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Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

propublica.org

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Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#141

Post by jeffrallen »

DrewADesign wrote: post #79
everdrive wrote: post #51

The experts were correct. Azure is the biggest pile of shit I've ever had to work with. Everything feels evolutionary. In other words, a new product in azure is barely a product at all, but a small appendage which totally inherits a bunch of preexisting Azure "stuff." And all this preexisting stuff may not really make sense for the product, and it might inherit stuff that makes the product much worse. But, it doesn't…

Absolute contempt for their users at every level. It’s so transparent. This is the end game of anticompetitive practices for decades— they just don’t have to try anymore… for now. Some day they’ll either have to compete in good faith or sink. I doubt that will happen soon, but someday.

They have to compete in good faith for developers, which is why VS Code does not suck.

But yes, normal Office users, where the company pays the bills, pay the price.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#142

Post by DANmode »

john_strinlai wrote: post #97
pram wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh this sounds like when I worked at Oracle/OCI. Some environments required a VPN, some a jumpbox, and some required logging into a virtual desktop, and then logging into a jumpbox. Just thinking about it gives me PTSD

any sufficiently large organization that is around for a decade or two trends towards spaghetti-access

So the problem is the team size, not culture?

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#143

Post by DANmode »

markus_zhang wrote: post #109
snapetom wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a hospital in that timeframe and they rolled out Teams. Up until they, shadow IT teams were running Slack just fine. Man, what a horrendous pile of crap Teams was back then. The Slack teams were griping that they should just buy Slack, but Teams was the "enterprise solution." The problems were amplified during remote COVID work. Teams is fine now, but how many corporations went through years of frustratio…

Yeah that's the thing. Management who made the deals are never put into that frustration, or very rarely, and I always wonder, at least for the big corporations, if there is any greasy palms...

Manager humans will sell out your workflow,

and indeed your entire workplace,

for as little as a steak dinner.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#144

Post by yoyohello13 »

ploxiln wrote: post #110
yoyohello13 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s Microsoft. 1000s of features and none of them really work the way they are supposed to.

it's "Enterprise" grade software! need to check the boxes for the procurement process (actually working is a separate department)

Exactly! I can’t even count the number of times we’ve been in the discovery phase of a project and see “Oh this MS product does that! Cool”. Then when we get to the actual implementation realize it’s a broken mess. It’s sales driven software development, they just need to get you far enough along to sign the contract, then it’s too late to back out.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#145

Post by iscoelho »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #112
iscoelho wrote: post #34

Microsoft has never been good at security, and that is why their centralization to cloud is absolutely terrifying. I'm reminded of Storm-0558 [1] where a stolen signing key was able to forge authentication tokens for any MSA / Azure AD / Government AD user. They downplayed the severity. Just imagine if that level of access was used to pull a Stryker on a nation-wide scale. That is an economic disaster waiting to happ…

Oh please, that could happen at any company. Humans screw up.

But it doesn't. Full authentication bypass exploits are extremely rare and unheard of among tech giants. Maybe account takeover/recovery, sure, but full bypass? It just never happens.

Microsoft goes beyond that: they've managed to have a critical vulnerability in almost every authentication product they have ever created. It's exceptional.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#147

Post by blks »

beaviskhan wrote: post #131
anonymsft318 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this. We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it. We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now…

> I probably have five different systems This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn…

And now slap widespread vibe coding and PRs that reviewed by LLMs without anyone giving it a proper look.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#148

Post by snapetom »

benterix wrote: post #126
bigbuppo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is still a horrendous pile of crap. It's just that you've gotten used to the stench. It has few redeeming qualities other than, "we don't have to pay for another subscription" and that's not even the case in the EU.

Yeah but today you can at least have a video call more or less normally. Back then it was a hiccup after a hiccup, it was impossible to work normally, and yet orgs pushed it down everybody's throats as it was bundled.

Definitely. Besides the performance issues, back then, Teams barely had any features. One example was that it wouldn't show you who was talking. First time we had a call was with 30 people and I remember a manager calling out a director responsible for this decision jokingly saying, "and you don't know who I am because Team doesn't show you who's talking."

The UI is an overengineered mess and I'd rather use literally anything else, but to say it's still unusable is disingenuous.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#150

Post by alexjplant »

babypuncher wrote: post #106

okay what the hell is a "cyber expert"?

Although "cyber" is a prefix used to denote a relationship to high technology there exist people who use it as a stand-alone term to mean "cybersecurity", e.g. "I work in cyber." It's very confusing given that it came from the word "cybernetic", the hundreds of other words that begin with it as well, and the existence of the term "cybersec" which is unambiguous and only a bit longer.
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