CUCuriousCosmic·Jun 2, 2024
> bitlocker
Windows is actually pushing for bitlocker by default now. I believe new Windows 11 installs either are already or will soon start defaulting to enabling bitlocker across the board.
> telemetry/training
It's really just timer triggered screenshots + OCR + an SLM (small language model) running on device on a TPU/NPU, GPU, or other ONNX compatible device.
I'm generally super uncharitable about Microsoft since a lot of their stuff is a nasty black box with unclear security assumptions however with Recall, it seems like people are really jumping to conclusions without really even looking into what all it is.
This is a largely "unsophisticated" product made by bolting a bunch of more or less preassembled components and the bulk of which is open source.
- Screenshot + OCR is almost certainly Microsoft Powertoys Text Extractor (https:
Read the rest
//github.com/microsoft/PowerToys)
- The DB is sqlite but the system is probably just kernel-memory which is a local .NET application: https://github.com/microsoft/kernel-memory
- The SLM is Phi-3 which is open and designed primarily to run locally https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-phi-3-red...
- The actual underlying tech stack is DirectML (https://github.com/microsoft/DirectML) and ONNX (https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime).
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So the data is intended to be encrypted at rest along with the rest of the OS, it's all run locally (which isn't a handwaivy thing, the tech is all very much capable of running locally) and if you don't have hardware capable of running it, it shouldn't be enabled in the first place.
My confusion with all of this is why Recall didn't start out as a PowerToys feature. It sounds like the exact type of internal "look at this cool little toy I built" thing that generally makes it into PowerToys but I'm assuming some exec ran with the opportunity and said "this is awesome, let's ship it with the OS and make it a highliner feature for our AI push" which is how we got here.