161–170 of 229 posts
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It kind felt like the ramifications of Snowden's leak were so wast that everyone just chose to forget about it.
There's definitely a political game of pretending that the US clouds are somehow compatible with GDPR.
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It's basically the "No one gets fired for buying IBM" effect. Microsoft became the default. Everyone was familiar with it, and knew it would work.
That's a very simplistic view of what Microsoft offers. They don't sell an office software package but a very robust solution for running the software side of a business. The OS, office package, email (server and client), calendar, cloud & backup, BI, etc. all aligned work almost seamlessly with each other (compared to the alternatives for sure). Nothing on the market comes close and that is the reason they are worth…
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There's definitely a political game of pretending that the US clouds are somehow compatible with GDPR.
They are most likely compatible until a national security letter arrives. An American company then has to choose which law to comply with, and it's an easy choice.
But companies can be a lot shadier than we give them credit for. Like, remember that "wink payment" contract between Google and Israel? If Google knew what they were doing, they accepted the contract to do the illegal thing, so they'd sell their product and get money, but they were planning to simply not do the illegal thing, breaking the contract (the customer would never know and if they somehow did, you can't stop using a cloud on a dime) but not breaking any laws.
If Microsoft knows what they're doing, they'll accept contracts from EU customers that say "we will never give your data to US authorities", they break it immediately, don't tell the customer and the customer never finds out.
Alternatively, they can give the US government a bunch of nothing, in order to comply with the EU customer contract, and pretend this is all the data the customer had on their account. I doubt this will happen though.
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For most of my life I also used to think there was a difference between the two. But now I realized they are actually just the same.
I understand the disillusionment. The gutting of the US machinery of state is disheartening to see.
Without oversight, abuse is inevitable.
You have two choices:
* Limit the damage that a person can do- IE; don’t aggregate everything in the hands of one person.
* Tonnes of oversight into who accesses the data and why.
In theory the US chooses the latter, but only for nationals and the snowden leaks were proving that this was basically just a rubber stamp and constantly was bypassed on technicalities..
.. outside of the US, there’s no legal framework to protect your data from US authorities, no matter who they are, at all.
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> So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership. In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC: What can the incomin…
> In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC True. Trump did not appear suddenly out of nowhere and he’s only able to do what he does thanks to people who prepared for this and have been pushing us down the slope for the last couple of decades. Thanks for th…
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MS365/Google docs is something entirely different to the old desktop office suites It's a collaboration tool, with synced storage and file management etc The overlap of a Venn diagram between users of these software is not very large - though there is some (overlap).
And both the products I mentioned also support online collaboration and storage. See LibreOffice Online ( https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ ), OnlyOffice Workspace ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/workspace ) and OnlyOffice Enterprise ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/docs-enterprise ). I can't comment how feature compatible these are but alternatives do exist and that's good new for us. (Note that open…
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The main problem is that 365 is just far cheaper than the competitors for environments like this, maintaining and supporting an open source alternative would be an incredibly expensive undertaking.
Maintaining ans support sounds like an opportunity for some EU businesses to me. Sweet gov contracts.
Who would you even hire to do this? A big consulting firm known for delivering poor quality software, or an unproven startup? What kind of a process could you use to make such a selection in a way that would ensure a good outcome?
It’s the same as the old libreoffice vs. MS office debate. Yeah, you can download libreoffice for free. It sucks. What sucks even more though is how much money you will spend on support, training and all the inevitable productivity losses associated with weird software that approximately nobody you hire will have experience with.
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I’d love to see pictures. I’d love to drop MS/Google docs for something I can control myself.
Have you tried LibreOffice ( https://www.libreoffice.org/ ) or OnlyOffice ( https://www.onlyoffice.com/desktop )? Both are pretty decent, and free, and also have commercial versions.
The UX is so clunky that I ended up giving up and started doing presentations in Google Slides, even if I then end up exporting them as a PDF to actually present/share.
Every time I try to use it, it feels like fighting my tool rather than my tool helping me. There is no one big bug; it's a million tiny things.
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From openDesk website: > Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats
It's missing from the list of their products though :( https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product
> Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats.
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From openDesk website: > Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats
It's missing from the list of their products though :( https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product
> Create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations with full support for all major file formats.