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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

#351

Post by smhoff256 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #181
proee wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It all depends of course on the level of your paranoia/threat model. To prevent standard data leaking or rather stealing like in this case, linux is a quite solid choice. But if you think you are a high profile target, you should probably learn how to deactivate Intels ME and co. And if you are really paranoid, you should assume that there are hardware backdoors. But what do you do then? Build your computer from scra…

Layers. It's all about layers.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#352

Post by Mountain_Skies »

q-big wrote: post #344
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a contentious issue in AppSec where most vendors want you to upload source code to their cloud for anything other than the most basic of scans. There are SLAs for how long the vendors can retain the source code they scan, but many clients are not aware of how much of these scans are performed manually behind the scenes by humans and how few of the vendors have their compliance audited. The possibility of a vendo…

> It's a contentious issue in AppSec where most vendors want you to upload source code to their cloud for anything other than the most basic of scans. Write the source code in some Assembler language (or even binary code ;-) ). Or use some obscure programming language that the vendor cannot scan, thus having a reason not to upload it.

In case you weren't being tongue in cheek, the purpose of the scan is to find security vulnerabilities so they can be rectified. If the scan cannot understand the code, it can't find the vulns that need remediation. Unfortunately, you don't even need to pick an obscure language. Almost all vendors of SAST products are chronically behind schedule on supporting the latest versions of languages and frameworks, and some of the biggest names have significant gaps in which commonly used languages they support.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#353

Post by squarefoot »

q-big wrote: post #345
squarefoot wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but the features 99% of users need are all here. I cannot believe this, in particular for the comparison Excel vs. LibreOfice Calc: the latter is used insanely actively in the finance and insurance industries, thus any proper user sampling should bias towards these industries. On the other hand: users in these industries know Excel really well and use very advanced features of it.

That is true, but let's not forget that the userbase that needs only basic spreadsheet functions or simply a tool for writing text documents is vastly superior. One of my accountants used StarOffice like 20 years ago, and I recently serviced a business consultant office in which all machines had OpenOffice (installed before the LibreOffice split). Excel is for sure a monster feature-wise, but outside of certain niches the need of all those features is really low, then again many Office users didn't even know about its existence since all they need is to read and write text documents.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#355

Post by Semaphor »

eloeffler wrote: post #233
Semaphor wrote: post #63

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.

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.…

Interesting, thanks. Note that your URL does not work, searching for "46241-0003" gets the right category, though.

I do wonder how many of those accidents are related to cars overtaking others.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#357

Post by jeroenhd »

simiones wrote: post #277
jeroenhd wrote: post #183

Like I said last time: > Did we consent to this? Yes, unless Microsoft doesn't ask for consent in whatever country the author is from. There's a consent popup that you need to click through that informs you that the content of your slides are shared with Microsoft. This is part of "intelligent services" in case you're looking for the details. The author should be able to turn this feature off easily, but yes, they di…

The text on that page is extraordinarily misleading, if indeed "Connected experiences" are sending your data to MS servers. Nothing on the page is explicit about the apps sending your data to MS, the only hint that this is happening is the footnote that these "Connected experiences" do not work if you are not connected to the Internet. For example, here is the description of the first type of such experiences: > Conn…

The consent popup that shows up before you enable these features explicitly talks about sending document content to Microsoft. Their privacy policy is unreadable just like any other big tech company's is, but I don't think a normal user who's actually read the popup before clicking "OK" can miss that document content is being sent to Microsoft.

I think it's safe to say that nobody reads consent popups and just clicks okay to make the magical prompts disappear but there's only so much you can do when you offer online stuff in your offline program. I don't think it's reasonable to expect three or four popups that say "are you really really really sure?" before enabling such a feature, especially since everything is probably being synced to Onedrive anyway.

Furthermore, the target audience of the page I've linked isn't general end users, it's for administrators managing company wide Office installs. I don't have Office installed so I don't have the exact link the prompts try to direct you to, but there's probably a better privacy page that you can find from within an Office install.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#358

Post by jeroenhd »

layer8 wrote: post #214
jeroenhd wrote: post #183

Like I said last time: > Did we consent to this? Yes, unless Microsoft doesn't ask for consent in whatever country the author is from. There's a consent popup that you need to click through that informs you that the content of your slides are shared with Microsoft. This is part of "intelligent services" in case you're looking for the details. The author should be able to turn this feature off easily, but yes, they di…

At least in some countries, it legally may not constitute actual consent if the text is so unintelligible to a normal user that they don’t understand what exactly they’re consenting to. And we all know that most users just click “Agree” without understanding what exactly they’re agreeing to because that’s the only way they can get their work done.

"To provide these services, Microsoft needs to be able to collect your search terms and document content" seems pretty explicit to me. This is what the Office settings say underneath the checkbox

Another prompt ends in "Office will use your searches and document content to support and improve the Intelligent Services to you."

The individual popups seem to follow a simple "what is it, what are some examples of it, what are you consenting to" structure. Any less details and you have no idea what you're agreeing to, any more details and you'll quickly lose people in the "EULA too long" problem.

I disagree that agreeing is the only way people will get their work done. There are many ways to translate text and the "let me design a PowerPoint for you" feature is nothing more than a nice to have. There are plenty of offline themes to choose from and individual themes to download without ever enabling this setting.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#359

Post by cassianoleal »

bodge5000 wrote: post #90
cassianoleal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Proton, not Photon. :)

It's true though. The Steam Deck is amazing, most games just work.

I agree that the GUI part is subjective. I find even the jankiest of Linux DEs to be better than Windows 10 and 11. I still find macOS quite superior, and the one area where this is not going to change any time soon is the cohesion of UI/UX between different apps and the OS.

Performance is unbeatable on Linux. Reliability depends a lot on the hardware and distro. This fragmentation makes it less approachable "on the desktop".

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#360

Post by raxxorraxor »

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…

That would be nice, but I would hate to see mobile OS with their permission system replicated for PC. Simply because mobile OS are fairly lacking.

At some point phoning home was a sin for software. Sadly that changed, also because of the naivete of some developers.

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