6 ms·

> Everything a user has ever seen, ordered by application. Every bit of text the user has seen, with some minor exceptions (e.g. Microsoft Edge InPrivate mode i

by oefrha 2y ago

> Everything a user has ever seen, ordered by application. Every bit of text the user has seen, with some minor exceptions (e.g. Microsoft Edge InPrivate mode is excluded, but Google Chrome isn’t). Microsoft was the company that used to add bespoke code to Windows to maintain compatibility with old third party software, patch explorer.exe to stop third party customizations from crashing it, etc. While the whole Recall thing is a pretty bad idea for most users, the lack of care extended to the third party browser with overwhelming market share among their users is just sad. Are they counting on people switching to Edge because “PSA: you’ll be recorded if you watch pr0n in Chrome!”?

ajross 2y ago
It was surely just schedule pressure. There's no system-visible API for "incognito mode" (nor should there be, obviously, as it would defeat the purpose) so they just skipped it. I dunno, and I say this as someone who works for a competitor and has no love for MS... a lot of the responses here seem really uncharitable. This isn't bad faith, it's just a rushed product with some poor planning. If Apple had rolled this same feature out with glitz and a giant slideshow about privacy and explained how everything was encrypted and never left the device, we'd all be crowing about how great it is even if it too was screenshotting incognito windows.
- twinge 2y ago
  It seems contrary to their docs[0]: > Recall won’t save any content from your private browsing activity when you’re using Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, or other Chromium-based browsers. Without a system-level incognito mode feature I could see apps allowing users to denote their windows as DRM content to avoid Recall. 0: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-control-over-your-recall-experience-d404f672-7647-41e5-886c-a3c59680af15 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-cont...
  - oefrha 2y ago
    > apps allowing users to denote their windows as DRM content to avoid Recall That would prevent user-initiated screen captures as well. Not a good idea for browsers at least.
- oefrha 2y ago
  I thought about it for a minute, and sure, given a chrome.exe HWND, I can't think of a way to tell if it's Incognito.[1] But companies work with important vendors on major features all the time. If they think it's important enough to exclude private windows in Edge, they surely could have worked with Google to figure out something. > nor should there be, obviously, as it would defeat the purpose No it doesn't. Incognito mode is about leaving no trace on disk, that's all. Recall is the one defeating that purpose right now, if TFA is accurate. [1] Not saying it's impossible. Only that I can't think of a straightforward solution in a pinch with my limited Windows experience and hacking skills.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    In Firefox, check for "Private Browsing" in the titlebar. In Tor Browser… default to "it's private". In stock Chromium, look for the string "Incognito" near the Chrome hamburger icon (e.g. via IAccessible2). It's not hard to support this functionality in the major browsers: it'd take me all of 15 minutes.
    - reverius42 2y ago
      What about localization? What if a release of the browser changes the string?
- klabb3 2y ago
  > a lot of the responses here seem really uncharitable. This isn't bad faith, it's just a rushed product with some poor planning. But it’s not the product people are criticizing, at all. Similar tools have existed for a long time and have not raised eyebrows except when it’s been forced by an employer or a school. It’s that it’s the OS putting an always on and enabled-by-default spyware on devices that are frequently shared by family members, when their average users who barely know what a web browser is and will just accept recommended defaults. Speaking of which, the whole spiel about Edge/IE is precisely their aggressive defaults. It’s the same here. If you’re a startup building custom tools you can talk about rushed products and assume good intent. This software is built by a software company with some of the worlds best software engineers all the way up to the top. I mean, people trust them with everything from business secrets to payment details to mission critical services. This is clearly not a “rushed product oopsie”, it’s blatant disregard for privacy, and to a lesser extent, security. I’m avoiding windows like the plague, but since seeing my mom get bombarded with “recommended Microsoft defaults” over the last decade or so, I’m convinced MS is deliberately exploiting uninformed users as much as they can get away with, while leaving hidden options for power users to disable the ads and the crapware so they don’t leave. This total recall debacle is probably a similar attempt at using their unknowing user base to train their new AI models, or similar. If it was a genuinely useful product it would not be enabled by default.
  - ajross 2y ago
    > It’s that it’s the OS putting an always on and enabled-by-default spyware on devices that are frequently shared And I have to repeat: if Apple Computer had pushed the same product, but with a slide talking about how it was all locally encrypted and unextractable and tied to both the device and the user account, HN would be celebrating the attention to privacy even though macs too are "frequently shared". And the reasoning would be how strong the security engineering was around the process, because we love that stuff and we love macs. MS doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt, and it leaks into the technical content of the argument, and that's wrong. And FWIW I'm mostly just handwaving the technical details. I mean, do we know for a fact that MS is *not* encrypting this with a TPM-managed key tied to the user account? I bet they are, honestly.
- patrick451 2y ago
  > a lot of the responses here seem really uncharitable. It's Microsoft. There no reason to extend any charity whatsoever when talking about this company.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > we'd all be crowing about how great it is Not all of us, no.
cortesoft 2y ago
How would this system know chrome was running incognito?
- kccqzy 2y ago
  Develop an API in Windows. Contribute to the Chromium codebase to use this API.
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    We already have "Launch as Administrator" add "Launch in private mode"
    - reverius42 2y ago
      So now the user has to remember to not only open a private window or tab in their browser, but also open the whole browser in private mode?
      - willcipriano 2y ago
        If you want to be really consumer focused, the OS could keep the browser (and other apps) honest about some of it's privacy guarantees by not affording it any persistent storage between sessions.
- btown 2y ago
  For one, OCR’ing the word Incognito from the screen?
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    So I just add a new custom toolbar to the bottom of the screen titled "Incognito" so that the text is always there, and suddenly nothing's being recorded anymore? :P On one level that's convenient, but on the other hand I'm not sure it's a very robust design.
  - 2y ago
Workaccount2 2y ago
Watching users flock to Apple's walled garden, to the point where it's a social issue to not have an iPhone, has left Microsoft (and many others) wondering why the fuck they have been so accommodating to user choices for all this time.
- leereeves 2y ago
  Outside of high school, where literally everything is a reason to ostracize people who are different, where is it a social issue to not have an iPhone?
  - lwhalen 2y ago
    I've been married for ages (so I can't speak to this first-hand), but my single friends in their late-20s to mid-30s say that NOT having an iPhone gets them rejected fairly often.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      Seems to me like an effortless way for them to automatically filter out terrible, shallow partners from their lives before investing anything into a relationship. What a time-saver!
      - lwhalen 2y ago
        You and I are in violent agreement on this, but... the younger generation seems more interested in 'smashing' these days than 'partner-seeking'. Can't say I was MUCH different, but I certainly wouldn't change the daily-driver tech I use just to peacock for a hot date.
        Gud 2y ago
        [flagged]
        _lvbh 2y ago
        Perhaps that’s more prevalent in the US and wealthier districts? I haven’t seen any of that in the UK (everyone here seems to use WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat which I similarly dislike)
rezonant 2y ago
Thankfully it looks like they've already added support for Chrome, Firefox and a bunch of other browsers: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/retrace-your-steps-with-recall-aa03f8a0-a78b-4b3e-b0a1-2eb8ac48701c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/retrace-your-ste...
- oefrha 2y ago
  That's what they say in marketing materials, but TFA claims to have dumped their database and was speaking from experience dissecting that. Hard to say which should be trusted.
  - wilsonnb3 2y ago
    TFA is using a preview release of Windows modified to run on hardware that isn’t officially supported, I would lean towards trusting the marketing material on what will be supported at release.
- NewJazz 2y ago
  This is not something to be grateful for. They are normalizing spying by default.
  - rezonant 2y ago
    I didn't say we should be grateful about that. I'm saying that thankfully they are not using the threat of your guarded personal data being exposed because you want this feature but don't want to use Edge.
- hammyhavoc 2y ago
  "Thankful" for surveillance?
  - rezonant 2y ago
    Thankful for not pushing Edge if you decide you want this feature. This feature is something the community has been independently creating for years. Personally I don't think people should actually allow this type of feature. It's too much of a risk. But my point stands on its own, that at least they aren't creating an even more perverse incentive to use Edge, which they absolutely could have done, and seems the MO of the Microsoft today who would sacrifice all else to be able to say there's 1 or 2 more Edge or Bing users.
bitwize 2y ago
Microsoft is still fighting the browser wars of the 90s. They're not going to give third-party browsers any quarter if they can avoid it.
friend_and_foe 2y ago
> if you don't use our browser we will spy on you Good god how more obvious could it be? Anyone still using this software is a lost cause.
- jmkni 2y ago
  Most people just don’t care that much about tech (they have other shit going on) and will use whatever is put in front of them. I think the tech community is responsible for keeping companies like MS in check and pushing back against literal spyware being normalised in operating systems.
gigel82 2y ago
Presumably there's work needed from the app side for this integration, the OS component won't know what the app / user wants captured or not.
michaeldavis099 2y ago
[dead]
almazzz 2y ago
[dead]

by oefrha 2y ago

ajross 2y ago

It was surely just schedule pressure. There's no system-visible API for "incognito mode" (nor should there be, obviously, as it would defeat the purpose) so they just skipped it. I dunno, and I say this as someone who works for a competitor and has no love for MS... a lot of the responses here seem really uncharitable. This isn't bad faith, it's just a rushed product with some poor planning. If Apple had rolled this same feature out with glitz and a giant slideshow about privacy and explained how everything was encrypted and never left the device, we'd all be crowing about how great it is even if it too was screenshotting incognito windows.

twinge 2y ago
It seems contrary to their docs[0]: > Recall won’t save any content from your private browsing activity when you’re using Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, or other Chromium-based browsers. Without a system-level incognito mode feature I could see apps allowing users to denote their windows as DRM content to avoid Recall. 0: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-control-over-your-recall-experience-d404f672-7647-41e5-886c-a3c59680af15 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-cont...
- oefrha 2y ago
  > apps allowing users to denote their windows as DRM content to avoid Recall That would prevent user-initiated screen captures as well. Not a good idea for browsers at least.
oefrha 2y ago
I thought about it for a minute, and sure, given a chrome.exe HWND, I can't think of a way to tell if it's Incognito.[1] But companies work with important vendors on major features all the time. If they think it's important enough to exclude private windows in Edge, they surely could have worked with Google to figure out something. > nor should there be, obviously, as it would defeat the purpose No it doesn't. Incognito mode is about leaving no trace on disk, that's all. Recall is the one defeating that purpose right now, if TFA is accurate. [1] Not saying it's impossible. Only that I can't think of a straightforward solution in a pinch with my limited Windows experience and hacking skills.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  In Firefox, check for "Private Browsing" in the titlebar. In Tor Browser… default to "it's private". In stock Chromium, look for the string "Incognito" near the Chrome hamburger icon (e.g. via IAccessible2). It's not hard to support this functionality in the major browsers: it'd take me all of 15 minutes.
  - reverius42 2y ago
    What about localization? What if a release of the browser changes the string?
klabb3 2y ago
> a lot of the responses here seem really uncharitable. This isn't bad faith, it's just a rushed product with some poor planning. But it’s not the product people are criticizing, at all. Similar tools have existed for a long time and have not raised eyebrows except when it’s been forced by an employer or a school. It’s that it’s the OS putting an always on and enabled-by-default spyware on devices that are frequently shared by family members, when their average users who barely know what a web browser is and will just accept recommended defaults. Speaking of which, the whole spiel about Edge/IE is precisely their aggressive defaults. It’s the same here. If you’re a startup building custom tools you can talk about rushed products and assume good intent. This software is built by a software company with some of the worlds best software engineers all the way up to the top. I mean, people trust them with everything from business secrets to payment details to mission critical services. This is clearly not a “rushed product oopsie”, it’s blatant disregard for privacy, and to a lesser extent, security. I’m avoiding windows like the plague, but since seeing my mom get bombarded with “recommended Microsoft defaults” over the last decade or so, I’m convinced MS is deliberately exploiting uninformed users as much as they can get away with, while leaving hidden options for power users to disable the ads and the crapware so they don’t leave. This total recall debacle is probably a similar attempt at using their unknowing user base to train their new AI models, or similar. If it was a genuinely useful product it would not be enabled by default.
- ajross 2y ago
  > It’s that it’s the OS putting an always on and enabled-by-default spyware on devices that are frequently shared And I have to repeat: if Apple Computer had pushed the same product, but with a slide talking about how it was all locally encrypted and unextractable and tied to both the device and the user account, HN would be celebrating the attention to privacy even though macs too are "frequently shared". And the reasoning would be how strong the security engineering was around the process, because we love that stuff and we love macs. MS doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt, and it leaks into the technical content of the argument, and that's wrong. And FWIW I'm mostly just handwaving the technical details. I mean, do we know for a fact that MS is *not* encrypting this with a TPM-managed key tied to the user account? I bet they are, honestly.
patrick451 2y ago
> a lot of the responses here seem really uncharitable. It's Microsoft. There no reason to extend any charity whatsoever when talking about this company.
JohnFen 2y ago
> we'd all be crowing about how great it is Not all of us, no.

cortesoft 2y ago

How would this system know chrome was running incognito?

kccqzy 2y ago
Develop an API in Windows. Contribute to the Chromium codebase to use this API.
- willcipriano 2y ago
  We already have "Launch as Administrator" add "Launch in private mode"
  - reverius42 2y ago
    So now the user has to remember to not only open a private window or tab in their browser, but also open the whole browser in private mode?
    - willcipriano 2y ago
      If you want to be really consumer focused, the OS could keep the browser (and other apps) honest about some of it's privacy guarantees by not affording it any persistent storage between sessions.
btown 2y ago
For one, OCR’ing the word Incognito from the screen?
- Terr_ 2y ago
  So I just add a new custom toolbar to the bottom of the screen titled "Incognito" so that the text is always there, and suddenly nothing's being recorded anymore? :P On one level that's convenient, but on the other hand I'm not sure it's a very robust design.
- 2y ago

Workaccount2 2y ago

Watching users flock to Apple's walled garden, to the point where it's a social issue to not have an iPhone, has left Microsoft (and many others) wondering why the fuck they have been so accommodating to user choices for all this time.

leereeves 2y ago
Outside of high school, where literally everything is a reason to ostracize people who are different, where is it a social issue to not have an iPhone?
- lwhalen 2y ago
  I've been married for ages (so I can't speak to this first-hand), but my single friends in their late-20s to mid-30s say that NOT having an iPhone gets them rejected fairly often.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Seems to me like an effortless way for them to automatically filter out terrible, shallow partners from their lives before investing anything into a relationship. What a time-saver!
    - lwhalen 2y ago
      You and I are in violent agreement on this, but... the younger generation seems more interested in 'smashing' these days than 'partner-seeking'. Can't say I was MUCH different, but I certainly wouldn't change the daily-driver tech I use just to peacock for a hot date.
      - Gud 2y ago
        [flagged]
      - _lvbh 2y ago
        Perhaps that’s more prevalent in the US and wealthier districts? I haven’t seen any of that in the UK (everyone here seems to use WhatsApp, Instagram, and Snapchat which I similarly dislike)

rezonant 2y ago

Thankfully it looks like they've already added support for Chrome, Firefox and a bunch of other browsers: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/retrace-your-steps-with-recall-aa03f8a0-a78b-4b3e-b0a1-2eb8ac48701c https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/retrace-your-ste...

oefrha 2y ago
That's what they say in marketing materials, but TFA claims to have dumped their database and was speaking from experience dissecting that. Hard to say which should be trusted.
- wilsonnb3 2y ago
  TFA is using a preview release of Windows modified to run on hardware that isn’t officially supported, I would lean towards trusting the marketing material on what will be supported at release.
NewJazz 2y ago
This is not something to be grateful for. They are normalizing spying by default.
- rezonant 2y ago
  I didn't say we should be grateful about that. I'm saying that thankfully they are not using the threat of your guarded personal data being exposed because you want this feature but don't want to use Edge.
hammyhavoc 2y ago
"Thankful" for surveillance?
- rezonant 2y ago
  Thankful for not pushing Edge if you decide you want this feature. This feature is something the community has been independently creating for years. Personally I don't think people should actually allow this type of feature. It's too much of a risk. But my point stands on its own, that at least they aren't creating an even more perverse incentive to use Edge, which they absolutely could have done, and seems the MO of the Microsoft today who would sacrifice all else to be able to say there's 1 or 2 more Edge or Bing users.

bitwize 2y ago

Microsoft is still fighting the browser wars of the 90s. They're not going to give third-party browsers any quarter if they can avoid it.

friend_and_foe 2y ago

> if you don't use our browser we will spy on you Good god how more obvious could it be? Anyone still using this software is a lost cause.

jmkni 2y ago
Most people just don’t care that much about tech (they have other shit going on) and will use whatever is put in front of them. I think the tech community is responsible for keeping companies like MS in check and pushing back against literal spyware being normalised in operating systems.

gigel82 2y ago

Presumably there's work needed from the app side for this integration, the OS component won't know what the app / user wants captured or not.

michaeldavis099 2y ago

[dead]

almazzz 2y ago

[dead]