https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
> 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.
So not only is the title clickbaity and not reflective of the actual content, it's also misleading enough that two completely opposite interpretations can be made.
* 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 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).
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.
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.
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.
Does this make your reply also editorialized?
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.)
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...?"