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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

#371

Post by account42 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #271
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…

We could go to our EU representatives and ask for them to make it mandatory. Though I suspect it'll go down the same way as the GDPR, at least at first. (Lessons have already been learned of course)

We really just need a clarification/ruling that ANY telemetry is not essential to providing a service and thus requires informed consent before it can be collected and consent cannote be required to use the service. And then enforcement against all these applications.

I don't think adding technical layers to block these data leaks is going to work long term.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#372

Post by account42 »

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.…

Does comparing raw number of deaths here make sense without taking into account the total distance travelled / time spent per person on these different kinds of roads? Not to mention other factors like e.g. how tired/inebriated/distracted the average person using these roads is, which is unlikely to be the same for short distance and long distance travel.

Also 744 < 606 + 318 so it doesn't even seem to be "more than half" even with some road types missing.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#373

Post by LegitShady »

simpleintheory wrote: post #226
hardware2win wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the compiler that you verified and built yourself :)

Itself built with a compiler you verified and built yourself.

It's self built compilers all the way down

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#374

Post by nocman »

happythebob wrote: post #152
reaperducer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised every healthcare related business doesn't either ban PowerPoint or block this "feature" somehow. I work in healthcare, and the legal department bars me from using Google Analytics for HIPAA reasons. Meanwhile, IT made Chrome the only browser the employees are allowed to use on every Windows machine in the org.

Did you read the article? I find your jaded sense of cynicism to be different than critical thought. I don't see any proof in the article posted about its claims. It's just very easy to get jaded, cynical people to support the right headlines on social media. Hacker News, be better.

I don't find reaperducer's comment to be jaded or cynical. It sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#376

Post by JeremyNT »

dougmwne wrote: post #245

This seems blindingly obvious? They use a cloud powered feature, then complain that information is sent to the cloud? According to this help article using designer for the first time will request permissions. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-profession...

The blog post CLAIMS to not be using that feature, so charitably they could be talking about something different.

Who knows though? They provide so little information and I have no particular reason to trust them without some kind of evidence. I'm flagging this article since all we can do is speculate.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#377

Post by LinuxBender »

doubled112 wrote: post #304
egberts1 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind, OpenSnitch is Linux-based and none of Linux firewalls can filter incoming packets by process ID like macOS/FreeBSD (Lil'Snitch) can.

I think iptables was supposed to be able to do this, right? https://linux.die.net/man/8/iptables --pid-owner processid Matches if the packet was created by a process with the given process id. But was disappointed by the note: > NOTE: pid, sid and command matching are broken on SMP

The owner module can control outbound communication by uid/gid. [1] There are no modules to handle things by PID AFAIK. This can however be accomplished by SELinux and Apparmor custom rules but that is a loaded topic.

Firejail [2] and Bubblewrap [3] can put limits on application capabilities and/or take away network access. Firejail has default policies for many applications, all of which can be overridden by user configurations in their home directory. Firejail leverages Linux Capabilities and AppArmor. For example, when I launch VLC even if it were configured to pull down album information, it could not. If one day they added default-enabled telemetry to VLC it would go nowhere.

A round-about and heavy handed way to manage communications by PID would be to isolation applications in their own VM or container and map the VM or container to a unique user or group.

[1] - https://ipset.netfilter.org/iptables-extensions.man.html

[2] - https://github.com/netblue30/firejail

[3] - https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#379

Post by mavhc »

thinkingemote wrote: post #367
mavhc wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In UK there's basically single track roads that have a speed limit of 60mph, and you'd be crazy to use them at more than 30mph most of the time.

If only a route planner would understand this fact too!

I assume Google Maps has data on average speed its users travel along all the roads.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#380

Post by mixmastamyk »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #361
mixmastamyk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work only allows Mac or Win to log in to their VPN.

Change your work then. Or use windows in a VM. Always good to separate work and private system anyway.

They provide a mac. I will exit at some point.
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