this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
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[–] [email protected] 108 points 2 months ago (2 children)
*/1

Get out. You're fired.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Oh does * mean every minute anyway.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Yes but why are you saying that to me?

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago

You are learning which is great.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The sysadmin version of

if(predicate) { return true; } else { return false; }

[–] [email protected] 80 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Gotta chain that with arecord too if you want the full, Orwellian experience.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How to add a picture from the Webcam?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (1 children)

ha, yeah. Throw in some fswebcam too. lol

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago

Don't forget to export your clipboard to plaintext

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

nice, i always wanted a telescreen in my house

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Its missing the command to forward every screenshot to Microsoft

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago

Something like: > sftp://telemetry.microsoft.com that would be even better.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

That's not the worst idea ever. Say a screenshot is 10 mb. 10x60x 8 hours =4800mb per work day. 30 days is 150gb worst case scenario. I suppose you could check the previous screenshot and if it's the same, then don't write a new file. Combine that with OCR and a utility to scroll forward and backward through time, it might be a useful tool.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Are you on 16k resolution or something?

When i take a screenshot of my 3440x1440 display it's 1MB big. I mean this doesn't change the issue in its core but dramatically downsizes it

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago

they're running 10 screens in parallel

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I just chose a number haha. That makes it much more feasible then.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Also, 1MB on full resolution. You could also downscale the images dramatically after you OCR them. So let's say we shoot in full res, OCR and then downscale to 50%. Still enough so everything is human readable, combined with searchable OCR you're down to 7,5GB for a whole month.

Absolutely feasable. Let's say we're up to 8GB to include the OCR text and additional metadata and just reserve 10GB on your system for that to make double sure.

Now you have 10GB to track your whole 3440x1440 display.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Running OCR every second sounds like a great way to choke your CPU

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Once a minute, and only if the screen contents change. I imagine there's something lightweight enough.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

In order to be certified for running Recall, machines currently must have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit, basically an AI coprocessor). I assume that is what makes it practical to do by offloading the required computation from the CPU.

Apparently it IS possible to circumvent that requirement using a hack, which is what some of the researchers reporting on it have done, but I haven't read any reports on how that affects CPU usage in practice.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

That's what recall is... It's literally screenshotring and. Ocr / ai parsing Combined with a sqllite database

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

I think it would be hugely useful.

But obviously I don't want a malware company like Microsoft doing that "for me" (actually the purpose is hyperspecific ads if not long term planning to exfiltrate the data).

Not sure if I even trust myself with the security that data would require.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

I mean taking the screenshot is the easy part, getting reliable OCR on the other hand ...

In my experience (tesseract) current OCR works well for continuous text blocks but it has a hard time with tables, illustrations, graphs, gui widgets, etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

I suppose you could check the previous screenshot and if it’s the same

Hmmm... this gives me an idea... maybe we could even write a special algorithm that checks whether only certain parts of picture have changed, and store only those, while re-using the parts that haven't changed. It would be a specialized compression algorithm for Moving Pictures. But that sounds difficult, it would probably need a whole Group of Experts to implement. Maybe we can call it something like Moving Picture Experts Group, or MPEG for short : )

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (3 children)

What does that command do?

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Takes a screenshot every minute and saves it

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Can you search the screenshots with OCR though? That's Recall's main selling point

[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 months ago (3 children)

You can start by running sudo apt install tesseract-ocr and then reading its docs.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago

Fulfills the AI quota 👍

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

It appears to be as simple as tesseract <infile> <outfile>. Possibly could even pipe (or tee) the screenshot straight into that and save both an image and a text file in a single command line.

So something like this should do the trick:

gnome-screenshot -f - | tee /Microsoft/yourPrivacy/$(date +%s).png | tesseract - /Microsoft/yourPrivacy/$(date +%s).txt

Skip the database, just use grep to search that directory if you need to find anything. Voilà, homemade Recall.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I can't imagine it'd be that hard to write some code that does that using an existing AI model.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

I found a small command to run KDE Spectacle (screenshot software) with Tesseract so I can OCR a screenshot if I want to, I only had to install Tesseract and a main language, you could easily do the same with an API and/or a local AI.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

You're probably right.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

This is a shitpost and not a real suggestion.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

its a cronjob that runs each minute (*/1) in any hour, any day, any month, on any weekday, gnome-screenshot obviously takes a screenshot and outputs it to the given file path and filename, where the filename is written as the current date as string and .png as format

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

It's a crontab entry which, once a minute, uses the gnome-screenshot program to take a screenshot of your monitor and save it to /Microsoft/yourPrivacy.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Does gnome-screenshot work without DISPLAY being set?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

It does not work like shown here, but with the same line in a script and the script as crontab it works.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Am I the only one who honestly thinks Recall is totally useless? I feel like everyone is acting like it's useful and the only thing to debate over is whether it's "worth the security risk". But I feel like it's not even worth anything at all. Even if there was no risk and I was 100% in control I don't think I would ever use such a feature.

Wouldn't you waste just as much (if not more) time looking through old screenshots, than to just go look up a solution the old fashioned way? Whatever you were looking at is probably still in your browser history too.

I know the point is it has some AI crap with it, but that still requires you to remember enough information about what you're looking for to filter them. And if you know that much information I think you could probably just find whatever you were looking for again normally.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

I've never heard a single good thing said about recall from anyone lol. Maybe my social media feed a bit of an echo chamber 😅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That's because you know how to find information in a computer quickly and precisely. Recalk is for clueless people. They can ask the computer in plain English.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I really can't understand why people would want it, given the added risks.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

The problem is, knowing Microsft, its gonna be turned on by default. And half the people who use Windows barely know how to turn the computer on and off. Let alone dive deep into some half baked settings app to figure out where to turn it off.

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