241–250 of 391 posts
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Yeah, I'm surprised every healthcare related business doesn't either ban PowerPoint or block this "feature" somehow. HIPAA is a hell of a drug.
Wouldn't it be easier to ban putting HIPAA protected information into a PowerPoint? We don't ban telephones just because an employee can read patient records over the phone.
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
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That assumes people actually have the capacity to examine the source to do so and make the requisite adjustments. The real answer IMHO is to control your networking stack outside of your computer instead. Firewall that and you have way better security
How do you do packet inspection when they're all encrypted?
Why 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 ma…
Producing more evidence is left as an exercise at this point.
Edit: no more posts allowed for me. Reply below:
That’s exactly what telemetry is, today. Grammarly built a whole business on this. Copilot, etc.
Refusing to believe that times have changed because you’ve not been paying attention, is not a compelling argument.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-profession...
Obtaining user data should be a horrifying prospect for companies. They should obsessively work for alternative ways to not need it for their goals. And when they need it, to be ridiculously careful about it. (you could substitute "user data" for "application state" here) But it's not because there aren't sufficient consequences. Memory leaks don't properly crash the company as they should.
Typically, companies just worry about about liability leaks. Which they take seriously enough to dedicate a lot of lawyer time to plugging redundantly with innocuously vague disclosure wording, terms of service wording, difficult to find and inconvenient to use opt-out tools, etc.
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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.
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That assumes people actually have the capacity to examine the source to do so and make the requisite adjustments. The real answer IMHO is to control your networking stack outside of your computer instead. Firewall that and you have way better security
How do you do packet inspection when they're all encrypted?
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…
> 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.
PowerPoint has a feature where it uses machine learning to suggest layout and design changes for your content. This feature most likely can be turned off, but of course it needs some data on what's on your slide to suggest changes. I hope this submission is flagged and removed. Just because you don't like Microsoft doesn't mean such misrepresentation is okay.
This shouldn't be software behavior by default. Why should it be flagged?