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New Software Remembers Everything Your Computer Has Ever Displayed (cnn.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the search-engineering dept.

A Napster co-founder launched a new software this week which lets you search for anything you've ever looked at on your computer. schwit1 shared this report from CNNMoney: Atlas Informatics Founder and CEO Jordan Ritter calls the software "a photographic memory for your digital life"... This includes web pages, emails, Slack chats, Netflix films, Spotify songs, or anything else that's appeared in front of your eyes on your screen... You can search by keyword, content type or time, and it displays all related information based on relevancy. For instance, if two documents were open at the same time and you toggled between them, they will both appear whether or not they contain a keyword. Once installed on your hard drive and browser, Atlas Recall runs in the background and begins collecting your activity. The company captures all the content you've looked at and stores it on its servers.
It's encrypted before transmission to the Atlas Cloud servers, though you can block it from capturing data from certain applications, files, and web sites. "The platform wars are over, nobody won, and no one will ever win them again..." Ritter told CNNMoney. "What we want is something that works the way we use our devices and data."

15 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Self hosted solution? by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 5, Funny

    In case I ever become Secretary of State.

    1. Re:Self hosted solution? by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Interesting

      A co-worker of mine actually wrote a piece of software that did this just for himself. His program took a snapshot of the screen about every fifteen seconds and saved it in a delta-compressed format he invented himself, and then archived it away on a large NAS drive sorted by date and time. Then, he could go back and look at exactly what code or project he was working on at any time, almost like a long term video replay. Of course, it was just visual data, so he couldn't search by anything but dates and times.

      Personally, my projects' source control (Git or Mercurial) is good enough for the purpose of long-term work archiving, as I don't really care about anything else, like chats or e-mails or random browsing. I have no need to keep a record of my slashdot postings or what porn pics I peek at. And I certainly don't want it recording financial data from my bank, etc.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  2. LOL NO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just what I need is gigs upon gigs of ads, spam, and other garbage backed up forever.

    1. Re:LOL NO by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is not a solution in search of a problem, its a solution that creates many.

  3. Bankrupt them by ChrisMaple · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What a splendid use for a wide bandwidth white noise generator.

    --
    Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
    1. Re:Bankrupt them by JoeMerchant · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Clever compression algorithms would recognize uncorrelated noise and edit it out of the data compressed and stored.

      But, you're right, they won't roll that out in 1.0, or likely ever because this is a boneheaded idea with a tiny niche market that could see any value in it that outweighs the creep factor. But, if a significant number of wiseguys who were forced to be subjected to this by their employer decided to turn on the white noise, the company could eventually deal with it - probably first with a corporate "DON'T DO THAT!" ban, followed a couple of years later by a technical solution that doesn't make them look like incompetent ninnies.

      I have enough faith in humanity to believe that the company will fail first for other more important reasons, before such a problem needs a solution.

  4. What reality did I wake up in today? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Everything you've ever done on your computer, uploaded to someone else's servers. Huh, huh? "

    "That's genius! What could possibly go wrong?"

  5. Re:"and stores it on its server" by sims+2 · · Score: 3, Funny

    That's actually a great idea! Then they would have to roll out broadband so their spying system would work.
    #govermentspyingforbroadband2016

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  6. How it must've started... by fibonacci8 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I bet we can get people to pay us to install a keylogger on their system.

    --
    Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
  7. What? by bigfinger76 · · Score: 3, Funny

    What we want is something that works the way we use our devices and data.

    Recklessly? Blindly? I'm missing something here.

  8. Riiiiight.... by markdavis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    >"It's encrypted before transmission to the Atlas Cloud servers"

    Yeah, right. Closed source binary blob program, right? So you just "promise" that it is done a certain way. Sounds a lot like those "wonderful" closed-source password storage databanks, put everything of highest value in it and just hope it actually IS encrypted the whole way and that there are no backdoors, no spyware, no three-letter-agency access, no undiscovered security holes, etc. Some things are better left to yourself.

    "Danger, danger Will Robinson..."

  9. Does not compute by Hank+the+Lion · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They claim that all your data is stored on their servers in encrypted form, yet they will be able to search that data - on their servers - for something that you are looking for.
    How will they ever achieve that?
    The data is encrypted so they don't have themselves access to it, yet, when you want to search something, they apparently have it all indexed for you.
    How can they ever index it if they cannot read the data itself?

  10. Re:This has GOT to be a joke... by michelcolman · · Score: 3, Funny

    You have to admire their audacity, though. Why write viruses and trojans if you can just ask people to use your "service" voluntarily? And they actually do sign up for it! Absolutely brilliant idea.

  11. Re:Remind me... by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... why on Earth would I want this?

    So someone could plant faked evidence of child porn or extramarital affairs into your browsing history.

    (Seriously though, I'm with you. This would be the last and I mean last kind of thing I'd ever willingly install on my PC.)

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  12. No Linux Support by cfalcon · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is one of the cases where a lack of Linux support is a feature!

    Check out their privacy page, where they eventually get around to admitting they have all your data forever.

    https://www.atlas.co/privacy-p...

    It starts with stuff like:
    "
        You retain ownership and control of your data.
        You can review and remove your digital items from the system at anytime.
        You control what the system remembers. You may temporarily pause the system or permanently block by URL, file, application, and more. This excluded content never leaves your computer or phone.
        Each digital item remains encrypted at rest and in motion.
    "

    But what does that really mean? And "encrypted" is only really meaningful if YOU have the key, which obviously, you do not- all the services they offer require that they access your data, after all. When it says you can remove the "digital items", they don't mention if that also removes the DATA. If it were to upload a personal LibreOffice document, what meaning is "digital item"? Is that the combination of my data plus the identifier that lets me see it? Have they provided a legal need to purge the data when I remove the document, or are we just deleting the reference, while the data still chills there? Also note the "block list" is itself a massive deal: the blacklist is a list of things that you DO NOT want transferred. This means that they have a list of things you do not want transferred, should that ever be something that can be used against you, hey, there it is.

    Can they snoop through your data? Here's what they say on that:

    "however, we do not have access to the contents of the items (documents or files) remembered through Recall beyond the minimum required to operate Recall and its associated services"

    Let me translate that: "we have access to the contents of the items (documents and files)". The clause on the back COMPLETELY ELIMINATES the statement on the front.

    The "privacy promise" does not appear to be a legal document. I can't find their EULA anywhere, and I will bet ANYTHING that the EULA both (a) doesn't actually have the legal safeguards that would be required to render them liable for breaking their promise and (b) allows them to update the EULA at any goddamned time. Again, I can't find it.

    As a note: I wonder what a secure version of this would actually look like. The searching would have to happen on your machine, or a machine you own, and the data could still pass through their server as long as it was encrypted with a key that the owner (you) know, and the server (they) do not. Pretty much every search and voice recognition is doing this crap now, and they never offer an option for someone who runs their own server. I'm sure this is all by design.

    Anyway, the big thing is this: anyone who uses this program gets exactly what it looks like, and fully deserves whatever results occur as a result. It is offered as a feature, and anyone who opts in must presumably want this.