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Microsoft lost its keys, and the government got hacked

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131–140 of 151 posts

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

#131
post #31

This headline does a good job of pointing out why we shouldn't allow backdoors in encryption.

Wasn't there a time when Microsoft shared it's code with China govt on a locked computer in a locked room with access to only a few people as a demonstration that there product did not have backdoors for western countries to spy on China?

IIRC it wasn't just China, I think it was any government that required an audit of the Windows source code. I can't remember if the US government though requested access.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux on the desktop is here. Go all-in on KDE. Everything is seamless and just works.

My experiences with Linux have been anything but seamless.

yea same with windows having to open that command prompt to run random commands to fix issues

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with large scale enterprise email security.

It does. Outlook is where it is for email because of Windows.

What does Outlook have to do with Windows? Outlook is a web app.

Outlook became popular because it was tied to Windows 20 years ago, but today this just isn't the case.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I'm not sure I agree completely. When I was learning Terraform, trying to figure out what the options a resource had and some of the possible values, I'd make the change in the AWS UI, then re-run Terraform to see what it wanted to change back. There weren't a whole lot of things in aWS that didn't have a UI to configure somewhere .

Yeah the AWS console UI is far from incomprehensible. Though I think what trips a lot of people up is how the resources are often something you use to compose other higher level resources.

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

#135
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…

One anecdote I have about Microsoft is that I once set up in Hotmail my birthday 5 months in advance to what it was, probably to bypass some 18yo check. Eventually (5 months later, probably) I set it back to normal.

Since then, for a couple of years, my father got a notification saying that it was my birthday (and he even obliged to congratulate me, once; he was -- and luckily is -- old :) ). That setting was not available anymore anywhere, and my birthday was set to the correct date, but the problem still happened. I contacted Microsoft, but it was like they had no idea what I was talking about nor what could be the problem.

So yeah, I don't trust them nor like them either.

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

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel I can't discuss some foreign nations anymore in a critical way since I fear giving mentally unstable war mongers ideas.

What do you mean? I can't say I have ever seen war mongering on HN.

Ye true, I meant in general outside of HN. How news articles are used to push agendas etc. Like, I got this thing in the back of my mind reading about social injustice in some place that it is some push to build up pressure to bomb them.

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

#137

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?

> What exactly are they doing with all that money?

Paying for ads and for developers that make ads I suppose.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I'm not sure I agree completely. When I was learning Terraform, trying to figure out what the options a resource had and some of the possible values, I'd make the change in the AWS UI, then re-run Terraform to see what it wanted to change back. There weren't a whole lot of things in aWS that didn't have a UI to configure somewhere .

You can also configure a resource in AWS, configure the bare minimum in Terraform (i.e. required attributes only), then run a `terraform import` and then `terraform apply`.

(Terraform does suck in that its import functionality can't spit out the HCL representation)

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

#139

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.

I like the Azure bash cli... That's about the only thing I like from Azure.

You mean the python-based `az` command?

running `az` without parameters takes 10 seconds on my machine. `az version` and `az --version` return differnt outputs and are also very very slow.

When I run `az account subscription enable` it tells me "Command group 'account subscription' is experimental and under development.".

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the conceptual framework and high level architecture of Azure: Resource Manager, sane naming compared to AWS, etc… What I hate is the unfathomably sloppy implementation that their developers refuse to fix unless held at gun point. You literally have to have an MS account manager about to miss out on millions of dollars to force a trivial fix through their pipeline. They have zero “customer obsession.”

Actually I'd say they have customer obsession but that it's for a small minority of what We consider thier customers (to them the small fry including smbs are not thiet customers, they're just the chaff they have to deal with and control in order to properly get the wheat out of the whole). BIG businesses and governmenta are thier customers, demanding maintenance of terrible legacy issues because they literally use b…

That's a myth. I've worked at those big government departments, and Microsoft ignores their requirements too!

Also, Azure is "all new", so legacy compatibility shouldn't be a big concern.

Except... it is, because a bunch of half-baked MVPs were thrown over the fence and now have to be supported while they work on the "proper" solution. We're up to the 3rd iteration of VM monitoring, the 3rd iteration of AAD client libraries, etc...

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