Microsoft introduces AI meddling to your files with Copilot in OneDrive | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft introduces AI meddling to your files with Copilot in OneDrive

theregister.com

115 pointsBender104 comments

This is going to be very bad for anyone with multiple Microsoft accounts on one computer. I don't see how Microsoft keeps OneDrive data separate.

Microsoft has not done a good job at keeping stuff separate. If you login to Outlook, Teams or any Office application with more than one account it becomes a giant mess. All of a sudden other programs like Edge will have one of your company policies like default home page applied.

Also authenticating with Microsoft accounts using Azure AD anywhere is a giant headache as Azure AD may have one login with multiple directories. So you're constantly having to re-authenticate & login with the proper AD account & proper "Directory selected".

I'm sure some older gray beards will respond with "Never login to your personal devices with a work login". That's great advice for plenty of situations but there are plenty where it doesn't work. Have a personal account & want to help your local church & non-profits out? Offer consulting services to multiple small businesses? While the Matrix setup looks awesome, it's not fun to login to 10 different devices or 10 different VMs.

I don't see how Microsoft is going to properly do security to protect your data from going elsewhere even if you only have one account, let alone multiple.

I like CoPilot, I love ChatGPT & overall I like most of Microsoft's products. But they're going faster then they can handle & they're very well known for not having great communication & cooperation between their large divisions.

I never mix work stuff with personal stuff. Every job I've had has given me some brand new workstation or laptop to work from. There's no reason to pull in all of that into your personal device.

Do you carry an extra mobile device specific to them as well?

I've worked with school districts & non-profits. They're all mixing that stuff up on the same devices. Same with most smaller businesses.

The one device thing would work okay if a person only ever dealt with very large businesses that can afford that.

If work wants me to install applications on a device then they can provide me with that device.

At my work it is an option to add messaging applications and such to our phones. I just don’t. If there is an emergency they know my phone number and can call me. No need for me to be instantly available. Life is better this way

~50% of OP's comment preemptively and directly addresses what you've written.

As the parent helpfully detailed, you may work for a charity or occasionally help out at a school where they have AD/central management but not have a dedicated device. In addition, it is easy to be working with 2 or 3 non-profits at the same time and nobody wants 4 machines to juggle.

I have a VirtualBox VM for situations like those.

> I don't see how Microsoft keeps OneDrive data separate.

The short answer is that cross-tenant access should only be available where it is explicitly granted through policy or request.

The long answer is that this is hard to balance and manage over time, and users should really be provided with their own device or remote workspace (which could includes SharePoint and Office for Web, not necessarily a remote desktop), rather than being asked to apply what amounts to an MAM policy to their BYOD device.

This was my scenario for two years.

Outlook, Teams and Edge were logged into Azure A.D. OneDrive for Business as well.

OneDrive personal, Windows 10, Firefox were logged into my personal Microsoft account.

Office was logged into both, but it was pretty easy for me to see which one, and to switch if I needed to. Recent document lists displayed the relevant documents for the account I was logged into.

For me, it was a non-issue having both accounts on the same machine. But I bet depending on your corporate policy, it could be an issue. In my case, as a consultant, the client did not have permission to "take over" my machine and implement policy on it. If it was their machine, I would not have logged into my personal Microsoft account on it.

Edge supports multiple accounts and surprisingly if you have sessions with both accounts open it recognises if a link you clicked was meant to be opened in the work account or personal and sends it to the correct browser window.

Yes, I really appreciate this, and its configurability, a lot. I have a work profile, a home profile, and a “demo account” profile (for a certain work resource that I have a dummy account in addition to my real account). Each has a distinctive theme for easy identification, and my computer always opens links into the right one!

> I'm sure some older gray beards will respond with "Never login to your personal devices with a work login". That's great advice for plenty of situations but there are plenty where it doesn't work.

I use several profiles on Windows with a mix between Microsoft logins and local accounts. It's a pain because Microsoft seems to design everything with the idea that every PC is a personal device for a single person with a single account.

IIRC Office has switched from machine based activation to user based activation. Microsoft thinks I should buy 4 MS365 subscriptions because I like to silo things with a few different profiles (ex: entertainment vs development). That's not going to happen. Instead of buying 1, I buy 0 and use alternatives even if they're not quite as good because I can't pay 4x to maintain compatibility between my own damn profiles.

> Worryingly, in the example given, Copilot can move files around and create folders depending on its interpretation of the user's instructions. What could possibly go wrong?

As long as copilot gives me a list of everything it’s going to change before doing it and an easy revert, I don’t see a problem with this. It sounds like a great feature!

> I don’t see a problem with this. It sounds like a great feature!

Famous last words

That's why they qualified it.

If I can get this to sort my huge mess of photos based on geolocation and time into folders for me based on my own folder and naming structure... This just might be useful.

Edit : even older folks who have no idea how tech works might be able to finally sort their photos as well.

That sounds very helpful, and if AI can do it, then that's great. But also, it seems like rule based file restructuring should already be easily possible without AI. Shame something like that doesn't exist.

It does exist, there are at least dozens of such tools. Here's a random one I found with a quick search. https://photostructure.com/getting-started/automatic-library...

But if it's not powered by AI it won't make the news in 2023

I know on Mac the popular tool for automatic file sorting is Hazel

https://www.noodlesoft.com/manual/hazel/hazel-overview/

You can do that in Apple Photos without an AI stuff.

What they need to do there is actually build a competent photo management app into the OS.

Isn't that what they just did?

No. Nowhere near that. It's a steaming turd.

Short circuit the problem by not taking so many photos. Ask yourself honestly, how often do you ever look at them? If you do, you've probably also got them organized. If you don't, then you're just hoarding.

This sounds a lot like Jobs’ famous “don’t hold it that way” suggestion to solve iPhone 4’s signal dropping.

Asking users to take fewer photos is not a useful solution to the problem of managing large photo libraries.

In Apple-land, it's done that for ages: group via face, put name to face, group by geolocation etc. I think it's started recognizing my dogs too. Happens all device side.

Google photos does amazing work with this. It's face people detection is so good it recognises baby photos all the way to adulthood as the same person.

yeah. I have spent two weeks hashing thousands of pictures scattered around the informal backups and now I still have to deal with different size versions of the same image.

I wish the computer could rename them consistently in my stead and removed the lesser quality versions. I would prefer if it was a tool developed by anyone else but Microsoft.

the undo button in explorer still doesn't work properly after 28 years

I recently hit ctrl-z in explorer after accidentally moving some files and instead of moving back, they just disappeared. I couldn't believe it. I had to recover them from a remote backup.

Shit, I once irreversibly lost a document I spent an hour on due to something like that. It’s ridiculous.

Recent-ish HN post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35927413

I saved a ppt in OneDrive the other day and it disappeared. It hadn’t synced, but it didn’t only show locally, it had completely disappeared!

I closed ppt and re-opened but corp IT has disabled history in ppt so I couldn’t get to it again.

It just magically showed up an hour later……..

> corp IT has disabled history in ppt so I couldn’t get to it again.

Some of these rules that security come up with are amazing.

Really? I've never had that problem. Can you get a repro scenario?

I've had it happen before. It's a bit more complicated but I can't remember an exact repro. Something like delete, undo, redo, undo.

maybe external hard drive?

Nah, it's more like not all deletions are equal. It probably has to do with the user launching the event on the backend, if I were to guess, but sometimes if you delete something through Explorer, it isn't added to the undo history. Some of these I've seen not end up in the recycle bin despite not permanently deleting them, hence why I wouldn't be surprised if it was another user being used for these edge-cases. The deleted items would then be added to that user's recycle bin and be unavailable to the actual user's undo history.

Basically; not really sure, just making a wild guess, but I've encountered similar edge-cases before.

--dry-run

*-WhatIf

they already generate your windows user name from your windows email leaving you with users like "hello" instead of the one you defined during startup... Such slop.

I absolutely do not trust Microsoft with file storage. For whatever reason their entire internal platform is behoven to Sharepoint and that is a no-go for me.

I was put in charge of a nonprofit org's IT recently. Decided to listen to the previous leader's praise about Office 365 [edit: oh, Microsoft 365], which they use. Turns out it's a mess with all this weird Outlook + Sharepoint overlap. I'm pretty confused, and the less technical people there are totally lost. Makes me appreciate GSuite more; I think MS just really knows how to sell to whoever's in charge.

MS sell the OS, which then sells the identity management, which then sells 365 and dynamics, which then sells Azure. It all links into each other. I'm not sure it's so much about convincing someone who's in charge, it's that from a relatively common starting point (Windows PCs) everything else flows sort of by default.

That strategy makes sense, but 365 in particular doesn't seem to flow so well even from Windows. All those Windows users in our org are thoroughly lost on how to use it.

Interesting. I haven't used Windows in a long time and haven't used Office since early high school, but I did get the impression there was still some amount of shared patterns and understanding.

I was in the same camp. After hearing glowing reviews from that one guy, I was expecting something harmonious and was willing to give MS another chance. After a few days, I lowered my expectations to "usable by everyone," like Windows is. Now I don't think it's that either.

The jump from M365 to D365 is significant, as is the jump to Azure. One can reasonably use the productivity suite independent of the vast suite of cheaper (and often more suitable) services that can be used in place of D365, not to mention Azure.

I remember when my previous place was looking into Dynamics as an option for the company it seemed like it would be very much easier to deploy various Dynamics-adjacent bits to Azure, and we didn't want to be multi-cloud so this was a minor detractor for us.

M365 to Azure is a bit more of a jump maybe, but there's AAD which I think is a bit of an on-ramp? Then I gather Excel is getting better at integrating with the data products on Azure? I think there's something there, enough to make Azure the path of least resistance for some orgs.

OneDrive consistently corrupted files in my organization. Garbage software.

At one point when they had OneDrive for Business, and regular OneDrive. Regular OneDrive kept installing itself into Windows 10, and confused the fuck out of everybody, and some people were even using personal accounts to sign into it because it would encourage you to create a Microsoft account. But that was different from their corporate Microsoft account, but used the same e-mail address. What a fucking disaster. I swore off that piece of shit ever since then. And SharePoint has never been good. It's always a disaster that needs dedicated staff that nobody wants to pay for. And they built OneDrive on top of it?

And now you have Teams running on top of it as well. And it's also a total piece of shit. God damnit, I'm so much happier not having to admin any more Microsoft shit.

The multiple accounts is so painful with microsoft. They should be able to make it work but somehow it always ends up in redirect auth-loop hell.

This. Adding AI on top of it makes me trust it even less, too.

> I absolutely do not trust Microsoft

Sentence should have stopped there.

I used to dislike Windows and Microsoft. Now my school administration is paying them tribute, probably due to effective lobbying practices. So I hate them now

Microsoft must be broken up into at least 10 companies. Otherwise, this nation needs to stop pretending any sort of "market forces" dictate our economy or corporate ability to consolidate.

Truly. This pattern is the default mode for how AI is being introduced to most people. That is, vertically. Existing platforms add it as a feature.

You have to prove, legally, that it harms the consumer. Good luck with that.

It's not that hard: which ms product has no competitors? MS Office. This could be a company all by itself.

Really? Gsuite is in the same market. It is even ahead in some areas (the browser version of Word is truely aweful last time I tried).

In this new Guilded Age we live in the opposite will happen. Also expect to be fined for your hate speech against microsoft, it has feelings you know.

We must have a legal framework to do this, because while the power is just a vote away, there are no rules for how to measure thresholds. Because of this, it becomes arbitrary, which is not how our legal system should work.

The hard part is finding an unbiased economic framework for understanding conglomerates like Microsoft. I suspect that if we built such a thing it would necessarily take down more than the tech giants. The media conglomerates (Disney, Warner, etc...), and more importantly, the financial giants. You have hurricane-strength headwinds to make something like this happen.

I'm not saying it shouldn't, I'm saying it's very difficult.

Having read the article, I could see the auto-recommender for files surfacing things which a scammer shared.

I get occasional google doc scams like that, where some random person shares a doc with me because they got my email from somewhere. I think more geared towards driving porn site traffic than something more malicious, but I don't really dig too deep on those. (Weirdly, it mostly seems to have text written in Thai, I don't know why)

Always something new to watch out for.

Microsoft tries to shove (broken, usually) features down the throats of their customers more than any other company I've ever experienced. Why do people keep giving them money?!

Well, it is a dispute as old as the Millenial generation. It all boils down to "When I was getting into computers, the most publicly pushed OSes were Windows and MacOS. Now we are used to working with Windows and if we are a corporation, their Office Suit is the best in the world with little to no shortcomings. So we let them charge us however much they want, cause immediate convenience is worth more than privacy, stability, deeper knowledge about tools we use daily".

Because the alternatives are to spend twice as much on Apple devices, or to spend countless hours wrestling with Linux doing things like finding a driver for your wireless card.

These are contrivances. MacBook Airs cost roughly as much as similarly-configured Ultrabooks (or whatever higher-end laptops are now referred to as) and wireless networking has "just worked" on the last two dozen devices I've installed Linux on in the past decade.

Linux itself pretty much "just works" on any mainstream hardware these days, but the same cannot be said about many enterprise software products. Then you're dealing with trying to run them in a Windows VM which adds complexity, may not be supported, or may not work at all.

> MacBook Airs cost roughly as much as similarly-configured Ultrabooks

My job is not buying fancy ultra-books for the vast majority of employees. The tooling for admins seems to be much better for them on the windows side vs Mac too.

This is such a tired old trope. Nobody who runs a business is going to just throw random Linux distros on random laptops. You buy a laptop that is supported with the OS that comes on it. You get the laptop, turn it on and it works.

You must also think that businesses are building their own custom PCs too.

Also the fact that you think business laptops are half the price of Apples shows your full ignorance. Enterprise laptops are rarely cheaper than Macs. Yeah you can go buy some POS Acer at BestBuy for $150, but no business worth working for is going to stick their employees with that trash.

Where were we talking exclusively about enterprise?

I haven't had to find a Linux Wi-Fi driver for a single piece of hardware made in the last decade.

The hardest thing about running Linux is video drivers, and AMD's are in the kennel now, and Nvidia's are nearly always up-to-date and in the package repository.

It’s a tired meme, but I thought the same until I came across a wireless card that was a slight variant of the norm. Four hours wasted one afternoon.

I use Windows, wsl and native Linux as a software dev. Linux gives me more problems than wsl, gives me more problems than Windows. I must say Windows is the slowest (especially booting and the file system), but the tools, drivers and user interface are much more stable.

Just a few days ago I managed to brick the Gnome terminal by upgrading python in Linux. Bing AI to the rescue to ctrl-alt-f7 / vim / i / :wq me out of that situation. And some more symlink re-patching.

Dll's versus shared objects: linking I find a true maze in Linux land. Anybody else needed rpath (hard code search paths in binaries) to make sure the shared objects were found?

I once got an unconfigured Windows terminal because of a windows upgrade over a duration of 7 years or so. It at least gave me a terminal window to work with.

That said, I don't trust fully the auto synchronization of SharePoint and friends. Most important stuff is checked in into a server that hosts git.

> Anybody else needed rpath (hard code search paths in binaries) to make sure the shared objects were found?

What the heck are you doing, that the binaries coming with your system aren't finding their libraries in the default system dirs?

I have to say this was for linking against a third party driver and there appeared no other way around. But my point is that at link time there is knowledge needed about the location of the shared object itself. https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-librarie...

Why do people keep giving them money?!

Because a lot of people actually seem to like Windows more than MacOS or Linux. Companies seem to find Office 365 a better deal than what Google offers. Also, and much more important, there is a whole world of software out there that is Windows only and for which there is no Linux/Mac alternative.

Because broken on windows generally means it sucks and broken on Linux means completely non-functional and f-you, you should've checked the WiFi cards chipset before installing to know if compatible drivers are available. Also "if you want it so bad, PRs are welcome".

Time to remove all my data from OneDrive!

I had enough deadly file collisions in the early stages of onedrive that I am unwilling to use it for anything important.

Sharepoint taught me "proper" file management early.

Always retain several local copies.

I guess. I've found that dropbox with file version history works perfectly.

Wish it were end to end encrypted and dropbox wasn't focused on constantly putting garbage into the windows shell, but their backup function works perfectly, even for versions of my edits and no collisions on multiple computers unlike onedrive.

Nothing can completely obliterate your chances of keeping or restoring files like Windows feature sets for keeping and restoring files.

Any backups I store on these kinds of sites are sitting inside an encrypted DMG. I don't even want to risk them compressing my images.

Copilot is the only AI tool allowed in my current client's network.

It's definitely useful as a better auto complete. However, I've found it's slow enough that I can type a short to medium length line before it can suggest something. Which could be due to VPN speeds.

Though I'm not a fan of its generated code. I haven't yet gotten working suggestions, just weirdly broken ones.

Interesting given there's been articles and posts here on HN about it scanning files outside the project since before ChatGPT. I've never investigated further since I'm not the target audience but if your client cares they might want to reconsider.

Apparently Microsoft promised that their data was safe.

I'm glad my camera wasn't on when I was told that!

Imagine this on a corporate folder.

This would make stealing corporate data more user friendly to those who break in. Or MS would monitor the prompt requests and do what linux does,

"Username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported"

MS used their own AI to create a mashup of Andy Cohen and John Malkovich and called it Jeff Teper

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-onedrive-bl...

This is just the beginning, folks. AI is going to destroy civilization, not in the form of evil robots, but in the form of unnecessary application.

You thought everybody having an app was bad? Wait until your dentist is using AI to drill your teeth.

Windows has been spamming ads at me via the task bar about this feature already.

AI as a pipe step.. What a time to be alive..

AI all the things. Damn the consequences. It's what Wall Street wants to keep the stock hot.

I already think Copilot for code is useless... I don't see this being any more useful.

If you can't imagine a use case for generative AI in your email client or word doc, well I really don't even know what to tell you.

That's a REALLY weird response.

Anything coming out of my email client is from ME. And I don't use Word, but if I did, there isn't one thing I could possibly produce that would be better off from having generative AI spewing out whatever it thought relevant.

It really takes just the tiniest fraction of imagination to come up with a valid use case. Think about the capabilities of Chat GPT. We know you don't need dropbox because you build your own with FTP and it can't replace your USB stick. Look outside of yourself for just a moment. Envision that everyone is not you.

Why would I want to talk to them as not me?

If I have to fall back on ChatGPT to respond, it means I may as well be silent… and that is an option.

I don't HAVE to make fake responses as if they are me, faster, cheaper and more dishonestly. I can be silent if I've got nothing to say.

Why on earth would I need, or want, generative AI to write simple documents for me? It takes me all of 1-2 minutes to write most emails (and the ones which take longer, an AI couldn't do). There's no onerous task here that the tool eases.

Moreover, I think that the world is a profoundly worse place if humans no longer actually communicate with each other, and just have a machine to it for them. This is an aesthetic preference so YMMV, but that's just a sad empty existence imo.

You are not every person. It really takes just the smallest bit of imagination to understand this. You even somewhat said it yourself "This is an aesthetic preference so YMMV". Yes, everyone's mileage will vary. The rest of your comment could have been left unsaid.

This is seriously concerning.

I don't like that malware called Onedrive. I really don't like it.

Let me guess: impossible to opt out for AI crawling your stuff?

European data protection sais no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com