The privacy concerns here are real and massive, and I suspect this will get worse before it gets better.
However. This is the holy grail of computer usage. A good version of this could be the killer app for modern AI. Because of that, ripple are going to keep trying to make this feature happen. There’s already a popular implementation on macOS. I’m excited for the end-state, but apprehensive about getting there.
> However. This is the holy grail of computer usage
i’ve seen this often and i’m trying to understand the issue. i have never wanted to go back in history or have a comprehensive history of all my actions. the only exception is the terminal and for that ctrl+r/history is more than enough. i learn, apply and move on.
I often have 100 tabs open so that I can find things I was looking at again. I regularly browse my browser history to try to find things I saw previously. I often remember seeing something in a chat session somewhere, but can't remember which person/channel/room it was...
Being able to search everything I've seen on my screen would address all of these. I think it would fundamentally change how we interface with computers, if we could do it reliably. Silos between applications can start to break down when you have sufficient intelligence about what's on the screen too, and that's a huge opportunity.
interesting. thanks for the reply. i also used to have lots of tabs open till i realised i need to organise better. since then i keep a few tabs open at max and regularly close all my tabs. i also tend to open a tab, read what i need to and then close it. no more clutter this way.
As someone with ADHD, being able to have an assistant with perfect memory that I can ask extremely vague questions to about things I'm pretty sure I did some time between last week and 5 years ago sounds amazing. I'm skeptical Recall will actually be able to do that. I doubt its usefulness outweighs the legal and social concerns. But I can absolutely see the use.
You don't see how having perfect / idempotent memory of every single thing you've seen on your computer would be useful? Half my day on my computer revolves around trying to dig up info I've seen previously that I didn't save/categorize properly. Not even having to bother with the categorization bit in the first place would be an amazing productivity improvement.
It'd be reasonable to see this as a waymark on a roadmap.
Which is why it makes little sense to users. Why it is counterintuitive in that it will drive people away instead of draw them to the product. And why it is being rammed out into the market regardless.
I wonder what kinda data they will get cause most people who code and do heavy stuff I think are on mac/Linux so I wonder how good the data they gather be you know? Mostly moms and dads using their computers wrong this is what I imagine my head is the data they gather, like maybe 50-60% of it lol and heavy users with good data are nowhere to be found
> What the hell is the "wrong" way to use a computer?
Searching for your bank's website rather than bookmarking it, and entering your credentials into the phishing site that's the top result.
Installing Anydesk or something for the "nice gentleman who called me from Microsoft to tell me my warranty had expired and he needed gift cards to pay for it."
Those are the two most obvious ones I can think of. There's a multi-billion dollar "industry" separating especially older people from their money using computers.
Frankly if you've even been around computers for 50+ years and haven't encountered the many and varied ridiculous ways people can use them "wrong," I have to wonder whether you've ever had to deal with regular people using them in the real world at all.
Eh, I'm a pretty advanced user by any mean, and I still search for my banks website a non-trivial amount of time. I have a bookmark, but it's honestly just as fast to do it that way
Is not wrong because it is slower. It is wrong because it is a security problem. A typo in your search or a phisher who managed to SEO their results above the genuine one, and you end up on a malicious site identical except for a hard to spot detail in the URL. You enter your username and password, and probably even helpfully do the 2FA dance for them to let them drain your account.
I'm somewhat with the parent on this. Getting this right will probably take a long time but can eventually bring us something like J.A.R.V.I.S, whereby an AI agent can reason about all activities you've performed on the computer in the past and give you advice or perform full tasks for you based on that. We can argue whether we want to give the AI that level of trust, but I'm very interested in the potential.
No. The holy grail of computing would be taking an instant snapshot as you do with emulators/vm's from anywhere, allowing you to rollback anytime, restoring the CPU and memory settings in the spot. With incremental snapshots, 'branches' and so on, switching back and forth seamlessly as you would do with save states under an emulator.
And with 'no time', with a delay of less than 5-10 seconds on creating/restoring a snapshot.
On search, as they stated, Recoll did it fine over 20 years.
Doesn’t Windows already have a data store that’s encrypted with a key that doesn’t exist in RAM unless you’re logged on? And some kind of isolation of sensitive processes in a VM?
Malware can probably read most of the user’s data in RAM, but if OS components keep getting more isolated from each other, maybe that can be secure enough.
The Data Protection API makes this quite easy from a programming standpoint (it also makes relocating keys to another machine hard, but in this case this should count as another upside): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_API
Why is a padlock with the key stuck right into it secure? The encrypted data and the decryption key is on the same physical device.
Sure, memory isolation techniques may serve as a deterrent with extreme care. But if Microsoft increases the attack surface by sloppily integrating that feature everywhere in Windows, the yet-to-be-implemented-if-at-all encryption is going to be ineffective. And that’s going to happen more likely than not.
That's exactly the kind of thing I was referring to when I wrote "memory isolation techniques." Even if you gate access with an API, you can still retrieve data from it and that's the problem.
Also, it should be clear by now that government agencies are going to demand access to this data once this becomes widespread. VMs aren't going to protect against further assault on our civil liberties.
How does that work? Can authorities compell Microsoft to surreptitiously have only my computer randomly unencrypt and submit stuff? If so, couldn't the authorities just tell MS to activate a tool like recall anyway?
Authorities compel tech companies to hand over data and place backdoors. They typically abuse secrecy laws to avoid public backlash, but their public demands have gotten bolder since the Snowden disclosures.
The same reason banks get occasionally robbed, despite all security cameras, delayed openings, biometrics, armed security, and everything else put in place.
When there is a will, there is eventually a way, for anyone with enough resources.
When has windows ever been a safe or secure OS environment? Seems to me, many an exploit has been installed by the user while trying to get device drivers working
I strongly feel that the "this is the holy grail of computer feature" take is tech-industry mindbubble. This line in the article hits very hard:
> A lot of Windows users just want their PCs so they can play games, watch porn, and live their lives as human beings who make mistakes
The vast, VAST majority of Windows users don't care about a feature like this. You might say "if we'd ask people what they'd wanted they'd have said a faster horse", but we've seen this play out time and time again since ~2014 where the tech industry believes some thing is going to be Next Big Huge, it doesn't stick, and Microsoft Office continues to make fifty billion dollars a year because, it turns out, we kinda solved PCs in the 90s and 78% of what We The Tech Industry has invented since then has a market 5% the size the hype would lead you to believe. Metaverse, VR, AR, Crypto, Decentralized Finance, AI, Voice assistants, tablets (what's a computer?), quantum computing, IoT (all consumers love our toasters connected to the internet, this is undeniable and people pay extra for this /s).
Sometimes people just want a faster horse; which in this case means "filesystem search that actually works". The techbro response to that is "well, you can have both" but there's fucking actually zero evidence of this, period, neither Microsoft nor Apple have demonstrated the capability to get the basics of their operating systems right anymore, We Their Customers should have zero faith in their ability to even get this right, as articles like this demonstrate.
> I used Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — which detected the off the shelve infostealer — but by the time the automated remediation kicked in (which took over ten minutes) my Recall data was already long gone.
This isn't a Microsoft problem; well, obviously it is, but its really an industry problem. Sorry for waxing abstractly here, but we've literally actually forgotten how to build software [1]. The smart & dedicated people have either left the industry or have been marginalized by MBAs, and the kids are rewriting the Windows Start menu in javascript [2].
However. This is the holy grail of computer usage. A good version of this could be the killer app for modern AI. Because of that, ripple are going to keep trying to make this feature happen. There’s already a popular implementation on macOS. I’m excited for the end-state, but apprehensive about getting there.