This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is so bad that I'm going to intervene with my elderly parents next PC purchase. Setup a Kubuntu or Mint machine for the using some refurbed wiped former windows 10 machines for a quarter the price.
If you have elderly parents, I advise you all do the same. There are threat actors that want to nab your inheritance before your parents kick the bucket.
I advise Kubuntu or Mint because they're basically Linux for windows users.
No duh.
Fuck M$ and this push for pointless Ai integration. Make them do some actual useful shit instead of robbing jobs and creating knockoff art.
This isn't even A.I., no matter what they call it. It's OCR and an SQLite database. Honestly, they could have done it 25 years ago .
The Ai part comes in when you search. Your not just doing keyword searches. You can use natural language and the Ai models "understand" what your looking for and will retrieve it. Also you need the AI for image recognition (what was that website I was looking at with the children's book with a dog on the cover?)
Ah, OK. Thank you! I hadn't thought of that.
That data they're collecting is more valuable now that it can be used to train A.I.s. A couple years from now they'll push some update that lets them exfiltrate it (or its usable features.)
This is exactly it, they're going to feed all this data into a model to try and get an AI to be able to perform operations in the OS like a human would.
Which on the surface of it sounds reasonable, but only if they actually paid people to generate that data for them. And this isn't even touching the privacy aspects of a record of everything you do being generated and stored in plaintext.
100% this is about generating more AI training data.
Can't wait to ask gpt6 what my neighbor was doing on the 19th of October 2024 at 17:00
Something I didn't think about until I saw someone making a post about it on Mastodon is that you may not have to worry about just YOUR PC, but what happens when you are on a zoom call or using another screen sharing app and THEIR PC is taking screen shots?
Now you just can't worry about your own machine, but every machine out there that might interact with you in that type of way could be capturing data. And if you accidentally have your email up or maybe a password manager, could their PC just be gobbling that up without you knowing?
Hasn't this always been a possibility? People could always record their screen or take screenshots during meetings or whatever
Since the invention of traffic lights people could just ignore them.... Now we know some AI "feature" will ignore them.
See the difference?
I usually find reasons to keep using microsoft products, but right now it's the first time I'm seriously considering ditching all my microsoft services for FOSS and move to linux.
It's gonna take a lot of effort and time migrating everything I use, but taking literal screenshots of your PC sounds fucking creepy, no matter how they sugar coat it. It's like someone else literally watching all you do.
Usually you know they get your data, but now they want exactly what you are seeing and exactly what you are doing, taking it right out of your screen. It's literal and plain spyware.
I have degoogled for a few years already, now I guess it's microsoft's turn.
If you have degoogled, even if partially, I doubt you'd find moving to Linux hard
Probably the hardest part would be to chose a distro... Stick with the main ones (Debian, Fedora or Arch) to start (you can chose one of their derivatives but pick a famous one so you can have easier time finding documentation)
Does Linux do steam games? Can it easily find the movies I already downloaded? Complete noob.
Most games work well; some don't yet, and a few probably never will (CoD, PUBG). The easiest way to check is to go here: https://protondb.com and either look up the games you actually play, or just give it your steam profile URL on the profile page and have it scan your library.
