MudMan

Well, I don’t know how long this has been a thing or how prominent it is. I haven’t seen it in the more mainstream news channels, this thread was my first notice. I expect if people start to freak out in larger, more mainstream circles they may want to address it. Right now it’s only reached a few people, I think.

I mean, it’s not like accidentally running Recall once is going to automatically compromise all your data to Microsoft in perpetuity. I don’t even know what the final implementation is supposed to be, I’ll make up my mind when I can review it, not before. Ditto for Apple’s version on the new iPhones and all the other stuff being promoted right now.

But in this case I’m just puzzled. At this point it sure looks like they installed some package or service that is probably the ground layer for the actual feature at some point, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing anything at the moment. Maybe logging the same metadata as the Win8 feature, but it’s not clear (there is a “activity history” setting in the privacy settings now, perhaps it’s part of that?).

If anything the panic shows how tainted the Recall name has become, but that’s not new for Microsoft. That original logging feature was also widely hated, as was a lot of their search or their current, mandatory “widget” news feed that nobody has ever found useful. The question is how widely tainted it is, and whether normies will want to burn it with fire as much as the Linux-facing techies.

So wait, did I miss a step or is this NOT the recall feature they announced for Copilot Plus PCs? None of the screen snapshots, none of the AI search.

As far as I can tell it’s some variation on the logging search that was in Windows in Win8, right? At least when it comes to user-facing functionality.

EDIT: As far as I can tell, people mentioning this mean the full Recall feature, but even though the package shows up on my Copilot+ PC the functionality itself is nowhere to be seen. I’m still confused about this and relatively convinced something is being missed somewhere.

Look, we’re in the realm where the guy decided to remove 50% of all life… as a resource conservation attempt.

Lovely movies, but the “guy’s a literal death cultist” required way less suspension of disbelief. Jilted incel Thanos pining after an annoyed Aubrey Plaza or whoever would have been way more timely, too.

But if we’re doing it this way… 50% of the plants, algae and plankton would have died too. XKCD MUST have figured out what that’d do to the atmosphere by now, right?