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Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

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Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that Apple shares their iCloud data (users' docs, pictures, messages, etc.) with the Chinese government in exchange for market access: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

Apple shares icloud data with the US government as well. https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin...

That's per warrant requests for individuals, IIRC.

Apple shares with the CCP for all users by default.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that Apple shares their iCloud data (users' docs, pictures, messages, etc.) with the Chinese government in exchange for market access: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

I think it's worth clarifying that this is just Chinese users, though that was probably clear to most. The Chinese and rest-of-the-world iClouds are completely separate.

The point is that Apple sells their user data for market access. Google won't even do that.

This is antithetical to Apple's privacy branding.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#383
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I've installed Linux+LO for years to a lot of people (also a couple times when it was in the earlier StarOffice incarnation, can't recall if under Windows or OS/2, certainly not Linux), being extremely clear on one thing: "this is not Microsoft Office, it's not as powerful as Microsoft Office and you may find some incompatibilities here and there (that was true especially during the old times), but the features…

> but the features 99% of users need are all here. I cannot believe this, in particular for the comparison Excel vs. LibreOfice Calc: the latter is used insanely actively in the finance and insurance industries, thus any proper user sampling should bias towards these industries. On the other hand: users in these industries know Excel really well and use very advanced features of it.

I have performed logistic regression in Calc, by using the Solver feature to find coefficients, after multiplying the input with them, passing the output to a sigmoid, and computing the mean squared error.

I suspect anything more advanced than this would be better worth implementing as a script, rather than using Excel.

The main arguments for Excel, that I suspect, would be better collaboration features (like comments and sharing and such), and better integration with other MS tools (Outlook etc.).

But even then, perhaps a script or Jupyter Notebook would be easier to work with (for diffs and version control that are not vendor-locked).

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#384
post #123

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…

Since 2014 I don't trust my macs. There is no Apple computer without LS installed on in my company. Actually, if LS is not available, I will not use Apple computers at all. Period.

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Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#385
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 2014 I don't trust my macs. There is no Apple computer without LS installed on in my company. Actually, if LS is not available, I will not use Apple computers at all. Period.

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Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#386
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It uses the windows firewall. Do I trust Windows firewall to block itself? NO!

> It uses the windows firewall. No: "simplewall is not a control UI over Windows Firewall, and does not interact in any level with Windows Firewall"

I was referring to the firewall functionality already present in windows, not the GUI called "windows firewall".

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#387
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the features 99% of users need are all here. I cannot believe this, in particular for the comparison Excel vs. LibreOfice Calc: the latter is used insanely actively in the finance and insurance industries, thus any proper user sampling should bias towards these industries. On the other hand: users in these industries know Excel really well and use very advanced features of it.

I have performed logistic regression in Calc, by using the Solver feature to find coefficients, after multiplying the input with them, passing the output to a sigmoid, and computing the mean squared error. I suspect anything more advanced than this would be better worth implementing as a script, rather than using Excel. The main arguments for Excel, that I suspect, would be better collaboration features (like comment…

> The main arguments for Excel, that I suspect, would be better collaboration features (like comments and sharing and such), and better integration with other MS tools (Outlook etc.).

No, the main argument why Excel is used in the finance and insurance industries is that many users know Excel really well.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#388
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do packet inspection when they're all encrypted?

You can still inspect whether you’re having packets sent when you add text or just when you click on certain options You could add large amounts of text and see if the packets increase proportionally. You can perhaps analyze which apps or extensions are sending packets. This post doesn’t provide enough information of value

> You can still inspect whether you’re having packets sent when you add text or just when you click on certain options

Batching very commonly obscures this kind of UI interaction reporting.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#389
post #234

There's a pervasive lack of precision in privacy discussions. There's a difference between a network request that does some computation on the server side, one that does the same but may log errors and increment counters, and one that actually stores the data temporarily or for a long time. And in the last case, there's a difference between the data being nigh-impossible for internal employees to access (perhaps only…

> This is not a useless feature.

Yes, it helps Microsoft, and it helps The Powers That Be advance their goal of total information awareness to maximize their security and power and be unaccountable. As a bonus, the harm it does to users is hard to see and hard to reason about, so the genuine proponents and their useful-idiot accomplices throughout the tech (and political) world have been very weakly opposed in advancing the pervasive surveillance agenda.

Re: Microsoft is phoning home the content of PowerPoint slides

#390

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…

On Linux there is OpenSnitch that does its job nicely, although I experienced some occasional desktop slowdowns even after training it to open everything for trusted programs. https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch I still recall the old days of Windows when I tried Kerio Personal Firewall and realized how much software already phoned home two decades ago. That was the last wake up call that pushed me into getting…

The slowdowns are because it still has to hold every connection until it can check which program it is coming from and whether that program is trusted or not, even when the same program creates multiple connections.

To get around the slowdowns, I made an alternative program called picosnitch which only monitors connections since I just stop using anything I don't trust or move it to a sandbox. It also uses BPF, has fairly low CPU usage, and some other features for improved reliability and detection of programs.

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