Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?
A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.
As reasonable the concerns are… it seems like there’s quite a bit of fearmongering over software and hardware that haven’t even really gotten into the mainstream yet.
Do you think it would be a better idea to wait until it’s installed and active on every Windows computer before we start a discussion on how bad Copilot is?
Only computers that can run it… are pretty much none of the computers running 11 today. The CPU needs to have an NPU, as the AI functionality is run locally on the PC.
Go look at all the Windows PCs announced in the last few months and you will see they have NPUs. So again, why would we wait until it is too late to try to stop this nonsense?
Also the “AI” may run locally but it saves the info into an easily accessible and readable SQLite database in the users AppData. It will be trivial for malicious actors to access.
@Blaster_M @Spuddlesv2 Apparently you can run it in an Azure ARM windows VM. Wanna try?
I heard this same argument from people all the time. Until it affects you in a meaningful way to change your mind, it’ll be too late.
The writing style is a bit weird, but I think the concerns are valid. That sqlite file is a treasure trove for hackers/scammers.