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Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

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Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#121

Post by cyberax »

project2501a wrote: post #89
seanieb wrote: post #21

I spent the past year working for a company that relies heavily on Microsoft for email, productivity tools, and identity management. After that experience, I can say with confidence: never again. The support is astonishingly poor, and user experience feels like an afterthought. More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, d…

Where do I find money to fund my rewrite of Kerberos 5 in Rust, removing the dumb options and Kerberos 4 compatibility and eventually create Kerberos 6 + AD that will solve a metric buttload of issues in Linux and knock a major peg of MS off?

Ask IBM/RedHat. They did a lot of foundational work with SSSD (aka "too many 'S' D").

Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#122

Post by firefax »

But what's the alternative? Most people use either O365 or Google Docs.

I hate that people are incapable of using Libreoffice and mailing documents around, but modern users are addicted to "the cloud", and it's my understanding there's no EU centric competitor to those two giants.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#123

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

amarant wrote: post #102
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like an emphasis has been placed more on legislating or policing what other people make rather than making anything of value themselves (as far as tech goes). Being a barnacle on the side of a boat might be a nice free ride for a while until it goes somewhere you don't want to.

I feel like this sentiment comes at least partially from American companies(especially Microsoft) habit of buying successful European tech companies, making people believe they're American and not European. There is plenty of European tech success stories, but plenty of them will be mistaken for American ones after Microsoft bought them(and more often than not ruined the product, see Skype for example)

Deepmind is another good example, as is ARM.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#124

Post by input_sh »

hulitu wrote: post #94
input_sh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the root issue in America right now is that you have one guy that can pass 200+ executive orders in less than a year completely bypassing the other two supposed branches of government. There's no such position or a branch in the EU. None of the three can make any sort of change of their own.

> There's no such position or a branch in the EU. cough vdL cough

She's the head of one of the three branches, she doesn't get to sign a piece of paper and for that to instantly become a law. Neither does her branch as a whole.

At most I would concede that she's way more of a household name than her predecessors, but that doesn't automatically mean she holds more power.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#125

Post by kakacik »

cyberax wrote: post #121
project2501a wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do I find money to fund my rewrite of Kerberos 5 in Rust, removing the dumb options and Kerberos 4 compatibility and eventually create Kerberos 6 + AD that will solve a metric buttload of issues in Linux and knock a major peg of MS off?

Ask IBM/RedHat. They did a lot of foundational work with SSSD (aka "too many 'S' D"). Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.

> Kerberos is not a great protocol

Understatement of the week

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#126

Post by ta20240528 »

YC398739847 wrote: post #99
ta20240528 wrote: post #81

If China can survive — and even start to thrive without ASML and TMSC, then have no doubt that should push come to shove Europe will be able to run a mail server and some office tools. They’re just hedging that American politics will stop licking the car battery.

EU politicians are just too dependent on keeping the status quo of the last decade. The status quo is how they got to their position so they have no incentive to change anything (Starmer, Merz, Marcon, Von der Lyen. Yuck). By the time they finally get the shove they need to rapidly decouple, e.g. when America invades The Hague* to rescue Netanyahu from war crimes charges, it will be when they're already on the edge o…

The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading continental Europe?

As I said, still licking the car battery.

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#127

Post by seanieb »

LPisGood wrote: post #88
seanieb wrote: post #21

I spent the past year working for a company that relies heavily on Microsoft for email, productivity tools, and identity management. After that experience, I can say with confidence: never again. The support is astonishingly poor, and user experience feels like an afterthought. More importantly, using Microsoft at scale can leave your organization fundamentally insecure. The obscure, insecure defaults are, at best, d…

What kind of obscure insecure defaults are there?

Direct Send was my favorite. Direct Send allows devices to send unauthenticated email to internal recipients using your organization’s domain, which can expose you to internal emails for phishing etc. It bypasses user authentication, making sender identity difficult to verify or audit. For all orgs made before mid 2025 it was enabled by default.

I saw a great Blackhat talk this year about Entra misconfiguration that got Microsoft's own sensitive internal services owned by a researcher, one of them owned by their security team. After the report they reconfigure their services, didn't pay a bounty and considered the problems solved. What about their customers making the same config errors as the Microsoft team... no changes planned.

There's much much more...

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#128

Post by SunshineTheCat »

amarant wrote: post #102
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like an emphasis has been placed more on legislating or policing what other people make rather than making anything of value themselves (as far as tech goes). Being a barnacle on the side of a boat might be a nice free ride for a while until it goes somewhere you don't want to.

I feel like this sentiment comes at least partially from American companies(especially Microsoft) habit of buying successful European tech companies, making people believe they're American and not European. There is plenty of European tech success stories, but plenty of them will be mistaken for American ones after Microsoft bought them(and more often than not ruined the product, see Skype for example)

That might be your feeling, but it isn't reality. It comes instead from EU companies not even being in the same galaxy as US ones when it comes to revenue, size, and market impact. There is literally no comparison. It's not like the major leagues compared to the minors, it's like the major leagues compared to tee-ball.

https://www.voronoiapp.com/markets/Comparing-the-Largest-Com...

Re: Can Dutch universities do without Microsoft?

#130

Post by js8 »

p2detar wrote: post #72
js8 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Unfortunately, the EU institutions have been designed during heyday of globalization and neoliberalism. So they are unable to adapt to (or even recognize) the end of it.

Oh, it’s very well recognized. You can check the Mario Draghi report or even recent comments by ECB‘s Christine Legarde. I think it’s mostly reluctance to make big structural changes that seems to be the issue right now.

But when Draghi wrote his report, he was leaving the power structures. It will probably slowly change, but the neoliberal hegemony is still there.

I think the big issue is that all European elites have investments in the USA, and they don't have reason to pick EU over USA for investing. So there is nothing compelling them to voluntary worsen the relations.

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