Its kind of funny to me that by pushing data harvesting of OS’s and office data then selling it to 3rd parties Microsoft has probably become the biggest security threat to the US government, maybe ever. And its all because the US refuses to pass basic consumer privacy protections.
Microsoft knows the government needs something, and is insistent on squeezing as many of your tax dollars from them as possible, or leaving us all vulnerable.
Capitalism is terrorism.
Literally the plot of the new fallout show
oh do I need to watch that?
I would recommend.
Once the government switched to Linux en-masse, Microsoft will have no leverage whatsoever, no solution they can possibly propose will beat free software.
LibreOffice is totally adequate for most government jobs.
It’s not like there’s no precedent, Germany’s government already switched to Linux
The only possible way to generate money is through the use of online document editing services, but Google Docs pretty much cornered the market here.
I just want to clarify that a german state switched. Not Germany.
And, IIRC, it’s just a trial to see if it will work.
Edit: I should have read the article linked in a comment above…
“As spotted by The Document Foundation, the government has apparently finished its pilot run of LibreOffice and is now announcing plans to expand to more open source offerings.”
“In 2021, the state government announced plans to move 25,000 computers to LibreOffice by 2026. At the time, Schleswig-Holstein said it had already been testing LibreOffice for two years.”
So, it seems the trial may be over and they are migrating for good.
Even if libre office didn’t offer those features, I’d be willing to bet the gov could donate 1/100 what they pay Microsoft in a year to have them implemented.
seriously. or just say “America’s gift to the world” and wave their dicks around over in house programmers adding it.
I’m honestly surprised the us govt hasn’t developed their own pos locked downed Linux os.
It seems the baddies are way ahead of the curve:
LTT had a video on using North Korea linux
Blue Star OS?
Blue stripe os
Back in 2000, there was something like that for the kernel with SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux). Which continues to live in various distributions’ kernels. Not a full O/S though, and not generally regarded as a PoS.
Just for the record : Schleswig-Holstein is only one of Germany’s 16 states. Let’s hope the rest of Germany will follow.
France is here a better example. The Gendarmerie has its own distribution based on Ubuntu called GendBuntu. The state developed Tchap, a messaging system based on matrix. And many are looking to Linux to simply cut the cost like the french army.
Side note: The app Fedilab has its package name based on the french government open source projects (fr.gouv.etalab.mastodon).
They can also just use Office online. That should be good enough to get people to switch without a huge disruption in efficiency.
You underestimate how much people rely on Excel macros.
Yeah, but there are alternatives, so it at least provides a smaller change than completely switching to something else.
Yeah but years of macros over macros that keep the business running won’t be easily ported to a new solution.
Sure, and being forced to redo it is probably a good thing in the long run.
Maybe they’ll get a developer to build it into a reusable product instead of relying on Jim in accounting to fix the macros to get it working after an update. Or maybe they’ll realize they could get the same result with a pivot table and clever formulas.
I agree with you, but nothing is more permanent than temporary solutions.
Your response is the rational one, but rarely the one taken.
It works and the new solution would cost time and money, we can’t have that.
Yeah, this is government, not a nice FOSS project. :)
Unfortunately, LibreOffice is still garbage. Microsoft it miles ahead in its apps compared to the Linux equivalent. There isn’t even a good OneNote alternative on Linux.
What is specifically broken or missing from LibreOffice?
As for OneNote alternatives, this one does a pretty good job: https://xournalpp.github.io/
Many things. The biggest issue, I’d say, is the unability to create tables in Calc. This severely limits productivity.
And I use both OneNote and Xournal++, and the latter isn’t really a replacement to the former, save for a few features.
Nah, Office 97 was the last decent one, Office 2003 is trash due to app menus all messed up. LibreOffice is modelled after Office 97.
Well y’all decided that finding and keeping zero-day exploits were more important than contacting the companies to fix them because you looked at both approaches and decided that intelligence gathering scale > cyber security robustness.
Now for all governments in the world: install Linux already and get it over with. Cut your dependence on an abusive and crappy software vendor
I cannot disclose any details but this article vastly undersells the risk and how exposed the US is. It is definitely goes well beyond government exposure.
It’s not like theres’s an NSA backdoor key called NSAkey in windows or something…
Windows is not the problematic Microsoft product. Not even close. If you understood how much of the US infrastructure and controls are consolidated under Microsoft cloud services, you’d never sleep again. Cloud was fine back when it was a product catering small and medium companies but when large corporations started migrating their critical infrastructures to cloud services to offload responsibilities, we really went off into the weeds.
Not only cloud infrastructure, tons of industrial automation devices are more or less open on the Internet. Best case that’s just a few minutes downtime in a factory, worst case someone fries the grid and destroys water treatment plants.
And even the actual applications being written for the government aren’t that great. The lowest bidder gets the contract, and security is really easy to cheap out on, if you’re doing just enough to not be legally liable - which isn’t hard.
The older I get and the more insights in the inner workings of the technical infrastructure I get, the more I’m surprised we’re not actively collapsing right now. It’s scary how abysmal security is and it’s scary how unprepared society is. Just as a hint: the European power grid spans the entire EU, Balkans, Turkey, Ukraine. There’s no plan how to restart the grid, if it shuts down entirely. None. Complete terra incognita.
No need to be quite so cloak and dagger mate, it fairly obviously to any one who pauses to think.
People have been calling out the problems of corporate oligarchy for more than a decade. This is merely part of that .
It’s systemic risk, not merely technical
its not cloak and dagger, its ‘whatever you do, don’t open the breaker box. you will die.’
Forgot about that one. Let’s share what Wikipedia has on it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY
The US at least has some degree of control over Microsoft. How much worse is that the EU is still not developing an own OS/distro?
There were grassroots movements like the Limux project (Munich using a custom Linux distribution). But that got shut down by Microsoft bribery (not confirmed, but MS did build a new headquarters in Munich…).
Yeah, that was a shame. But I really think we’d need a shared OS for all administration units of the EU (from EU level down to munipiality levels). Would be much easier as the private sector could also adjust to it.
Whoever uses Microsoft products should be aware from the start that security is a low priority for them. If you can accept the risk, fine. If you can’t, think about the consequences.
I feel like they are so close to an epiphany……
Another subscription model, you mean?
Which then raises the question: why isn’t the US using open source software everywhere, paying the same -or very likely - much less to maintain and expand said software? Can you imagine the money stream towards thousands of devs fixing any (but, feature or security) issue, which they would already do for free? Finally some recognition and so on.
Finally they’d have software that they can trust and rely upon, it’ll kill one huge company and spawn hundreds of smaller companies. Win-win all around
Because there is seldom a good replacement for the majority of software that enterprises use.
As much as I like FOSS it’s significantly harder to fund.
With proprietary you keep the source code, ship the app, collect data & sell it, and charge for a premium /subscription. They then use that money to fund talented devs and give them deadlines to make good software.
With FOSS it’s largely contribution work by people who work on it in their free time. They use donations or paying for enterprise support, and if they do add a subscription service / premium version you can just modify the code and get it for free.
That’s largely why FOSS software is behind, what’s the direct incentive for someone to make it good?
If its anything like the private sector its a mostly a liability thing. If something is wrong with the program, you can sue the vendor. With open source… Thats a lot harder to do. Large groups wont use the thing if you cant put the blame on someone else when it breaks.
Because open source doesn’t have support contracts
I’m sure there are other companies, but here’s Red Hat’s Support options.
Really? Maybe ask redhat? Ubintu? And those are the large ones, there are loads of companies that give support contracts.
Time for a change!
Let me explain…the same people that brought you windows 3, 95, 98, 2000, nt, XP, etc now want to obtain everything you type via an AI tool they created.
They would know all your health history, everything you scan, your photos relating to family and work secrets, etc. for the corporate, they would know who from LinkedIn will get the job and who will be fired. They will know about layoffs and about business secrets and success. Etc.
It’s pretty simple. Rather than just a keylogger, Microsoft wants you to use a smart keylogger that they control. How is that not the dumbest thing to ever use at work? It’s gotta be the biggest IT security failure ever.
Duh!
Bad procurement is a national security threat
