Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#201

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:13 PM UTC

vnorilo wrote: post #68

sheerun wrote: 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!"

Happened the other day on HN. "Imagine we could use this to stream movies to astronauts on their way to Mars" / "well... you know local storage is a thing, right?".

I don't have a link to that exchange handy, but this for the first time drove home to me the realization that we have a whole generation of people brought up on Internet streaming services, who may not even realize that it's not only possible for the media to be stored locally on their machines, but it's in fact the natural state for data.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#202

Post by charcircuit » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

beckingz wrote: post #5

I look forward to the day when PowerPoint is banned due to enterprise security concerns.

Enterprises who care will just disable it via group policies.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#203

Post by wongarsu » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:14 PM UTC

mavhc wrote: post #88

rjsw wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends. In Germany we try to set the speed limit at the speed you should be driving in clear and dry (or slightly wet) conditions. In Sweden in the other hand I've seen roads where no sane person should be going the posted speed limit

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#204

Post by three_seagrass » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

roody15 wrote: post #78

The 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.

Friendly reminder that Apple shares their iCloud data (users' docs, pictures, messages, etc.) with the Chinese government in exchange for market access:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#205

Post by matternot » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:17 PM UTC

How it was determined that it phones back the content of the slide ? From my understanding it's just exchanging some network packets.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#206

Post by nmeagent » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:17 PM UTC

deafpolygon wrote: post #2

You did consent to it, in the fine print. Unfortunately.

If I have one hope for the future, it's that 'accepting' click-through corporate EULAs containing unconscionable terms that few read will no longer be considered consent.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#207

Post by matternot » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

how was it determined that it is phoning home the content of the slides? One thing is to exchange network packets with a remote server, and another thing is to claim that it's leaking slide content.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#208

Post by roody15 » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

three_seagrass wrote: post #204

roody15 wrote: post #78

The 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.

Friendly reminder that Apple shares their iCloud data (users' docs, pictures, messages, etc.) with the Chinese government in exchange for market access: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

Apple shares icloud data with the US government as well.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#209

Post by return_to_monke » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #175

IceWreck wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). If you want to you can do that with Linux. Sure you'd need to use the CLI, and a combination of tools but you can…

Not quite. For this to work well, all your apps need to run with not being able to do their own TLS, but to various (reasonable) reasons a lot of applications today do their own TLS. You also don't want to add self-signed certificates, but grab the traffic _before_ it gets encrypted IMHO. In some cases it's still quite viable, like if they dynamic link to OpenSSL (or similar) you could create a facade which allows gr…

While i partially agree, even DNS query/http headers (I'm not sure if that is encrypted with ssl?) Could be useful here. Told the software not to connect to cloud, still connects to cloud. Enough reason to complain.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#210

Post by adrian_b » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

user3939382 wrote: post #64

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…

I believe, even if I have not tried yet to do this, that you can do this in Linux if you create one or more virtual network interfaces in some namespaces, and you ensure that only that interface or those interfaces get IP addresses.

Then any program that is not run inside the namespace with configured virtual network interfaces can see only unconfigured interfaces, so it will not be able to open and connect sockets.

The Internet browser and any other program that needs network access, e.g. a NTP server, DHCP client, e-mail client etc., can be run inside the namespace with an IP-configured network interface.

The same could be done in FreeBSD by using a jail for the programs that need network access.

Obviously, this would not be enough to prevent network access for a program that would be aware of this configuration and would try to circumvent it, because such a program could list the network namespaces and try to execute itself, or another helping program, inside the network namespace. For complete isolation, all the programs for which network access is not desired would have to be executed inside a distinct namespace. That requires a more complex configuration.