> Who, exactly, is clamoring for Recall in the first place?
I'm not clamoring for any Microsoft software for the last two decades, but the idea itself is interesting, like being able to catalog and look back at what I did at specific times in the past, or be able to query "What was the website where I saw X at?", would have been useful just last week for me when I was trying to find some document I read but didn't bookmark/download.
But I'd probably trust BP to not spill oil into our oceans again over Microsoft not having security/data leak issues.
It is a totally worthwhile and useful bit of tech, unfortunately the scumbags have it and so you want to disable it because you don't want them to benefit even though they are giving you something useful in exchange.
I use gmail from time to time, and YouTube, but literally everything else I do on the computer won't be visible there.
What would be cool would be to ask "What documents about ICs did I have open last night around 23:00?" and have it give me a list of local paths that I looked at, and it's all outside of browsers/Google. And of course, have it all be local.
I'm not sure if both you and previous parent don't know, but the main useful thing with Recall is understanding whatever is on the screen, not just file accesses, or URLs visited but basically anything. So while Google's activity might see some parts, recent files sees another and so on, deriving that from screenshots captures everything you'd see on the screen.
I'm aware. You suggested querying local file access history based on their contents, that could be achieved without taking screenshots and OCRing them.
Google's Activity History has gotten less and less useful ifself. The searh function basically doesn't work anymore, particularly past a few years ago. They probably keep the data to use themselves, but good luck accessing it without doing a Takeout request.
We've given up top much ground to scumbags who give us cool stuff that ends up being a Trojan Horse. Anything these scumbags give us is not to add value to our lives, it's to extract value from society in underhanded ways. "Wow look at how nice this drink is! It was given to me by that professional date rapist!"
At this point, Microsoft should be treated as a threat to society and the individual, and we should probably start shunning Microsoft engineers & executives from public spaces.
This is crazy! Can I ask how to run this ? I'm not an advanced developer & can't really tell how exactly to run this on my machine .. maybe an update on readme.md could help?
There definitely is a sort of pseudo generational gap of how peole interact with computers. I was having a conversation with a 20ish year old the other day about computer for storage and they didn't understand the filing cabinet analogy. Like, for then everything had to be in the desktop folder, but the concept that C:\Users\User\Desktop was like having a folder in a filing cabinet, where C: was the actual cabinet, was so alien to them.
The desktop metaphor makes it look like the desktop is the starting point. You can understand why someone who has not interacted with a directory through a terminal would think this.
My parents use their email inbox as a filing system. Specifically, a top of bucket filing system. They need something? Email it to them. Did you email it to them? Email again. They can find it if (and only if) it's near the top of their inbox.
A special kind of insanity that puts me in a mild, cold sweat. Such filesystems can come for your family too!
Worth noting, my father was an early adopter of the home computer. It's somehow regressed over the years.
Windows seems to make this deliberately confusing, eg displaying "Desktop" as the root of the hierarchy in the default Explorer window makes no sense (Desktop > Home > Desktop?). Then layer in typical corporate MS software like OneDrive, and it gets even weirder and harder to determine what's where on the local fs.
Be glad you've gone through life without having a partner or friend that just puts everything on the desktop.
And then complains to you all their files have disappeared.
Usually it's because they've run out of diskspace and windows has created a temporary profile for them (which is crazy default behaviour when you think about it). Not sure if that's still a thing.
Of course they just closed the popup saying "you're running low on diskspace" last week. After all, what are they supposed to do about that?
I save everything to my desktop and when it gets too messy, move the stuff I'm done with to a folder called archive. If I'm looking for something recent, it's on my desktop, else it's in my archive folder. Works pretty well for me.
I was married to someone for over 20 years who did that. She got told to stop doing it at work as well years ago because it took 40 minutes to copy her profile on login/logout.
I often ask myself, where _would_ I put such a thing. Rarely do I have to check more than two or three directories before finding the document I'm looking for, when I pretend that I'm looking for a place to file it now.
I'm wondering if you're either a savant or just have very few documents?
The more documents you have, the more likely you are to have strict classifications. The stricter the classifications the more likely you are to run into something like Russell's paradox.
At least on OneDrive for Android, a bizarre thing is that search is _not_ equivalent to find . -iname. It is able to find search terms in the _content_ of documents but not their filenames.
Though I much prefer this solution, the GP solution is better when there are non-text documents in the directory tree. Find is nice and that you can narrow it down by file name or file extension, without relying on bash globs.
THe same people who wanted web searches to appear in windows search bar, the higher ups at microsoft. they juice their numbers and say "See, look how many people are using our recall product. just like "See, look how many people are using Bing (in case of the web searches in windows search).
The most interesting part of TFA is that Microsoft is apparently deliberately restricting the ability of apps to opt out:
> We were partly inspired by Signal’s blocking of Recall. Given that Windows doesn’t let non-browser apps granularly disable Recall, Signal cleverly uses the DRM flag on their app to disable all screenshots. This breaks Recall, but unfortunately also breaks the ability to take any screenshots, including by legitimate accessibility software like screen-readers. Brave’s approach does not have this limitation since we’re able to granularly disable just Recall; regular screenshotting will still work. While it’s heartening that Microsoft recognizes that Web browsers are especially privacy-sensitive applications, we hope they offer the same granular ability to turn off Recall to all privacy-minded application developers.
This is not the kind of thing you'd do if you expect app developers to be enthusiastic about the feature.
first, Microsoft will exfiltrate data for the purposes of performance and analytics, in scare quotes.
Next, they’ll do it in order to train copilot, in an unannounced update, and tell us this is a wonderful new feature.
Finally, they’ll bundle this data that they said would always remain local, and offer it for sale as training data, which government users will then buy, for obvious reasons. this will be done in the name of safety, and for the children.
And who is to say that Microsoft will honor the toggle, “for analytic and performance metric” purposes?
EDIT: the rant above shouldn’t cast aspersions on Brave, good on them for trying.