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
    0·
    12 days 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.

    • arakhis_@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      11 days 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
        1·
        9 hours 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 data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution.
        • MS = Microsoft
        • OSS = Open Source Software
        • Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings 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 and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows.

        Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)

        Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry