Adrianna Pińska
This Recall thing is a prime example of how bad we are at understanding when something is a systemic problem.
It doesn't matter if *you* disable it. It doesn't matter if *you* install Linux. It doesn't matter if *you* set your computer on fire and move to a Luddite commune.
If you have *ever* sent sensitive data, no matter how securely, to another person who now has this shit enabled, and they find your data and look at it, your data is compromised, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Adrianna Pińska
I don't know if I believe the theories that Microsoft is being pressured to introduce this by state actors who want to be able to spy on us.
But it would be darkly funny if, after all our paranoia about secret back doors, The Man just rolled up with a bulldozer in broad daylight to install a *front* door, complete with a neon sign and a welcome mat.
Adrianna Pińska
@fancysandwiches I think Linux would meet a lot of people's needs, but it really annoys me when it's promoted as a trivial drop-in replacement, because it clearly isn't. You need to have the time, willingness, and inclination to learn it (and potentially solve some problems), and to continue to maintain it in the future. The first part is the easiest to solve, but you can't *make* people learn and use a skill they're not interested in.
Adrianna Pińska
@fancysandwiches I've exclusively used Linux for two decades -- I'm reluctant to call myself an "expert" on anything, but I'm certainly an experienced user, and as a software developer and general nerd I'm comfortable debugging userspace Linux issues. And *I* experience at least a few hours of frustration every time I upgrade to the next LTS and five little things break in unexpected ways and I have to tweak them.
Fancy Sandwiches
@confluency the "just install linux crowd" are so infuriating. I "just installed" it a few weeks ago, and had to spend at least 30 hours tweaking shit to get a "normal" and usable experience, and there's no way I could have done any of that in the amount of time that I did, without being a huge nerd that used to use Linux full time over a decade ago. It's not viable unless you're someone steeped in this stuff, which most people aren't, and don't have time to be.
Adrianna Pińska
"But if everyone just installed Linux..." "But everyone *should*..." But they won't. They absolutely won't, for the same reason that everyone won't "just" do literally anything else in history that would immediately fix everything if everyone "just" did it. No matter how much you reason, beg, cajole, or threaten. So that *cannot be the plan*.
Adrianna Pińska
In response to another criticism, yes, my phrasing is imprecise. It matters to some extent whether you take precautions to secure your own computer -- doing so will reduce your level of risk, and you should do it. But you cannot assume that if you do this you will be completely protected. We live in a society, and that means that we have already given out a lot of personal data which is now stored in conditions which are about to become a lot less secure.
Adrianna Pińska
In response to a frequent observation / complaint:
Yes, it has always been possible for individuals to leak your data in various ways. The difference here is in *scale* and *uniformity*.
This is a tool being rolled out to the most widely used desktop operating system, as a trusted operating system component, which will be enabled by default, and will save its data to a single standardised location which attackers can trivially target.
If you don't see the issue, I don't know what to tell you.
br00t4c
@confluency @fancysandwiches I've found the Ubuntu LTS upgrade experience to he mostly seamless for years now.
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