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Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

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Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#82
post #68
post #12

The next era will be of Offline Apps because of stuff like this

I'm kind or envisioning some young bright engineer realizing they could just store some files locally. "It's like.. we don't need a backend at all!"

And we'll need a programming language that we can write our application in once but will still run on the different operating systems.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#83

I've raised this point repeatedly in different orgs. It's met with some combination of indifference and lack of understanding and not-my-responsibility-ism, but I'm sure that this will eventually blow up hard in some company's face - like 9-digit settlement for breach of contract, or worse things like breach of export control laws. Enterprise data security on the "MS Office level" at this point is like driving 60 mph…

> is like driving 60 mph on a road with no lane dividers That’s somewhat funny, because a Landesstraße in Germany has no lane dividers and the speed limit is 100 km/h (about 60 mp/h). Unless I’m misunderstanding and lane dividers mean the printed lines.

Same speed limit in the UK, and there are roads without painted lines.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#85

I've raised this point repeatedly in different orgs. It's met with some combination of indifference and lack of understanding and not-my-responsibility-ism, but I'm sure that this will eventually blow up hard in some company's face - like 9-digit settlement for breach of contract, or worse things like breach of export control laws. Enterprise data security on the "MS Office level" at this point is like driving 60 mph…

> is like driving 60 mph on a road with no lane dividers That’s somewhat funny, because a Landesstraße in Germany has no lane dividers and the speed limit is 100 km/h (about 60 mp/h). Unless I’m misunderstanding and lane dividers mean the printed lines.

"Unless I’m misunderstanding and lane dividers mean the printed lines."

Well, we also have plenty of really narrow roads on the countryside, with no lane divider, no printed lines and - no speed limit, where you could do 100 km/h, as well.

(And well, some people do, but if you crash, it would be also legally your fault, for not having the adequate speed, even if there is no formal speed limit. Which is a nice counterexample to the usual, everything is forbidden unless it is explicitely allowed mentality)

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#87

What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built into the OS where every process, including all native ones, including UI apps, are blocked from network connectivity by default, and the user gets an easy monitor of outgoing traffic with TLS/SSL inspection built in (you'd need some OS API to enable that). Kind of like granular oauth permissions, apps should have to declare which outgoing they have, a description/why, an…

> with TLS/SSL inspection built in (you'd need some OS API to enable that).

I'm not sure of that. Provided you can add a cert to your OS, you should be able to get away with a piece of protocol downgrade network gear that you can then pipe to a different (ideally, offline other than UDP receive) computer for analysis.

You'd need to disable HSTS, but other than that I think it should be the solution you're looking for. Oh, and for good measure, ethernet cable instead of wifi.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#88
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is like driving 60 mph on a road with no lane dividers That’s somewhat funny, because a Landesstraße in Germany has no lane dividers and the speed limit is 100 km/h (about 60 mp/h). Unless I’m misunderstanding and lane dividers mean the printed lines.

Same speed limit in the UK, and there are roads without painted lines.

The speed limit and the speed you should be driving are different though

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#89

Is there any way to tell if your company has opted in? Mine makes a huge show of classifying Office documents and barking about the policies of what can be shown to outside people. It would be hilarious to find out that they've done this, and are letting Microsoft slurp up all the stuff that would get us fired if we sent it to an outside email address.

I believe this is covered by the "Optional Connected Experiences" option. On Mac, this is accessible via the App's main menu > Preferences > Privacy.

Looks like these instrucitons should help you check:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/privacy/optio...

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOSS and offline-first is the future.

2023 is the year of Linux on the desktop?

Joking aside I think we are getting close, Photon did a lot to bridge with Windows in terms of gaming, GUI is often times at least on par with Windows/MacOS, if not better (obviously thats subjective), and reliability/performance has already been there for a while.

That being said, I still think theres more work to do, and arguably the hardest work is ahead.

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