Hacker News Reader

Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> Who, exactly, is clamoring for Recall in the first place?

I'm not clamoring for any Microsoft software for the last two decades, but the idea itself is interesting, like being able to catalog and look back at what I did at specific times in the past, or be able to query "What was the website where I saw X at?", would have been useful just last week for me when I was trying to find some document I read but didn't bookmark/download.

But I'd probably trust BP to not spill oil into our oceans again over Microsoft not having security/data leak issues.

View on HN

if you use google then history.google.com

It is a totally worthwhile and useful bit of tech, unfortunately the scumbags have it and so you want to disable it because you don't want them to benefit even though they are giving you something useful in exchange.

> if you use google then history.google.com

I use gmail from time to time, and YouTube, but literally everything else I do on the computer won't be visible there.

What would be cool would be to ask "What documents about ICs did I have open last night around 23:00?" and have it give me a list of local paths that I looked at, and it's all outside of browsers/Google. And of course, have it all be local.

Google's Activity History has gotten less and less useful ifself. The searh function basically doesn't work anymore, particularly past a few years ago. They probably keep the data to use themselves, but good luck accessing it without doing a Takeout request.

Windows already tracks file usage (e.g. recent files), maybe that could be set to keep more history.

I'm not sure if both you and previous parent don't know, but the main useful thing with Recall is understanding whatever is on the screen, not just file accesses, or URLs visited but basically anything. So while Google's activity might see some parts, recent files sees another and so on, deriving that from screenshots captures everything you'd see on the screen.

I'm aware. You suggested querying local file access history based on their contents, that could be achieved without taking screenshots and OCRing them.

We've given up top much ground to scumbags who give us cool stuff that ends up being a Trojan Horse. Anything these scumbags give us is not to add value to our lives, it's to extract value from society in underhanded ways. "Wow look at how nice this drink is! It was given to me by that professional date rapist!"

At this point, Microsoft should be treated as a threat to society and the individual, and we should probably start shunning Microsoft engineers & executives from public spaces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com