It's Back

Remember Clippy? 

Remember how you thought that Microsoft could go any lower?

Remember how Microsoft came up with an an "AI" powered "assistant" that recorded your every keystroke, and you realized that, yes, they could go lower than Clippy?

After it was revealed to be dangerously insecure, and ineluctably creepy, the boys from Redmond backed down.

Well, They're Back!!!!! 

Microsoft is now saying that their totally non-creepy and totally non-stalking and totally non-insecure system has been fixed.

Yeah, right.

And Microsoft BOB was the greatest advance in computer interfaces the 20th century. (Heck, BOB wasn't an advance in user interfaces on March 10, 1995)

Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company's original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn't elaborate further on specific changes it's making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June.

For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the OCR text and the screenshots to a giant searchable database on your PC. The goal, according to Microsoft, is to help users retrace their steps and dig up information about things they had used their PCs to find or do in the past.

The problem was that other users on the same PC, or attackers with physical or remote access to your PC, could easily access, view, and export those screenshots and the OCR database since none of the information was encrypted at rest or protected in any substantive way.

………

When the preview is released, Windows Insiders who want to test the Recall preview will need to do it on a PC that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ system requirements. Those include a processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS), 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The x86 builds of Windows for Intel and AMD processors don't currently support any Copilot+ features regardless of whether the PC meets those requirements, but that should change later this year.

Yeah, unrealistic hardware requirements, and it's still collecting extremely sensitive data.

The best way to keep this sort of data secure is to never allow Microsoft to get their grubby little hands on it.

For some reason, the operating system as spyware and "Artificial Intelligence" are central to the Blue Screen of Death vendor.

It probably won't end well.