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Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

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Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#101

Post by _a_a_a_ »

Zelphyr wrote: post #32

I hate to go negative. I really do because, usually it doesn't improve the discourse whatsoever. However, I feel like it needs to be said: Microsoft makes bad products[1]! They're overpriced, insecure, slow (it's astounding to me how slow their web properties are), and hard to use. Easily some of the worst UI I've ever seen and, what's worse, they've been like that my entire career. They keep slapping lipstick on the…

MS SQL dev here, and I disagree because it's been going downhill in terms of code quality and especially documentation for a long while. Absolutely classic example why https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3074/use-caution-with... but there are others

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#102

Post by marcosdumay »

taeric wrote: post #81
giancarlostoro wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It saddens me to say, I don't know what the answer is. I think the answer is a company willing to put in the work to force GPU manufacturers to provide high quality hardware drivers for a commercial Linux Distro. I mean all out partnership with the various vendors. Then sell prebuilts, maybe someone like System76 has come close, or has the capacity to do so. The Linux issues for me always seem to be hardware specif…

I'm curious on the non-sequitur to GPU stuff? At large, running machine learning code has been easily doable in linux for a long time. Frustratingly hard, yes, but no harder than in Windows. Often more repeatable and cheaper to fan out to a fleet of machines, to boot. Is there another aim of GPU that I'm ignoring? Microsoft makes fine enterprise software, sadly. To know and believe that, though, you have to see what…

> Microsoft makes fine enterprise software, sadly.

Hum, no they don't. They make shit and use anti-competitive practices to push every other offering out of the market.

The fact that you only see experimental alternatives without the maturity to get any polish is caused by them destroying the competition, not the reason they won.

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#103

Post by oskarw85 »

notjoemama wrote: post #72
jdm2212 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ah, no, but point taken. I can't think of an example myself because I don't know how Nasa functions. Besides that, I think the valid critique (without the subtext) is, it's probably not a good comparison to measure a very large companies failings to a much smaller companies failings because their size is a definitively weighted factor in the outcome. The caveat that I would add, is Nasa is publicly funded and it's pr…

"Just stop buying their products" is silly answer when those products are epitome of corporate IT offerings. Especially where people doing "the buying" are completely different than people doing the support.

On the contrary - criticism should be loud, clear and persistent. Being private company does not make you immune to criticism.

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#104

Post by taeric »

marcosdumay wrote: post #102
taeric wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious on the non-sequitur to GPU stuff? At large, running machine learning code has been easily doable in linux for a long time. Frustratingly hard, yes, but no harder than in Windows. Often more repeatable and cheaper to fan out to a fleet of machines, to boot. Is there another aim of GPU that I'm ignoring? Microsoft makes fine enterprise software, sadly. To know and believe that, though, you have to see what…

> Microsoft makes fine enterprise software, sadly. Hum, no they don't. They make shit and use anti-competitive practices to push every other offering out of the market. The fact that you only see experimental alternatives without the maturity to get any polish is caused by them destroying the competition, not the reason they won.

I meant that as a purely "backhanded compliment." The bar is rather low in enterprise software.

That said, fully fair that, even in the field, they probably rely more on bad practices to shoulder out competition than I'm crediting.

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#105

Post by jamesjuicy55 »

JamesonNetworks wrote: post #9

Seems like they are assuming the same key was used to forge tokens and jump from that assumption to the conclusion that they found all instances of requests. If more keys were used to generate more tokens, isn’t it possible this attack had a much wider surface area?

Absolutely. Maybe Louisiana and Oregon DMV hacks?

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#106

Post by fatfingerd »

mschuster91 wrote: post #34
Zelphyr wrote: post #32

I hate to go negative. I really do because, usually it doesn't improve the discourse whatsoever. However, I feel like it needs to be said: Microsoft makes bad products[1]! They're overpriced, insecure, slow (it's astounding to me how slow their web properties are), and hard to use. Easily some of the worst UI I've ever seen and, what's worse, they've been like that my entire career. They keep slapping lipstick on the…

> With a $2.5 trillion market cap, it may seem like they're killing it but, I really think they're riding on momentum just like IBM did. Twenty years ago, IBM's market cap was double what is is now and, in my experience, their products are every bit as bad (admittedly, I have almost no exposure to their big iron products). People are only not shitting on IBM so much anymore because they sold off Lotus Notes...

I don't see Lotus Notes as all that different than other Offices products developed by big Tech. I think it would be similar to Google's business platform with some more legacy automation but not unlike SalesForce or ServiceNow.

Having used Microsoft recently, after Google for work, I'm absolutely flabbergasted at how terrible Word, Teams, Outlook, etc are. I would describe the average Microsoft product as a zombie in its own feature set, at war with a different version of itself, and attempting to steal organs from other products to try to transition to every possible entirely different role in the suite.

Attempting to use a Microsoft product is like watching developers capitulate to some kind of bizarre internal political war between Product managers.

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#107

Post by formerly_proven »

Zelphyr wrote: post #32

I hate to go negative. I really do because, usually it doesn't improve the discourse whatsoever. However, I feel like it needs to be said: Microsoft makes bad products[1]! They're overpriced, insecure, slow (it's astounding to me how slow their web properties are), and hard to use. Easily some of the worst UI I've ever seen and, what's worse, they've been like that my entire career. They keep slapping lipstick on the…

> However, I feel like it needs to be said: Microsoft makes bad products[1]! They're overpriced, insecure, slow (it's astounding to me how slow their web properties are), and hard to use. Easily some of the worst UI I've ever seen and, what's worse, they've been like that my entire career. They keep slapping lipstick on the same pigs and claiming to have reinvented themselves.

Some think tank should make an analysis how many billions of dollars are lost in productivity across the globe if you compare the current MS Office stuff to an alternate of "the Windows 2000-era stuff, but with security patches" or "the FOSS office stack, with more money behind it".

Anyone wanna estimate how many digits that number has?

(Teams, while being ungodly slow, at least has the value proposition of being an integrated product - persistent chat, file sharing and voice / video calls - that really didn't exist in 2000)

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#108

Post by tracker1 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #96
MrDresden wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After spending 5 years of corporate work having to wrestle with Azure (in a ci/cd capacity) I would never recommend Microsoft's cloud offerings to anyone. Problem is that there is no other provider I would rather recommend. They are all bad in one way or another.

AWS is pretty decent in my experience, and when managed with Terraform (which is all but a requirement if you don't want to go completely b0nkers) it's a breeze to manage.

And this is one place where I think Azure does better... I mean, the UI/UX sucks, but at least you can do everything in the UI without loosing too many brain cells. Google and AWS seem to require automation tooling to make sense, which IMO makes all of it harder to learn in practice. I tend to like learning some of those things visually first, then automate out of necessity as opposed to the other way around.

Not that I'm tethered to Azure... I've used a combination of dedicated server, DigitalOcean and Cloudflare for my personal stuff... though just started delving into the Cloudflare (edge compute) stuff.

There are definitely ups and downs to them all.

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#109

Post by krono »

mistrial9 wrote: post #85
dgoodell wrote: post #56

I work for NASA. Our budget is like $25B. We’re definitely inefficient and wasteful, but we still do a lot of new things. Just not nearly as much as we could. Microsoft’s operating budget was like $123B last year. There are bugs in office products that have been there for years What exactly are they doing with all that money?

you the user are not the customer, management and legal are the customer. You the user, are last, and least, in the priorities.

Based on my own dealings with Microsoft from such a management role over the years:

The only customer Microsoft seems to care about or is really even cognizant of its responsibilities towards, is Microsoft itself. Every single one of its products and services exists solely because and only for as long as some division of Microsoft believes it requires those specific things and whatever they're meant to evolve into over time, in order to manage its increasingly complex and ever expanding internal operations.

It's like a snake eating its own tail.

Re: Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

#110

Post by Spooky23 »

lostmsu wrote: post #88
_8j50 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big red issue with MS is they elaborately make it very difficult to integrate outside their ecosystem and they love holding customers hostage to ridiculous restrictions, but also Azure is very difficult to centrally manage things for all subscriptions. Others are as well but not as much. I actually like the azure UI and CLI as well as many if their offerings, but it's so difficult to piece together a bigger pictu…

Yeah, that Entra ID was the biggest "why?" moment I had in years. Seeing the new name no better or even worse than the old one I can already imagine the pain of renaming packages, namespaces, fixing documentation etc. Probably the most expensive marketing campaign with 0 gain I am aware of.

That’s easy and makes sense.

Azure AD was initially a shim to enable O365. Now it’s evolved into a pretty awesome identity platform for Enterprise and B2C.

The problem is M365 adoption (ie O365 + the other crap) is high. So they are out of stuff to sell. Entra will add the governance and compliance bullshit and increase revenue.

End of the day, Microsoft chisels $38-55/head for every corporate worker. Services are all about cash flow, so they are looking to grow that up to $100 user/month. Every $1 of subscription spend is like $400 on the scorecard for the bonuses of SVP staff.

Because of anti-trust, they can’t just do what Adobe does and raise the price every few months. They just keep adding services and move stuff around in the bundles. M365 Plus+ E9 with Entra technology will give you $350 in value for only $103/month!

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