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Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

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Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#341

Post by alternatex »

Lio wrote: post #271
dieortin wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure the people who designed Teams and Meet use their own products on a daily basis. And if those are crap, what’s a better alternative?

Do they? Didn’t Microsoft force all its employees back to the office? That doesn’t sound like they have faith in Teams themselves. I use Teams every day and it can’t even do threading in channels properly. The spellchecker is unreliable and even copy and paste is occasionally patchy. It is not a good product. I’d switch to Slack given the choice.

Teams is used in the Teams org that develops it in Microsoft yes. Source: I work on Teams free/consumer.

Not to say that the developers working on it are satisfied with it..

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#342

Post by philipallstar »

Spooky23 wrote: post #163
philipallstar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is just so much more horrible than Slack and Zoom, and dev teams use Slack and/or Zoom.

Most customers of both use O365. The zoom fascination is pretty weird. It’s literally Webex 3.0 without Cisco bullshit. Slack is pretty awesome. It wouldn’t factor in selecting an employer, but that’s just me.

> The zoom fascination is pretty weird

Why? It's much better than Teams, if for no other reason than Teams just got deprecated on MacOS Monterey and that's really annoying. Or rather not for just that reason, but for the reason that Teams is Microsoft's 10th biggest priority, whereas video calling is Zoom's only priority, so they make a better product.

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#343

Post by alternatex »

fujigawa wrote: post #145
Etheryte wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man, you're gonna have a very tough crowd if you're gonna try and convince anyone that Teams is as good as Google Meet.

They are all equally crap. I'm convinced the people designing collaboration tools don't have to use them on a daily basis.

When it comes to Teams, unfortunately we do. It's actually used across Microsoft in general. A company of this size requires Teams even if just for the sake of keeping up with security and compliance.

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#344

Post by Hikikomori »

unethical_ban wrote: post #114
crmd wrote: post #94

One of the first things I do after getting an inquiry from a recruiter or friend referral is lookup the MX record for the company’s email domain. It is an anonymous one-command check to see if they’re a Microsoft shop. If they are, it’s enormous personal red flag. MSFT is very popular so I’m only speaking about my own experience, but I have learned over the course of 20 years that an MSFT IT stack is highly correlate…

Companies that don't use Outlook? All five of them? I've seen companies with varying levels of MS product integration but Outlook is pretty foundational. Now, if a company says they use SharePoint or Teams to store their documentation, run to the hills. Wikis or bust.

Worked for a company that used Lotus Notes 10+ years ago and switched to 365 and outlook, hard to believe that an email client could be worse than Lotus Notes. Only worked for Google workspace companies since then.

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#345

Post by tehjoker »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #196
tehjoker wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good argument against having nukes

One can paraphrase the joke about democracy for nukes. Having nukes is the worst, other than every situation where you don’t have nukes and the other guy does.

Most of the other guys get nukes because we have nukes and threaten them militarily. They're very expensive, countries don't want them unless they need a deterrent, and we're often the main threat.

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#346

Post by bArray »

mmooss wrote: post #293
jmm5 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a social worker and SharePoint is unfortunately widely used by nonprofit agencies for storing client records. It's a real shame, but they can't afford anything better.

Why not use a file server and/or a simple database, even a CRM database (there must be FOSS ones)? What do you mean by "client records"?

Some of it will be about reliability, i.e. the office burns down and Microsoft still hold a copy. Some of it will be about having a third-party that is "trusted" handle the most dangerous part - security. If SharePoint gets compromised there is plausible deniability that "we did everything we should do".

I know for example that some companies will hire subcontractors for high risk parts of a project, just so that there is somebody to blame if anything goes wrong.

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#347

Post by bArray »

rs186 wrote: post #36
bArray wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Word online deletes text in Firefox Linux (maybe others too) for at least two years now [1]. The one thing you want a text editor to do is be able to write text into a document, and somehow this bug goes unfixed. You would think it would be priority #1 for paying customers of Business Office 365 - and yet nothing. It ended up being easier just to switch to paid Overleaf and teach our non-tech members how to…

Not defending Microsoft in any way but my guess of what's happening: * Too few people use Firefox to access Office online, they don't care * Your organization is too small for them to care

> * Too few people use Firefox to access Office online, they don't care

It's pretty much the majority of their Linux users. Firefox is often the default browser on many distros due to the Chrome/Chromium data sharing concern.

> * Your organization is too small for them to care

Then why even have a business tier if not for the support?

The result of Microsoft's current stance is simply that users look elsewhere. I mentioned Overleaf, but Google Docs is also a solid choice. For local editing we are using LibreOffice.

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#348

Post by bArray »

mmooss wrote: post #292
bArray wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Word online deletes text in Firefox Linux (maybe others too) for at least two years now [1]. The one thing you want a text editor to do is be able to write text into a document, and somehow this bug goes unfixed. You would think it would be priority #1 for paying customers of Business Office 365 - and yet nothing. It ended up being easier just to switch to paid Overleaf and teach our non-tech members how to…

> teach our non-tech members how to write LaTeX How did that go? :)

Far easier than it sounds. Essentially the advice was "copy something else that does what you want, and if you run into issues or want something new, just ask". For the most part they were able to edit and generate large parts of the documents without issue.

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#349

Post by zelphirkalt »

1123581321 wrote: post #247
zelphirkalt wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely wouldn't call Slack "awesome". Self-hosted tools like Zulip are doing a better job. Slack is however, the smaller evil amongst MS Teams, Zoom, MS Outlook and similarly bad software. Like, if someone told me all communication, including text chat shall happen via MS Teams, I would seriously consider looking for another job. It is a recipe for absolute disaster and completely broken communication. If the s…

What do you do to make Zulip better than Slack? A vanilla installation is not better, and scales worse with more users, more devices per user more mobile users and more integration sources. But, I’ve never been in a situation where I was forced to make Zulip an attractive communication tool to an organization; there must be a lot that is possible. Getting away from a Salesforce product is a good goal.

What I would do if hosting Zulip for a company, is:

(1) host an up to date Zulip version

(2) setup or rent a Jitsi Meet or other open source / free software voice + video chat solution. Jitsi Meet might be a bit difficult to properly set up, compared to Zulip, because of extra things needed, like TURN server and in general the complexities of web RTC. Maybe renting that for some (3) Configure Zulip to have for example `/jitsi` or `/meeting` for creating meetings right out of Zulip.

(4) Setup other integrations, that exist for Zulip.

(5) Setup backups for the Zulip database. It is just a postgres database. One can dump it and move the dump to a backup store.

If this is too much, for example because the company doesn't have the knowledge in their employees to manage this, then one can also rent Zulip hosted solutions.

Getting away from Salesforce alone is in my opinion already worth it.

Re: Foreign hackers breached a US nuclear weapons plant via SharePoint flaws

#350

Post by bArray »

nairboon wrote: post #70
bArray wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Word online deletes text in Firefox Linux (maybe others too) for at least two years now [1]. The one thing you want a text editor to do is be able to write text into a document, and somehow this bug goes unfixed. You would think it would be priority #1 for paying customers of Business Office 365 - and yet nothing. It ended up being easier just to switch to paid Overleaf and teach our non-tech members how to…

That bug has been around for years. I always wondered if that was deliberate. I guess that Microsoft support answer settles the question... >Sorry for that we may have no enough resources about the Linux environment.

> That bug has been around for years. I always wondered if that was deliberate. I guess that Microsoft support answer settles the question...

I remember years ago there was a browser demo, some kind of game I think, that would only be played on Internet Explorer. If you changed your User Agent string to be Internet Explorer, the demo would work entirely without issue. I think this was prior to Microsoft getting a large fine for not offering other browser choices.

> >Sorry for that we may have no enough resources about the Linux environment.

That is a difficult to parse sentence. "may" indicates uncertainty about the claim about to be made. "have no enough resources" seems to indicate that there is not enough engineering time available. "about the Linux environment" seems to indicate that it is a knowledge gap. Very strange.

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