Back in January Microsoft encrypted all my hard drives without saying anything. I was playing around with a dual boot yesterday and somehow aggravated Secureboot. So my C: panicked and required a 40 character key to unlock.
Your key is backed up to the Microsoft account associated with your install. Which is considerate to the hackers. (and saved me from a re-install) But if you’ve got an unactivated copy, local account, or don’t know your M$ account credentials, your boned.
Control Panel > System Security > Bitlocker Encryption.
BTW, I was aware that M$ was doing this and even made fun of the effected users. Karma.
and also Recall
Recall Rec all Record all, their not even being subtle about it anymore
My god it’s all true 🤯
Rectal is what it’s called I believe?
Microsoft Rectal
Can you remind me what that “recall” is?
It logs literally everything you do with screenshots, then sends it to M$ despite their assurances that it would be local only.
Super invasive!
Thanks, it was hard to recall
I’m not aware of them uploading the screenshotted data, not for now anyways.
The data is indexed and parsed somehow. The last report on it that I saw had a picture of a semi-famous person be properly indexed under the person’s name, despite it being a picture that was taken by the person talking about recall, which means the image was not public. Whatever recall was doing, it analyzed the picture, and that’s probably not a local process.
It takes a screenshot every five seconds and runs an LLM over it to extract text. Then there’s a UI where you can query it for what you did in the past.
It came under fire when they wanted to introduce it last year, because it stored all that data on your disk in unencrypted form. Meaning if anyone manages to run malicious code on your system, they don’t need to do the collecting themselves anymore, but can rather just send off any screenshotted passwords or whatever other secret things you might’ve been doing on your PC at any point in time. In particular, Microsoft had claimed that the data would be encrypted and it wasn’t. Didn’t even need special permissions to access it.
No idea, if they fixed the encryption now, or if this is just a case of the shitstorm having died down, so they roll it out now. But yeah, even with encryption, the implications aren’t great. If your parents or boss or law enforcement want to know what you were doing on your PC, they now have an exact history. And Microsoft could still change their mind and decide to upload all your data at any point in the future.
Doesn’t that take a ton of CPU/Memory?
Yeah, good question. I imagine the screenshotting itself is largely negligible, although obviously not free either. I don’t know when the LLM gets to do its job. Theoretically, it could be delayed until some point where there’s not much going on on your PC.
At some point, Microsoft wanted to roll out these AI features only on PCs which have an NPU, which is basically an additional CPU with a different architecture optimized for pattern recognition and such. I don’t know, if they still hold onto that requirement, but it would mean that it wouldn’t hog your CPU at least.
They have been somewhat desperate to roll out Recall, because it was the only semi-useful out of a handful of features that they came up with to somehow integrate AI into Windows. So, that’s why I’m never quite sure, what requirements they’re still holding onto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Recall
Basically takes screenshots and stores them, then scans them and makes the text searchable. There’s been a bit of controversy over it lately and how it deals with PII/PHI.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsoft-recall-screenshots-credit-cards-and-social-security-numbers-even-with-the-sensitive-information-filter-enabled
Open your mind!