from the Your-Personal-Details-Belong-To-Us-Dept dept.
Yammer, the Facebook clone for enterprises, now demands users to provide their date of birth to be able to access the network. The fallacy with this is that while saying "Verify your age to continue" it says "Enter your birthday to verify that you meet the age requirement to use Yammer." which doesn't make sense for a social network designed for work environments where it is a given that users will be of adult age.
Microsoft have stated (Microsoft account required) that this is due to the pending merge of Yammer with Microsoft 365, however it also states that if the organization using Yammer does not have any users under the age of 16 then this verification step of sending each user's date of birth to Microsoft is not required. This is being seen as another step by Microsoft towards killing Yammer in favor of "Microsoft Teams" which so far has very little traction in the social networking space. This may be one of the final nails in the coffin for the ailing social network for corporations.
(Score: 4, Funny) by requerdanos on Monday June 04 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)
Perhaps if they added features like source code repositories and associated wikis and bug tracking, it would catch on a little better.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 04 2018, @06:03PM
Teams and Yammer.
Who ever heard about either of these?
I had to look up Yammer where I found
Oddly, that "Private" claim is missing from Yammer's own website.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Monday June 04 2018, @04:55PM (4 children)
Look, Microsoft is obviously doing its part to stop child labor. We should commend them for that!
Sarcasm aside... Any chance this has to do with GDPR or some regulation?
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Monday June 04 2018, @05:23PM
Go to your local video rental store. Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, any of them. And rent HOME ALONe 2: Lost in New York. Starring me -- and Macaulay Culkin. You'll change your mind about youth employment!
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday June 04 2018, @05:38PM (1 child)
Probably not connected with the GDPR, but Europe has been asking the various social media sites to ensure that age limits on usage are enforced. This is perhaps as much as any company can do in the short term to placate those voices, but as we all know typing in a date of birth hardly means that it is accurate or true.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 04 2018, @05:55PM
Ah, but then you've violated the TOS by entering false information.
And they already have your DOB anyway (harvested along with everything else they know), so they instantly know you are lying.
But don't worry. They won't use it against you - not now anyway.
They will sit on it till there is some reason for them or some government agency to throw you under a legal bus somewhere down the road.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:03PM
> Any chance this has to do with GDPR or some regulation?
Date of birth is personal information. Unless they can document that they have a need to know the specific date and not just how old the person is, it is thus information they are not allowed to collect.
So I guess the answer is yes. Assuming that someone at Microsoft took the GDPR and asked... "Google is still beating us on evil. How can we be more evil"?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @05:05PM (5 children)
In five years, will we be talking about the final nails in the coffin for GitHub?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @05:21PM (1 child)
No... But everything on GitHub will be blessed with NSA piggybacked payloads.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @06:29PM
They've already got sourceforge to distribute cometcursor and various spyware as a binary download site; they don't need 50K college students version of babys_first_hello_world.py source code.
Something I really like about python is regardless if the system I'm setting up has 2.7 or 3.x installed, there's a 100% chance that if I need some python FOSS cruft from somewhere, that it'll only work on the opposite version. Despite claims 2.7 was released 8 years ago and everyone's going to 3.x as of six months from now, for the last 8 years. Didn't Indiana Jones say something along the lines of "snakes, I hate snakes".
I like how the Perl community handled the transition to Perl 6 by not transitioning at all. Much less painful than the python transition to 3.x that is scheduled to be complete six months from now. I wish the Linux community had handled the transition to systemd the same way.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Monday June 04 2018, @05:31PM
Yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 04 2018, @05:34PM (1 child)
Genuine Microsoft brand nails.
And coffins.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @05:38PM
Microsoft brand nails are actually screws as anyone who has been screwed by Microsoft will attest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @06:27PM
Names, birthdates and workplaces will be enough for Microsoft to identify most users of Yammer effectively enough to sell data about them or target ads at them outside of the workplace.
Reminder: you may Yammer but you are still the product.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @06:35PM
Age is boring; its so half way. If you're gonna piss off people, so it right. MS should have required something much more useful, like proof of citizenship or legal immigration paperwork.
Wouldn't it be a novel hack to the system for crappy "BS as a Service" providers to put just enough crypto in the products to get on the naughty list where you can't do business with citizens of Syria or Somalia or Best Korea or whatever, and then all ..AAS products have to verify legal citizenship to make sure the NKs aren't stealing military grade ROT13 encryption by posing as legal US employees and stealing yer HTML and CSS files... I cautiously endorse this idea...
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Monday June 04 2018, @06:43PM
I'll see your
And raise with
I've worked at big corporates, conceptually a real world not fake social network would be something like infinite /b/ posting trolls about every other department. Ha ha here is a meme pix of a dude in a car crash making fun of accounts receivable department, and stuff like that, into infinity. The smiley face BS corporate speak is a company social network would be all about unicorns with candy flying out their butts and infinite profitability via synergy but real world corporates mostly see every other dept as their primary enemy, when they aren't seeing the customer as the enemy of course. See, this guy, this guy Kafkas, I know all about corporate lyfe.
Seriously in dog eat dog world, you don't want people discussing the cooking recipes. And no thats not anti-Korean slur, one of my favorite coworkers was from (south?) Korea. AFAIK.
(Score: 2) by Sourcery42 on Monday June 04 2018, @07:36PM
Please go away so starry eyed twits can stop telling me I'm resistant to change and failing to embrace new technology when I pick up the phone to get shit done instead of composing a post for some glorified bulletin board.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday June 04 2018, @09:30PM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @09:45PM
well, these "celebrities" were born then,
1970 Kimberly Page, American wrestling manager and actress. Life path number 1
1970 Sergei Kiriakov, Russian footballer. Life path number 1
according to https://mybirthday.ninja/famous-birthdays/January-1/page-14/ [mybirthday.ninja]
Oddly, this site doesn't seem to know about the beginning of time or any eunuchs...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:09PM
Nope, I'm born in February 31st. At least when Steam wants my age to show me another crappy zombie game.
(Score: 2) by https on Monday June 04 2018, @09:36PM (1 child)
Interestingly, the article is not accessible if you lack a microsoft online account. This could be fiction, for all I know.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:43AM
Ya see, you have to sign up and give your date of birth to find out if you have to give them your date of birth or not. Clever, eh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @11:31PM (2 children)
Set your date of birth to 1/1/1970.
You can always claim it on a bug!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:21AM (1 child)
We've been trying to figure out why so many people are born on January 1st. Maybe it has something to do with dark matter violating the Standard Model on 4/1.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday June 05 2018, @08:44AM
Is this a horse race?