Someone was using those pictures as placeholders as they were not provided with actual camera pictures, and they either forgot to replace them or the real pictures were just added to the mix and the stock photos remained. This is why placeholders have to be explicitly marked as such or otherwise be something nobody would sign off on (I used nyan cat for such things myself).

They did. They also said IE6 was the last version of IE.

They probably couldn't go through with it. Increasing the system requirements would leave things in a weird state where you and a friend might both be running Windows 10, but yours is version locked because it's can't upgrade to the newest version as the hardware doesn't support it, while your friend can continue receiving updates. It's better to call the new version "Windows 11" to reduce confusion. Which is exactly what they did.

Furthermore, all Windows 10 users received a free upgrade to Windows 11. So it would be difficult to argue that MS' statement is at all relevant to any damage when the plaintiff already had/has a copy of Windows 11 available to them for free.

Windows 11 requires TPM and newer CPUs for security features, they want to make standard. Forcing requirements for these features also forces PC manufacturers to provide them. This makes users more secure over time as everyone upgrades or gets new PCs with Windows 11. I am sure this is what MS will argue (in part, there's a lOT of holes in this lawsuit). Plus MS has focused on security since Vista, and I am sure they will present this as another step in that process of securing their users from threats.

From the description this sounds like analytics. Generally these frameworks track how users use an app and anonymize it, and aggregate all the information together. You can use this to determine how users are using the app. For example let's say you have a feature you think is super useful. But you get your analytics back and almost nobody is using it. You may decide it is not worth maintaining and drop it in favor of focusing on areas of the app people are using. Or perhaps you may determine a particular common pattern of usage indicates a screen's layout is confusing, and work to fix that.

In this case it's easy to imagine many users weren't aware this was happening in this particular app. I didn't dig into what exactly what was happening here nor what the claims were so I won't speculate further.

"AI" is a marketing term for these types of tools. They are just specialized for a specific type of task, it's just that task can be generating images, video, audio, or text that can cover as wide a variety of topics as you can train it with data. Ultimately, text generating AI is only concerned about putting the "most right" words together in sequence to follow up your prompt. These can be wrong if there is no really right words (eg it doesn't "know" the answer, so you get "halucinations") and it certainly isn''t designed to play a good game of chess.

Browsers already blocked access to file:// by websites, they will jus treat local or LAN addresses the same way. You'll need to have a compatible origin as the top-level address to access. Should be an easy fix, no legitimate site should be doing this. Any sites that are should be using a custom protocol to invoke some action on the user's device with their permission instead.

It will be nice to have a built-in markdown reader in windows. Then I can write text files in markdown and know anyone can open and read them properly with a fresh Windows install. This does seem a bit odd, but not as bad as the AI integration, and honestly I'd say it's only bad if it interferes with using Notepad when you're not interested in writing markdown (for example, increasing application start time or making it easy to accidentally add formatting).

1, Microsoft should add an API to allow apps to declare content to be private/non-indexable. At the same time, they should add overrides in Recall so users can choose to force index or force ignore specific apps regardless of how they mark their content. The power should be in the hands of the user. If the user indicates they want to index their Signal activity, it should be done in an unblockable way. Conversely, the default would allow for ignorant users' privacy to be respected. And Signal would not have to engage in unsupported behavior that could potentially break down the line (imagine a future Windows where rendering to Recall and the screen is treated the same to simplify the code base and reduce bugs).

2. When I run software on my PC I am granting it permission to use my property to perform some task. If that program goes off and starts doing other things I may decide it is violating that trust and terminate it. That is my right as a PC owner. Signal is interfering with Recall's operation which doesn't really fit in with its basic premise as a messaging app and if it is not configurable this can be seen as sketchy behavior. Since they have announced this behavior publically it indicates it is not meant to be hidden behavior which does make the behavior more legitimate.

3. Apps should not claim that content that users can see cannot be permanently stored. This is at best naive and at worst a bold-faced lie. For example I could take a picture of my computer screen and Signal would never know. And of course the person being spoken too can remember what has been said. Users who are under the impression that what they say will have no consequences may end up behaving differently than if they were aware of the reality that anything they put "out there" may very well never go away.

I suspect the first questions the court will want answers to are a) why is filing a lawsuit a more reasonable option to you than just turning the feature off and b) why don't you just run one of the many free alternative OSs available, many of which can run a wide array of Windows programs through translation layers? It's a free market.

You can always take a picture with your phone of your monitor and Signal would never know. I think this is the real problem with apps that claim to deliver messages without a trace... they try to hide the reality that if the recipient can view messages, they can save them permanently and there's no way to prevent that. Misleading users isto believing otherwise is unethical.

If io_uring requires root then this is a nothingburger.

Raymond Chen, Microsoft developer, uses the phrase "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway" to refer to such "exploits".

If you know how AI works... it's basically a computer recreating gameplay based on only videos fed into it of people playing... it's pretty impressive. I walked myself to the beginning of the level, hurt myself with an exploding barrel, and then to the end of the section (where it got stuck on a loading screen; I presume maybe that's the end of this tech demo) and only noticed the AI make one mistake (it fired a shot when I did not press F near the start). It's interesting, and clearly this is not an end result, but a stepping stone to bigger, more interesting things in the future.

I've done a lot of web dev work, you can detect CTRL fine, the problem is the hotkeys. CTRL+D adds a bookmark, CTRL+A selects all text on the page, highlighting it, CTRL+S saves a page to disk, opening a dialog to ask you where. And finally CTRL+W closes the browser tab. You can block CTRL+A but I am not sure if you could block any of the others, definitely not CTRL+W (not without an intrusive "are you sure you want to close" dialog)..

This person's point of view is fairly reasonable, he just didn't realize the judge would be so annoyed by his use of AI and didn't think he needed to disclose it or explain it ahead of time. Considering AI is such a hot button topic perhaps he should have anticipated such a reaction, but it's not an unreasonable mistake to make.

It was shown you can do the same thing with the Run dialog. Get the user to paste something in there where the end of what they pasted looks benign but the beginning has malicious commands. There's only so much you can do to protect users from themselves. In this case, I would also have to ask, how do the LNK files get on the user's machine in the first place? It seems to me that's probably the piece that prevents this from being considered a security issue. As Raymond Chen (Microsoft employee) sometimes quotes Douglas Adams: "It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway." If a machine is already compromised, further "exploits" aren't really security issues at that point.