The editorialized title is also seriously misleading; it's hard to square "how does the Linux community respond?" with what looks like a single-person project that's cross platform:
> Cross-platform Support: OpenRecall works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, giving you the freedom to use it on your preferred operating system.
Edit: Also, the HN title seems unreasonably accusatory; something to the effect of 'MS invaded user privacy, and now the Linux community is copying that', but there is a world of difference between a company with a track record of contempt for its users and their privacy pushing something as opt-out, vs a community building something that opt-in - Linux is about choice, and if a user decides to use something like this and it actually respects their privacy (which MS claimed to do, but why would you ever trust them?) then I could see it being a great feature.
Been thinking... Why is AI even needed for a thing like this? Aren't there assistive tech API's for screen readers for people who are blind, that could be used to scrape all text from all windows, without resorting to OCR? Or maybe Electron apps break all of that...
* First, yes you can often use a11y APIs, but OCR is likely to be useful/needed for apps that don't play well with those for whatever reason.
* Once you have the text, I could potentially see value in AI/LLM fuzzy searching; it's easier to say "find something I saw about a new programming language yesterday" than "search for... oh what was the title of that page? Oh, I'll just search for 'language' and hope it was mentioned..."
There's probably no body of works more impressive to me than Karli Coss's work to capture data from the various devices & systems they use. The map of infrastructure shows off the architecture here, what it takes to read your own systems: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html . The overall blog post/digital gardening plot on the topic is probably https://beepb00p.xyz/sad-infra.html .
There's something remarkably smart about OCR as a failsafe that gets around all technical problems. Karlicoss's work shows the extensiveness of reading out data, and even that will have various limitations with what the datastores choose to encode. Simply building super-agency stop the actual agency directly afforded us real humans, by dealing with the screen as interface, has a certain elegance to it (in a world gone mad with difficult unyielding technologies).
Assistive APIs require active participation from all software - and said software to use them properly, thus it creates as many obstacles as the number of programs (or actually, UI elements) on a computer.
AI-based OCR does not, there is only a single obstacle and that is the AI OCR itself.
With the former you need every developer who ever contributed/will contribute to everything that ends up on your screen to participate properly. With the latter you only need the developers of AI OCR to participate and then it can work with anything exposed on screen regardless of if the program uses (or even can use) assistive APIs or not.
While the latter is obviously much harder, once (if) it works you get consistent results for everything and even if the results are consistently mediocre, they're better than consistently absent.
IMO even aside for things like recall etc, assistive software will be taking advantage of AI and OCR in the future so it can work regardless of what the individual programs do.
Anyone who runs a free software operating system is free to implement any such recording system they desire. These developments should be driven by user requirements, not in response to some new M$ feature.
By "community", it's implied that this is a diverse and disparate group of individuals and organizations. If any one of these desires to make or use a system, like the linked openrecall, then others are free to use it or not, or ignore it completely if they desire.
This makes no inference about the motives, or user desires of any other members of the "community". Which is completely different from the MS OS user "community", who are all bound by what the M$ corporation chooses to do.
This is an excellent example of the distinction between free software and open source. The point of free software is to facilitate user freedom, not just to share the source code.
You're responding to the editorialized headline. The (too long to fit) link's title is:
openrecall/openrecall: OpenRecall is a fully open-source, privacy-first alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft's Windows Recall. With OpenRecall, you can easily access your digital history, enhancing your memory and productivity without compromising your privacy.
> OpenRecall is a fully open-source, privacy-first [...]
Depends what you mean by "privacy-first".
Much like the most privacy-respecting practices of a company might be not to capture certain user data at all, that also applies to data you let be captured on your own computer.
Just because it's initially only on your device, and is encrypted, doesn't mean you're the only one who can ever access it. There's hackers, disgruntled significant others, software bugs, interacting tech you don't understand, future tech, and various kinds of investigations.
When thinking about adopting new kinds of extreme self-surveillance, individuals should make informed choices about benefit vs. risk. Did you really need this, or do you need to capture information more selectively.
Maybe just wait a year, listening for other people's sobs of regret. Say, you could let "influencers", anxious to generate social media content about using all the latest shiny things, be your guinea pigs.
(Confession: In '97 or '98, I made a desktop program HTTP proxy called Webephant, which permitted future keyword search of every Web page you visited while it was running. I didn't think about privacy implications at the time, but I should've. These full desktop recall things are much more invasive.)
> Just because it's initially only on your device, and is encrypted, doesn't mean you're the only one who can ever access it. There's hackers, disgruntled significant others, software bugs, interacting tech you don't understand, future tech, and various kinds of investigations.
And thieves, who didn't originally want your data at all, but just a new laptop. But hey, it's 2028, and this new quantum algorithm can decrypt anything, so "Why not look through whatever happens to be on this computer I stole yesterday...?"
philipkglass|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
yjftsjthsd-h|1 year ago
> Cross-platform Support: OpenRecall works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, giving you the freedom to use it on your preferred operating system.
(and https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall/commits/main/ to see the "community" - don't get me wrong, this might become a community project and get wide support, but today it's one person's project)
Edit: Also, the HN title seems unreasonably accusatory; something to the effect of 'MS invaded user privacy, and now the Linux community is copying that', but there is a world of difference between a company with a track record of contempt for its users and their privacy pushing something as opt-out, vs a community building something that opt-in - Linux is about choice, and if a user decides to use something like this and it actually respects their privacy (which MS claimed to do, but why would you ever trust them?) then I could see it being a great feature.
allanrbo|1 year ago
yjftsjthsd-h|1 year ago
* First, yes you can often use a11y APIs, but OCR is likely to be useful/needed for apps that don't play well with those for whatever reason.
* Once you have the text, I could potentially see value in AI/LLM fuzzy searching; it's easier to say "find something I saw about a new programming language yesterday" than "search for... oh what was the title of that page? Oh, I'll just search for 'language' and hope it was mentioned..."
jauntywundrkind|1 year ago
There's something remarkably smart about OCR as a failsafe that gets around all technical problems. Karlicoss's work shows the extensiveness of reading out data, and even that will have various limitations with what the datastores choose to encode. Simply building super-agency stop the actual agency directly afforded us real humans, by dealing with the screen as interface, has a certain elegance to it (in a world gone mad with difficult unyielding technologies).
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
compsciphd|1 year ago
https://patents.google.com/patent/US8214367B2/en
"a context recorder that uses accessibility mechanisms to record context information derived independently of screen-images"
then again, we arguably patented much of what makes up recall.
thot_experiment|1 year ago
badsectoracula|1 year ago
AI-based OCR does not, there is only a single obstacle and that is the AI OCR itself.
With the former you need every developer who ever contributed/will contribute to everything that ends up on your screen to participate properly. With the latter you only need the developers of AI OCR to participate and then it can work with anything exposed on screen regardless of if the program uses (or even can use) assistive APIs or not.
While the latter is obviously much harder, once (if) it works you get consistent results for everything and even if the results are consistently mediocre, they're better than consistently absent.
IMO even aside for things like recall etc, assistive software will be taking advantage of AI and OCR in the future so it can work regardless of what the individual programs do.
dboreham|1 year ago
johnea|1 year ago
Anyone who runs a free software operating system is free to implement any such recording system they desire. These developments should be driven by user requirements, not in response to some new M$ feature.
By "community", it's implied that this is a diverse and disparate group of individuals and organizations. If any one of these desires to make or use a system, like the linked openrecall, then others are free to use it or not, or ignore it completely if they desire.
This makes no inference about the motives, or user desires of any other members of the "community". Which is completely different from the MS OS user "community", who are all bound by what the M$ corporation chooses to do.
This is an excellent example of the distinction between free software and open source. The point of free software is to facilitate user freedom, not just to share the source code.
fragmede|1 year ago
openrecall/openrecall: OpenRecall is a fully open-source, privacy-first alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft's Windows Recall. With OpenRecall, you can easily access your digital history, enhancing your memory and productivity without compromising your privacy.
neilv|1 year ago
Depends what you mean by "privacy-first".
Much like the most privacy-respecting practices of a company might be not to capture certain user data at all, that also applies to data you let be captured on your own computer.
Just because it's initially only on your device, and is encrypted, doesn't mean you're the only one who can ever access it. There's hackers, disgruntled significant others, software bugs, interacting tech you don't understand, future tech, and various kinds of investigations.
When thinking about adopting new kinds of extreme self-surveillance, individuals should make informed choices about benefit vs. risk. Did you really need this, or do you need to capture information more selectively.
Maybe just wait a year, listening for other people's sobs of regret. Say, you could let "influencers", anxious to generate social media content about using all the latest shiny things, be your guinea pigs.
(Confession: In '97 or '98, I made a desktop program HTTP proxy called Webephant, which permitted future keyword search of every Web page you visited while it was running. I didn't think about privacy implications at the time, but I should've. These full desktop recall things are much more invasive.)
CRConrad|1 year ago
And thieves, who didn't originally want your data at all, but just a new laptop. But hey, it's 2028, and this new quantum algorithm can decrypt anything, so "Why not look through whatever happens to be on this computer I stole yesterday...?"
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]