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Microsoft’s upcoming reminder feature in Windows 11 sparked a wave of controversy this week following initial tests that revealed massive security flaws. The initial edition of Recall saves screenshots and a giant database in plain text that tracks everything users do on their PCs and in existing files. editing the feature, it’s incredibly simple to borrow and view that database and all the screenshots for any user on any given site. PC, even if you don’t have administrator access. Remember that it doesn’t do much to remove the delicate ones either. data from your screenshots or from this database.
Microsoft has announced that it will be making very important adjustments to Recall ahead of the first wave of PC Copilot later this month.
“Even before we made Recall available to consumers, we heard a clear signal that we can make it easier for users to decide whether to allow Recall on their Copilot PC and ensure privacy and security,” wrote Pavan Davuluri, vice president of Microsoft Windows and devices. in a blog post. ” With that in mind, we are announcing updates that will take effect before the recall (preview) is delivered to consumers on June 18. “
First, the company claims that the reminder will be allowed by default, so users will have to decide whether to allow it. This might seem like a small change, but many users never touch their PC’s default settings and the fact that Recall retrieves all of this default knowledge definitely puts more users at risk of having their knowledge inadvertently stolen.
The company also claims that it is adding additional protections to Recall to make it harder to access data. You’ll need to allow Windows Hello to use Recall and authenticate through Windows Hello (either a face scan camera, a fingerprint sensor, or a PIN) every time you want to open the Recall app to view your insights.
The screenshots and SQLite knowledge base used for callback searches are encrypted and will require Windows Hello authentication to decrypt them. Microsoft has described knowledge of Recall as “encrypted” previously, but no encryption has been used for screenshots or the knowledge base beyond the full Bitlocker disk encryption that is enabled by default for maximum PCs when they sign in to a Microsoft account.
This new replacement deserves to solve Recall’s biggest problem: any user logging into a PC (or any malware that can access the registration system) can seamlessly view and copy other users’ screenshots and the Recall database to the same PC. It’s measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes or gigabytes, so it wouldn’t take long to swipe if someone controlled access to your system.
Microsoft has also reiterated some of its assurances about Recall’s privacy and security in general, saying that all knowledge is processed locally, that it is never sent to Microsoft, that you know when Recall has been enabled thanks to icons on the taskbar and formula tray, and that you can disable the feature or exclude quick apps or sites from the snapshot at your discretion.
All of the new additions to Recall are still in active development: existing test versions of Windows 11 are still the insecure edition of Recall, and our review sets of the new Surface hardware are delayed for about a week, likely so Microsoft can upgrade. to them.
Microsoft has reiterated that Recall will be released in preview, a label the company is also applying to the Copilot chatbot to deflect complaints from some of its initial and ongoing bugs. We’ll have to use the updated edition of Recall to see if the new protections work as intended, it’s at least encouraging to see Microsoft take the time to repaint Recall’s default and security settings before making it public, even though those protections deserve to have been provided in the first place.
The recall is usually only available for Copilot PCs, a new Microsoft logo that applies to PCs with sufficiently fast neural processing sets (NPUs), at least 16GB of RAM, and at least 256GB of storage. Existing Windows 11 PCs may not benefit from the recall, it can currently be forcibly activated via the third-party AmperageKit script on Arm PCs running Windows 11 24H2 edition 26100. 712. There may be tools that allow this later on other unsupported PCs.
The first wave of PC Copilot will exclusively use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors. Intel and AMD systems that meet Copilot’s needs likely won’t be available until later this year, and Microsoft hasn’t specified when Copilot’s features will be available. available for non-Arm PCs.
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