Microsoft just delayed Recall again | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft just delayed Recall again

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70 pointsfooey77 comments

I'm making the first effort in many years to finally be rid of windows,because of recall. I'm really uncomfortable with the idea that once that is implemented I really will have no un-monitored/spied source of computer usage. It used to be almost impossible to reach some sort of usability parity linux/windows but I think its possible now. A big part of that is with computer power long surpassing daily usage needs the lack of cutting edge driver support on linux is no longer as big a deal. I started with ubuntu, but I also am pairing it with NIX package manager. I'd like to use this experiment to get familiar with the disposable OS paradigm. I think that could be a killer feature to move away from windows. I don't see them ever getting windows to be rebuildable on demand.

I realize NixOS has some hurdles and learning curve though.

<rant>

Been using Manjaro XFCE for a minute, KDE is great if you're rocking ~32GB of RAM but for lightweight, MX Linux (Debian), Lubuntu (LXDE) Lightweight Ubuntu. Most distros come with drivers that trackpads and wireless just ..work. So many flavors but with KDE you can customize everything with rightclicking, no config edits. It's fun, but lower end machines I'd suggest XFCE, KDE will use 2GB of RAM just idling on desktop.

I ditched Windows completely back in 2017-2018 and haven't looked back. I'm no star-programmer or star sys-admin or anything but the love of tinkering with things, VMs, networking, sockets, SSH, SCP, rsync, having direct access to my kernel (like sysctl stuff), managing my ssh keys in ~/.ssh/, using a drop-down Quake style terminal (Tilda) has been a dream.

Why would somebody want to sign on with a 'cloud account' for their desktop login, have forced stuff like Teams, Edge (Are you SURE YOU WANT TO SWITCH TO CHROME/FIREFOX? notifications), OneDrive, and have things like Recall pushed on them.

Linux isn't rocket science any more there's Add/Remove programs on every distro and people can browse from there, there's software pulled straight from github for compiling/installing as well as the 'app store' for exploring.

It's been my tinkerer's heaven. Most you need is a trustable VPN with a killswitch that runs Wireguard and your linux install is going to be great.

Gaming wise, well gaming needs to get their heads out of their asses and dev for Linux and respect that just because there's not yet manjority market share doesn't mean there won't be.

Disposable OS now adays is just boot a live CD (USB) that loads everything in to RAM with NVidia drivers already loaded.

My suggestion to anybody, check out Ventoy: https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

Try a bunch of linux distros .isos in oracle VMs or any VM managers, use Ventoy to put the ISOs on a flash drive, my 128GB stick lets me have dozens of them, and boot any distro you want you can have as many ISOs that will fit, they'll all boot when you select which one you want.

For the nerds: https://www.ghostbsd.org - BSD Desktop.

Say no to Recall.

</rant>

> KDE will use 2GB of RAM just idling on desktop

As much as I dislike KDE, this is just not true. Perhaps you mean your whole system idles at 2GB including all other running services?

To anyone new to Linux, I recommend sticking to Wayland. Gnome if you're familiar with MacOS, KDE if coming from Windows. Use a popular distro with good documentation online (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch).

Don't worry too much about memory. Just about anything will be lighter than windows. I've had friends choose the absolute worst X11 desktops because it's "light" then run into all sorts of multi monitor issues

I'm talking utilizing it with the desktop widgets, tools, customizations cool taskbar widgets (I'd add the openAI app), different system informations/rss feeds embedded across multiple monitors.. the stuff KDE is awesome for.

KDE is amazing. I love it. My little laptop though I get by with just XFCE on an i3 8GB RAM, 250GB NVMe SSD.

Agreed on everything else you said. People switching from Mac's ultra-HD for fonts get the 'ick' switching to Linux desktop too. We'll get there.

What you are saying about KDE is misinformation. Plasmashell in KDE 6.2 uses between 300 and 500MB RAM depending on the age of the session.

I replied to an above comment, not when utilizing KDE's widgets and other desktop integrations like RSS feeds, weather, embedded system/server informations, etc. KDE is amazing, but I like to utilize the widgets, and full functionality of things with it. With my i3, 8GB RAM I opted for Manjaro XFCE.

I absolutely suggest using KDE for people switching over. Full desktop experience.

When not using anything my systems would idle at around 800MB-1GB running default install Manjaro. Firefox after awhile and I was using the full 8GB and tabs were crashing.

> Earlier this week, Microsoft again clarified that Recall will not be mandatory on Copilot Plus PCs, and will be an opt-in experience that can be fully removed. The clarification came after various YouTube videos claimed Recall was being installed on any PC with Windows 11, version 24H2.

Oh, thank god. I definitely heard the "You can't opt out!" line and was worried.

Until Microsoft gives users a legally binding "And we'll never quietly turn it on with a Windows Update" promise I don't trust them, given the way disabled features repeatedly get reenabled by updates in Windows 10 and 11 already

Hope they warn us of the incoming spyware, so we can uninstall on the very next second, right before it grabs all it can and runs away with it.

Seriously. Not sure if the marketer who's preparing the "Get started with Recall!" graphic that's gonna pop up on our computers realizes that they're doing us a different kind of service, lol.

What exactly keeps people on Windows if they feel like theyre in such a relationship with their operating system?

In my household it's MS Office. My partner very much enjoys the UX of KDE, but can't switch because she's highly reliant on features in MS Office that I cannot find transliterated well enough to work on Linux. Otherwise, there is no place for Windows in my house.

It doesn't have all the features, but there is a web version of Office now. Might be worth a look?

It isn't sufficient if you're fluent in Excel, which she needs more than any other part of Office.

Aye, feared as much.

back in the day, I had little problem using crossover for office support.

Personally? Inertia. I hate switching tools/systems unless absolutely necessary. If I were a frog you could absolutely boil me.

For me? Gaming and lack of alternatives. I hate MacOS' hostility toward anything not Jobsian, and Linux doesn't have parity with Windows particularly around gaming.

I prefer Linux, but I dual-boot Windows for gaming, since I haven't been able to get my Nvidia card to work at its full capacity on Linux.

Yeah that's the best news so far. I would have used hacks to disable it anyway but the problem is that at work I can't do that.

But I'm in the IT department at my work and our privacy teams are also not even considering to implement this as it's a legal minefield in Europe. So big brother won't come to my work yet, at least for now.

Question: why are people having a tizzy about this specifically yet touting Apple Intelligence?

- people are going to be using intelligence with Siri. Siri sends all transcripts to Apple, even if processed locally. Will this include text transcripts too? That’s some seriously private information that gets sent to Apple that you can’t opt out of.

- have you looked at what’s in knowledge.db?

People hissy with Microsoft’s product because of OCR of the screen or is that only a factor?

A key and screen logger is what I consider malware. At least with Siri it can be disabled during the setup Wizard and you can choose to use it or not (i never do on Mac)

And Apple intelligence is mostly local on device. I don't think I'll use it either as I have my own AI server already and I only use a Mac for work. But Apple's implementation is privacy-first, where Microsoft's is "get this to market first, worry about everything else later"

> At least with Siri it can be disabled during the setup Wizard and you can choose to use it or not (i never do on Mac)

How is that different than disabling Recall on first boot/setup?

Microsoft is notorious for resetting user permissions randomly. Like after updates

Options turn themselves on for some reason, historically speaking

I'm sure Copilot will get turned on when it sees my browsing history. I certainly did :)

Knowing the Microsoft of this decade, eventually you will only have the options [Yes, spy me] and [Ask me later].

Historically, the comparison from Apple is simply "Spy on me - but pretend you don't through shiny advertising". What's a better is up for interpretation I think.

Apple: CONSUMERS, WE RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY UNLIKE GOOGLE!!!11

Consumers: Then why did you implement equivalent APIs to the ones advertisers use to siphon our information from Android?

Apple: OH UNFAITHFUL CONSUMER, IT WAS DONE SO TO TEST THEIR FREE WILL

> How is that different than disabling Recall on first boot/setup?

Microsoft is known for being utterly user-hostile when pushing features on people. I have a gaming PC I occasionally boot up and every single time I do so it harasses me to use their cloud service in a way that very much seems like it will restrict my ability to use my own computer if I don't.

User trust is expensive to buy and cheap to relinquish!

Microsoft has shown time and time again that they will gleefully reactivate things you have disabled and they will use dark patterns to hide their intent.

Remember this option was never planned from the start and only introduced after backlash. This is what I mean by the privacy-first focus at Apple. They don't need to be pressured into doing this.

> privacy-first focus at Apple

I'd argue Apple is more an "Invade the privacy but keep quiet about it" with a shiny and aggressive ad campaign toting privacy from (others, but conspicuously not apple).

> people are going to be using intelligence with Siri. Siri sends all transcripts to Apple, even if processed locally. Will this include text transcripts too? That’s some seriously private information that gets sent to Apple that you can’t opt out of.

I don't use Siri. I have never been interested in talking to my computer. So that's one way to opt out.

On the other hand I kind of need a screen to use my computer.

I don’t use Siri because of the transcripts myself. I want to, but I don’t.

I think you’ve skipped over the knowledgeC.db part. Know what that is and how it works?

I didn't skip over it, I chose not to reply.

My understanding of it is it collects metadata. It doesn't collect screenshots or do OCR, again as far as I know. It'd a completely different system from Recall.

Their security track record does not really help. I will never trust them again after they refused to tell their customer about a workaround because they wanted that juicy DoD contract (https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-solarwinds-gold...).

Why would I trust that company with my data?

I have a slight suspicion that the overlap between people upset about Recall and people excited for Apple Intelligence is very small. As for why the gap, let's be honest. Nobody has more loyalty to a giant corporation than many people do to Apple. You may speculate exactly why that is, but the reputation doesn't lie.

There's something about automatically taking screenshots of everything people do on their computers that creeps people out, it's weird

I forget who did the research, but I believe Recall data was being stored in SQlite on-device, unencrypted. Accessing that data from a malicious script or various applications interested in data collection would have been pretty impactful to end users.

I assume they’ve changed functionality after that media, so I don’t know anything about its expected implementation anymore (and don’t particularly care, since my Windows device is just for games).

aI, on the other hand, is very interesting because it runs locally from a custom LLM with some very interesting instructions pre built. I’m excited to see where it goes and Apple’s press during WWDC makes it clear that they’re extremely interested in a secure and private implementation.

It's now encrypted on disk and access to the db is pretty much completely locked down.

I think this is probably as good as it gets from a security pov, and completely misses the point of why this is an absolutely-terrible-no-good-idea in the first place.

I only have windows 11 on my media pc (accidental upgrade that i've never bothered to revert) and I believe it is not able to run recall - but even on a media pc, the thought of MS taking screenshots every few seconds creeps me the f*ck out.

This has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with Microsoft.

Apple has much to complain about, but Microsoft is really outdoing itself by pushing Recall so insistently. Key/screen loggers should not be part of the default OS no matter how much potential shareholder value they have.

> People hissy with Microsoft’s product because of OCR of the screen or is that only a factor?

I mean that seems like an absolute mountain of a factor. Who asked for or would want this? Delivering the ingestion of agents before the consumer use-case was never going to work. At least apple intelligence (:rolleyes:) seems to be tailored around the hypothetical needs of users.

I guess some people do want it given that Rewind AI somehow exists.

I don't understand it and I can't imagine how out of touch you'd have to be to make it the default, but weirdly the market for this is out there.

> I guess some people do want it given that Rewind AI somehow exists.

That doesn't imply anyone wants it. This is triply true for consumer products that are forced on consumers.

I would probably find it useful but if and only if it's completely open source so I can see what it's doing, and it runs completely locally and under my management. Definitely not implemented like recall, built and managed by big tech.

After Claude Desktop’s release, I think it’s reasonable to presume a lot of people want this functionality.

> After Claude Desktop’s release, I think it’s reasonable to presume a lot of people want this functionality.

Release of a product does not imply any demand, especially for people outside the industry. People inside the industry should be considered insane until proven otherwise.

Yeah this seems to be more in the interest of Microsoft who can use the gathered data to understand the user's interests better.

Of course this information will only be used to improve your experience by us and our 872 selected partners.

Mostly had to do with the initial roll out. Was enabled by default. Stored data unencrypted in a simple SQLite DB. And yeah... taking screenshots constantly is literally what a lot of malware does so it freaked people out. knowledge.db maintaining a record of app usage and spotlight searches is not really an apt comparison.

"Initial rollout" was to testers only who are supposed to test things...

Us Linux users are just here… using our computers…

Truly, I game and I use Open Office and I cannot fathom why anyone would hold the position 'these corporate compute environments that I rent are just so convenient' over just having full control of the device where all their data lives.

From this thread:

> I definitely heard the "You can't opt out!" line and was worried.

> Microsoft is known for being utterly user-hostile when pushing features on people.

In truth ( so far ) .. you can opt out (not easily) and here Microsoft is guilty of poor engineering rather than active hostility (although hard to seperate).

Chris Titus, the source of a two week(?) old HN thread about Recall being "Mandatory" and unremovable from latest Windows w/out breaking file explorer released an eight minute update video on the matter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42002418

For those not watching, the problem was a bad Microsoft dependancy manifest - a common DLL not marked as a file explorer dependancy got removed along with Recall causing file explorer to glitch.

This is now 'solved' and included in his cleanup | debloat scripts for those that want the feature gone.

He closes with some other thoughts on Microsoft feature software deployment going forwards into the future.

'Recall' for now is little more than a placeholder stub for most, incapable of activation or more for many w/out specific hardware, and intended to be "removable" provided the engineers get their manifest dependancies sorted out.

> In truth ( so far ) .. you can opt out (not easily) and here Microsoft is guilty of poor engineering rather than active hostility (although hard to seperate).

I find that a bit hard to believe given how aggressive Microsoft is putting copilot in the market. Copilot buttons on keyboards, in edge, in the windows toolbar, all without being asked for it.

I think it's more of a combo of both elements. I'm sure the marketing people don't like it being too easily removable. And the "not easy" opt out process is something I already call user hostile for such an invasive feature.

Sure it's only on copilot+ hardware but soon that'll be the only thing one can buy. And there's more reasons to want local AI without having a big brother spyware integrated.

Chris Titus is skeptical and has a community of windows hackers and former (and likely current) Microsoft engineers commenting on his work and offering tips.

_So far_ to date it's plausible to see what's happened with Recall being hard to "safely" remove as casual incompetence rather than deliberate malicious behaviour.

He expands on this in the latter part of the video linked above - but a very good point is that moving into the future, whether intended or not, care will likely not be taken to ensure ease of removal and seamless operation after scapel applied simply because the Windows stack of cards is getting big, unwieldy, and harder and herder for single engineers to grasp all of.

> And the "not easy" opt out process

In this specific instance it looks more like human error on a dependancy tree .. generally these are correct in Microsoft packages, screwups can happen.

I mentioned this in another post recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41699265

but I've been using something of a homegrown equivalent of Recall most of the year and I really do think the concept has a lot of potential. definitely understand the privacy concerns (and especially if there's no opt-out), but I just want to encourage y'all to be open minded and consider the potential benefits.

anybody use google photos? I've got almost 20 years of photos and videos on it. But there's so many gaps in the timeline! so why not just record everything. and with an AI layer on top to help surface and search interesting/relevant moments. same thing for facebook and twitter and ig and hn and whatever social media you might use. it's such a privilege to be able to go back and look at our digital artifacts from years and decades past. so why not do it in 4k+audio.

I take screenshots and use pHash to see if I should save them. Then I OCR them etc. It's basically a homegrown little recall. Then a timestamp of when the screenshot was taken goes into a db. I also have a keylogger and some more personal data collectors. Still working it out into a "usable platform" though.

Do you have any sharable info as to how you setup your own private version of recall?

I talk about it a little bit here (high level not technical) https://youtu.be/2zqXkNhaJx0

but it's basically private daily youtube livestreams whenever I'm at my PC (so like 8+ hours a day) + limitless.ai for real time audio transcription (and whisper for local/offline transcription) + every 30 minutes throughout the day I do a quick status update+reflection in my obsidian notes, or ad-hoc annotation of notable moments in the day. WIP is using local multimodal models to add additional more fine-grained annotation from my livestream videos.

Steve Jobs once said something about working back from the desired user experience to the technology. What Microsoft is doing here is the complete opposite. They’re making the technology fit the user experience.

near as i can tell, the "ai revolution" consists largely of nontechnical climbers trying to get a promotion package (or scamming VCs, just like the XML craze of 1999)

it's very much along the lines of "i've got a great idea for a video game, all you have to do is implement it". that and two bucks will get you a cup of coffee

also, get off my lawn :-)

In other words, they are struggling to implement it. Software development in an average company is on some sort of a weird asymptotic curve towards getting anything done becoming literally impossible. And Microsoft is so, so painfully average.

I've been waiting for Windows to get the vertical taskbar back, but I'm beginning to think that the difficulty-to-develop is increasing faster than the development itself is progressing.

Just like "No" has been replaced with "Remind me later," dropping bad ideas entirely has been replaced with delaying them. Way to go, Microsoft!

> We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.

- Jean-Claude Juncker, former president of the European Commission

Funny that this was supposed to launch in June 2024 and now it’s being delayed for the second or third time because Microsoft needs more time to make sure it’s secure.

I don't find that funny. I find that relieving if they are delaying to make it more secure.

Yes but it wasn't secure at all to begin with. Security and privacy are not really focus points there. Just getting it out the door seems to be the priority.

I'd never owned an Apple computer until last week. I couldn't buy a new Windows computer knowing Microsoft's trajectory with intrusive tracking, Recall being the most prominent example.

Terrible feature is delayed. Hopefully it will be delayed indefinitely and go away.

Shouldn't it be finished faster now that AI is doing all the coding? Just imagine the delay if they didn't have Copilot as a productivity booster.

MS is such a mess of a company. The existence of MSFT is only proof that profitability doesn’t mean jack shit when it comes to the products themselves.

Haven’t liked windows in a long time (XP?). But still sad to see it go down this way.

There's a lot of FUD about Recall. Recall was always opt-in. Windows 11 24H2 installs the feature for everyone by default, in the same way Japanese might be installed for everyone by default. It's there, but not on until you opt in. If it detects a Copilot+ NPU in device manager, the update shows a full screen splash screen explaining Recall, with a No & Yes button. Spamming Spacebar/Enter doesn't do anything. You must tab or mouse to the Yes button, as there is no default. As for paranoia that Microsoft may one day switch you to Yes, or the idea that one ought to go further than saying No and uninstall the feature as well, I will leave those arguments to the youtubers. I understand folks distrust of Microsoft's dark pattern tactics, and the willies they get about AI watching their screen. Personally, I think you either have to trust a company at the kernel level to not abuse your Print Screen button, or stop using the company products entirely. Anything in-between doesn't make sense. You either have to take Microsoft at it's word or don't, because if they are lying about this then why would they stop there?

it's also a shitty employer's dream

it will be forced on using group policy, feeding some dashboard which then will inevitably form part of promotion/payrise/layoff process

Yep this. Though I was relieved to see the hatred of this feature at our privacy certification team. They're seeing GDPR nightmares already. At least at our place this isn't going to happen any time soon.

But not all companies care about ethics of course.

FSD for Microsoft Windows.

Maybe they just wanted to wait until it was feature complete...

... some sort of Total Recall, if you will.

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