There’s been more controversy regarding Microsoft’s Recall feature for Windows, with people supposedly discovering Recall was being secretly installed on Windows 11 24H2. Furthermore, trying to remove this secretly installed Recall would break Explorer, as it seemed Explorer had a dependency on Recall. Unsurprisingly, this spread like wildfire all across the web, but I didn’t report on it because something about it felt off – reports were sporadic and vague, and there didn’t seem to be any consistency in the various stories.
Well, it turns out that it is a big misunderstanding arising from Microsoft’s usual incompetence.
“Ever since the Recall security fiasco in summer, all insider and production builds lack Recall completely,” explains Windows watcher Albacore, in messages to The Verge. Albacore created the Amperage tool that allowed Recall to run on older Snapdragon chips. The references we’re seeing in current installs of 24H2 are related to Microsoft making it easier for system admins to remove Recall or disable it. “Ironically, Microsoft going out of its way to make [Recall] removal easier is being flipped into AI / spying / whatever hoaxes,” says Albacore.
[…]“Microsoft has an ungodly complex and long winded system for integrating development changes into a mainline build, parts of the optional-izing work were most likely not merged at once, and thus produce crash loops in very specific scenarios that slipped testing,” explains Albacore.
↫ Tom Warren at The Verge
What this story really highlights is just how little trust Microsoft has left with its very own users. Microsoft has a history of silently and secretely re-enabling features users turned off, re-installing Edge without any user interaction or consent, lots of disabled telemetry features suddenly being turned on again after an update, and so on. Over the years, this has clearly eroded any form of trust users have in Microsoft, so when a story like this hits, users just assume it’s Microsoft doing shady stuff again. Can you blame them?
All of this is made worse by the absolutely dreadfully bad messaging and handling of the Recall feature. The shoddy implementation, the complete lack of security, the severe inability to read the room about the privacy implications of a feature like Recall, combined with the lack of trust mentioned above, and you have a very potent cocktail of misinformation entirely of Microsoft’s own making. I’m not trying to excuse Microsoft here – they themselves are the only ones to blame for stories like these.
I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot more Recall problems.
> Microsoft isn’t secretly installing Recall on your Windows PC
Yet.
+1
I think this is true, they aren’t doing it secretly, they are talking about doing it and then doing it.
They also say: it will not be enabled by default.
Well.. that’s where the rub might be.
Even my wife finally switched to macos. I wish Apple would get their head out of their ass with gaming and finally become the real alternative they could have been this whole time.
With deprecating openGL, that’s never happening. It seems Apple pays to have Tomb Raider and Blender ported to Metal, and if they didn’t pay for the port you’re probably out of luck. Also Tomb Raider seems to consistently be the only Metal game benchmarked in reviews.
CaptainN-,
IMHO there are several factors that impede gaming on apple hardware.
Apple depricated OpenGL on their hardware years ago.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65802625/develop-using-opengl-4-x-on-osx-big-sur
Devs can target opengl 4.1 or wrapper libraries that work, but it doesn’t build confidence in apple gaming. Meanwhile few game devs will target apple’s metal API that only runs apple hardware. It also didn’t help that apple dropped all dedicated GPUs across all new product lines, limiting gamers to the M# iGPUs. While it ranks well among iGPUs,that is low end for a gaming machine in general. Naturally it depends on the games, but devs working on cutting edge graphics generally want dedicate GPUs that modern apple computers don’t support at all.
You’re right, apple could have done a lot better by gamers. Despite the uphill battles, I actually think linux has become a better gaming platform thanks to steam’s portability initiatives paying off.
How long until Linux is a more viable platform for gaming even on Apple hardware ?:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/995383/4660bf5a7308c08c/
Lennie,
Haha, that’s a funny thought….apple users switching to linux to benefit from better software & API support. Maybe some day linux could actually be preferred for gaming on apple. If linux were to become popular on apple hardware, I wonder if apple would see that as a competitive threat? If so, it could get shut down.
Anyway, I find the information in your link interesting…
I’m surprised Apple’s hardware doesn’t support geometry shaders, which have been an opengl feature since 3.2.
https://open.gl/geometry
What happens when programmers try to use them using apple’s official drivers?
Also, I find it quite funny that someone undertaking the task of reverse engineering and writing linux drivers for apple doesn’t understand the microsoft reference tessellator software, haha.
I guess that’s one way to do it, although I disagree with the premise that they should be using the software tessilator rather than a hardware implementation.
The referenced spec doesn’t actually claim implementations have to be invariant with other implementations, they only have to be invariant with their own results. As such, I think she’s going about it the wrong way. Implementing the CPU code on GPU without understanding it is going to be hard. It might be easier to write a tessellator one can understand from scratch, especially in order to optimize it for GPU.