Live data from Hacker News

Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

tutanota.com

121–130 of 214 posts

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#121
If anyone needs a good example of the: 1. click bait title 2. primitive advertisement, all in one place, this article is a great example.

Was Gmail banned in Denmark schools? Obviously not, there is some regulation in one of the counties and it was about chromebook usage because of some privacy concerns. One. County.

Article is written by a company which is a direct competitor of Gmail (they are email service too) and are apparently searching for some topic they can use to get some publicity. Nothing bad in itself, but lies are lame.

And no, nobody is going to switch from Gmail to tutanota, because nobody wants mediocre user interface, be unable to search emails and force others to use some particular service to decrypt emails.

Even with encrypted emails, that's just the beginning of the privacy story. If I am sending encrypted email to Bin Laden or to abortion clinics it does not help much that the content is encrypted.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#122
post #117
post #2

Now let's ban MSFT Office365 too. It's of zero use to teach whatever to the kids.

Quoted post unavailable.

As someone who used to work in IT for a VERY large school district, I will agree with you that O365 is way better than the GroupWise/NetWare solution we had running for probably decades.

BUTTTTT....

> i can tell you you are as dumb as you are stupid

This is a terrible way to start a civil discord though.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#123
post #56
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you only need Facebook and TikTok in very few office jobs (and there probably other interfaces than users typically use). Excel is present in pretty much all office jobs. Maybe not all programmer jobs, but apart from some backend coders I haven't seen many people who never had to work with Word or Excel.

I have had a long career with many office jobs all across the US and never once has anyone taken issue with me using LibreOffice or similar as long as I got my job done and documents were exported in compatible formats. Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible without teaching students products of whatever specific corporation donates the most money or free licenses.

You must’ve been lucky, because using existing formatted spreadsheets and docs with Libreoffice always has and always will be a hit or miss proposition. It’s not LO’s fault, but you are clearly an outlier.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#124
post #106
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should need to teach how to think. Part of that means the ability to adopt to whatever tool. Thus schools should require students to use each of 4 different office system. O365 is only one of them, and LibreOffice is an obvious section choice (I'm have no idea what the others might be). tools come and go, but the concepts you are using the tools for stick around. I wasted a lot of time learning WordPerfect F-keys bac…

> Should need to teach how to think. Do you know if there is any sort of consensus on this topic on how to do it? It looks like a very popular belief, but do anyone actually knows how to think, and even more, how to teach how to think without making it just a different kind of propaganda?

Teaching is always propaganda. What matters is what you are propagandizing.

Robert Fulghum figured it out decades ago.

The teacher should were two message buttons on their shirt:

"Trust me; I'm the teacher"

"Question Authority"

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#125
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had a long career with many office jobs all across the US and never once has anyone taken issue with me using LibreOffice or similar as long as I got my job done and documents were exported in compatible formats. Teaching the concept of spreadsheets is totally possible without teaching students products of whatever specific corporation donates the most money or free licenses.

Excel is a far different beast than what Libre Calc offers, and then what Google Sheets offers. It has some formulas that are exclusive (mind you Liber likely has some that Excel no longer has), outside of startups it is effectively the industry standard as well and is used in all kinds of industries and roles. Libre also has different features than Excel which has different features than Sheets, etc, but Excel is th…

And that's why you only learn to drive an excavator if you get a job that requires it.

Nothing at the level students do spreadsheets is different between spreadsheet programs

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#126

This is basically European protectionism under the guise of privacy. My guess is that within a few years (or even sooner), you will be reading about a massive breach of student data from whatever alternative they choose to go with.

>This is basically European protectionism under the guise of privacy.

Same can be said of American protectionism. TikTok being the prime example.

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#127
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe what you need to know, but not how to use the programs. I was very anti Microsoft in my school days but had to learn Excel and Word in school. It helped me so much in my first job.

If you had learned OpenOffice calc or write, would that have made much of a difference? Takes a few hours to move 80% from one to the other. Maybe if very specific functions it may take a few minutes more.

Would you prefer we mandate Vim or EMacs for kids? Both are free, so it’s a deliberate choice to be made. And how do you suggest we support this decision and their potential inability to use an IDE in the real world?

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#128
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a big fan of Protonmail but there recent outages have been far from ideal. Might be worth considering other alternatives if 24/7 access to emails is a must

You mean the outages from like... last week/this week? That was the first outage in like years of service, and it was resolved pretty quickly, with good communication throughout and an apology. The discussion on Reddit is worth looking at[0]. What alternatives are out there without service degradation/outages? Also not to undermine my own point (Protonmail is wonderfully stable for me) who is getting life or death em…

Personally, I don't rely on it 24/7 and just use it for my personal use but some people use it for business purposes and not having access to your emails for a day or two can be expensive down time.

But you are right, no service is bulletproof

Re: Denmark bans Gmail and Co from schools due to privacy concerns

#129
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to disagree here. Teaching kids how to use Word and Excel will help them for the majority of office jobs out there.

Plenty of open source options that will teach them 90% of what most people will need to know. Taxpayer money should not be going to these corporations.

And 90% of people probably could continue to use these.

Schools should not use the non-free products even if Microsoft provided them for free to them (which they did or do), because it is a Trojan Horse into kid's minds in order to create soft dependencies. People who learned to use one office suite are rarely motivated to learn yet another one.

Post reply on HN