internally hosted services - windows is designed to do this, there are specific policies for everything, such us Windows Update services, even the MS App Store. Because no company wants machines pulling random crap from outside the company (they probably even block the access at the network level - I would).
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.
On the other end of the spectrum, the vast majority of home users have no idea how to disable this or that it’s even activated. There will be folders of Recall shit filling up everywhere, waiting for someone who knows it’s there to access it.
If any of them access their work data on the Microsoft 365 web apps, it’s now sitting in that folder, and they will not know.
This is honestly the biggest evidence yet of a need for some sort of regulation that certain privacy related things should not be allowed to be activated by default. They should always be opt-in, period.
As much as I lean to hate this despite it not even affecting me as a Linux user…
I’m going to structure this as a Q&A with myself now, based on comments online
What is that? “I’m going to pretend to ask questions that I’ll then answer myself the way I think it’ll outrage that most people do I’ll get a lot of clicks on this shitty article”? What crappy excuse for content creation is this? I hate it.
I rather liked it. I mean he was just re-phrasing questions he’s seen without having to bother with direct quotes and making sure the questions were articulate.
It’s pretty important to get this info out there and make sure everyone and their 2nd cousin knows about it. If Microsoft can’t make this absolutely infallible on a security front it will almost be laughable at how many people could get completely fucked over by this. Every hacker and country in the world are going to be poking at the security of this feature. It would be the holy grail of infosec penetration.
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.
I saw that as anticipating the questions they’ll get regarding this article and pre-answering them.
Do you mind calling out the questions you think are inappropriate or exist for rage clicks? What constitutes a good article for you if this is a shitty one?
Stopthatgirl7 and inflammatory headlines, name a more iconic duo.
Edit: Reminder to self: do you really want these kinds of posters in your media feed?
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.
Yeah, I gotta say that I read the article and it seemed pretty reasonable in terms of content. The fake-Q-and-A thing wasn’t quite my cup of tea either, but eh, I don’t think it was all that problematic.
Agreed. The way i took it was “i am going to write ‘questions’ based on the concerns people are commenting online and give the answers to those things people are interested/worried about”
Microsoft, stop giving me Red Star OS flashbacks.
It’s basically the same shit at this point
Are Microsoft a big, evil company?
A. No, that’s insanely reductive. They’re super smart people, and sometimes super smart people make mistakes. What matters is what they do with knowledge of mistakes.
I have no doubt there are smart employees, but they don’t call the shots. Case in point.
Being super smart and super evil are NOT mutually exclusive. Intelligence =|= morality.
Wasn’t Lex Luthor supposed to be Tony Stark levels of intelligence?
Why reach for a fictional example when so many real world examples exist? Just curious because I think of Bezos, Musk, and to a lesser degree Gates as examples of smart people doing bad things. I mean there’s several very smart people that have done good things as well but those are harder to come by. Even people like Alfred Nobel created something he thought would save the lives of miners for his invention to be used for war. Einstein also did a lot for the advancement of theoretical physics and his work was subsequently used as the foundation of the atomic bomb. It’s actually way harder to come up with a Tony Stark type smart “good guy” in the real world for me because reality is often far more grey.
I don’t think of Bezos, Musk, or Gates as exceptionally intelligent. They are lucky and influential, sure. Intelligent? Musk is automatically out just because of his Twitter feed. The other two haven’t shown themselves to be particularly intelligent, just ruthless and efficient when it comes to generating profit.
As far as the other side of that coin, I tend to agree. Most of the really intelligent people that have existed have been pretty grey morally speaking.
Hence why I went with fictional examples. At least with Lex Luthor, there’s very little grey area in his moral stances.
Gates is insanely intelligent, like demonstratably so. Musk and Bezos are also very highly intelligent people. Do they have terrible, awful, even downright despicable views? Absolutely. But don’t be fooled, all three of those people are incredibly smart with actual high IQs (not in the braggart, “I have a very IQ.” sense either).
Intelligence doesn’t translate to empathy or wisdom. Some of the least book smart people I’ve met have been profoundly wise at times, and some of those same people were incredibly empathetic. Unfortunately, I think all three of those people (Musk, Bezos, and Gates) are lacking in those traits, but saying they aren’t in fact measurably intelligent is only fooling yourself.
I say this as someone who was raised by a measurably very highly intelligent person who could be, and was, a complete monster at times, and had some really twisted views on the world/other people. Lucky for me I didn’t inherit that innate Intelligence I guess!
A rotten apple spoils the bunch.
