Comment by Melting_Harps | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Melting_Harps | Hacker News Reader

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> Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted.

Today?

Where were you when it's 'free' OS' was 'phoning home' or during it's behemoth days in the 90s-2000s when it forced the most pro-business Government (US) to essentially break it up when it was using it's monoploitic practices too far for even them?

I have to use Teams and just logically assume all of what was said or talked about exists on some server somewhere for the employer, LEO or intelengence agencies to retrieve; if Snowden has taught us anything is that M$ is the darling child of the Intelligence agencies in the US for a reason.

Using M$ outside of a (forced) work environment is literately like asking to be tracked, monitored of your own accord. Nothing they do should be presumed to be secure until proven a length to be otherwise. It's very likely why it's so bloated and runs terribly, they are optimizing no for UX but for it's real business model: spying.

Sadly, and with only a slight tinge of despondence: I've given up on preaching about FOSS to the masses, but with stuff like this it's like asking why people sign up for death cults, it alwasy ends in: Humans just being Humans.

Please don’t give up praying about FOSS to the masses. It was a post like this that convinced me to try Linux Arch. I will never look back. I didn’t boot into my Windows drive for more than a month now. I just keep a bare installation for online games that don’t run on Linux. For now.

It's a noble cause, congrats on freedom.

If you feel adventurous you can eventually transcend dual boot to a VFIO setup that helps to keep your bare metal protected from Windows entirely.

It’s unfortunate, but there’s not really a FOSS alternative for a general purpose personal-use OS that comes close to Windows.

It completely owns that market. There’s macOS and iOS I guess, but they’re not generally available to install on third party equipment.

Linux, sadly, is just not at all a consumer OS and never became one. The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years).

> The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years)

Surely you are talking about Windows... :-)

Linux isn't any better. Take any Debian based os download a .deb and double click it.

It's executable by default, opens up in something like Eddie and just asks for a password.

Nothing about Linux is really more secure than windows other than the fact it is a small target.

Knowing the root password for a machine is meant to grant you full control over that machine...

You literally just described an .exe or .msi.

You are aware that users are not privileged by default in Linux? While historically in Windows...at least until UAC and Windows 2008...

Not sure what the example proves. The simple fact you can compile your kernel, have a strong model with Linux SE, it's just another ballpark.

Besides the fundamental aspect that Microsoft are telemetry kleptomaniacs, one OS assumes the user machine does not belong to the user, and Microsoft knows better. Linux assumes it's your machine and nobody else.

You can have your own hardened and lighter Linux kernel, with less surface exposure, while with Windows you start with whatever version version of Cortana Microsoft would like to push that week on it's users...Plus all the other unnecessary components that create an almost infinite opportunity of attack vectors.

Naturally for Linux, the open source code, makes for a more transparent process, even if I don't subscribe to the idea that more eyes on the code, correlates directly to higher safety.

.deb is not executable. It’s an “ar” archive (see https://manpages.debian.org/buster/dpkg-dev/deb.5.en.html for more details) containing a few other archives - for files and metadata.

The fact that deb extension is associated with an application (I don’t know what Eddie is) does not make deb executable. It’s like Winzip opening a zip archive on double click in Windows: yes, the file is opened, but no untrusted code has been run (assuming, Winzip is installed already and is considered trusted).

Linux is more secure because it has a much smaller attach surface. Even from the kernel interaction perspective, the number of syscalls in Linux is much smaller than in Windows, they are in a way more primitive and easier to audit. But the biggest distinguisher is lack of DCE (or MS) RPC - in Windows it’s ubiquitous, available both locally and sometimes over the network with various ways to access it (named pipes over SMB, DCE over TCP/IP, even over NetBEUI, over HTTP in some cases) which makes it hard to secure (Windows firewall is very complex as a result). Finally, Windows Carrie’s enormous amount of legacy and Microsoft is not interested in fixing it (they would rather push you to “cloud”).

Combination of code complexity and large attack surface makes Windows less secure that competition (although Pottering seems to be working on fixing it).

It is like self extracting winzip archive, because of maintainer scripts.

Self extracting archives don't require scripts or other functionality to work. They have a decompressor built-in. This is why they're _self_-extracting and not just archives.

- notarization, code signing and revocation

- sandboxing

- root of trust hardware encryption

None of the above can be enforced at a distribution level, and where these features are opt-in they’re significantly underdeveloped relative to Windows/macOS/ChromeOS as no-one is using them in significant numbers.

I’m not even sure you could find any amount of FOSS advocates to even get on board with notarization let alone get it implemented.

You could maybe enforce protected folders at the distribution level but I don’t know if anyone could really trust a feature like that if it wasn’t implemented in the kernel directly.

I've been railing about all the spying Microsoft Teams is doing across corporate networks for the last year or so, to nothing but shrugs, 'I'm sure Microsoft isn't using our business data' or similar responses. People never learn.

We use Teams at work. We also use almost everything else Microsoft sells, which is probably the only reason we use Teams.

I suspect that the kind of company that uses Teams is just not very interested in critically evaluating Microsoft or competitors (relative to companies that are evaluating specific Microsoft products as one-offs). They're already bought into an ecosystem whose main strength as a collection of mediocre (or worse) software is that it is integrated with all the other mediocre software in the collection. If they don't 'trust Microsoft', where does that leave them? So they 'trust Microsoft', and that's the end of that.

Never mind teams, imagine what kind of data Office gives them. Every email, every word doc, and every excel document created by nearly every company on the globe is theirs to pick through! It must provide insane levels of insight into what most companies (even those that compete with MS) are doing.

Teams takes all that data, plus all the conversations about it, including audio, IMs, web browsing, etc and creates reports tying it all together. Teams is the 'one ring to rule them all' that allows it to all be coordinated in context. It takes all of data that Microsoft can gather from other apps and weaponizes it into a competitive advantage against its own customers.

For example, if Bob at ABC Company is working on an MS Word doc, yes, Microsoft can steal that data. But it's worse when Teams is on a corporate network, because maybe Bob has a Teams meeting, pulls up the Word doc, discusses it with coworkers Sarah and Bill, and now Teams tracks the doc, the conversation, who was in the conversation and what the conversation was about. It tracks the email conversation that follows. All of this is proprietary information. Teams has handed Microsoft the internal working projects, context, thoughts and strategy of ABC Company.

> is that M$

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m

21 years ago: "It is difficult enough already to engage Gabriel in a discussion of security or Digital Rights Management, and spelling Microsoft M-dollar sign is probably the best way I can think of to get your mail deleted. He might even have a rule that does it now, I haven't asked. When Ross Anderson penned his now famous Palladium FAQ, which reads somewhere between a toaster manual and grim speculative fiction, you will note that he never deploys the dollar sign, because he would like to be taken seriously."

People can come up with whatever reasons to ignore others that they want. That doesn't make those reasons reasonable, it just makes those people ignorant.

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