lauren

lauren, 14 hours ago to microsoft

Here is the script of my national radio tech segment from yesterday on the topic of #Microsoft's new "Recall" feature. As always, there may have been some very minor word variations from this script as I presented it live.

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So I touched on this very briefly recently, but now we have a lot more details and it really has a lot of privacy and security experts shaking their heads and saying, what the blazes is Microsoft thinking? It's really quite bizarre and for many observers, including myself, calls into question Microsoft's management.

So they've announced with great fanfare a new feature named Recall, that will initially be restricted to an upcoming new line of Windows PCs but will spread rapidly once more PCs are released with suitable CPUs. In fact experimenters have already been working on making this run on older computers, which is important to help understand all of the risks. So Recall is basically a full-time kind of spying system for those computers. That is, Microsoft enables it by default, so if you do nothing it's turned on in the background.

And this baby takes a screenshot of everything you do on that PC (except for limited categories like explicit browser private modes and of course watching movies and such) and takes a screenshot every five seconds and saves it potentially for months or even years. And then there's this supposedly on-device AI system that lets you ask questions and dig through all that saved material.

And Microsoft loudly proclaims that users are in control, and this can be encrypted, and it's safe since it runs locally and blah blah blah. But you don't have to be a privacy expert or a security expert or a computer scientist to see what an enormously dangerous idea this is when anything goes wrong. Think of all the personal (for example health data and so much more) information and for businesses, their proprietary data that crosses these screens. Microsoft says that the system will happily capture usernames and passwords and pretty much anything else that isn't already protected in some other way. And this system means that anything you wanted deleted, including old email, notes, photographs, documents, whatever, could still be held in that Recall storage for, as I mentioned, months, years -- depending on the size of configured storage space.

Now it's one thing if you accidentally delete something and want it back. It's something else entirely when there are items you need deleted and you thought they were deleted but in reality there're still present. So the risks are obvious. What happens if PCs running Recall fall into unauthorized hands. What if they're hacked. What will authorities in repressive countries do with the knowledge that they can get access to pretty much anything a user has done on a PC for such long periods of time. Anytime you're looking at something that can store so much personal or critical business data, the primary concern has to be how that capability can be abused, especially in an environment when there are so many reported ransomware attacks and other kinds of kinds of exploits.

Sure, there are some valid use cases for Recall, those would particularly be the case if users had to choose to turn it on and be aware of what it's doing, rather than have Microsoft turning it on by default. But the general consensus I'm seeing about this is that the abuse potential is so enormous that any potential positive benefits drastically pale by comparison.

You may not find yourself on a PC with Microsoft's Recall in your immediate future, but you may very well be using one before too much time has passed, and if that's the case, it's one feature you should strongly consider turning off on day one and keeping turned off. For sure, I certainly would.

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lauren, 16 hours ago to random

A tablet that one of the commentators on MSNBC is reading from to cover Trump trial testimony has a big piece of green tape slapped to the back that says VERIZON on it. No point, just thought it was amusing.

lauren, 1 day ago to random

Trump is complaining about the prosecution going last.

In one of his rants on this Memorial Day, Trump complained that it's unfair that the prosecution goes last in closing arguments (summations). Sorry Donny, that's the way it works in criminal cases in this country. The party bringing the case bears the burden of proof and so delivers its summation last, the opposite of the order of opening statements. No exceptions for you.

lauren, 1 day ago to random

The Future?

Google Search A: Free searching, with AI Overview results that may be completely wrong -- be sure to independently research all answers before you act on anything Google tells you! (Why are you using Google A in the first place, then?)

Google Search B: No AI Overviews. $5/month. Annual discount available.

lauren, 1 day ago to random

Nifty cell site tour! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPPrdE05XPc

lauren, 1 day ago to random

"Bone Spur" deferment Trump has said that anyone who dies for their country is a loser and sucker.

SteveBellovin, 1 day ago to random

Uh, @lauren, were you responsible for https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/comics/bizarro/ ?

lauren, 1 day ago to random

About a quarter of Trump supporters say a conviction in New York will make them MORE likely to vote for him. Of course those votes were never in question, it's the effect on the margins especially on independents that matter, to the extent anything does matter in this respect.

lauren, 1 day ago to random

By the end of this week, Trump may be a convicted felon. Or not. Experts seem to be putting the odds of conviction very high, with 80% or higher frequently mentioned, but what the jury will actually do is of course unknowable.

lauren, 1 day ago to random

This morning Joe Biden gave a speech honoring our military. Trump wrote about "human scum" and how unfairly he feels that everyone is treating him.

lauren, 1 day ago to random

I never thought I'd publicly say anything positive about Libertarians, but yeah, they did a great job on Trump yesterday! 10 out of 10.

lauren, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago) to random

A #Google Haiku

Google now decrees
AI Overviews for all
The Winter of Search

lauren, 1 day ago to random

Tonight on my usual Monday evening national network radio tech segment, I'll be discussing Microsoft's new uber-creepy and uber-dangerous privacy and security nightmare named "Recall" -- that records everything on your screen every few seconds and keeps it all for months or years. Do you Recall Big Brother? I sure do.

SteveBellovin, 1 day ago to random

Cleaning out my office and stumbled on an old RS-232 breakout box, for DB-25 connectors. I don't really want to get rid of it, but I haven't used even a DB-9 serial port for decades…

Peternimmo, 1 day ago to random

I'd heard The Internet Archive [https://archive.org/] might have to close. I can't connect to it today. Anything know anything?

lauren, 2 days ago to random

Europeans who assume that Americans never use the metric system are 100% wrong.

lauren, 2 days ago to random

I'm supposed to be something of an expert on this stuff, but despite thinking that I knew EVERYTHING there was to know about the Roger Corman film "Battle Beyond the Stars", I discovered today that I missed something.

This 1980 film is great fun, with a wonderful early James Horner score.

It is essentially a space remake of "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), which itself is a western remake of "The Seven Samurai" (1954). Battle even co-stars Robert Vaughn who played a similar role in Magnificent!

But here's what I missed. The peaceful planet under attack is called Akir. OK, fine. And (you idiot, Lauren, how did you miss this reference all these years?) the director of Seven of course was Akira Kurosawa! ARRGGH!

VeryBadLlama, 2 days ago to random

[doing a Google search in 2012] having instant and reliable access to relevant websites is fine, but I’d really prefer to have all my questions answered by a deranged version of Microsoft Clippy that tells me to eat glue

lauren, 2 days ago to random

I've received a note from a follower commenting (complaining?) that he has a vast collection of identical Leela photos from my various posts. I want to be very clear about this. It is technically impossible to have too many photos of Leela. So it is written. So it shall be done.

(Leela made me send this.)

lauren, 2 days ago to random

Because Voyager 1 is so far from Earth, it takes almost 23 hours for a command to reach it at the speed of light, and the same for a response to reach us back, for a total of close to 50 hours.

Which means that interactions with Voyager 1, currently around 15 billion miles away, are still faster than many Microsoft Windows updates.