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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."
y'know my searches work very well via google thank you
What's "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.
I don't mind having some software monitor my activity and provide opportunities to make like simpler. I quite like the idea. I have a huge problem with that information being sent off and collected in some far off place. I'm already quite spooked by the lack of privacy in Windows 10. But I'm also a bit spooked by Google and a bunch of other vendors who seem to expect to have access to quite personal information. I'm not a fan of big government - but this is one area I would like a bit more clarification on, if they are listening.
that I'm moving to Linux.
what Google does. That's what makes a Google and Facebook so creepy. Microsoft is catching up to them.
"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
They're not even bothering to call their surveillance software by some other name to obfuscate it's actual purpose anymore, they're coming right out and telling you: We are watching and recording everything you say, do, and type, and are analyzing that data to predict your intentions. The only obfuscation left is saying it's for 'Bing', when it's also going to government agencies. It is clear now that anyone who actually tolerates this violation of their civil liberties and human rights just doesn't understand the implications of what is being done to them, and needs to have it explained to them, so they can be properly outraged.
Microsoft needs to be dismantled, plain and simple.
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.
First, it's astonishing to me that the answer to the problem of the user being bad at searching is ever more encroachment on their privacy instead of teaching users how to search. The only thing you're actually doing in making searches attempt to account for bad searches is giving bad rules to good searches. Why is it not good enough that a search engine is a tool and you have to spend a little time learning to feel out its edges, much like you'd have to get a feel for what angles and distances produce which effects if you put a nail into a board? Why can't they be tools? Why do they have to be bubble-wrapped cotton candy? These two things are essentially mutually exclusive ends in the realm of search. If you want to be able to get good results, you have to know how to get them. The machine can't divine specifically what you're looking for, it's showing you its best guess. Meanwhile, if you can formulate your search properly, you can generally get what you're looking for.
Secondly, the premise here is that they're saving you time, but how, exactly? You still have to switch applications, you still have to do some typing, it still has to give you suggestions. Maybe it'll be automated but then if your guess is wrong (go figure), you'll have to spend double the effort to make it go away. Okay, let's grant for a moment that in some universe, it'll save time. How much time? If we're talking about potentially giving you better suggestions, it's basically no time at all. Thus there's not much point. If it's instant, you might save a second or two here or there, but it'd be offset by the times when it's wrong. So basically no time at all. And how many times do you switch between applications to search? Programmers do it a lot, but then, they're generally not terrible at searching in the first place. And you won't really be able to turn code into searches in this way. This is more of a natural language process. Who else switches applications a lot to do searching? If we're talking student research or something like that, how many times is it application switching versus how many times you just do several searches within the browser? I find it specious to suggest that it ever saves much of any time for any reason.
And then there's the more pressing issue, is this even remotely relevant for the security and privacy nightmare that this is? Even if it can't be compromised itself, it can't tell what an application will or won't do with the data. What's to stop it from being an officially-supported keylogger? Further, this isn't even a good thing from Microsoft's perspective. Their new business model will be selling user data, right? How much more attractive will it be when you've got all kinds of false positives in your search and ad records?
Thirdly, at what point do you look at what you've done and think to yourself that you've gotten the maximum amount of benefit for the minimum amount of cost? Even ignoring all of those practical issues, you're talking about the most minor of objective benefit for a large cost. I mean, you're apparently looking to grossly gut privacy and security further for a second or two. There must be some point at which you can call yourselves done. What is that point and how will you know when you're there? I look at this and the value prop is abysmal. But they seem to think it's worthwhile for some reason. When do things like this stop being worthwhile? Inquiring minds would like to know.
I don't get it.
Improves search results for whom?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I hate this sort of thing. Not just for the surveillance problem, that's self-evident how awful it is.
I hate it because I want a search engine to give me clean results for every search. I search for very different things for very different reasons, and they don't frequently have anything to do with anything I'm typing in an app. Having even my previous searches coloring the results I get is worse than unhelpful, it's actively detrimental.
If I'm searching for an app install failure, I don't want results related to the movie I was looking for yesterday, and I don't want results related to the Arizona Revised Statutes search I did an hour ago to answer a legal question for a friend. And I certainly don't want it to know about the sales proposal I typed up earlier today.
Microsoft Bob 2.0!
Clippy was bad enough on his own. I don't think giving him an AI and access to every program would be any better.
Guy1: "I heard they're going to make Portal 3"
Guy2: "Really? No way! I loved the Portal series. I need to find out more about this."
Guy2: Begins typing 'portal' into the Cortana search box
Clippy: "It looks like you're searching for porn. Here are some suggestions."
GF: "WTF are you doing on the computer?"
I saw Thulsa Doom in Trondheim over the summer. Not bad, but not really worship-level quality, either.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
For this one, no pretense of family language.
This post will cover first the competition fine print; then the long-term relationship; and, finally, the lamentable low bar responsible for this Tourettic outburst.
***
To qualify for certification, the DA candidate must be able to distinguish when I'm searching something deserving to bring it more fully into my consciousness, and when I'm searching something horrawful to determine the appropriate size of BFBM (big fucking black marker) required to cross that POS—along with any predictable next of kin—out of my life For-Fucking-Ever.
Digital assistant, read my lips: having now surveyed the top twenty search results in any extreme lather of sudden aghast attention, be it resolved that I hate this thing per the aforementioned For-Fucking-Ever. Please eradicate with extreme vigilance, or crawl back on your pathetic digital stomach to the corporation that brought you into this world with no goddamn balls.
YouTube, for example, keeps on suggesting styles of videos I explored for a tawdry half hour at some point in the distant past, long after a sane AI would have wooshed that bowel movement down the egress funnel, around the septic hair pin, to swirl and merge into the collective effluent.
But no, Google has settled for the derp, derp, derp algorithm in which it presumes that if you ate it once, you'll surely eat it again—forgetting, I suppose, that it gave you the major shits—so long as we continue to wave it under your nose until the end of time.
Nicely done, YouTube.
....Microsoft Patents A User-Monitoring AI That Improves Search Results
...and calls the appropriate government agency(s).
you get that when you want to look for "how to disable AI search".
Surprise, surprise, surprise.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
What does that actually mean? Is it "improved" as in "reducing the amount of crap advertising that is pushed to the user", or is it "improved" as in "New, Improved Recipe", which basically means they have found a new way of adulterating a product, so it is cheaper to produce?
I use YouTube as my TV, so I watch it a lot. I also search for things and more and more I get the same results over and over again, even with different words doing the search.
The bad part is that most of it I have already seen, so I spend more and more tme searching.
I already delete my cookies, but Google tracks me in other ways as well and changing browers works only till they are able to link it back to me. Not so much as a person, but as a database entity.
This might be interesting for ads (for them) but not for me. You see it at sites like Amazon as well. I just bought a USB hub and they are proposing USB hubs to me. Idiots, I just bought one.
Yet another is music. Listening to music and then proposing the same sor over and over again and again (Oh, PorHub does it as well)
So no, I do not want them to help me and second guess what I would like. And the only things that stick out are things they want to promote. I am not interested in things I know when I do a search. I am interested in things I do NOT know.
So I have started recently using Bing instead of Google to do searches, because I get different results for now.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Microsoft will need to log every keystroke to do something like this. They will have your usernames, passwords, and security answers to secure sites like banks. Is Microsoft doing this now with Windows 10 to collect data for this kind of "feature?" Is there any way to guarantee an OS is not doing this?