Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Apparently testing was pretty good and MS has decided to launch Recall for Windows 11. They have made it opt-in, thus you must specifically enable it before it starts snapshotting your system. This is good.

But there's something better: it doesn't run on most machines out there!

Recall requires a system with an NPU, a Neural Processing Unit. These are additional chips installed on the motherboard that have only been in the sales channel for about a year. I'm also pretty sure that these computers came with a keyboard that had a Copilot key on the bottom row to the right of the space bar, though there may be keyboards with that key sold with computers without the NPU. So if your PC is from 2023 or older, it doesn't have an NPU and won't run Recall.

And yes, there are laptops with NPUs.

Recall is part of a feature package called CoPilot+. From the article: "The only consumer processors that currently support Copilot+ are Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips, Intel's Core Ultra 200V-series laptop chips (codenamed Lunar Lake), and AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series. Copilot+ features have generally been coming to the Arm-based Qualcomm PCs first and to x86-based Intel and AMD PCs later; Recall and the improved Search are available for both Arm and x86 PCs, while some Click to Do features are currently only available for Arm systems."

Of course there is the problem that when you go to replace your current system in a few years, it's likely that your new box will contain an NPU and you'll get nagged to activate Recall.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/microsoft-rolls-windows-recall-out-to-the-public-nearly-a-year-after-announcing-it/


In an interesting sidenote, Intel's AI chipsets are not selling well, people are really wanting the previous generation known as Raptor Lake. The AI chips are known as Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake, I think one name designates laptop chips.

Intel is having all sorts of corporate problems and it's being felt up and down the product line. They're looking at selling off divisions to hunker down and get their act together.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intels-ai-pc-chips-arent-selling-instead-last-gen-raptor-lake-booms-and-creates-a-shortage

They're still going to migrate some of the functionality into the Settings app on an unclear timeframe. Whether or not this is clearing up fuzzy wording or actually changing their mind after blowback from users is unknown.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/microsoft-formally-deprecates-the-39-year-old-windows-control-panel/

Most of the systems affected are back working, but the remainder still accounts for a rather staggering 250,000 PCs and servers. My guess is these are the hardest hit and are either physically difficult to access or encrypted and might need to have the drive replaced and rebuilt from scratch.

Oh, the Uber Eats gift card debacle has been resolved. It's still a debacle, but apparently the cards that were sent out are now actually redeemable.

So why is the European Commission to blame? Let's get technical.

The core of an operating system is its kernel. This is the set of programs that provide its basic operations and core security. Obviously this is the most important part of the OS, and the part that you want to protect the most. Preferably, as the maker of the operating system, you don't want anyone to have direct access to the kernel.

Linux and Apple Mac do not allow access to the kernel, not even for anti-virus and anti-malware applications. They have a framework that allows those sorts of programs to run and defend the kernel, but not actually link into it. Thus, they were completely unaffected by the ClownStrike event.

But because of Microsoft's overwhelming market domination and ubiquity, the EC didn't like that everyone was banned from kernel access for their third-party software for things like malware and virus protection and required that Microsoft literally and actually break their security model to allow such kernel access. The alternative was that they couldn't sell Windows user or server software in Europe, and there was no way that was going to happen. So Microsoft broke the security protections that Windows had, and ClownStrike broke Windows.

Now the big question is what happens in the future to prevent a similar event? Microsoft says they are evaluating newer frameworks, more along the lines of what Linux and Mac are currently doing, to remove ClownStrike and similar software from the kernel to keep a repeat event from happening again. I would suspect that the EC regulators will take a look at what this cost the world-wide economy - estimated at over $5 billion dollars - and see that Apple and Linux allow third-party products to work well with their operating systems and give MS permission to lock down their kernel in a more secure fashion.

Which will make things better, but will also take some time to roll out.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/97-of-crowdstrike-systems-are-back-online-microsoft-suggests-windows-changes/

Meanwhile Windows 11 adoption rate DECLINES to below the 26% mark after hitting a high of just over 28%.

I'm running 11 Pro on my desktop at home. But given the choice, I prefer 10. I can't go back to it, don't have the media. And it's about to go to paid-for support, which I don't want to mess with. I have not yet found any feature in 11 that benefits me, in fact I had to find a workaround to move the task bar to the vertical left side of the screen, where I prefer it.

I really hate it when they eliminate features that people like.

https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-10-reaches-70-market-share-as-windows-11-keeps-declining/

This is excellent news. Most of Windows is written in C and C++. Those languages have memory problems. Let's use a simple example. There's a programming construct known as an array, it's sort of an indexed list. Let's say we have an array called MyList(10). It has ten elements to it, what's in them doesn't really matter. What happens when you try to reference element 11?

Usually in the C family of languages, you access the memory 'above' the tenth element and what is returned is undefined: we don't know what it will contain. Maybe it overlaps with the password cache, perhaps it has your banking account number in it.

Now, to be fair to C (personally I hate the C/C++ languages, but I firmly believe in 'to each their own'), later versions have better protection against accessing outside array boundaries and things like that which can cause information to leak.

A while back another programming language came to town, Rust. And it is designed, from the clear page, to have memory protection that will prevent access to element 11 and other buffer/memory issues. Which means that code, properly developed! (always a big problem), will theoretically be safer/more secure than C family languages.

Microsoft is now rewriting some subsystems in the Windows operating system into Rust!!!

This is excellent news. The ability to improve security is always a good thing, and this is the first step in doing it. You simply cannot rewrite the entirety of Windows in Rust in one swell foop, but you can rewrite portions of it - letting you see how it works - and progressively get the whole thing redone eventually!

This is now in an Insider edition of Windows 11, meaning it will eventually see the light of day to all users, and should be completely transparent.

In other Rust news, Linux has started rewriting SUDO into Rust. Sudo is a program that lets an account that does not have administrative permission run admin commands if they have the password for it. A fundamental rule of network security, and computer security in general, is to NEVER let your users run their local machines as administrator! Aside from the fact that it gives them far too much control to utterly screw their machine over - and I've seen it! - if your account with admin permissions gets taken over by malware, that's a leverage point to get into the entire network and subvert it!

Speaking as a system administrator, we see far too many programs that won't work if the user is not an administrator on the machine. The normal vendor solution? Make the user an admin. Usually this is caused by the bad coding practice of the developers having admin access on their computers, which really ticks me off. If a software package only runs as administrator, then it's badly written. We can usually develop some selective permissions to make such software work without giving the user admin, but it's always a PITB.

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/282995/first-rust-code-shows-up-in-the-windows-11-kernel

Specifically, Windows Media Player and 32-bit apps!

WHEEEE!

This may be a carryover from the problems with the October update, hard to say. There's also apparently issues with iCloud installations: they may be blacklisted from receiving the 1809 update, which is fine by me as I have iCloud installed and I definitely don't want a buggy update installed!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/latest-windows-10-update-breaks-windows-media-player-win32-apps-in-general/

Forewarned is forearmed, though what it has to do with forearms I really don't know.

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/windows-worm-ta.html