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Microsoft Patents A User-Monitoring AI That Improves Search Results (hothardware.com)
Slashdot reader MojoKid quotes a HotHardware article about Microsoft's new patent filing for an OS "mediation component":
This is Microsoft's all-seeing-eye that monitors all textual input within apps to intelligently decipher what the user is trying to accomplish. All of this information could be gathered from apps like Word, Skype, or even Notepad by the Mediator and processed. So when the user goes to, for example, the Edge web browser to further research a topic, those contextual concepts are automatically fed into a search query.
The search engine (e.g., Bing and Cortana) uses contextual rankers to adjust the ranking of the default suggested queries to produce more relevant [results]. The operating system...tracks all textual data displayed to the user by any application, and then performs clustering to determine the user intent (contextually).
The article argues this feels "creepy and big brother-esque," and while Microsoft talks of defining a "task continuum," suggests the patent's process "would in essence keep track of everything you type and interact with in the OS and stockpile it in real-time to data-dump into Bing."
The search engine (e.g., Bing and Cortana) uses contextual rankers to adjust the ranking of the default suggested queries to produce more relevant [results]. The operating system...tracks all textual data displayed to the user by any application, and then performs clustering to determine the user intent (contextually).
The article argues this feels "creepy and big brother-esque," and while Microsoft talks of defining a "task continuum," suggests the patent's process "would in essence keep track of everything you type and interact with in the OS and stockpile it in real-time to data-dump into Bing."
"creepy and big brother-esque,
That means it will succeed wildly. People dig that shit. The more surveillance they are subjected to, the happier they seem to be. If they weren't, the modern world would be a very, very different (and less Orwellian) place, because they wouldn't keep buying commercial products that spy on them and voting for political candidates that promise to increase government-originated surveillance to keep them "safe".
So yeah. This should fit right in with what we've come to expect from modern consumer computing. No keystoke people ever type will remain un-mined.
"would in essence keep track of everything you type and interact with in the OS and stockpile it in real-time to data-dump into Bing."
Just what we need. A private company storing everything we type on their servers without our approval.
You know what I don't need? Someone telling me what they think I'm thinking. It's bad enough Microsoft has gotten people into the nastily bad habit of thinking they have to search for everything on their own system or network* rather than going to the source, now they want us to believe we're incapable of asking the questions we want.
Guess it's a good thing I won't be using W10 except at work where we can turn this crap off.
* Even after we show them how to use the command line to connect to a print server, people are still insistent on "searching" the network to find a printer then complain when they can't locate it. Stop searching! Go to the source.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
More than 10 years ago I wrote something similar for KDE. It was called Knapsack. It monitored all keys pressed on the X desktop, all text on the clipboard and the title of the active window. It used all that text to show files related to the users current activity.
Every time a user would click a suggested file, the system would get positive feedback about that suggestion in that context: it learned.
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail...
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.