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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 16 2019, @01:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the outlook-cloudy-try-again-later dept.

Several sites are reporting that Windows 10 telemetry and the invasiveness of Office 365's monitoring mean that schools in the German state of Hesse have been banned from using it. The decision was handed down by the Hesse Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (HBDI — Hessische Beauftragte für Datenschutz und die Informationsfreiheit.) The ban also applies to many other "cloud" services for the same reasons, so Google Docs and Apple's hosted services are banned as well in the same move.

The issue is not solely with hosted services in and of themselves but with the data collection carried out by the services and the question of consent for that with minors. The issue of coerced consent is not raised yet in that context. For the time being, standalone solutions like LibreOffice or Calligra would solve the problem and, many would say, be significantly better all around.

[There used to be a datacenter in Germany — the Deutschland-Cloud — on which the German student data was stored, but that was closed in August 2018. That data was migrated, and new data is now stored, on a European data center that can be accessed by US officials upon request. --Ed.]

9to5Mac: Office 365 banned from German schools, Google Docs and iWork also ruled out
CNet: Microsoft Office 365 banned in some schools over privacy concerns
The Verge: German state bans Office 365 in schools, citing privacy concerns
The Next Web: German schools ban Microsoft Office 365 amid privacy concerns
Original Decision: Stellungnahme des Hessischen Beauftragten für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit zum Einsatz von Microsoft Office 365 in hessischen Schulen


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:17PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:17PM (#867615) Journal

    The irony of the ribbon interface is that LibreOffice now has the standard familiar pull down menus, and Microsoft Office does not.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:11PM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:11PM (#868085) Journal

    The irony of the ribbon interface is that LibreOffice now has the standard familiar pull down menus, and Microsoft Office does not.

    But are they "standard and familiar" anymore? I'm not being dense here. Think about this. The "pull down menu" concept was standard for a couple decades, but how often do most people interact with such systems nowadays? It's still part of Mac OS X (even in MS Office), but not in Windows. An increasing number of Linux and Windows applications tend to minimize drop-down menu systems or completely eliminate them.

    Today most young people interact with apps on devices that require them to "discover" how to interact through weird combinations of swipes and clicks and two-finger clicks and who knows what else, all surrounding a bunch of meaningless graphical icons whose meaning is impossible to decipher unless you just try clicking on them. Pretty much the model of the Ribbon. I find them as annoying and stupid as you probably do too, but that's the reality. The closest many apps come to a "drop down menu" is often a single "Start-like" button that hides a single menu of settings, sometimes opening dialogues for more advanced settings. But multiple sets of organized drop-down menus classified by action and concept? They grow less prevalent with each passing year.

    I'm not happy about this. But I definitely know younger people who grew up with the Ribbon and love it. They find it intuitive and less clunky than menus. If you read the LibreOffice forums, you'll see quite a few posts complaining about the lack of a Ribbon interface.

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:52PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:52PM (#868119) Journal

      I agree that younger people are sadly grow accustomed to awful interfaces.

      The Ribbon interface at least has discoverability. Something sadly lacking in, say, Gnome 3, for example. It's like being back to the command line but with a GUI. You have to know what you're looking for in order to find it.

      However, a large number of desktop applications on both Windows and Linux still use pull down menus. I don't think they are going away anytime soon. Pull down menus solved a real problem. How to make a huge number of commands instantly available, yet discoverable, yet without taking up screen space when you don't need to see them. Next came "toolbars" which made commands available, visible, but continuously took up screen space. Sometime in the classic Mac days, there was some experimentation with "tear off" menus. You could grab, say the File or Edit menu, and "tear" it off the menu bar, so it became a free floating "window" with its commands revealed. (with a close box, like a window)

      Once there was toolbars, then we had toolbars gone berzerk.

      Then the Ribbon -- which despite my outright hatred of Microsoft -- was an improvement, I think. At least it wasn't that horrible. But it was different than a couple decades of existing familiar practice.

      Ubuntu's default interface, and Gnome 3 are both awful because they seem to try to make things almost inaccessible unless you know what you want already. An interface not fit for new users.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.