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Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

rogermexico.bearblog.dev

141–150 of 391 posts

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#141

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…

> 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).

If you want to you can do that with Linux.

Sure you'd need to use the CLI, and a combination of tools but you can pinpoint every packet to an associated process and if you add your self made cert to trusted certs, then you can decrypt TLS as well in most cases.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#142
post #110
post #91

Can you imagine, receiving all powerpoint content from your competitors (the rest of FAANG) in real time?

I can't imagine powerpoint is a useful application to any org that hires mildly talented designers

Big presentations at conferences may involve designers but there are surely many internal meetings at many levels that have a lot of PowerPoint and no designers.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#145
Microsoft and Google have OneDrive and Google Drive where most slide decks are stored anyway so in some ways this is barely newsworthy, on the other hand I guess if someone purposefully selected Office instead of Google slides for their presentations and thought using an offline app which doesn't save the files to their OneDrive would keep them secret might get surprised by this feature.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#146

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…

For Windows, check out simplewall, it does (almost) exactly that.

https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#147
post #78

The future of personal computing is really dark these days. I just attended an apple event for education and government. The amount of data tracking and the standardization/normalization of this behavior is dystopian. What happened to computers being just fun and a source of exploration and freedom? Microsoft, Gooogle, Apple all constantly push their cloud based accounts … where everything is tracked.

> What happened to computers being just fun and a source of exploration and freedom?

Having this experience isn't any harder than it was in the old days, it's just that there are so many more people participating in computing in some form that it's harder to find the people who truly own their computing experience.

The companies that made "personal computing" easy enough for the masses want to profit off of that, and they've settled on strip mining data and robbing user control as the best way to make money. This leaves their mass-marketed version of "personal computing" a hollow shell of the original, but it doesn't remove the original.

You can still install a privacy-friendly Linux or BSD with only FOSS software. You can still self-host your data and retain full control and privacy. What you can't do is benefit from the ease of use that mass-market computing provides while still retaining full individual control.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2023 is the year of Linux on the desktop?

Joking aside I think we are getting close, Photon did a lot to bridge with Windows in terms of gaming, GUI is often times at least on par with Windows/MacOS, if not better (obviously thats subjective), and reliability/performance has already been there for a while. That being said, I still think theres more work to do, and arguably the hardest work is ahead.

Linux is on par with Windows kind of but not really. It's a little ghetto

For example, desktop environments are just wonky and buggy most the time, random games don't work, WINE is the worst piece of software on the planet, drivers suck, other random weird issues.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even. It’s an explicit feature that must be separately enabled, and requires Microsoft 365. > The first time you try out Designer, it may ask your permission to get design ideas for you. If you want to use Designer, select Turn on. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/53c77d7b-dc40-45c2...

> it may ask your permission I wonder when that is? Because I haven’t used PP yet, and it didn’t ask me. Of course, we use Office 365, and maybe my boss turned it on globally? Does anyone know where the setting is?

Have you used the Designer feature? That’s what’s being talked about. It should prompt you when you first use it.

If you’re on a work account, your admin may have enabled or disabled it already with GPO/MDM.

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