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Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated but get off my lawn.

> We are trying out a new experience for Copilot in Windows that helps showcase the ways that Copilot can accelerate and enhance your work. This experience will show when you copy text – since Copilot supports helpful actions that you can take with text content. In this scenario, the Copilot icon will change appearance and animate to indicate that Copilot can help (there are several different treatments so you may notice a different visual effect)

Full disclosure: I like AI. I also like my clipboard being mine…

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Microsoft owns your computer so your clipboard isn’t yours

I’m reminded of the 90s era Slashdot that had a Bill Gates of Borg icon for every Microsoft related article. Seems to be where they are headed

Surely this will never go wrong with a password manager copying stuff to a clipboard.

Also they probably never tested that with pornographic search queries / clipboard contents, which will be very common in the real world. And even if they did test, they probably just did so with vanilla terms that are easily identified as pornographic by AI. Cue Copilot regurgitating porn queries because it mistakenly believes they are relevant to some current work task.

Personally I'm ready with popcorn for Microsoft unleashing chaos.

>Surely this will never go wrong with a password manager copying stuff to a clipboard.

Window's clipboard API allows password managers to mark if the clipboard content is allowed in history or is cloud syncable.

Somehow I doubt it would work correctly for my setup. My middle monitor has a KVM switch to switch from my Linux work/main setup (laptop in a docking station) to my gaming Windows tower computer (+a bunch of audio hardware to merge output and split mic input). I'm using barrier[1] to share mouse and keyboard between my Linux and Windows PC. My password manager runs on Linux because the Windows setup is bare-bones for obvious reasons, with barrier syncing the clipboard over the network. If I had to guess, that stuff is going to synced to the cloud and ran through AI by default, because Microsoft won't have the foresight to make cloud-sync opt-in as opposed to opt-out by the software.

Obviously I will make damn sure that Microsoft thing isn't running on my setup, but if they considered barrier/synergy users, I'll be surprised.

[1] https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

For Linux, Android based systems clipboard content can be marked as sensitive. For systems using X and Wayland the informal standard is to add an extra format to the clipboard contents with the MIME type "x-kde-passwordManagerHint" and have the contents of it be "secret" to signal that it is sensitive.

If these aren't being properly translated between systems when using barrier than that is a security issue with barrier itself.

Of course you're right, but bugs in third-party software using your APIs should not cause security issues in stuff you introduce later. Using whitelisting/opt-in vs blacklisting would solve this.

I already don't like how many operating systems retroactively dealt with passwords on the clipboard. "Sensitive" should've been the new default. Passwords aren't the only thing either. If I'm using some app or software that is either messaging, financial, or something medical, even if it just tracks my period, anything I copy originating from there should be treated as sensitive.

Soon you won't be able to write family members "hey, the results are in and I've got testicular cancer" without some data-kraken like Microsoft gobbling that up and feeding it to their AI.

Next thing you know some AI sneaks that into a company-wide mail "Quarterly Results" at your mother's place of work, because your mother has trouble using computers and is happy AI can write mails for her now. If that sounds unlikely to you, then to illustrate here's ChatGPT making that exact mistake:

https://chat.openai.com/share/0130c72e-aa51-4042-b0d0-d12101...

I can't wait to experience this new experience in my clipboard experience.

Every time I get upset about the decline of MacOS, Microsoft manages to cheer me right up again.

Your clipboard is all yours in Linux.

I get that no every use is supported on Linux but at this point most everyday uses are. I don't understand how people don't at least seriously consider using Multiboot and Windows only were it is absolutely necessary.

Modern Windows is little more than an appliance with all it's modern day adware. It's closer to one of those Amazon buttons designed solely to get you to buy more stuff than a real computer where the user is in control.

Must be some kind of mass learned helplessness or something.

Multi-booting means stopping what I am doing and rebooting.

Unless I use two computers of course.

But since I can only use one computer at a time (for many practical definitions of "use"), I will probably use the computer that has all my tools on it.

And of course, Excel, etc. Which is why I went back to Windows after almost a decade of Linux as a daily driver. I am sure there are hills worth dying on, but Linux turned out not to be one of them for me.

Suspended virtual machine that you resume as needed might be a slightly better experience.

Is there an app like Parallels on Mac that supports seamless mode - it merges the Windows apps with my other windows?

virtual box can do a seamless windows mode. It in't as slick as parallels but it is passable.

Well there’s WSL to run Linux in Windows. It’s just a feature to turn on.

And before I started driving Linux daily, I ran Linux in VM’s for a couple of years to sandbox web browsers. This was before common browsers supported multiple identies.

But your question highlights why I went back to Windows. I finding solving many classes of ordinary problems easier than reading Archwiki.

I’ve found the Office web apps to be pretty good for my occasional use and they obviously work fine on Linux.

I used “Excel” metaphorically.

Office Online doesn’t solve Photoshop, AutoCad, Ableton, utilities for configuring miscellaneous hardware, etc. etc.

Like I said, I drove Linux daily for close to a decade. I found and used work-arounds. Going to Windows removed a lot of “arounds” and lets me spend more mental cycles on the work.

Can't spell "copilot" without "clip"

Actually... CLIP is an image-to-text computer vision model. It has nothing to do with copilot.

I think GP was going for a clippy reference.

We have a potential Linux convert right here guys!

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