mrmondo

Indeed, Apple is known (internally) for sitting down with privacy offenders and having serious conversations where they explain not just the rules they broke but why those rules are in place and that one of Apples business models comes from the value that they place on data and information privacy above all else is both a product and a right that people should have.

Well I can’t speak for other people, for me and the three others in the immediate space around me that I just asked: We all stopped used Facebook some time ago as we either found it irrelevant or did not trust the company. As for google, two people in the room with me use Gmail but both just agreed they’d rather start moving away from Google (as they are an Ad and data company) but regardless - neither of those two people use the gmail / google apps on their iPhones so it wouldn’t affect them at all. I moved from gmail years ago as part of a move to distance myself from Google due to the lack of regulation on their business and the fact as the other two said - they’re an Ad company - they make money from information about you - you are literally selling out when using them. Obviously not everyone will agree with me and that’s fine, but that’s my state of play. (I work in Software / Platform Engineering & Security)

Give me a real app over a web app any day, the performance, the power and flexibility of native integration and if nothing else - JavaScript is a mess.

"Facebook has insisted that all participants below the age of 18 submitted parental consent forms, but it would be impossible for Facebook to remotely verify that the teens just didn’t fill them out themselves without extra steps."

Absolutely disgusting, they're likely too young to sign the contract or understand what they're signing - let alone the impact of what Facebook is doing with their data (or potentially to them directly). It's incredibly disturbing, predatory behaviour.

and today Microsoft's "Xbox live" cloud service is down and it's causing Xbox's to fail to boot: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/xbox-one-black-screen/

Yes, Skype / Skype for business uses Microsoft’s centralised servers including for authentication.

They're barely desktop apps - they're essentially bloated javascript heavy web-frame like apps that perform poorly, have many bugs (IMO 7~ years of use) and require login to Office365 / Azure online.

The Office365 status page now states "There are currently no known issues preventing you from signing in to your Office 365 service health dashboard." and when you click the link and are forced to login (now that auth appears to be working for me at least) you're presented with an error preventing you from seeing service status or historical events stating "You don’t have permission to access this page or perform this action."

Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/pALWiIR

I find most of the time when Office365 (especially the mail or calendaring component aka Exchange online) is down - their status pages all say everything is fine, if you contact support no matter what you tell or provide to them they want you to reinstall Outlook.

More so that there should be redundancy if it's a critical system.

While I agree with your sentiments about the products, MS as a company and their software model, some of us are forced to use their products at work and of course some of us have tried to improve things and move away to more standards based and ethical software we don't always win (no pun intended) (and words are my own etc...)

Indirect, but the light comes from a west-facing window that I've since covered in tinfoil heh.

I find the same issue, on several occasions I've done some wireshark / tcpdumps on Outlook (desktop) traffic and it was quite shall we say 'messy', additionally as we notice emails sent via Office365 at times go missing or just never arrive (with no NDR), a couple of us started inspecting headers of Office365 sent emails and found them to be bouncing around internal Microsoft servers with broken certificates and NTP so out of sync that exchange online (or whatever component does this for their system) moved on to another server until it got to one that was working.

Said domain is not registered, While I suspect your comment is just aimed at being humorous it may be taken by some as a bit of a troll comment.

Does that mean that you don't (ever) have to login to Microsoft / Office365 online services with the desktop software? I have been hearing that people are having issues with desktop apps asking them to log back in to use them - and they can't.

This also impacted "US government cloud resources": https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1090379738424569859

Also from ITNews: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/microsoft-hit-by-global-offic...

If that, been an enterprise customer with a company that is a gold partner and been using Office365 for 7 years now - it's down so often we stopped monitoring it, easily the most flaky, unreliable, slow and poorly managed online service I've personally used. (Words are my own, not necessarily those of my employeer(s) etc...)

Update: This apparently affected all of Microsoft Cloud products - not just Office365 as I stated in the title. Source: https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1090366788972404737

*Edit: I believe this includes Azure-AD, which I would assume would affect people using it for auth for non-Microsoft cloud products (perhaps even on-prem (if people do that?)).

Interesting, I suspecting their 'restart' of 'authentication infrastructure' may be a rolling restart and perhaps they have not got to Germany yet, perhaps by using Google's DNS different 'authentication infrastructure' is being provided?

As I said below the "status page which a) may not be accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed"

We thought that too - gwmigprda.aadg.windows.net.nsatc.net seems / seemed to be failing to resolve, but then it seemed like it was internal to their infrastructure - which they later added to their status page (and clarified it was their authentication infrastructure which needed to be 'rebooted').

Not sure why I was down-voted for this, it's a direct copy-paste of the service status page which a) may not be accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed.

The status page reads as below (I've copied the text here as it a) may not be accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed / edited, c) this status page / information is usually pay-walled and only available once you've authenticated):

--

Microsoft 365 Service health status

Title: Unable to access Microsoft 365 services

User impact: Affected users are unable to authenticate to and access Microsoft 365 services.

Current status: We've received reports of an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 services. We've identified a degraded portion of infrastructure that manages authentication requests and have restarted that infrastructure to mitigate impact.

Scope of impact: This issue may potentially affect any of your users attempting to access Microsoft 365 services.

Start time: Tuesday, January 29, 2019, at 9:15 PM UTC

Preliminary root cause: A portion of infrastructure that manages authentication requests is degraded, affecting access to one or more Microsoft 365 services.

When I went to jump in the shower this morning (Melbourne) at around 7AM, it was 32deg or so, the taps in the shower were actually too hot for me to touch, I had to use a facecloth over them.

Personally - I find Apple maps (now, not at all in the early days) much better than Google maps - except for one thing: On several occasions where I enter a street address and if it's in a heavily populated area particularly if it's on an intersection the pointer will be in the wrong place on the street - I've reported these when I've encountered them and Apple has fixed each one within 24-48 hours but it's still a bit annoying when it does happen. My guessing is that because Google farms a tremendous amount of public and private data from Android devices and Google searches / services they are able to use their privately held wealth of peoples information to improve street numbering especially when new roads are added or intersections have been changed - that combined with Google maps being 14 years old and Apple maps only being 7. Still, a sensible move for a privacy focused system I believe.

Absolutely - Reeder IMO is a very well designed app and it’s great going from my phone / iPad to my home / work desktops and having the syncing work properly.

I use Feedly for my subscriptions, filters and other logic processing.

Thanks :)

Howdy, Firefox version?

Not like the example you've given, but for well designed and easy to configure diagrams that can be saved or exported in plain text (e.g. for use in documentation, websites or markdown) I use Monodraw: https://monodraw.helftone.com

For graphical diagrams I use yEd or occasionally draw.io for quick and simple graphical flow charts (online or offline as a gross javascript web frame - but it works well enough and it's free).