Is Microsoft Stealing People’s Bookmarks?
schneier.com
schneier.com
They just preserve your precious little soul. To your best interest. Which may coincidentially be in their best interest. A friendly customer service, because you happen to honour them using their products. And, if you're lucky, even in the best interest of people that do protect you against evil forces out there in the dark. From time to time they may look into your precious little soul lying down on the ocean ground in an underwater Microsoft data center, to see if all is well with you.
Think about it, sometimes you yourself don't know you're part of those forces, but Microsoft and those other people might know. And they can help you.
They are like shepherds to their flock.
Some may call it customer profiling, customer-retention or even vendor lock-in, mass surveillance and other ugly terms, but I tell you it is love.
Yes, pure caring and love. You may not understand that at first. Like Apple had to learn bitterly recently. But I tell you, in the end, with their help, there will be just shiny happy people around you.
Amen.
There's nothing remarkable in my bookmarks. I've never really found it to be a useful tool beyond a way of marking things I want to check out again soon. I don't use it for day to day links. I do recall going through this with Chrome and Firefox in the past when they pushed syncing as a huge wonderful benefit for me and I had no interest at all. I'm sure some people have bookmarks as part of their personal workflow and are grateful to have this syncing ability for multiple devices. That's great for them but all vendors need a very strick opt-in policy, not a "we're so sure you're going to love this that we turned it on for you" scheme.
> All synced data is encrypted in transit over HTTPS when transferred between the browser and Microsoft servers. The synced data is also stored in an encrypted state in Microsoft servers. Sensitive data types such as addresses and passwords are further encrypted on the device before being synced.
That's pretty flowery language for "basically all your data is readable by us". It's pretty ridiculous they would do this without an explicit opt-in.
Google and Firedox do it for their passwords, I'm not sure about bookmarks.
Once received, MS decrypts your data, does whatever serverside things it wants to on your data (OCR, NSA, search indexing), and then re-encrypts it with a key only they know. Protects your data from unauthorized rogues within Microsoft and random attackers, but not from Microsoft betraying your trust.
If you ask for your data, they decrypt it with their storage keys, re-encrypt it with their transfer keys (which you can decrypt) to guard against middlemen.
You receive the data, you decrypt it.
The model is secure, in that it's resilient against attackers, but requires you to trust the provider to be trustworthy and uncompromised.
That model is much better than some indie apps, which do encrypt your data between your machine and their server and the reverse, but store your data at rest on their server in a plain, unencrypted format. This means attackers and rogue employees have an easier time getting to your data.
True end-to-end or zero knowledge encryption encrypts the data on your device, and the provider's server only ever sees encrypted nonsense, they don't have the keys to undo the decryption even if they wanted to (thus the name zero knowledge). Your data is only decrypted on your device locally.
Edge stores passwords and some other data end to end encrypted, as far as I know, but only some data types. You can't make everything zero knowledge if you tried to. As far as I know, Chrome doesn't do zero knowledge by default, but can be set up to do it.
Firefox, Brave and Vivaldi all run their own sync services and all are (as far as I know) zero knowledge setups.
A quick search online makes it seem like Mozilla still has no ability to read what you sync. E.g. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_Sync you see:
> It keeps user data on Mozilla servers, but according to Mozilla the data is encrypted in such a way that no third party, not even Mozilla, can access user information. It is also possible for the user to host their own Firefox Sync servers, or indeed, for any entity to do so.
I can't find independent verifications, but I would trust Mozilla about this at this point. But I'm not sure what sharing capabilities you refer to so I can't really speak to that.
[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefo...
If you log into any Microsoft product (Office, Teams, Skype OneDrive, etc), Windows forces you to log into everything else.
This is especially infuriating with Office, as they make it extremely difficult to get a standalone product, they very aggressively push Office 364, so you are forced to log into Office to even use it.
I think the solution to the problem is obvious.
For many people, "Just stop using Microsoft" is about as useful as "Just stop using computers"
For many people, it isn't. All of those people should "just stop using Microsoft."
That not only helps them, it's an act of solidarity with the people who are still stuck. Because then alternatives have more market share and vendors have to support platforms that aren't Microsoft, which helps the stuck people extricate themselves tomorrow.
Do it if you can. Even if it's a little bit of work.
MS Office's Excel is better than LibreOffice Calc, and Powerpoint is far, far better than LibreOffice Present. But LibreOffice Writer is much easier to use than MS Office Word. That's not just my opinion - everyone who tries it and does not need some esoteric Word-only functionality agrees. Except for one thing: collaboration. MS Word is, from what I'm told, still better for collaboration.
Absolutely true, but the SaaS/cloud tendency is to turn all computers into terminals (Chromebook/box anyone?), so that one day they'll be a lot cheaper, but sadly all software will have to come off a server on which the user logged in, and all user data will be stored on that or another server as well. Microsoft aims at this, as do Google and others, so for many people sticking with Microsoft and other SaaS pushing companies might really mean one day to stop using real computers anyway.
As is right now I have a local unlinked windows account, a work account signed into Office, and a personal account signed into the store.
I think you're using an old version ;)
No? Unless something changed, I specifically remember it asking me whether I wanted to sign into the OS, or that app only.
Never create a Microsoft account. At all.
At least until they stop allowing that for products you're already using, which will probably be tomorrow, if it hasn't already happened.
I've been forced to enter a Microsoft account to log in to my computer after an update. No thought toward the possibility that I may need to use the computer I'm in front of to reset the password to that account. No Microsoft account, no getting past that screen.
I had to boot into Linux to reset my microsoft account so I could log into windows. I don't even.
Thats also a reason to use even a simple login.
I also use a default bookmark folder, so all new bookmarks just go into that one folder, with the most recent at the top of the folder. That means I'm relying more on the position, tags, and naming to find a bookmark, rather than a position in a hierarchy.
I keep meaning to research how to extract/sync from the SQLite database that Firefox uses for bookmarks. I feel like there's a lot of unexplored personal value to one's bookmarks and history.
It's only a half-formed idea and unfortunately it'd require both lots of Emacs elisp work and an extension in Firefox.
I've been using Firefox for years, but I've never paid attention too this before. I just tested this and yeah . . . I am going to be using this a lot.
This comment was generated by GPT-3 because somehow signing up for the sandbox and telling it to rewrite my comment was more fulfilling than just typing a comment. I tried to get it to give you a generic thanks with specifics of how I would use this . . . but GPT-3 kinda sucks for this. Oh, well.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-p...
To me it's absolutely mind boggling the amount of text in that link.
There are nearly 100.000 words, which is the same as:
A 100,000 word count will create about 200 pages single-spaced or 400 pages double-spaced when using normal margins (1″) and 12 pt. Arial or Times New Roman font.
Reference https://capitalizemytitle.com/page-count/100000-words/
It happened to me too. And then they used this data to show me creepy ads.
I think this is a very silly idea that would be super destructive and net negative for the world.
The whole reason there are anti-competition laws is because many smaller companies are better for an economy than one large company.
Let me give you one small example: MediumCo and SmallCo each need 50 stenographers to get the office work done. When the two merge into MegaConHugeCo, it only needs 60 stenographers to get the office work done. "Economies of scale" are great for the giant new company, but throw 40 people into unemployment. That is bad for an economy.
Multiply that by all of the functions of a company, and you understand why the federal government and politicians put so much attention and resources into helping small and medium businesses.
I've had Hotmail accounts hacked back in the day, never happened with Gmail. MS is insidious in trying to keep squeezing more from you and automatically adding your account to everything. Google just gives me useful stuff, and even takes away all ads on the products I've paid for. With MS there's still ads in paid products.
With Onedrive I'm facing the nightmare that you are not allowed to configure it until syncing is in progress. If you pause syncing immediately on install, you're not allowed to change settings to prevent said syncing from happening.
I have a mix of personal and business data on there. This has been the case for a few years now but recently got worse. Basically, I don't want my hard drive contaminated with this data when going through customs, that's why I am traveling with a FRESHLY FORMATTED AND REINSTALLED laptop. And what does MS do? Coerce me into all this data's metadata touching down on a drive I have no intention of ever letting touch it. Makes my blood boil. It's a well documented fact these idiots in customs will infringe your privacy for shits and giggles and harass you about stuff that has nothing to do with any valid legal concern. Thanks Microsoft.
And it's hard to take your complaint or needs seriously when it starts out with mixing personal and business data.
It's just their default settings went from years of causing data corruption as soon as you try to change the default of everything checked to this new cluster of ghost syncing.
> Try to avoid own data being on machine
> Log into Microsoft cloud account
> ???