Microsoft’s Windows Recall feature is attracting controversy before even venturing out of preview.
Microsoft said in its FAQs that its snapshotting feature will vacuum up sensitive information: “Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry.”
Mozilla’s Chief Product Officer Steve Teixeira told The Register: "Mozilla is concerned about Windows Recall. From a browser perspective, some data should be saved, and some shouldn’t.
Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor at ESET, noted that while the feature is not on by default, its use “opens up another avenue for criminals to attack.”
Moore warned that “users should be mindful of allowing any content to be analysed by AI algorithms for a better experience.”
Cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont was scathing in his assessment of the technology, writing: “In essence, a keylogger is being baked into Windows as a feature.”
AI expert Gary Marcus was blunter: “F^ck that. I don’t want my computer to spy on everything I ever do.”
Total Recall? Get your ass to Linux!
Honestly if you do truly value having control over your privacy take this advice to heart. There are so many good Linux options now that are even easier than Windows to install. All it takes is a few clicks. You can even choose which UI you prefer in many cases. All those previous barriers to entry no longer exist.
I’ve tried to get into linux 4 different times now. Over the coarst of 15 years.
I have no idea what I’m doing.
Try BazziteOS
It’s meant for gaming, but I find it’s so feature complete that’s it’s great for non-gaming purposes.
Somehow it even works better on my monitor than Windows, since I can actually control my brightness from an applet rather than having to use my monitor buttons.
Not OP, but I feel like every time I come across a thread like this, someone is recommending a different version of Linux. It makes it really difficult to decide, and I can’t exactly just “try out” Linux on my computer the same way I could try out other programs.
Yes, I could install it on a thumb drive, but that’s not persistent, so I couldn’t try it out for more than a few hours. Takes longer than that to decide to completely switch OSes.
You can make a persistent install on a thumb drive actually. Has been possible for about a decade I think. There’s even a program now called Ventoy that lets you make multiple persistent installs of different Linux distros on a single thumb drive even.
I think I’ve tried Ventoy before, actually. I didn’t know it did persistent installs.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to enable my PC to boot from a USB device. It uses the most recent version of the MyAsus UEFI, the one that looks like this picture I pulled from online (minus the red outline, obviously):
You don’t happen to know how to enable booting from a device from there, do you? All the guides I found online were for an older version of the Asus UEFI settings.
Normally when your PC is initially starting up, F8 will bring up the boot menu and you’d select the USB drive. Otherwise, where it says boot order, clicking around there should let you change the boot order and have the drive boot first every time. Actually, if you’re using it as a persistent then this is probably the better option.
I’m not the biggest computer buff compared to some here, so if I’m wrong in any way let me know or comment again - someone will likely come give the right answer lol.
Plus I haven’t used Ventoy much, I only used to do it the old fashioned way of partitioning it many years ago until I found what I liked best.
For beginners, I recommend Fedora or Ubuntu based distros because they’re definitely the most user friendly, like windows or the days, possibly more now? At least BazziteOS has had more feature compatibility than Windows, which I was shocked by. Still testing all my games, but so far that works well too.
Chiming in to say that on my asus laptop, the start up button is f12! Press as soon as the first logo appears on the screen. It might take a few times to get the timing right, if you miss it just restart the computer.
It should take you to a menu that looks like a classic hacker screen (blue screen with pixilated text, no clickable UI). Then go to the boot options and select the USB.
The kicker is, for years and years down the line, all of your tech questions will be written to Google as “How do I xxxx in <obscure distro name here>”.
Many, but not all, of those problems are resolved by searching “in Linux”, but others you’d have to search for “in <similar distro>”. Windows is just Windows.
You can use something like VirtualBox or VMWare. Won’t be the fastest experience, but also not so bad. It’s good enough to have a feel of how something works.
You can create a partition on your hard drive and set your PC up to dual-boot. I have no idea if this is still widely used or if there is another, better/easier way, but it’s what I did a long time ago for a hat simulator game.
I’ve read in a few different places that, unfortunately, more recent Windows bootloader’s can break dual-boot setups.
And not just that, but each distro of linux has its own quirks and each one is compatible with a different list of brands of hardware. you could brick your system if you install the wrong distro on the wrong hardware, like down to the bios
And contrary to popular belief, LINUX CAN GET MALWARE JUST AS EASILY AS WINDOWS CAN.
With windows, there’s a 30 year history of malware infections and there’s several good choices for windows based antivirus programs, and three amazing ones. The people who work at those antivirus companies know how vulnerable windows is and so they’re always working on improving their software…at least the good ones are, but those same antivirus programs on linux don’t have nearly as much stuff in them to fight against APTs most linux versions of great antivirus programs like comodo and kaspersky are gutted down to just a regular antivirus with heuristics, no zero-day threat protection at all, you’re completely dependent on how fast the new malware can get added to the blacklist.
But on windows, if you use comodo and know how to configure it and understand that it will never pop up unless something might be wrong, you’re always prepared for zero-day threats and even zero-hour threats.
Linux used to be super secure, simply because there were so few people using it or even aware of it, but with every linux distro being open source, malware-makers can make all kinds of exploit kits for it in record time, because there’s no trial an error like there is on windows, at this point in time, no antivirus company is really prepared to deal with zero-day linux malware.
But windows users, even stupid ones know that you need an antivirus program on windows. So the malware-makers have to play a cat-and-mouse game with windows malware if they hit a decent number of systems with their malware, that malware isn’t going to be unknown for very long. And antivirus companies like bitdefender and avira, the former of which is great at adding new samples to the blacklist at super speed, and avira which isn’t as good at that anymore because they got bought by…norton? If I remember correctly, they rent their database out to other antivirus companies, Eset, another really good detector of new malware also rents their database out to other antivirus companies.
ClamAV is good at detecting linux based malware…as far as I’ve heard, but it’s useless against anything unknown to it.
windows is a pain in the ass to detail with…but that’s only if you don’t know how to work with it. Linux can be that way too. If there’s a bug in some software that fucks up parts of your OS, there’s not much support you can get from local techs, but if something like that happens with windows, there’s loads of freelance independent computer techs out there that know how to fix it.
Linux is cool, if you can make it work for you, great! But don’t act like windows is worthless. There’s ways to deal with the bloat, and there’s endless amounts of free advice on countless forums across the entire internet on how to deal with problems that come up
Honestly, I have Windows working just the way I want it right now (and I do know enough to be able to wrangle it to do just what I want it to do), but I could do without so much spyware. That’s the main reason I’m looking into Linux. Any way you know how to get rid of Windows’ built-in spyware without impacting security at all or breaking anything too badly?
On a different note, I have actually been looking for a new antivirus, preferably a free but very good one. Norton (my dad subscribed to it and got like 10 license keys years ago and shared with the family) has become too much like adware for me in recent years. Your comment has been helpful with that.
malware on linux is surprisingly common, more common than most people realize.
in fact, for every variety of malware for windows, there’s a version of it for many linux distros too
Most malware that targets linux goes for server stuff, since those are the most valuable targets. End user linux, which barely hits 3% usage, isn’t a common target because there’s not much to be gained.