Microsoft says it has “listened to feedback” following a privacy row over a new tool which takes regular screenshots of users’ activity.

It was labelled a potential “privacy nightmare” by critics when it was unveiled in May 2024 - prompting the tech giant to postpone its release. It now plans to relaunch the artificial intelligence (AI) powered tool in November on its new CoPilot+ computers.

[…]

When it initially announced the tool at its developer conference in May, Microsoft said it used AI “to make it possible to access virtually anything you have ever seen on your PC”, and likened it to having photographic memory. It said Recall could search through a users’ past activity, including their files, photos, emails and browsing history.

[…]

But critics quickly raised concerns, given the quantity of sensitive data the system would harvest, with one expert labelling it a potential “privacy nightmare."

[…]

[Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows and devices says] that “Windows offers tools to help you control your privacy and customise what gets saved for you to find later”.

However a technical blog about it states that “diagnostic data” from the tool may be shared with the firm depending on individual privacy settings.

[Microsoft says in a blog post that users can remove Recall entirely by using the optional features settings in Windows.]

  • DarkThoughts
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    23 months ago

    Huh? ROCm is not working for me at all so far. I’ve tried to get it to work with Koboldcpp (which I have to build in a distrobox for it to even run, but then it only runs in software / cpu mode), tried LM Studio (which is easy to install, but again, no ROCm / gpu support detected), and I tried Krita’s diffusion implementation (again, only cpu working). This and the fact that I can’t get Mullvad to run are my biggest pet peeves so far.

    Ironically, I decided to try it, despite my already existing skepticism beforehand, because TimeShift managed to break my post update broken system even further to the point where I couldn’t figure out if it is even salvageable (definitely not for me though). I can’t go back to Windows but I also still have not really found a good distro for me yet.

    • @GenderNeutralBro
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      13 months ago

      Hmm, I’ll have to double-check it on my build. Pretty sure it was working, but it’s possible I was only getting OpenCL or Vulkan acceleration. Out of curiosity, what’s your GPU model? I think only the 7900XT[X] is officially supported for ROCm.

      • DarkThoughts
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        23 months ago

        RX 6650 XT. And no, all RDNA 2 cards support ROCm. I literally had it running on my previous distro. Was a pain to install with all its dependencies and building the tools properly, since you often had to specify the model, but it was doable. On Bazzite it just seems impossible for me.