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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

#231
Just wondering along the lines of 'perhaps a cigar really is a cigar'.

What would Microsoft be doing with the text of every PowerPoint presentation once they have analysed the style/font/content information?

Must be thousands of slides per hour 24/7 for years. How long is this information kept?

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#232

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…

For Windows, check out simplewall, it does (almost) exactly that. https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall

It uses the windows firewall. Do I trust Windows firewall to block itself? NO!

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#233

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.

Not so funny considering that more than half of fatal car accidents in Germany happen on exactly those streets (744 in 2021). Followed by Bundesstraßen (606 in 2021), which only sometimes have dividers and are usually limited to 100 km/h as well.

In compare, on the Autobahn, which always has dividers but often has no speed limit at all and is not below 100 km/h under normal circumstances there were "only" 318 deaths.

Source (German language, Federal Statistical Office): https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=abr...

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#234
There's a pervasive lack of precision in privacy discussions. There's a difference between a network request that does some computation on the server side, one that does the same but may log errors and increment counters, and one that actually stores the data temporarily or for a long time. And in the last case, there's a difference between the data being nigh-impossible for internal employees to access (perhaps only used as input for other automated systems), and data with few controls. What about the ability of the user to invoke a delete for all their data on the server side? There's so many dimensions.

This is not a useless feature. I can imagine it might help someone make a better presentation. We have to weigh the potential privacy implications against that.

And asking the user to consent for every little thing isn't the solution either. It's so annoying to be pin-pricked by dialogs. At work, this sorta thing should be decided at the organization level, by setting appropriate fine-grained org policies for Office.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#235

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…

Nah, you can't. The issue is the "easy monitor outgoing traffic with TLS/SSL" part. It is not impossible but it is far from easy. If the application uses statically linked SSL client (as it should if it is commercially distributed) then you have to modify the application (for example in memory) to get a copy of everything that gets written to the SSL stream.

You know how you can do Ctrl+Shift+K in Firefox to open up the browser console and inspect all the bits of the page, see the code (and fuck with it), see all the network traffic, and so on? I dream of being able to do that for arbitrary applications. Imagine having a Super+Ctrl+Shift+K that opened an OS-level GUI showing all the pertinent details of the running program.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#236
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...

I think it's worth clarifying that this is just Chinese users, though that was probably clear to most. The Chinese and rest-of-the-world iClouds are completely separate.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#237

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…

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.

In fact, you cannot trust an OS you DIDN'T build yourself. And there are only two of those: Linux from scratch and Gentoo.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#239
post #184
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happened in 2014? Also someone told me here that LS should be considered harmful.

It's complicated, but the 2013-2014 years were when the bulk of the Snowden leaks were hitting the internet, and people were starting to dig up really suspicious stuff relating to all big tech companies, not just Apple. However, Apple was still among the companies compliant with PRISM, the NSA's newly established surveillance/tracking effort that also roped in Microsoft, Google, AOL and any other major service provider you can think of.

The implications of this are unclear. I like blowing these claims out of proportion, but in reality we genuinely have no idea what this means. It could simply signal that Apple is complicit with benign cloud-storage security procedures enforced by the USA. It could also mean that the US has carte-blanche access to iCloud data and decryption keys. You're free to draw your own conclusions, but the surrounding context seems to imply that Apple has an under-the-table relationship with our government (as does most of the tech industry, surprise surprise).

Oh, and I don't really know/care if LS is harmful. You should be aware that it's not going to outsmart Apple if they want to collect your info, though. They have kernel-level networking access, which companies like Microsoft have abused in the past to collect telemetry on crafty users. It's probably not harmful, per-se, but your perception of it as an impassible wall might be.

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