Microsoft pulls Windows 11 24H2 from Insider Release Preview Channel

They "Recalled" it!... :P

Whoops, forgot to add more bloat

Microsoft, probably

At the tail end of last week, Microsoft finally admitted – as it pulled 24H2 from the Release Preview Channel – that the Recall feature, which takes a snapshot of whatever is on the user's screen every few seconds, was going to need some changes before the preview ships on June 18.
- Why does it have a picture of Google's CEO?

If feel like this community could use a bot that comments the following on every post:

Sail the high seas
Switch to Linux

Delete facebook, hit the gym.

Presumably to minimize exposure while they add the announced security band-aids?

So... while I have you guys here, how do we feel about iOS having just announced basically the same feature? We angy about that one too or nah?

I mean, joking aside, I'm genuinely curious about what the reaction is going to be. On paper it's a very similar concept, but it feels like routing it through Siri and not surfacing the stored data will legitimately kill some of the creepy factor even if what's happening behind the scenes is very similar.

The fans will lap it up and all those Apple YouTubers will gush about how Apple's new invention is the best invention ever. Apple has the advantage of owning a cult.
- I disagree, I think Apple will do this feature with privacy/security in mind which Microsoft didn't do.
  
  I absolutely don't like Apple but I think it's undeniable that they try to keep their OS secure. It's still a golden prison but at least it takes privacy fairly seriously.
  
  Microsoft didn't seem to think about the challenges of that feature and it looks like a draft from an intern after a 1 hour meeting.
  
  Obviously, something that scan a user screen has some implications that are hard to miss.
  
  So yeah it's easy to point at people and say they are fanboys. But in this case the fanboys would be probably right in the sense that Apple already did better than Microsoft when it comes to privacy.
  
  At the end of the day both are businesses that you shouldn't trust with your data but I would trust a lot more Apple than Microsoft for doing this right.
I’m pretty mad about the iOS “upgrade” too.
people generally probably hate the iOS integration just because it’s another AI product, but they’re fundamentally different. the problem with Recall isn’t the AI, it’s the trove of extra data that gets collected that you normally wouldn't save to disk whereas the iOS features are only accessing existing data that you give it access to.

from my perspective this is a pretty good use case for “AI” and about as good as you can do privacy wise, if their claims pan out. most features use existing data that is user controlled and local models, and it’s pretty explicit about when it’s reaching out to the cloud.

this data is already accessible by services on your phone or exists in iCloud. if you don’t trust that infrastructure already then of course you don’t want this feature. you know how you can search for pictures of people in Photos? that’s the terrifying cLoUD Ai looking through your pictures and classifying them. this feature actually moves a lot of that semantic search on device, which is inherently more private.

of course it does make access to that data easier, so if someone could unlock your device they could potentially get access to sensitive data with simple prompts like “nudes plz”, but you should have layers of security on more sensitive stuff like bank or social accounts that would keep Siri from reading it. likely Siri won’t be able to get access to app data unless it’s specified via their API.
- Wait, no, that doesn't sound right. From the way Apple describes this they are accessing all your info, plus extracting context from it. So not only does it know people's faces, who sent you what when, the content of every image on your device and every message you sent or received, but it knows which people are related to you and how, where you are and a bunch of other stuff.
  
  Plus there are other issues on the Apple side where it compares worse in terms of privacy. As far as I can tell this doesn't have an opt-out, right? And they do send the data to Apple servers for processing (but don't store it), which the MS version doesn't do at all. It seems like they each have ways in which they're worse than the other privacy-wise, although presumably the only actually secure option between the two would be Windows with Recall turned off, unless Apple do have an opt-out they're not talking about.
  
  Ultimately, like I've been telling everyone, the interesting bit here is how the presentation of each of them and the branding and positioning of each brand alter the outcome. Both MS and Apple are arguing the same thing: that your data is secure because their system is secure and your data remains local or at least under your control. But one of them did not pay any mind to presenting security as a concern and will only ship some common sense additional security in response to pushback while the others will ship something very similar but reassuring you in a calm voice that this is all very private even if it's flying through the ether to an Apple server. So one is "a security and privacy nightmare" and the other one... well, if you have your nudes just sitting in your personal device you're really just asking for it, you know?
  
  That is the kind of understanding of marketing that separates Apple from MS, if you ask me. A whole master class in branding right there. I'll go one further: Based on what I'm reading about this, I suspect if MS had announced their bad, unencrypted leaky version today, after the Apple presentation they would have seen less angry pushback because Apple's good messaging would have smoothed things over for both.
  
  Human brains are squishy and weird.
I feel like people who buy apple products aren't the same people who don't want apple seeing everything they do.
Apple didn’t announce anything even close to Recall. Apples AI directly accesses data it doesn’t save an unencrypted screenshot every 3 seconds.
- Well, presumably neither does the Windows version they'll ship, according to them. But it IS supposed to record all activity on the background. I don't know that it's doing OCR, but presumably that's because they don't have to, since they control more of the ecosystem. From how it was described it's closer to Timeline, where it's logging all activities you take on the device and then uses an AI search to parse them and identify them. If it can find a picture you were watching on a specific time range by its content it must be logging with enough detail to know what's on the screen at all times. And unlike MS they are not committing to not sending the data over to server, although they are comitting to not storing it.
  
  But hey, this is a good case of them hiding just what they are pulling helping them make it sound less creepy even though it really isn't. This is the kind of reasoning I was wondering about. As I said above, it'll be interesting to see how sticky this framing is.
Just Say No To crApple has been my attitude towards them for years and their latest moves will not change that one tiny bit.

I bet they've come up with a new way to convince people to switch to Linux

Vista was going to make everybody go Linux. Then Windows 8. Then Windows 11 requirements. Then Recall....

Let's me honest. Average Joe doesn't understand or care.

Right now for 75% of users it's less work to install Linux than Windows, with all the crap people does to avoid TPM, Microsoft account, edge....
- It's also still relatively easy to tinker with windows to remove things you don't like while still getting to use all of your software. Linux requires a lot of tinkering too but it's so that you can use your software in the first place. It's easier for me to tinker to eventually remove bloat and disable features I don't use than it is for me to have to tinker to use my software and features in the first place.

lol too late, I’m on Linux, my server runs Linux, my dads on Linux, and later today my wife will be on Linux.

I love how Apple is flying under the radar, doing effectively the same thing, because they used the word "Private" in every heading and server name

Wrong. In the keynote, they announced that the server handling all this will be open source and anyone can analyse the code for exactly the malicious behaviour that Microsoft is pushing.

I’m not an Apple shill, but at least this they handled much better than MS

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