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Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

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Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lets them use their personal hardware without much compromised in the way of security How do they protect against an attacker compromising this client, waiting until the employee is asleep or away for a few minutes, then using the employee's session to compromise the remote machine? Even if session establishment requires 2FA, the attacker could keep the session alive after the user attempts to close it.

For a targeted attack with a hacker remotely or physically controlling the client, I agree. However I think an automated attack would be difficult, especially if the VD sent its data to the client as a video stream, and only recieved keyboard and mouse inputs. Now maybe there's some fancy computer vision that could handle this (and all without the employee noticing)...

You don't need computer vision to send Win+R, cmd, and whatever the Windows equivalent of "curl | bash" is.

It's definitely going to keep a lot of the commodity malware out, but it's only going to stay secure until attackers start targeting it. And the risks from "inside" the machine (user downloads and runs something bad) don't go away, although the company gets a bit more control over the network (could also be done with an always-on VPN).

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#112

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management eas…

They are bundling the IaaS hardware with the price of the MS software stack subscription. You need to net out the cost of standalone windows and office from the monthly price. At the lower hardware tiers, it's a bigger percentage of the price. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/business/compa...

Where are you seeing that? Your link just goes to the Microsoft 365 (nee Office 365) pricing page. I couldn't find any mention of hardware on the Windows 365 pages.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#114

Azure can't scale? I can't imagine this happening with AWS, what a horrible PR

If AWS started offering resources for free, then they'd have to pause it within 4h since announcement and I'm pretty optimistic I think

...they offer a ton of stuff for free.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#115
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to policies from frustrating departments, people tend to find workarounds, especially if there is no easy way to enforce the rules. At a prior company, one of the only reasons we adopted anything SaaS was that IT didn't have to know it existed.

Ohhh man/woman. I'm a security person. I often work with my customers' central IT. I'm not going to have an opinion or judge you, but consider: You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking t…

> You're giving people nightmares. I've seen it go very wrong (front-page news wrong). And then the threads commenting on "how incompetent can they be, blabla". I've worked with the people stressed, sad and disappointed that they got pwned because of shadow IT. It's a ticking time bomb.

Who cares about front-page news wrong lol. Equifax was front-page news wrong, and there were 0 actual consequences for people in it.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

selling dekstop pcs to businesses is totally different than selling gaming to consumers.

It isn't. Some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former.

You are talking about Microsoft and Google - two of the largest computing companies on the planet.

By the same logic, you could say that game streaming is like a search engine, because some of the companies that do the latter are also doing the former.

The idea of provisioning remote cloud VMs is far older than Stadia or Xbox Cloud anyway.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#117
post #18

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management eas…

Who the heck is buying these VMs that cost 5x real hardware? Right. This has already been tried in the "game streaming" business. There have been multiple services where you rent a PC in "the cloud" by the hour, or for some number of hours per month. Either they cost too much, and fail for lack of customers, or they are underpriced as a loss leader, and get shut down after losing money. Google Stadia and NVidia Cloud…

I play video games about 8 hours per month. At 40c per hour, it would cost me less than $40/year to rent a gaming computer in the cloud. Even $400/year seems pretty reasonable. It’s only not cost effective if you use it a lot (which is the case for most pay-per-use commodities).

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#118

> including one at the top end that includes eight vCPUs, 32GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage for $158 per month Why is it so popular? I can't understand the economics of it. Can someone explain? Why would I pay ~$10k over 5 years for something that's similar to the laptop I'm typing on which costed me $700 used? I know it's for businesses, but even then, does it come with tooling or something that makes management eas…

You have an 8core laptop with 32gig RAM for $700? That's not super common though, I think usually you'd spend more like $2500-$3000k for it. Count in the reduced maintenance and hardware support + having your whole stuff in one place.. Might make sense if you are not super low on money

Not quite 700$ but I recently bought a Laptop with a Ryzen 5700u (8 cores, 16 threads) and upgraded the RAM to 40Gb. Easily under 1000$ brand new.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#119
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely hate using VMs over VPNs, any slight interruption in my fragile home Wi-Fi (or whatever the hell the VPN is doing) causes my whole dev environment to freeze. It's a security/usability trade off for me.

I had Ethernet installed in all rooms at home. For some 800 euros (5 Ethernet outlets including the router) you get sub millisecond latencies to your router and your computer works wonders again. Installing an Ethernet LAN network is the best investment for anyone who works from home. Wi-fi really sucks in urban areas and soon even in rural areas because of the IoT crap.

You get Ethernet for Gigabit speed, not latency. 5x 30 Euro routers in Wireless Bridge mode would've delivered the same latency.

And I could've done the wiring for 2/3 of the price, btw.

Re: Microsoft pauses free Windows 365 cloud PC trials after ‘significant demand’

#120
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 365's lowest tier, with only 2GB of RAM, works out to $288/year. If you're on a Mac, you can grab the Pro version of Parallels for $99USD/year and run it locally, and spin up an instance of any version of Windows you need, along with guaranteed uptime and availability. I really don't see Windows 365 as a viable option for most developers, when there are so many better -- and cheaper -- alternatives readily av…

If I would have to pay $100-$200 for the software subscriptions for my Windows VM (windows license, office) it gets close? Especially if Microsoft is also throwing in some hardware so my local computer is taxed less? Of course streaming a cloud desktop introduces its own problems (latency, unreliability, etc) but also advantages (portability, reproducibility, etc)

MS does offer W10 VM images that are good for 60 days (or 90, can't remember), to be used for development and testing.
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