Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

After weeks of withering criticism and exposed security flaws, Microsoft has vastly scaled back its ambitions for Recall, its AI-enabled silent recording feature, and added new privacy features.

Microsoft has been accused of likely tracking hundreds of thousands of European schoolchildren’s data through its education software deployed in schools across the continent, according to advocacy group NOYB.

The Windows Recall system takes screenshots of your activity every five seconds and saves them on the device. Two weeks ahead of Recall’s launch on new Copilot+ PCs on June 18, security researchers have demonstrated how preview versions of the tool store the screenshots in an unencrypted database. The researchers say the data could easily be hoovered up by an attacker. And now, in a warning about how Recall could be abused by criminal hackers, Alex Hagenah, a cybersecurity strategist and ethical hacker, has released a demo tool that can automatically extract and display everything Recall records on a laptop.

Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights nonprofit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data protection authority.

​Security researchers at Tenable discovered what they describe as a high-severity vulnerability in Azure Service Tags that could allow attackers to access customers’ private data.

Microsoft is about to launch a new AI-powered Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on your PC. Recall is part of the new Copilot Plus PCs that are debuting on June 18th, but experts who have tested the feature are already warning that Recall could be a “disaster” for cybersecurity.

When Windows 11 arrived on the market in October 2021, it was supposed to revolutionize the popular operating system. Unfortunately for Microsoft, many users still prefer Windows 10 as the better option for their everyday PCs and refuse to switch. Indeed, the numbers for Windows 11 are continuing to decline and Windows 10 continues to dominate.

Search capabilities for ChatGPT, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and other platforms stopped working on Thursday morning due to a Microsoft outage. The issues — which began around 3AM ET — appeared to be linked to Bing’s API and any service that relies upon it. While Microsoft’s own web search engine, Bing, was also seemingly affected, according to TechCrunch, it came back online eventually.

If you use the Microsoft Edge browser at work, your days of texting a screenshot of a web page to your spouse or coworker are nearly over. Microsoft is adding screenshot prevention controls to Edge.

Microsoft’s full-throttle push into artificial intelligence technology is getting more scrutiny by regulators worried that the conglomerate is invading consumers’ privacy.