Wednesday Newsbytes: Windows Recall is a PR Disaster; Google Still Recommends Glue for Your Pizza; Microsoft Start AI Weather Beats Competition; Microsoft Compels Windows 10 Users to Upgrade with Full-Screen Banners… and more
Every day we scan the tech world for interesting news in the world of technology and sometimes from outside the world of technology. Every Wednesday, we feature news articles that grabbed our attention over the past week. We hope you find this week’s ‘Wednesday Newsbytes’ informative and interesting!
A PR disaster: Microsoft has lost trust with its users, and Windows Recall is the straw that broke the camel’s back
The world is up-in-arms over Windows Recall, but why? It stems from Microsoft’s seeming lack of care for Windows and its users.
It’s a nightmare scenario for Microsoft. The headlining feature of its new Copilot+ PC initiative, which is supposed to drive millions of PC sales over the next couple of years, is under significant fire for being what many say is a major breach of privacy and security on Windows. That feature in question is Windows Recall, a new AI tool designed to remember everything you do on Windows.
On paper, it’s a cool idea. As CEO Satya Nadella described it, Windows now has a photographic memory that uses AI to triage and index everything you’ve ever done on your computer, enabling you to semantically search for things you’ve seen using natural language. It’s a new and improved way of finding things on Windows, and in our testing of the feature, it works really well.
However, for a tool like this to be feasible, trust between the user and the platform is required, a luxury Microsoft doesn’t appear to have with its Windows user base right now. Recall operates by taking and storing captures of your screen every few seconds to build a database that the user can later search…
Google still recommends glue for your pizza
It’s almost like AI answers aren’t fully baked!
You may remember we all had a fun little laugh at Google’s AI search results telling us to put glue in our pizza. Internet legend Katie Notopoulos made and ate a glue pizza. A good time was had by all! Except, whoopsie, Google’s AI is training on our good time.
I will grant the query “how much glue to add to pizza” is an unusual one — but not that unusual given the recent uproar around glue pizza. As spotted by Colin McMillen on Bluesky, if you ask Google how much glue to add to your pizza, the right answer — none! — does not appear. Instead, it cites our girl Katie suggesting you add an eighth of a cup. Whoops!
You may be wondering if this is a faked screenshot. I wondered that, too. But The Verge confirmed by running our own query…
Microsoft Start Weather blows away the competition with AI-powered forecast accuracy
Microsoft Start Weather has been recognized as the “overall most accurate weather forecast provider globally” by ForecastWatch for the second consecutive year, relying on AI technology for enhanced forecasting accuracy.
This recognition followed an independent analysis involving 22 weather services, evaluated across 13 metrics throughout 2023. Microsoft Start Weather performed notably well in accuracy for predicting temperatures and cloud cover for short-term forecasts of 1-5 days.
Traditional weather forecasting has relied on supercomputers and physics simulations, but Microsoft Start Weather has integrated AI to utilize extensive weather datasets, computational models, and user-generated data. This AI-driven approach supports a variety of predictive features, from immediate rain and snow forecasts to longer-range 30-day forecasts.
The service is part of initiatives like NOAA’s Weather Ready Nation…
Microsoft compels Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11 with annoying full-screen banners again
It’s time for Microsoft’s ‘weekly’ reminder, asking ‘Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11.
Microsoft wants Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11, and it’s clearly not shy about it. In the past few months, we’ve seen the Redmond giant use several tactics in a bid to get users to transition to its AI-powered OS. You might remember Windows 10 users receiving multi-panel pop-up ads, taking up the PC’s entire screen real estate — recommending a Windows 11 upgrade.
Perhaps more interestingly and strange, Microsoft’s latest gambit touts Windows 11 as a great resource for staying updated with celebrity gossip, stocks, and weather updates. According to StatCounter’s latest report, Windows 11 still lags miles behind Windows 10’s dominant 68.36% market share worldwide.
And as it now seems, Microsoft is back to its old tricks. According to Windows Latest, the tech giant is using full-screen banner ads to push Windows 10 to Windows 11. This time, the ads aren’t just exclusive to Windows 10 users with devices that meet Microsoft’s stringent system requirements for Windows 11. Users with unsupported devices are getting these seemingly annoying ads, too.
The outlet reports the ad popped up after installing the Windows 10 May 2024 Update…
New York magnet fisher catches safe full of soggy $100 bills, he says
James Kane has used a powerful magnet to fish all manner of junk from New York City waterways, but he says the stacks of $100 bills he pulled from a safe were something else entirely.
Kane’s girlfriend, Barbi Agostini, was recording last Friday as he pulled a slimy safe out of a lake in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, famous as the location of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, and extracted bags of waterlogged, gunk-covered Benjamins from inside it.
“Oh, that’s money,” Kane said in the video of the discovery. “Oh, it is! Stacks of bills, dude!”
“Oh, my God!” Agostini says.
The couple estimates that the safe contained as much as $100,000, though the bills were partly decomposed…
Thanks for reading this week’s Wednesday Newbytes. We hope these articles were informative, interesting, fun, and helpful. Darcy & TC
How come I only sometimes receive the Wednesday Newsbytes newsletter? I receive all of your other daily newsletters without fail, but often the Wednesday one never arrives. Like today. I received it last week, and the week before, but not the two weeks before that. It’s not in my spam folder, or anywhere else. It’s very weird and if there is anything you can do at your end to rectify the situation, that would be great. Thanks!
We have several Gmail accounts and we receive the Wednesday newsletter every Wednesday. Did you check the spam folder? Wednesday’s newsletter covers a lot of topics we don’t normally cover.
I just found the missing ones in the Trash bin, but I cannot figure out how they got there. I never delete any Cloudeight emails. And they were only in the Trash on webmail, which I don’t use – I use Thunderbird with POP3, so if I deleted them, they would be in my local Trash, but they are not. Which means Google deleted them before they got to my Inbox. Why would they do that? Not even to Spam first, but straight to Trash. Bizarre. If you have any insights on why or how this might happen, something that maybe I messed up on, I’d love to hear it, because I cannot figure it out….
Google has spam filters that are not perfect. They may have marked it as spam and dumped it in your spam folder and not your inbox…so you never downloaded it.
I check my spam folder weekly because a few things have ended up there that shouldn’t. But these emails never showed up there, they went straight to Trash.
Thanks for having a think on it. I guess it will remain a mystery. If you ever do come across some reason that Google might randomly delete someone’s email I hope you’ll include it in your newsletter.
Thank you for all you do!