Microsoft takes pains to obscure role in 0-days that caused email breach

Where AWS really showed its unsuitability to host applications on the Microsoft stack was that AWS doesn't have a PaaS way to host .NET Framework web applications; IaaS is the only option.

So both .NET Framework web application nor Microsoft SQL Server database were noticeably harder on AWS than Azure for us. Standing up one IaaS server to host SSRS in Azure was a lot less work than accounting for all the gaps on the AWS side would have been.

There's an annoying difference between 'Azure SQL Database' and 'Azure SQL Managed Instance'. I recall the Managed Instance does support timezones and SSAS, while the ordinary offering also misses other useful stuff like Resource Governors.

This may also explain why in Azure, more cores run a Linux kernel than Microsoft Windows.

> "HN is full of people willing to fall in their swords for MS because they weren't around for its last round of despicable behavior"

When was this last round? Is HN full of 20 year olds? Microsoft is really popular with the youth of today? That's nearly halfway back to when Microsoft was founded.

Not even Apple nor Android. ;)

Governments do a bad job of funding news production, newspapers didn’t take the internet seriously and made a massive mess out of it, and the tech companies just sucked out the remaining value and killed news.

The fact is the big tech companies make next to nothing on news. It’s rational to just stop doing it if the value goes negative.

If government wants to levy a real tax and use that money to fund and support news, fine - but these laws are based on a mistaken premise that somebody is making buckets of money in news. Nobody is.

I doubt you’ll find any company with an IT department with enough resources to roll their own Office 365.

> There's still FTP, NFS, SMB, etc...

> Hell, there's still Lotus 1-2-3

You're not serious I hope? While these apps have some basic functionality, they would not work in the modern world. Even collaborating has become so much better (remember all the emails in the mid 2000s "CAN WHOEVER HAS OPENED REPORT.XLS PLEASE CLOSE IT SO I CAN EDIT" :). And that was already a huge improvement on the Lotus 1-2-3 days. Now we can seamlessly collaborate on the same document.

Sometimes I'm genuinely surprised we got so much work done then. Things are so much more efficient now.

If you are selling to a general consumer via a one-sided contract then there are implicit guarantees of fitness for the plainly advertised purpose that can almost never be waived at least in the US. Note that this does not usually apply to gifts so non-commercial OSS is likely unaffected.

If you are selling to a business customer then they are accepting those terms. If they wish to then go on and use that product in their delivery to a general consumer then they are accepting the liability of verifying or making it fit for their purpose. If they wish to provide other guarantees then they are also responsible for those.

Are you arguing that the intended functionality of Exchange is leaking emails? No.

Are you arguing that customers find their emails being leaked a desirable or neutral option? No.

Are you arguing customers will accept a product that they know will leak their emails? No.

So, a flaw that leaks emails makes the product unacceptable to the customer. The only possible defense for Microsoft here is that they accepted no liability or disclaimed all liability for leaking emails.

It is certainly possible that Microsoft did that in their contracts. I applaud the skills of their salespeople and lawyers if they tricked the customer into accepting products inadequate for their needs. That does not stop me from calling it out as duplicitous, immoral behavior that should be stamped out.

Part of this being pointing out how they have changed the words to make their statements seem less bad. The use of correct, industry-standard words makes it harder to misdirect customer intuition.

Sure, in a strictly literal, legal sense, it is quite possible that they are not selling a defective product because they lied to the customer and tricked them into purchasing a substandard product. However, in the colloquial sense, they are absolutely selling a defective product as the consumer is not getting the plain meaning of what they were advertised (even though it is not contractually binding).

I do not know about you, but I really think we should push for the consumer-friendly model over the lawyer-friendly one.