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German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

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Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#71

Post by fnord123 »

martin_a wrote: post #16
fnord123 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the experience is like on Windows, but on other platforms it barely works. Super buggy. Super flakey. Super slow. The audio in conferencing also renders it unusable.

Takes 520 MB right now for sitting idling in the background. That's how well it runs on Windows...

Teams uses sqlite to store data. Are you able to use Process Explorer[1] to see how much of the 520MB is the sqlite file mapped into memory, if sqlite memory mapped IO has been enabled[2]

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/downloads/pro...

[2] https://www.sqlite.org/mmap.html

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#72

Post by Spooky23 »

darkwater wrote: post #11
pndy wrote: post #2

Meanwhile, Polish gov't uses Microsoft Teams [1] as one of ways of verifying citizens who are applying for trusted profile service. [1] - https://moj.gov.pl/uslugi/engine/ng/index?xFormsAppName=Wnio... (in Polish)

In Spain they use Zoom for the same thing. It's really astonishing how governments, especially the European ones, don't cluster on open-source and self-hosted resources for all of these things. To be honest, I know the "easy answer" to this: "IT consulting firms, incompetence, bureaucracy and corruption", but even with that, it should be possible to do it with open system and not just rely on some other countries eve…

Huh? Rolling some bespoke conferencing solution instead of just integrating an existing commercial solution is the definition of waste.

Navel gazing at open source isn’t a great use of the limited resources of the taxpayer. There’s 100 other priorities to expend resources on, many of which have a meaningful open source component.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#73

Post by wil421 »

weinzierl wrote: post #57

At the beginning of the pandemic Microsoft Teams was practically forced on everyone with children in Bavaria. With practically forced I mean you could either sign a document to get Teams for free or your child could not participate in online classes. A whole age group of children whose first online experience is Microsoft. In my opinion we should start there: Instead of unrealistic bans that no one will ever enforce…

In settings where IT knowledge is usually lacking like in school systems, sometimes off the shelf vendor based solutions are better to administer and run than OSS or free tools. I can’t even name an open solution for Teams. The UI/UX is horrible but I’m slightly more confident in Microsoft than what I’ve seen from Zooms security and privacy.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#74

Post by debugnik »

lzooz wrote: post #20
martin_a wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes 520 MB right now for sitting idling in the background. That's how well it runs on Windows...

That's 6.5 % of available memory of a computer with 8 GB of RAM.

15.75%, for an app doing nothing in the background and a trivial set of data to work with, unless you meant 16 GB. Install just 5 more applications with that same development philosophy and an 8 GB machine is already swapping, which is ridiculous.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#75

Post by wil421 »

mordae wrote: post #17
darkwater wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Spain they use Zoom for the same thing. It's really astonishing how governments, especially the European ones, don't cluster on open-source and self-hosted resources for all of these things. To be honest, I know the "easy answer" to this: "IT consulting firms, incompetence, bureaucracy and corruption", but even with that, it should be possible to do it with open system and not just rely on some other countries eve…

Neoliberalism is super entrenched here. It is almost impossible to create a state/county/municipal IT department that would actually have enough sysadmins. All such departments rely almost entirely on external suppliers. One way this happens are salary controls. It is impossible to hire someone and give him the market rate, but it is trivial to tender the work associated with such position to a random external compan…

I worked with European firms for over 5 years, from the company who makes lenses for ASML machines, European telcos, to well known German shoe companies and groceries stores, and luxury French brand conglomerates. They all had slightly less than 0 IT knowledge and outsourced almost all IT work to contracting companies.

I’ve seen large contracting firms get the boot for pulling the let’s withhold docs to get another large change order for producing said doc. It’s BS games.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#76

Post by m1ghtym0 »

Garlef wrote: post #25
m1ghtym0 wrote: post #4

Maybe they should deploy it via Constellation https://github.com/edgelesssys/constellation

Who are "they"? Microsoft? The issue is not a technological one but a matter of legislation.

Yes and no. It's a technological problem in the sense that there is a technological solution to this. See the Delos Cloud for example: https://www.handelsblatt.com/technik/it-internet/delos-cloud...

However Confidential Computing and Constellation unlock another technological solution where one can run IT infrastructure while being completely locked out and without access to the any of the data. Ensuring data sovereignty for the users and without building physically separated data centers.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#77

Post by hk1337 »

wil421 wrote: post #73
weinzierl wrote: post #57

At the beginning of the pandemic Microsoft Teams was practically forced on everyone with children in Bavaria. With practically forced I mean you could either sign a document to get Teams for free or your child could not participate in online classes. A whole age group of children whose first online experience is Microsoft. In my opinion we should start there: Instead of unrealistic bans that no one will ever enforce…

In settings where IT knowledge is usually lacking like in school systems, sometimes off the shelf vendor based solutions are better to administer and run than OSS or free tools. I can’t even name an open solution for Teams. The UI/UX is horrible but I’m slightly more confident in Microsoft than what I’ve seen from Zooms security and privacy.

Big Blue Button (https://bigbluebutton.org) is one. We actually used it at work for meetings but it seems they have since pivoted to be for more virtual classroom.

I agree though, even that would need decent IT talent to setup and maintain.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#78

Post by BartjeD »

_tk_ wrote: post #48
BartjeD wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a bit clickbaity. But on the whole i'd say its warranted. Because these judgements are precedents which bind other DPA's. The scope of the factual findings is broad enough to say that it affects any business using 365 handling personal data. That leaves only the question of legality in the specific case. Which depends on the presence and kind of personal data present in 365.

Data privacy agencies in German federal states do not rely on precedents set by other agencies. They have authority over how the law is interpreted in their federal state. Coming back to the gp, this title is not only clickbait, it's outright wrong. Similar decisions have been made in recent years in other federal states, nothing has changed for the national state of Germany or businesses in Germany.

This is only partly correct: In so far as Privacy law is based on EU law the DPA has duty apply the law in a consistent manner. In line with the rest of the EU, that is to say. To avoid fractures and discrepancies in EU law.

Obviously these issues can sometimes only be decided at EU level. But the DPA's usually meet each other to discuss and align on contentious issues. And at other times they wait for EU level judgements.

What's worrying in this case is that it's becoming a trend.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#79

Post by jasmer »

phatfish wrote: post #70
jasmer wrote: post #35

MSFT should be leading the way. In what universe do they need to be collecting data from kids, especially that which cannot be kept locally. Telemetry data (which I suggest is reasonable that they collect) can be stored in local 'log' style DBs. It's not data they need to repatriate. Although for login and identity management, it might be reasonable to have that quasi centralized for security reasons. While MS could…

Data sovereignty is here to stay, no matter the push back from Silicon Valley. A government would be stupid to hand over all their citizens data to the US via US technology companies. There should be two directions of attack on this issue. Legislation to try and force US companies to legally protect personal data of citizens from other countries. And to build competitors to Microsoft, Amazon etc. Obviously creating a…

This is mixing a few streams.

"A government would be stupid to hand over all their citizens data to the US via US technology companies"

They have been for decades in some cases, and where is the problem, specifically?

It is possibly one of national security, less so one of companies selling data for advertising and other reasons because Slack and MSFT are reliably not doing that, and contracts with companies can make that clear. If the contracts are breached those companies can be wiped out - just the same as any other commercial issue.

So yes, it's reasonable for companies to want to have some data hosted within their own countries, but it most cases it will not matter.

For instance, kids classroom telemetry data in the US vs. Germany will make absolutely no difference.

That data is as 'safe' in the US as in Germany so long as there is a contract in place to specify how that data can be used. MSFT has no very special leverage with customer data in the US as opposed to Germany, if they are contractually bound.

GDPR is a lot about protecting users from willy nilly use of their data which is a different question that national security and other legal issues.

Theoretically, there are some concerns about US spy apparatus, but I suggest that if the CIA wants to access data in what the US deems to be in a 'lawful manner' - that having the data hosted in AWS outside the US won't make a huge difference. That kind of protection would require yet another level of thinking.

Re: German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools

#80

Post by jasmer »

pmontra wrote: post #60
jasmer wrote: post #35

MSFT should be leading the way. In what universe do they need to be collecting data from kids, especially that which cannot be kept locally. Telemetry data (which I suggest is reasonable that they collect) can be stored in local 'log' style DBs. It's not data they need to repatriate. Although for login and identity management, it might be reasonable to have that quasi centralized for security reasons. While MS could…

MS, G, AWS will end up offering local datacenters operated by local companies owned by them. They'll cost a little more.

MS, G and AWS have locally incorporated entities. Google in Germany is 'German'.
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