Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Spivak 627 days ago
Yeah, Rewind is super useful and this is just a clone of it for Windows. It's your browser history but works for everything.

You can not trust Microsoft and that's totally valid, I don't, but I also don't use Windows. It's a really stupid line to draw if this is the straw. They control the entire OS, basically force online accounts, have been confusing the line between remote and local storage for years, exfiltrate local searches to Bing, track everything for in-app and in-os advertising and send undisableable telemetry. Does this feature just lay bare the reality you've been living under for years?
1 comments
woodruffw 627 days ago
I think it's not that people don't trust Microsoft with their data (they obviously do if they use Windows, as you note), it's that they don't trust Microsoft to have performed basic diligence on data control within this feature.
link
indymike 626 days ago
> it's not that people don't trust Microsoft with their data

Let me fix that... People don't trust Microsoft.

link
woodruffw 626 days ago
Per the GP, there's a great deal of evidence that people have a revealed preference for trusting Microsoft, if they're already in the Microsoft ecosystem.

(I don't particularly trust Microsoft, but I'm also not in their ecosystem.)

link
indymike 625 days ago
This assumes those people have a credible alternative, which in most cases they do not.
link
woodruffw 625 days ago
25 years ago (or even 15 years ago), I would have probably agreed. But I don't think that's true anymore; to my understanding, students in public schools are equally as likely to use Chromebooks as they are to use Windows or Mac machines.
link
indymike 625 days ago
Yes, and that decision is not made by the user.
link
Spivak 626 days ago
It's on the user side of the airtight hatchway, that's good enough. If you could read my browser history you could read this and vice versa.
link
woodruffw 626 days ago
If I remember correctly, one of the original concerns was that the feature didn't respect user boundaries on the host machine itself. In other words: multiple users sharing a machine could inadvertently (or intentionally) retrieve information about each other.

That would be a straightforward example of "can't read the browser history for a user, but could read it indirectly via the agent."

link