Copilot+ Recall feature pop quiz:

You deal with a sensitive matter on my Windows PC. E.g. an email you delete. Does Copilot Recall still store the deleted email?

Answer: yes. There's no feature to delete screenshots of things you delete while using your PC. You would have to remember to go and purge screenshots that Recall makes every few seconds.

If you or a friend use disappearing messages in WhatsApp, Signal etc, it is recorded regardless.

It comes up a lot as people are rightly confused, but if you wonder what problem Microsoft are trying to solve with Recall:

It isn't them being evil, it's business leaders who are middle aged and can't remember what they're doing driving decision making about which problems to solve.

A huge amount of business leaders are dudes who have no idea what the fuck is happening. This leads to the Recall feature.

Microsoft exists in and is driven by that bubble.

Some screenshots of Recall's SQLite database here: https://mastodon.social/@detective/112513529733646088

Just to clarify, I can access it without SYSTEM too. Microsoft are about to set cybersecurity back a decade by empowering cyber criminals via poor AI safety. Feature ships in a few weeks.

The latest Risky Business episode on Recall is good, but one small correction - it doesn’t need SYSTEM rights.

Here’s a video of two MSFT employees gaining access to the Recall database folder - with SQLite database right there. Watch their hacking skills. (You don’t need to go this length as an attacker, either). Cc @riskybusiness

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is the dumbest cybersecurity move in a decade. Good luck to my parents safely using their PC.

Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code — inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster.

My look at the feature, FAQs from the community etc

https://doublepulsar.com/recall-stealing-everything-youve-ever-typed-or-viewed-on-your-own-windows-pc-is-now-possible-da3e12e9465e

this is the out of box experience for Windows 11's new Recall feature on Copilot+ PCs. It's enabled by default during setup and you can't disable it directly here. There is an option to tick "open Settings after setup completes so I can manage my Recall preferences" instead.

HT @tomwarren

You allow BYOD so people can pick up webmail and such. It’s okay, because when they leave you revoke their access, and your MDM removes all business data from the machine ✅

What the employee does: opens Recall, searches their email, files etc and pastes the data elsewhere.

Nothing is removed from Recall, as it is a photographic memory of everything the former employee did.

Security and privacy researchers - You can now install Copilot+ Recall on any ARM hardware (doesn’t need an NPU) or in Azure VMs.

Guide from @detective

The devices launch THIS MONTH to customers so I suggest people look at this.

https://github.com/thebookisclosed/AmperageKit

Recent DHS published report handed to the US President which said it had "identified a series of Microsoft operational and strategic decisions that collectively pointed to a corporate culture that deprioritized enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management"

Microsoft: let’s use AI to screenshot everything users do every 5 seconds, OCR the screenshots, make it searchable and store it in AppData!

If anybody is wondering if you can enable Recall on a machine remotely without Copilot+ hardware support - yep.

I’ve also found a way to disable the tray icon.

I went and looked at YouTube for Recall to get out of the echo chamber and I can only find one positive video. Even the people at the event are slating it, including people with media provided Copilot+ PCs.

There’s some content creators who’ve realised it records their credit cards, so they’re making videos of their cards going walkies.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Microsoft get out of this one. They may have contractual commitments to ship Recall with external parties.

I thought they were risking crashing the Copilot brand with this one, but I was wrong looking at the videos and comments on them - I think they’re crashing the Windows consumer brand.

The reaction to photographic memory of what people do at home has - you’ll be surprised to know - not been seen as a reason to buy a device, but a reason why not to.

Microsoft has been declining to comment on criticism of Recall for a week - but they have apparently told a journalist off the record at Future that changes will be made before Copilot+ devices drop in the coming days.

This may include an attempt to invalidate researcher criticism, we’ll see.

WIRED has a piece about Total Recall, a now released tool which dumps keypresses, text and screenshots (they’re JPEGs) from Microsoft Recall

https://www.wired.com/story/total-recall-windows-recall-ai/

Total Recall software by @xaitax https://github.com/xaitax/TotalRecall

Example search for ‘password’:

🪟 Captured Windows: 133
📸 Images Taken: 36
🔍 Search results for 'password': 22

📄 Summary of the extraction is available in the file:
C:\Users\alex\Downloads\TotalRecall\2024-06-04-13-49_Recall_Extraction\TotalRecall.txt

I hadn’t been aware until today of the external reaction to Recall. Holy shit. Tim Apple must be pleased.

Everything from media coverage to YouTube to TikTok is largely negative. All the comments are negative.

These videos have tens of millions of views and hundreds of thousands of comments.

I knew it would be bad but.. it’s worse. I’ve spent hours looking at the sentiment and.. well, they probably would have got better coverage from launching an NFT of pregnant Clippy.

A key element of Recall is Microsoft say only you can access your Recall, it is per user.

ArsTechnica enabled Recall on Windows 11 box and tested the claim. By logging in as another user they could access the database and screenshots.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/windows-recall-demands-an-extraordinary-level-of-trust-that-microsoft-hasnt-earned/

If you want to know how Microsoft have got themselves into this giant mess with Recall, here’s what the documentation says between the lines:

you, the customer, are a simpleton who doesn’t want to be an AI genius yet. Have a caveman mode.

Recall and Copilot+ is also coming to ASUS systems, including AMD, in a deal with Microsoft.

ASUS Announces Complete Portfolio of AI-Powered Copilot+ PCs https://www.asus.com/us/news/pnm9tg6qccql6ern/

Nvidia announced they are bringing Copilot+ and Recall to PCs, in a deal with Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/2/24169568/microsoft-copilot-plus-gaming-pc-nvidia-amd

Three Copilot+ Recall questions that keep coming up.

Q. Can you alter the Recall history?

A. Yes. You can change the OCR database and change the screenshots as the logged in user or as software running as the local user. There is no audit log of changes.

Q. Are they snapshots, as Microsoft says, or screenshots?

A. They are just screenshots, jpegs.

Q. What is to stop apps on your machine accessing your Recall covertly?
A. Nothing. There is no audit log of access.

If anybody is wondering what Microsoft's reaction to any of the Copilot+ Recall concerns are, they're continuing to decline comment to every media outlet.

I've seen comments MS staff have been given for enterprise customers, which are nonsense handwaving.

Product ships live on devices from Dell, Lenovo etc this month. https://x.com/zacbowden/status/1798221879741931847

You can now remotely dump Recall data and screenshots over the internet from Linux etc. Changes in flight for parsing data too.

https://github.com/Pennyw0rth/NetExec/pull/335

Turns out speaking out works.

Microsoft are making significant changes to Recall, including making it specifically opt in, requiring Windows Hello face scanning to activate and use it, and actually encrypting the database.

There are obviously going to be devils in the details - potentially big ones.

Microsoft needs to commit to not trying to sneak users to enable it in the future, and it needs turning off by default in Group Policy and Intune for enterprise orgs.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/7/24173499/microsoft-windows-recall-response-security-concerns

Obviously, I recommend you do not enable Recall, and you tell your family not to enable it too.

It’s still labelled Preview, and I’ll believe it is encrypted when I see it.

There are obviously serious governance and security failures at Microsoft around how this played out that need to be investigated, and suggests they are not serious about AI safety.

I should be transparent btw that I took Satya and Charlie’s commitment to security at face value too - I even published a blog on it backing that up - and I have concerns (it isn’t just me).

They’re now going to have to win trust back about winning trust back.

I know somebody at a retailer in Europe that is selling Copilot+ PCs. They’ve had fewer than a thousand preorders through to customers.

In relative terms, for them it’s about as successful as Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League.

A reminder that a few weeks ago at RSA, Microsoft signed CISA's Secure By Design pledge... and then shipped an enabled by design keylogger that OCRs your screen constantly into AppData.

Edit: I should say that's less a reflection on Microsoft and more a reflection on CISA's Secure By Design pledge.. it's a good idea, but the scope is extremely limited.