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ON SECURITY

By Susan Bradley • Comment about this article

Taming that technology

Two years ago, we added a tagline to our logo: “Tame Your Tech.” My idea was that you must be in control of the technology that surrounds you, and that we’re here to help.

But lately, I’ve been feeling as if I ought to add yet another tagline: “Whom should you trust with your technology?”

My original plan for this edition of On Security was to preview Microsoft’s upcoming feature, Recall, coming soon to special hardware branded “Copilot+.” Recall is designed to capture screen shots every so often (apparently measured in seconds), then allow you to scroll through that history so you can more easily remember what you were doing — and thus what you were thinking. Not unreasonable, right? I often stop and think, “Hang on; what was that site I saw after I last did a search?”

Of course, browser history helps, but it can be imprecise. It might miss the exact page I was trying to recall.

Or perhaps you want to see that Registry key you swore you set, but you now can’t remember where it was. In our home or office, how often do we stop and go back to where we started — just to remember what we got up to do in the first place?

So the idea is laudable. A third-party vendor for Apple has had a similar product, Rewind, for several years. Its intent was to slurp up your interactions on your computer and make that history searchable. As you interact with your computer, the software reminds you about tasks that you forgot to complete. It’s like an electronic version of sticky notes.

So why did this kind of feature cause such a furor over on the Microsoft side of things, yet generate nary a peep in the Apple environment, even after several years?

Trust. Or, rather, our lack of trust in Microsoft.

Before going any further, let me reassure all our readers that Microsoft Recall software is not being released with the upcoming 24H2 release. Nor will it be shipped on the Copilot+ hardware shipping next week, the very hardware for which Microsoft said it was intended. It will not be turned on by default on any system. It will not be available to all users. Plans are to enable Recall only when Windows Hello authentication is enabled.

And it may not even be what it originally was when announced. Recall garnered almost instant pushback from security researchers and governments alike, so we may not recognize it once it finally gets released. Get the idea that customer feedback in this case made Microsoft pull back?

Microsoft forgot that, for the last several years, it has been slowly chipping away at our trust. Despite the positive reaction to Bill Gates’s Trustworthy Computing initiative in 2002, it didn’t take long for us to start questioning whether Microsoft deserved that trust.

You are not alone.

The easiest way to avoid the new AI features in any of the major platforms (Google, Apple, or Microsoft) is to keep using the same hardware you have been using. Don’t buy anything new. Until the dust settles on this artificial-intelligence silliness and marketing, the best thing you can do is wait. AI requires hardware acceleration to work at an acceptable speed, but most computers running Windows today do not have that.

It’s a bit silly for Microsoft to say it will have an Insider testing group wring out Recall before it is released. Sure, there are some beta testers who will spring for a new computer to perform advance testing, and certainly larger companies can afford it, but average folks like us?

An expensive new PC just to test Recall? I don’t think so. Recall is a bleeding-edge feature at this point, a very good reason why Microsoft should proceed with care.

Here’s another, related example. Microsoft has been pushing Copilot hard. But Redmond recently announced that it was removing GPT Builder from Copilot Pro beginning on July 10, 2024. Worse, anything built with GPT Builder will no longer work. Copilot Pro is a paid service, so Microsoft is turning off something for which Pro customers paid. My guess is that too few customers were using it: the bean counters realized it wasn’t making money, and Microsoft bailed.

I was scratching my head. I lost something (I subscribed for editorial purposes) that I did not know was there. But I still lost it, or perhaps I should say that Microsoft gave and then took away. Microsoft is rolling this stuff out too quickly, apparently without regard to its marketplace. For the record, GPTs are “Generative Pre-trained Transformers.” They can be used to code up answer bots, or other code, better suited to business applications rather than to consumer applications. Thus it’s a case where the company put in a function that was hardly ever used and was not a good fit for the consumer Copilot offering.

An AI-ready PC must have at least 16GB RAM, 256GB storage, and — more importantly — an on-board NPU that’s capable of 40 TOPS (trillions of operations per second, typically 8-bit integer instructions). NPUs are a different type of computing core, separate from CPUs and GPUs. They’re based exclusively on performing AI computations much more efficiently than GPUs.

So, you don’t want AI on your Windows PC? Then don’t buy a PC with NPU capability. That will stop it in its tracks — at least until you really, really need that next PC.

Once again, Apple’s push into intelligence is a bit more refined but nonetheless can be tamed by not purchasing the latest and greatest hardware. Rewind will work on older Apple hardware but is designed specifically for Apple Silicon (M-series). As for Apple Intelligence, you’ll see near the very end of the news release that Apple lists “iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and iPad and Mac with M1 and later.” If you don’t have such hardware, Apple Intelligence is not supported.

As with Microsoft, you can sit on the sidelines to see what the future holds in the Apple ecosystem while holding on to the hardware you have. Apple’s migration tools for moving from phone to phone are a work of art, even if you skip a generation. It’s so simple — put the new and old iPhones close together, launch the migration wizard, and wait. Of course, multifactor authentication apps may not migrate this way for security reasons, so you may have to use their individual migration tools.

Some folks buy the latest phone versions every time a new one is released. I don’t, and I know many others who don’t. Instead, we wait until the phone battery starts to go. Having the latest and greatest isn’t really necessary, and keeping a phone until its actual end of life reduces e-waste and reduces carbon emissions.

Other platforms are rolling out AI as well, but many in the Linux or Mozilla ecosystem are doing so through different offerings or through third-party apps. Linux distros are jumping on the bandwagon. Deepin Linux is adding AI features to certain video and photo needs. Mozilla Firefox has third-party vendors coding up AI-based extensions. In both cases, if you don’t trust the operating system or the application, don’t install them. It’s as simple as that.

If you have Windows 10 and dread that end of life coming up next year, don’t panic; I’ll be devoting an entire article to ways to keep your machine running after its end of life. If you don’t trust all the AI options that seemingly every vendor brings to market, don’t worry. Keep the hardware you already have.

I still strongly believe that both Windows 10 — and yes, even 11 — can be tamed and trusted. As it stands now, Windows Copilot can not only be disabled, it can be ignored so as not to interfere with your daily use. Even when signing in to a system with a Microsoft account, my interaction with Copilot is almost nil — other than the occasional and accidental clicking due to the slightly annoying Copilot browser integration. In my testing of Copilot, I see no indications that it’s functioning — unless and until I choose to use it. Integration of AI into our operating systems is clearly a work in progress, and it will take time for its capabilities to come into focus after the hype dies down.

Can we trust our technology? For now, yes. Stay tuned, as vendors realize that they’ve all gone a bit too far.

Contribute your thoughts in this article’s forum!

Susan Bradley is the publisher of the AskWoody newsletters.

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