Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge / The Recall feature as it currently exists in Windows 11 24H2 preview builds. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Microsoft’s Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs come with quite a few new AI and machine learning-driven features, but the tentpole is Recall. Described by Microsoft as a comprehensive record of everything you do on your PC, the feature is pitched as a way to help users remember where they’ve been and to provide Windows extra contextual information that can help it better understand requests from and meet the needs of individual users.
This, as many users in infosec communities on social media immediately pointed out, sounds like a potential security nightmare. That’s doubly true because Microsoft says that by default, Recall’s screenshots take no pains to redact sensitive information, from usernames and passwords to health care information to NSFW site visits. By default, on a PC with 256GB of storage, Recall can store a couple dozen gigabytes of data across three months of PC usage, a huge amount of personal data.
The line between “potential security nightmare” and “actual security nightmare” is at least partly about the implementation, and Microsoft has been saying things that are at least superficially reassuring. Copilot+ PCs are required to have a fast neural processing unit (NPU) so that processing can be performed locally rather than sending data to the cloud; local snapshots are protected at rest by Windows’ disk encryption technologies, which are generally on by default if you’ve signed into a Microsoft account; neither Microsoft nor other users on the PC are supposed to be able to access any particular user’s Recall snapshots; and users can choose to exclude apps or (in most browsers) individual websites to exclude from Recall’s snapshots.
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
There’s no denying that not everyone is happy with the state of the GTK world, and I, too, have argued that GNOME’s massive presence and seeming unwillingness to cooperate with or even consider the existence of other GTK-based desktop environments is doing real, measurable harm to the likes of Xfce, Cinnamon, and others. A major root cause is a feeling that GTK is nothing but a vessel for GNOME, and that the project doesn’t really seem to care much about anyone else.
GNOME Foundation member and all-round very kind person Hari Rana, also known as TheEvilSkeleton, penned a blog post highlighting the other side of the story. In essence, what it comes down to, according to Rana, is that it’s better for everyone if GNOME-specific widgets are moved out of GTK, and into something else – first libhandy, and now its succesor libadwaita, splitting the toolkit (GTK) from the design language (libadwaita). This allows GNOME developers to focus on, well, GNOME, and frees up time for GTK developers to focus on generic widgets that aren’t specific to GNOME.
Thanks to the removal of GNOME widgets from GTK 4, GTK developers can continue to work on general-purpose widgets, without being influenced or restricted in any way by the GNOME HIG. Developers of cross-platform GTK 3 apps that rely exclusively on general-purpose widgets can be more confident that GTK 4 won’t remove these widgets, and hopefully enjoy the benefits that GTK 4 offers.
↫ Hari Rana
From a GNOME standpoint, this makes perfect sense, and I can obviously see the benefits for them. However, what this entire post seems to ignore is that the main effect of the split between GTK 4 and libadwaita is that various GTK applications, now targeting libadwaita because of GNOME’s immense popularity, simply no longer integrate very well with other desktops, like Xfce or Cinnamon. GNOME is, of course, under no obligation to remedy this situation, but at the very least they could acknowledge this is a very real problem that their fellow developers working on Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, and others, have to deal with.
It works the other way around too. Developers targeting the Linux desktop, where GNOME is more or less the default, have to choose between making a GTK application that integrates well with GNOME by opting for libadwaita and leaving non-GNOME users with a crappy experience, or opting for ‘pure’ GTK 4 and leaving GNOME users with a worse experience. Neither option is good for the Linux desktop as a whole.
The very real ripple effects of GNOME’s choices regarding GTK and libadwaita are seemingly being stubbornly ignored, neglected, and often not even acknowledged at all, and it’s no surprise this creates an immense amount of friction in the wider desktop Linux community. It just feels smug and careless, and of course that’s going to rub people the wrong way- regardless of the purity of your intentions.
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge (credit: 400tmax | iStock Unreleased)
Yesterday, Amazon failed to convince a US district court to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit targeting the tech giant's alleged history of tricking people into signing up for Prime.
The FTC has alleged that Amazon "tricked, coerced, and manipulated consumers into subscribing to Amazon Prime," a court order said, failing to get informed consent by designing a murky sign-up process. And to keep subscriptions high, Amazon also "did not provide simple mechanisms for these subscribers to cancel their Prime memberships," the FTC alleged. Instead, Amazon forced "consumers intending to cancel to navigate a four-page, six-click, fifteen-option cancellation process."
In their motion to dismiss, Amazon outright disputed these characterizations of its business, insisting its enrollment process was clear, its cancellation process was simple, and none of its executives could be held responsible for failing to fix these processes when "accidental" sign-ups became widespread. Amazon defended its current practices, arguing that some of its Prime disclosures "align with practices that the FTC encourages in its guidance documents."
Source: Hack a Day
Even among ThinkPads, which are nearly universally loved by hardware hackers and Linux tinkerers alike, the 701c is a particularly rare and desirable machine. Best known for it’s “butterfly” slide out keyboard, the IBM-designed subnotebook from the mid-1990s has gained a following all its own, with active efforts to repair and restore any surviving specimens still out in the wild.
[polymatt] has already taken on a number of 701c restoration projects, but the recent release of a 3D printable case for the vintage laptop is arguably the most impressive to date. After spending an untold number of hours with an original case and a pair of calipers, the final design has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license — in other words, you’re free to print one to spruce up your 701c, but don’t run off a stack of them and start trying to move them on Etsy.
Originally, [polymatt] just wanted to 3D print a replacement for the laptop’s display bezel. But as often happens with these sort of projects, things just sort of started rolling and pretty soon the whole case was modeled. As you might imagine, the printed case has some slight differences between the original. For example, the printed version is designed to use heat set inserts. There’s also certain components, such as the hinges, which need to be sourced from an original case.
The most obvious use of these files is to perform repairs — if a piece of your 701c case has broken, you might be able to use one of these files to create a replacement. But it also offers some fascinating possibilities for future modifications. If you were planning on replacing the internals of the 701c with something more modern, these files would make an excellent starting point to create a customized case to better fit more modern components.
Whatever you end up doing with these files, don’t be shy — let us know.
