[HN Gopher] Memos - An open source Rewinds / Recall
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       Memos - An open source Rewinds / Recall
        
       Author : arkohut
       Score  : 76 points
       Date   : 2024-11-17 12:59 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | arkohut wrote:
       | Memos is a privacy-focused passive recording project. It can
       | automatically record screen content, build intelligent indices,
       | and provide a convenient web interface to retrieve historical
       | records.
       | 
       | This project draws heavily from two other projects: one called
       | Rewind and another called Windows Recall. However, unlike both of
       | them, Memos allows you to have complete control over your data,
       | avoiding the transfer of data to untrusted data centers.
        
         | walterbell wrote:
         | _> avoiding the transfer of data to untrusted data centers_
         | 
         | In short order, this will create a large corpus of unsecured
         | local data.
         | 
         | Is the user expected to secure the data independently?
         | 
         | Do Recall/Rewind help the user to filter recorded data for
         | retention or deletion?
        
           | arkohut wrote:
           | Rewind and Recall also store similar data locally but maybe
           | not only locally. And Recall/Rewind allow data deletion, they
           | can retain the most recent data based on time.
        
             | walterbell wrote:
             | Thanks to PR debacle, Recall now encrypts the data in a VM,
             | https://www.windowscentral.com/software-
             | apps/windows-11/wind...
        
               | arkohut wrote:
               | If this is very important, I suppose I will implement
               | encryption for stored data in future versions.
               | 
               | However, I still have a question about this: it seems
               | that lots of hard disk is already encrypted. After all, I
               | also store a large amount of personal photos, documents,
               | bills, and other important information on my computer,
               | and I haven't meticulously encrypted all this data again.
               | Should I be doing that?
        
               | pstoll wrote:
               | It's a question of risk.
               | 
               | Full disk encryption targets a different threat model -
               | disk encryption protects against someone grabbing your
               | computer.
               | 
               | Writing into an encrypted blob on disk adds a layer of
               | protection against bad actors exfiltrating data by
               | running code on the laptop.
               | 
               | Overall I really am amazed that this sort of thing is now
               | possible and appreciate a privacy-aware / local compute
               | and storage version of it!
        
             | patrickhogan1 wrote:
             | Rewind and Recall are 2 separate projects and 2 separate
             | installers. I use Rewind and I have several outbound
             | network monitoring apps as well as local disk monitoring
             | apps. Rewind does not send data offsite.
             | 
             | Rewind does glitch sometimes specifically with audio
             | recording which is extremely annoying. You go back to an
             | area where you thought you had audio notes only to find you
             | didn't - even though you had audio recording turned on the
             | whole time. It has something to do with meeting detection.
             | Which is silly bc disk space is cheap just auto record. I
             | do like the concept of an open source version and I will
             | look into this.
        
           | 627467 wrote:
           | "large corpus of unsecured unsecured local data" is this much
           | worse than unencrypted outlook mailbox (pst or est)? Or
           | offline files from your Dropbox/GDrive/etc? Or your browser
           | profile?
           | 
           | I guess it's worse in the sense that it also records audio,
           | but large corpus of information is already at risk on a
           | unsecure or compromised devices
        
       | mdaniel wrote:
       | Ah, I see the commit that renamed the repo[1] because the title
       | says "Memos" and the URL says "/memos" but the repo was
       | different. I similarly got confused while reading the readme
       | thinking Pensieve was a dependency or something
       | 
       | 1:
       | https://github.com/arkohut/pensieve/commit/e81057d5bebcf9cab...
        
       | pheatherlite wrote:
       | Great work, op. As others have said, encryption is vital to such
       | a project. In fact if your ethos is privacy, it would be great
       | marketing material to assure users that this is in fact resistant
       | to basic infiltration. I think recall is a fantastic idea, even
       | for professionals and corporate env. But the kind of sensitive
       | information that is handled by employees cannot risk being leaked
       | from such a tool.
        
       | moltar wrote:
       | How's the performance with Python? What's the overhead?
        
         | traverseda wrote:
         | Have you used much python, or are you just buying into the
         | "python slow" memes?
         | 
         | Unless they've done something very very wrong performance will
         | be fine. This isn't doing anything where python's overhead
         | would matter.
         | 
         | It's glueing together some highly optimized code written in
         | other languages, or using python as a DSL to interface with
         | highly optimized libraries like numpy, or generate highly
         | optimized assembly with something like JAX, or if they're
         | really fancy compiling a restricted subset directly to GPU
         | shaders or something.
         | 
         | Python is plenty fast for most stuff, and when it isn't it has
         | one of the best pathways towards optimization.
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-17 23:00 UTC)