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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2023

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  • I’m sure there are many ways to improve on this solution, but they would all require significantly more effort (ElasticSearch isn’t exactly trivial to set up).

    This is really just a proof of concept, the most minimal viable implementation that gets you something similar in terms of functionality.

    For instance, Windows Recall stores OCR content tagged by app, this solution doesn’t. Also, as others have mentioned, a practical implementation should likely check if anything has changed at all and discard any screenshots that don’t have any new data.







  • It appears to be as simple as tesseract <infile> <outfile>. Possibly could even pipe (or tee) the screenshot straight into that and save both an image and a text file in a single command line.

    So something like this should do the trick:

    gnome-screenshot -f - | tee /Microsoft/yourPrivacy/$(date +%s).png | tesseract - /Microsoft/yourPrivacy/$(date +%s).txt
    

    Skip the database, just use grep to search that directory if you need to find anything. Voilà, homemade Recall.




  • In order to be certified for running Recall, machines currently must have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit, basically an AI coprocessor). I assume that is what makes it practical to do by offloading the required computation from the CPU.

    Apparently it IS possible to circumvent that requirement using a hack, which is what some of the researchers reporting on it have done, but I haven’t read any reports on how that affects CPU usage in practice.