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[-] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 153 points 6 months ago

Just saw in another post that Microsoft is pushing their copilot AI into Windows 2022 servers. Windows 11 will become a data syphoning ad-riddled spyware. And Microsoft office will send everything you type to some AI learning machine god knows where.

This will be a huge privacy concern for governments very soon and may force them to switch to Linux and libre office. Germany is not even the first one to do this. French police already use Ubuntu on their desktop computers.

[-] bassomitron@lemmy.world 72 points 6 months ago

I work with government admins a lot and they've already told me the shit show they've been dealing with regarding feature updates somehow installing themselves on their devices despite it being disabled via GPO. Unfortunately, I think the government will just flex on Microsoft and force them to strip the shit out for their baseline Windows images rather than move to a Linux alternative.

[-] fossilesque@mander.xyz 23 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

My windows PC bricked its OS in the last month, it was definately caused by an upgrade (corrupted hive). I strip my windows installs bare with a script so I assume it was looking for some telemetry service or something. Jokes on Windows, I was planning to switch the OS on that PC anyway. Annoying because it was bad timing.

[-] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 5 points 6 months ago

Care to share the script?

[-] PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 15 points 6 months ago

Ya I’m pretty sure gov with E5 M365 tenants will just not have those features installed. Most govs have rules about data residency.

[-] fossilesque@mander.xyz 84 points 6 months ago
[-] CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world 6 points 6 months ago

That's oddly uplifting.

[-] lurch@sh.itjust.works 33 points 6 months ago

i wouldn't call this a rebellion or battle. it's just government trying to find the right tool for the job.

[-] db2@lemmy.world 25 points 6 months ago

You're assuming Microsoft will just respond to it with "Oh, OK then, we're cool with this."

They won't.

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

Yeah, even if nothing else comes from this, they'll get some real fucking good conditions from Microsoft.

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 22 points 6 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The plan is to start with LibreOffice and move through essential infrastructure and desktop OS to the full top-to-bottom open stack.

Microsoft's focus on moving people to Office 365 and upping hardware specs for Windows 11 for no good reason makes taking a different path much more palatable.

In the past, its privacy stance saw it banned for use in schools in the state of Hessen, although the company has absorbed rectifying decisions that eventually followed.

If a change to Windows happens to break that compatibility, guess who picks up the pain and the bills.

Schleswig-Holstein itself will become a new hub of technical excellence in an area that intensely interests the rest of the world, in public and private organizations.

That may change if a new set of politicians are elected with a different agenda, but here we must give the voters the responsibility of keeping an eye on things.


The original article contains 904 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[-] toastal@lemmy.ml 21 points 6 months ago

Microsoft products you can start saying no to: Windows, WSL, GitHub, Sponsors, Copilot, VS Code, Codespaces, Azure, npm, Teams, Outlook, Office, & LinkedIn.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 6 months ago

Yeeeeeah…

Many of these I agree with. Then you get into things like github and LinkedIn. Dropping GitHub means not contributing to a huge swath of open source projects. Dropping LinkedIn is a great way to get your job application passed over (it’s literally required for some companies…. For some dumb reason.)

[-] toastal@lemmy.ml 5 points 6 months ago

Use them reluctantly & push back against it until you can free yourself from them. Let folks know you are unhappy about it or powers at be will think everything is okay. Surely we can agree fundamentally that Microsoft should not be controlling these spaces as it does with the platform lock-in.

[-] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 17 points 6 months ago

Just to say it the Lower Saxony example is not quite correct. The situation is that they started using Solaris a Unix system in the 90s in the tax department. When Solaris was no longer really developed, they opted to switch to Linux, as it was easier to migrate. However to unify German states tax departments, the previous state government opted to move to Windows. However the migration has so far failed. Mainyl due to the systems never having been designed for Windows in the first place. The other large user of Linux in Lower Saxony is the police and although they migrated from Windows to save some money, they too had problems migrating back as it was just too difficult.

That is just the reality of it. Software is sticky and once you migrate it often stays. Even when politicans do not like that.

[-] MonkderDritte@feddit.de 2 points 6 months ago

suzerain-vassal treaties

Good comparison. Though, germany is that to US anyway.

this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
410 points (100.0% liked)

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