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German State of Lower Saxony Plans to Switch From Linux to Windows

posted by chromas on Saturday July 28 2018, @12:16PM   
from the progress dept.

takyon writes:

Another German state plans switch back from Linux to Windows

The German state of Lower Saxony plans to follow Munich's example, and migrate a reported 13,000 users from Linux back to Windows.

Apparently undaunted by the cost of the Munich switch (which we reported in January could be as much as €100m), Lower Saxony is considering making the change in its tax office. The state seems to expect a much cheaper transition, with Heise (in German here) reporting the first-year budget is €5.9m, and another €7m further out.

The tax office argues its decision is driven by compatibility: field workers and teleworkers overwhelmingly use Windows, while the OpenSUSE variants are installed on its office workstations. The office workstations are also ageing and due for replacement, something that helped open the door for Windows.

Related: Linux Champion Munich Takes Decisive Step Towards Returning to Windows
Munich Switching From Linux to Windows 10
German Documentary on Relations Between Microsoft and Public Administration Now Available in English

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Original Submission

• Re:alternative headline... (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29 2018, @05:52AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29 2018, @05:52AM (#714246)

  I have a different theory: SystemD is the NSA's Linux backdoor. I know, this sounds tin-foil-hattery nutty, but it's one of the few explanations that make sense (another one being that Lennart Poettering is one of the most elaborate and succesful trolls in history).

  • SystemD originated from and was heavily pushed by Redhat, a US company. After Snowden, it has become clear that US IT corps have lots of incentives to play nice with the NSA and those who refuse will be bullied. A rationally acting company (or one that wants the juicy government contracts) will play ball as long as it's guaranteed the public will never know.

  • Several large FOSS distros went ahead with the conversion to SystemD despite heavy internal resistance. In the case of Debian, my impression was that their democratic process had been subverted by agents of some external agenda. Especially in the early days of SystemD, there weren't compelling technical reasons to prefer it over SysV init. In fact it was a buggy mess causing lots of people lots of headaches, yet those distros pushed it on their users anyway. It was a political decision, it's just not clear whose policy it was.

  • Runs as PID 1 and gets its grubby fingers on all critical system components, feature creep nonwithstandng, while being a huge fucking mess of a code base. It would be easy to put several backdoors/exploitable bugs in there, using underhanded code and plausibly claim ignorance if one were discovered.

  • The Linux kernel, the only other system component with the same potential for subverting security, is well-audited and often has distro-specific patches - while SystemD is the same code on every distro and to my knowledge has never been audited by trusted third parties.

  • Linux by design has a much smaller attack surface than Windows - which for an organization like the NSA may have become an increasingly prevalent showstopper with Linux dominance in the server segment and rising numbers of desktop users. The NSA itself contributed SELinux which can mitigate even successful exploitation of a system. Maybe Linux was too secure. If that was the case, then putting some zero days of their own in every distro is just the sort of evil genius plan I'd expect from the NSA. SystemD would be the perfect vehicle. After having seen the Snowden docs and their approach to targeting individual users for exploitation - subverting the very infrastructure of the whole internet - subverting some FLOSS hippie communes and selling them on a piece of FLOSS software with at least some merits looks like the easier task.

  Call me a conspiracy theorist. But from how things stand, I'll default to assuming that SystemD is an NSA trojan - until proven otherwise.

  Parent

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