Microsoft is relaunching its AI-powered Recall feature, which records everything you do on your PC by constantly taking screenshots.
  • In December, an investigation by Tom’s Hardware found that Recall frequently captured sensitive information in its screenshots, including credit card numbers and Social Security numbers — even though its “filter sensitive information” setting was supposed to prevent that from happening.
  • Septimaeus@infosec.pubEnglish
    63·
    16 hours ago

    Just a tip: if you must use consumer editions of Windows regularly, consider adding an automatic provisioning tool like AME to your workflow.

    The example above uses customizable “playbooks” to provision a system the way docker compose would a container image, so it can fill the role of a VM snapshot or PXE in non-virtualized local-only scenarios.

    The most popular playbooks strip out AI components and services (there are many more than just Recall) but also disable all telemetry and cloud-based features, replace MS bloatware with preferred OSS, curtail a truckload of annoying Windows behaviors, setup more sensible group policies than the defaults, and so forth.

    I have a few custom playbooks for recurring use cases so that, when one presents, I can spin up an instance quickly without the usual hassle and risk.

    • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      2 hours ago

      We did not take the easy path of writing our app in Java or a web-based Java-script heavy framework. Using C# and .NET allows us to craft an experience that minimizes resource use and is very fast.

      This got me good. I just love how they try to make using .NET for making a windows application “not the easy path”.

      Sounds kinda interesting though. If I’m ever so unlucky as to having to use Win11, I will give it a try.

      • Septimaeus@infosec.pubEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Lol I noticed the same. They evidently have some ongoing internal disagreement as to their target audience. Docs and functionality says “our audience is enterprise developers” but their marketing definitely says “our audience is end users.”

        It may be explained by recent partnerships with former custom ISO devs (seeking legitimacy and offering a sizable user base in turn). I expect the plan is eventually to sell premium support for an enterprise toolset, but for now their target audience is the non-dev-but-tech-savvy end user. And those happen to be surprisingly opinionated re: java and electron.

    • BearGun@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      14·
      8 hours ago

      consider adding an automatic provisioning tool like AME to your workflow.

      The example above uses customizable “playbooks” to provision a system the way docker compose would a container image, so it can fill the role of a VM snapshot or PXE in non-virtualized local-only scenarios.

      I know what most of these words mean individually

      • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        5 hours ago

        Basically, a playbook is a set of instructions or baselines for how you want the system to look/be setup, and the provisioning tool will engage in however many tasks are required to configure the system to your specifications. I played around with something similar with PowerShell DSC, and its pretty cool to be able to eliminate config drift when it checks against the config and remediates any changes that weren’t updated in the playbook.

    • boatswain@infosec.pubEnglish
      11·
      16 hours ago

      This looks like useful stuff; thanks for sharing. I’m not on Windows myself any more, but this looks like info with passing on to those in my life who are.

    • Jay@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      15 hours ago

      This is really interesting! I’ve usually installed Winaero Tweaker back when I still used Windows, if I knew this existed I probably would’ve gone with this instead. Having access to “playbooks” would be quite handy.

    • arakhis_@feddit.orgEnglish
      27·
      12 hours ago

      You for sure feels so good being this helpful. But TIN really don’t understand SHT if you use so many Technical terms(TT)

      But there’s a solution in brackets I just presented, that’s commonly accepted in academia if you still want to use TT like that

      • Septimaeus@infosec.pubEnglish
        5·
        53 minutes ago

        Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation.

        • Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process.
        • Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition.
        • Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot.
        • Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine.
        • Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image.
        • Telemetry refers to the data harvesting apparatus. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad but it is easily abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is a precaution.
        • MS = Microsoft
        • OSS = Open Source Software
        • Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, software and file system access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control.
        • Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing only what they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, the resources they need, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge the only equivalent for Windows to date is Wine and its successors like Proton.

        Many of these concepts are IT-related, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple to use if you pick one of the premade playbooks. (The AtlasOS playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)

        Edit: added docker