Technology

This is what the government gets to farming literally fucking everything out to third parties whose goal is profit instead of making government agencies that exist to do the same job whose goal is to serve the people.

Like, no shit, Sherlock.

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.

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.

Microsoft, an early example of enshittification. I read about the pay-to-play nickel and diming of security logs to cloud providers. Logs which would help identify intrusions. Theres just been so many examples of security failuers that highlight the company knows its embedded status within the US govt, and knows it can do less for more.

sure its fun to shit on public servants being old and not wanting to change from microsoft office. there is more then a little truth in that.

but IT departments are often staffed with techs that cant and dont want to do anything but microsoft, it really doesnt matter how much better linux is.

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.

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.

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?

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

Time for linux

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……

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

I'd focus on enforcing standards and interoperability first, in a serious an highly punitive fashion for offenders.

If you can read/write your spreadsheet using any spreadsheet tool or OS you're half-way there and will've severely hampered the old embrace-extend-extinguish (it's still a thing).

Time for a change!

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Interview Microsoft has a shocking level of control over IT within the US federal government – so much so that former senior White House cyber policy director AJ Grotto thinks it's fair to call Redmond's recent security failures a national security issue.

Grotto this week spoke with The Register in an interview you can watch below, in which he told us that exacting even slight concessions from Microsoft has been a major fight for the Feds.

"If you go back to the SolarWinds episode from a few years ago … [Microsoft] was essentially up-selling logging capability to federal agencies" instead of making it the default, Grotto said.

Grotto told us Microsoft had to be "dragged kicking and screaming" to provide logging capabilities to the government by default, and given the fact the mega-corp banked around $20 billion in revenue from security services last year, the concession was minimal at best.

Add to that concerns over an Exchange Online intrusion by Chinese snoops, and another Microsoft security breach by Russian cyber operatives, both of which allowed spies to gain access to US government emails, and Grotto says it's fair to classify Microsoft and its products as a national security concern.

But what can be done to solve the problem when 85 percent of US government productivity software, by Grotto's reckoning, and even more operating system share, belongs to Redmond?

The original article contains 352 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 35%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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.