this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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I know this will sound paranoid as fuck, but I've really been thinking about Microsoft lately. Like, they're pushing their Recall shit whether we like it or not. The fact that it even made it past the concept stage tells me that no one at Microsoft gives a single fuck about their users anymore. The final shreds of any trust I had in them as a company are gone and I've started thinking of them as an adversary.

Today I was considering Teams in particular. My company has been using it for maybe six years. When our email provider went teats up, I did some research and realized we had Microsoft cloud stuff included in our Action Pack subscription. We started using their email, and about the same time we started using Teams.

Teams offers EEE but only on Teams Premium, which we don't pay extra for. Microsoft has access to every message and chat. They could be saving transcripts and voice calls. They might have accumulated billions of hours of voice data by now.

What could they do with all this data?

  1. Sell to LEO
  2. Commit corporate espionage
  3. Gather government secrets
  4. Use for AI training

Something else just occurred to me. I did research a while back on the software stacks that big tech companies use. Not one uses IIS.

I've been a Windows developer for thirty years. I used to like Microsoft. I looked forward to new versions of Windows and Visual Studio. Now I feel like they've lured us all in slowly until we put our throats in their jaws. Fucking mental.

Talk me down, if you can.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (3 children)

no one at Microsoft gives a single fuck about their users anymore

I don't think they ever did.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I suppose pointing out MS also owns linkedin isn’t the talk down you’re looking for?

If you’re a dev, this along with GitHub, and your employer using teams, is a pretty severe panopticon.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 2 months ago (1 children)

All I can do is talk you up. I think it's a lot worse than what you've highlighted.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Sell to LEO

Low Earth Orbit? I hate TLAs

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh sorry I meant law enforcement. Not sure what my dumb ass was trying to abbreviate there.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Law Enforcement Organizations, it's a valid initialism

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

Yeah, just as Zoom.

Jitsi for the win! And also Big Blue Button, for certain settings that may be better.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Teams is absolutely used already or going to be used to train AI. Probably already has been used in corporate espionage. And yes, IIS is a steaming pile of shit compared to the alternatives. It's really only even entertained as an option at smaller businesses in my experience.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

@sgibson5150 all valid points and the business practice they employed many times before. Embrace, extend, and extinguish. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

On a related note, within the past year microshit made it so you can't join a teams meeting on their android app unless you give it permission to see your phone number

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