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Microsoft is adding AI powered facial recognition to OneDrive.
And it can be disabled, but get this: “You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year.”
WTF, microsoft?
I suspect its planning ahead for the expanding 'know your customer' laws. Wonder if you cover up your camera ( like many of us do ) if your PC stops working.
Related to the above, a friend pointed me to the below tidbit. I wonder when your stuff is no longer yours. I think ill be repairing my Nikon with the bad switches, so i can switch to it from my phone when that happens across the board, with no opt-out. 90% of my pictures are cats and dogs, but its still none of their freaking business.
"Meta has rolled out an opt-in AI feature to its US and Canadian Facebook users that claims to make their photos and videos more “shareworthy.” The only catch is that the feature is designed for your phone’s camera roll — not the media you’ve already uploaded to Facebook. If you opt in, Meta’s AI will comb through your camera roll, upload your unpublished photos to Meta’s cloud, and surface “hidden gems” that are “lost among screenshots, receipts, and random snaps,” the company says. Users will be able to save or share the suggested edits and collages."
Windows 12. From their own mouths.
“The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”
I suspect its planning ahead for the expanding 'know your customer'
laws. Wonder if you cover up your camera ( like many of us do ) if
your PC stops working.
Since it is OneDrive they're talking about, it sounds to me like they're just going to scan your photos and identify anyone who is in them. I think I'll have to fill mine with pictures of Bryan Lunduke.
Not necessarily a bad outcome..
Fri Oct 10 2025 17:58:47 UTC from ZoeGraystoneWith the way the economy is here now.. many wont have much of a choice.
Fri Oct 10 2025 02:19:00 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarI just felt a great disturbance in the Force ... as if millions of people suddenly switched to Linux
“The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire
operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes
truly the AI PC.”
This sounds as ambitious as the time they tried to put a database in the filesystem.
Ya. ( tho the idea wasn't bad in principle, just not practical )
Annnnd clippy is back. With a new name "Mico" https://www.theverge.com/news/804106/microsoft-mico-copilot-ai-assistant-clippy
Related to MS failures, i was one of the few people who thought the *idea* of Bob wasn't bad at the time. Adapt the interface to non-techies in a way they could identify with ( sort of like apple was doing with the newton ). But implementation was horrendous and it needed to fail.. Of course today, that ship has sailed. Most people dont need that level of abstraction. ( but we are going to get it anyway, with stuff like Mico.. "hey Mico, do x" and wont even know how its being done in the background )
Thu Oct 23 2025 20:56:43 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar“The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire
operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes
truly the AI PC.”
This sounds as ambitious as the time they tried to put a database in the filesystem.
Annnnd clippy is back. With a new name "Mico" https://www.theverge.com/news/804106/microsoft-mico-copilot-ai-assistant-clip
"Mico" looks like an overweight Luma. Nintendo should sue them for a trillion dollars.
In the beginning, there was Bob. Bob begat Clippy, Clippy begat Cortana, Cortana begat Mico.
It's been 30 years and Micros~1 still hasn't figured out that we don't want this.
They don't care what you want or don't want. If they did, they would be selling win2k. I was still not a fan of Microsoft then, but i do think it was their pinnacle. Uphill there, and downhill ever since. Of course it had a lot to do with code they stole from IBM from the OS/2 partnership years before... IBM was stupid. you dont partner with your enemy...
It's been 30 years and Micros~1 still hasn't figured out that we don't want this.
But the best operating system Microsoft ever published? Well that was Xenix.
[ https://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Skeptic%20Tank?p=882354635 ]
I donno, back then i had to support 3.51, 4.0 and for a while OS/2. 2k seemed a lot more stable for me than the NT ones. None of them came close to the real thing, OS/2, but i did think 2k was their best effort ( even if it was using a lot of "stolen" code ). Of course it all went down the tubes after that. Had NT3.51 on a DEC Alpha server for a bit. Until they took it away from me and recycled it. ( was a failed experiment. i got it after that and kept it quiet.. i guess finance ran across the hole in the books 'hey, where is....' )
I agree with Xenix, but didn't they steal/re-brand/modify that too, much like MSDOS? i didn't think the core was truly theirs, i could be wrong and it was licensed. not stolen.. its been far too long and too lazy to research.
And i do put stolen in quotes for NT.. as it was technically shared with IBM.. they worked together, so it was really both of theirs to own and do with... But i can still hate them and call it stolen :)
( and unrelated: googles spell check does not even recognize Xenix as a word )
Architecturally, the best Windows was Windows NT 3.51. It looked like shit, but it worked pretty well because it still maintained most of the architecture that Dave Cutler put into it ... before the 'softies started larding up everything in the Win32 layer instead of playing downstairs in the microkernel clients where stuff belonged. That's how you ended up with printer drivers that could bluescreen the whole system in the next few versions.
But the best operating system Microsoft ever published? Well that was Xenix.
[ https://uncensored.citadel.org/readfwd?go=Skeptic%20Tank?p=882354635 ]
Fun fact: Microsoft originally intended Xenix to be the successor to MS-DOS.
Ok so not stolen, licensed. I knew it wasn't 'their idea' but wasn't sure the history. Its been too long.
Xenix wasn't an original Microsoft creation; they licensed the unix code from AT&T like so many others did. They added a bunch of stuff to it, and if you ran it on 8086 or 80286 hardware you got the Microsoft C Compiler instead of AT&T C, but it was a real, actual unix. Now, because it was a port of System III at a time when many vendors had already switched to System V, and because of the weird compiler, it was considered a difficult unix to port things to ... but it was real and it was there and it worked better than any version of Windows ever did.
Fun fact: Microsoft originally intended Xenix to be the successor to MS-DOS.
Not sure how wide spread but i hear Azure was f-ed today.
Was effecting mail, authentication ( so took down a LOT of things for us )
Yup! Azure crashed bigly. Probably because they run it on Microsoft software.
And AWS had a second outage at the same time.
All those people paying exhorbitant money to rent time on someone else's computers are having a bad day. It's time for people to learn the IT trade again. The Cloud is often not the answer to every problem.
All those people paying exhorbitant money to rent time on someone
else's computers are having a bad day. It's time for people to learn
the IT trade again. The Cloud is often not the answer to every
problem.
I had this conversation last Saturday with friends. For reference, most of my friends are software developers or do software deployments. Their stance is if they can rent infrastructure as a service or services as a service it is much better because they have to work less.
People has forgotten the value of being less dependent. I have never forgotten it because I find social interactions detestable, therefore doing something myself is much better than hiring somebody to do it just because that way I have to talk to nobody.
Sure, canning vegetables at home is "more work" than buying them (not entirely true, because that means instead of working on the vegetables I work for somebody else to afford them). Then, inflation hits, or shortage hits, and I don't t really care that much because I have a year worth of food stored.
I am happy to report my computer systems are the sort that don't go down when there is severe Internet or power shutdowns. I even run my own caching DNS services at two of my work sites and I have been told during the dyn crapdown employees didn't notice a thing.
Damn, there was a citywide blackout very recently and employees didn't notice either XD
This mentality of depending on external people as a matter of routine is going to bite people in the ass eventually. I am not subscribed to any multimedia streaming service but I have quite a powerful library of VHS and DVDs. My afternoon is not ruined when there is service disruption. I have friends whose afterlunch plan for service disruption is to go bed early.
Personally i think the cloud is a scam for the most part. However, to me it has one purpose, as a backup plan in case my datacenter goes up in flames. Not rely on it for daily ops, but if we go down hard, gives us breathing room to get back up locally. Far cheaper than a setting up 2nd facility.
And i guess for a 2nd off-site backup use. Just in case the storm takes out my DC and the 'safe place' i have the 1st one stored a town or 2 away... ( it happens.. not often, but it can )
Their stance is if they can rent infrastructure as a service or
services as a service it is much better because they have to work less.
Pay now or pay later. I work for an MSP that does both colocated managed hosting *and* public cloud consulting. And my experience and observation has been: either way you need IT staff (or an MSP doing it for you) -- they just have different skills depending on how you did the deployment.
A few people are new here since the last time I've said this, so I'll repeat it:
There are two places where hyperscale public cloud makes sense. One is when you're just starting out and you don't really know what you need or how much of it you're going to need. Hyperscale is fantastic for this. When you can rent a resource by the hour you literally can't make a wrong decision; you can just keep trying stuff until you figure out what works. Then you can just scale it to the appropriate size. The other place is when you need absolutely massive elasticity -- think Intuit during tax season or a retailer during Christmas season, when your hosting needs are several orders of magnitude larger than your base load.
For everyone else in the substantially large middle, renting someone else's computer by the hour is the worst deal in town. Amazon and Micros~1 are jumping Scrooge McDuck style into piles of money because moronic CTOs who believe what they read in Gartner and Flexera think it's the cool thing to do. Meanwhile, the *smart* ones are repatriating -- taking what they learned in the cloud about automation, scaling, virtualization, containerization, and devops, and rebuilding it on their own hardware in a colocation facility, or on hardware leased for three to five year terms. They're saving MILLIONS over what they'd have to pay Scamazon for the same resources.
Why? Because if you have to pay someone to know and maintain (say) Kubernetes, it doesn't matter whether the cluster is in Shamazon or in the colo across town, it's the same skill. And the smart ones know that even if you pay premium prices for 24/7 maintenance on a rack of servers, over the lifetime of those servers you've still saved a million or three relative to renting them from Cramazon.