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Not being a security expert, this looks great at first glance and I am very happy Microsoft put in the security effort they told everyone they would. It does ho
by petterroea 2y ago
Not being a security expert, this looks great at first glance and I am very happy Microsoft put in the security effort they told everyone they would. It does however raise a few discussion points:
This wasn't so hard, was it? Why wasn't it done before? To me, the fact that the new recall architecture wasn't in the initial release says that there are still huge security culture issues. But organizational culture is slow to change, and Recall has happened in parallel with the new security reforms, so you can't expect them to get rid of their old ways over night.
As others in the thread have pointed out, it seems Microsoft are promising things that are very non-Microsoft-y, like promising to never re-activate, promising an easy opt-out to never be bothered again, and promising that activating the service in the first place is an opt-in-during-install feature. Microsoft have a reputation for being a pushy company that doesn't take no for an answer, and coupled with the recent security culture issues, I have personally started recommending non-tech people to just switch to Apple now before things get worse. Can we trust that Microsoft won't backpedal on their promises? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice...
- the_snooze 2y ago>Microsoft have a reputation for being a pushy company that doesn't take no for an answer Exactly, this Recall feature exists in the context of all the user-hostile crap Microsoft has been pushing for the past decade or so. Those design decisions are a direct reflection of Microsoft's values and culture. Even if Recall itself is indeed perfectly fine, I wouldn't use it because the service operator is demonstrably disrespectful of their users' agency.
- petterroea 2y agoWith Microsoft promising to fix their shit and promising no bad user patterns in only some cases where there has been enough backlash, it's an even worse situation than being outright bad. It makes them more unpredictable. I bet it would also ensnare more well-wishing sysadmins and non-tech consumers who take singular instances of apologizing/fixing at face value.
- schmorptron 2y agoThat's been something I don't get. Someone at Microsoft must be aware that they've completely killed user excitement for new features over the last 10 or so years by pushing them relentlessly, the features mostly not being strictly a good deal for the users and them being hard to disable and even coming back after you've explicitly denied consent. Surely that isn't good for MS in the long term? Having a userbase that likes using your product must be better for business than a userbase that has been taught to be wary of anything you do, and to dismiss anything you come out with based on previous "features". Is it the typical hacker news theory of management looking for short term user number growth to get promoted, or something else entirely? When apple releases features, most of their userbase is excited. They have learned that in most cases it's either something cool they can use straight away or an optional service that they might or might not need. Apple still does some annoyances to push their services, but not nearly as bad as MS.
- skydhash 2y agoOperating systems are supposed to be boring, very much like databases or virtualization software. Improvements are nice and welcomed, but changes for the sake of changes are likely to upset people. Microsoft is free to create new software for their OS, but they shouldn't make them a dependency of said OS.
- rsynnott 2y ago> This wasn't so hard, was it? Why wasn't it done before? Got to get the ‘feature’ out before the bubble bursts, regardless of how broken it is.