This seems kind of shocking, is MS really hoarding the trade secrets of like every Fortune 500 company on their servers?
Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
161–170 of 391 posts
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#162The future of personal computing is really dark these days. I just attended an apple event for education and government. The amount of data tracking and the standardization/normalization of this behavior is dystopian. What happened to computers being just fun and a source of exploration and freedom? Microsoft, Gooogle, Apple all constantly push their cloud based accounts … where everything is tracked.
On the other hand, Atlassian’s stock lost 66% of its value, and it could be because investors notice that converting people to the Cloud is not currently working. Atlassian should have better bet on their Server solutions, but they really really wanted to be a cloud operator. “For strategic reasons.” Maybe for governmental reasons, who knows.
> it could be because investors notice that converting people to the Cloud is not currently working
Given the barn storming financial performance of other cloud operators and Atlassian's impressive record in (un)reliability, I think investors are quite aware that converting people to the cloud is going swimmingly most places that aren't Atlassian.
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> worse things like breach of export control laws The entire Department of Defense runs on PowerPoint, along with all of their contractors. It is not at all uncommon to produce slide decks that are either classified or covered by ITAR; this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Do they run on the same infrastructure as the rest of us?
No they run in isolated networks. No classified DoD networks have any access to the internet.
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#164LibreOffice FTW. https://libreoffice.org/ It may be glitchy in some areas, but I've been using it since graduating high school, and I can do whatever I want with it.
This.
I've installed Linux+LO for years to a lot of people (also a couple times when it was in the earlier StarOffice incarnation, can't recall if under Windows or OS/2, certainly not Linux), being extremely clear on one thing: "this is not Microsoft Office, it's not as powerful as Microsoft Office and you may find some incompatibilities here and there (that was true especially during the old times), but the features 99% of users need are all here. Keep it for a while, and if it doesn't work for you, I'll install your Microsoft Office back for free and you lose nothing".
It was a success almost everywhere, but it's extremely important for "normal" users to be comfortable with the different tool; remember that we value privacy, Open Source, etc. they don't. If something that they don't perceive as important requires a change in their workflow, they'll refuse that, so I don't even talk them about different file formats and just set it up to read/write in MS Office formats from scratch.
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't count anywhere that is protected by GDPR.
> protected by GDPR This is like the firewall in windows 95: nice but useless.
Many companies have gotten their first fines already. Hundreds of millions of shareholder value down the drain because they blatantly ignored the rules.
No, most companies don't get a massive fine in the first round, but I already see enough have gotten then that even Google now allows me to opt out with a single click :-}
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built into the OS where every process, You cannot trust an OS you cannot build yourself. That's why I see Linux as the only option for professionals and privacy minded people.
How do you know there are no outside efforts to log linux activities? There's a lot of source code to go through and is it possible there are callbacks even within OSS that most people are not aware of?
OSS is necessary, but (as you point out) not sufficient.
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#167I'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.
Yeah, my point is not that such roads don't exist, they are relatively common, as you say.
My point is that your only "defense" against oncoming drivers on such roads is to pray that they stay in their own lane. This mostly works because people are mostly sober and undistracted and not malicious. It is kind of terrifying when you start to think about it.
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#168Why doesn’t this article include the packet capture or whatever data he has that shows exactly what’s being sent?
One possible reason is that the actual data that's being sent is a lot less nefarious than is being implied.
I've seen people vehemently argue that merely checking if a new version is available amounts to horrible invasive unethical tracking. You might want to turn that off for the truly paranoid situations, and that's fair, but it's of course completely different than "sends all your data".
I don't have a Windows machine and I certainly don't have PowerPoint, so I can't actually check anything myself. But I see a lot of confirmation biasing going on in this thread, and I bet most people didn't check anything either. All I can give this article is a shrug.
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I want is Little Snitch on steroids built into the OS where every process, You cannot trust an OS you cannot build yourself. That's why I see Linux as the only option for professionals and privacy minded people.
How do you know there are no outside efforts to log linux activities? There's a lot of source code to go through and is it possible there are callbacks even within OSS that most people are not aware of?
Well at least with open source, you CAN verify it. There are people and companies who do audit
You're replacing a big and unstoppable problem with a smaller one that can be mitigated
Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides
#170What 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…
Since 2014 I don't trust my macs. There is no Apple computer without LS installed on in my company. Actually, if LS is not available, I will not use Apple computers at all. Period.
Why don't you trust your macs since 2014. Also why do you still use them if you don't trust them any longer?