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
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:15PM (2 children)
An entire generation raised using LibreOffice (and other great open source software) in their learning would be a nice start.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @04:32PM (1 child)
Yes. Schools, which are supposed to promote education and independence, should never use proprietary software, except perhaps to teach students how to reverse engineer it. Proprietary software is the antithesis of both education and independence; it denies users their freedoms, thus making them dependent upon someone else to develop the software; it denies users the ability to educate themselves about how the software functions; and it often locks users in and allows the developers to abuse them with near impunity.
It should be outright forbidden for schools to use proprietary software, in fact.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:27PM
i came to post much the same except i would add that it is adding insult to injury to use extorted tax dollars to buy software that the extortion victims wouldn't even have rights to/own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @02:51PM
Then it will find a loophole to continue doing business.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SomeGuy on Tuesday July 16 2019, @03:28PM (5 children)
I will never, ever, understand why anyone would want some "cloud" shit like Office 365. But I do understand why Microsoft wants everyone to have it. In part so they can spy on people just like this. The other part, of course, is getting money forever without ever adding features.
As I understand it, Microsoft "still" sells a proper desktop version of Office 2019, but Microsoft is trying to get rid of it.
Haven't given a shit about Microsoft Office since they added that awful ribbon interface.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:17PM (2 children)
The irony of the ribbon interface is that LibreOffice now has the standard familiar pull down menus, and Microsoft Office does not.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:11PM (1 child)
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
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.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @06:28PM (1 child)
Students here ate the google shit up when it first came out; many being able to collaboratively work on a document at the same time was (and is) rather cool.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:32PM
yeah, and you can do that with FOSS now. pretty sure Nextcloud has this feature.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by CheesyMoo on Tuesday July 16 2019, @03:54PM (12 children)
is big pain in the ass for these big institutions.
I wouldn't want to be an IT worker in one of these offices or large institutions that is shifting from traditional, on-prem software that you can install and then secure/lock-down the computer, to these cloud installs that are constantly phoning home and transferring data in the background. With lots of software going in the direction of a subscription, push-based model, your security is now a pain in the ass. Either you let this application call the mothership and download the new updates, or you have a potentially broken install. Maybe some clever Soylentils have better ways to manage this (yeah, I already know *nix, what else ya got ? "I ONLY USE A JAILBROKEN TI-89+ GRAPHING CALCULATOR"), either way, I'm glad this isn't my problem.
Personally its easier to keep one of my work machines air-gapped and never update it again. Its not like the extra bloat companies are adding are doing me favors anyway.
(Score: 5, Funny) by srobert on Tuesday July 16 2019, @04:15PM (5 children)
"Personally its easier to keep one of my work machines air-gapped ..."
As a water resources engineer I find the term "airgapped" to be an interesting metaphor for an isolated computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:12PM (4 children)
You've never heard of it?
It's an old term -- think SCADA networks or say nuclear power plant and other 'critical' function computers that would experience a significant degree of 'bad' should they be compromised over a remote connection.
"Airgap" used to mean "I disconnected the network cable" and then included "we sealed all the USB ports with glue and clipped the wireless antenna wire built into the frame and spun it around three times and howled at the moon" until finally it meant "christ what else are they using to provide "valuable services" that we can't disable?
One must disable the microphone, speakers, serial, bluetooth, flashing LEDs, "wireless", "network", pour epoxy or glue into any applicable interface port, and maybe even disable biometric scanners and such that could be used to record information that can be copied later during a fateful intrusion that occurs later on when someone finds a way to restore some of the conveniences again, or gets a new computer that has a new interface that wasn't disabled yet, etc.
The air means "I can wave my hand through it and there are no connections to stop me from doing it" That obviously is a little outdated considering wireless ethernet, bluetooth, etc--but the idea is the same. You essentially put the device in a bubble of isolation and hope no one pops it.
It often works best in environments that also demand responsibility and accountability from people that know the dangers of being insecure--places that instill such things because the paper cert CISSP from the tech firm supplying outsourcing services read on gartner that its a magic quadrant win to embrace hybrid air gap clouds or something... *at a business with other concerns they should be worrying about...everyone there will resent the air gap policies and some of them will defeat it out of spite, if not malice.
*these things are sometimes tested via the mysterious USB key found in the parking lot. Sometimes because a business paid for the security audit, sometimes because of other reasons.
(Score: 4, Informative) by captain normal on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:57PM (2 children)
That post by srobert seems to have whooshed right by you. As a retired facilities project engineer, I groked his joke and had a good laugh. "Airgap" is an old (much older than network systems) plumbing term referring to a physical separation between potable water supply and sewage.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday July 16 2019, @08:49PM
I call dibs on the potable water supply!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Friday July 26 2019, @03:38PM
You are probably right, but forgive me for seeing the facet based on what I do for a living...
I know what a sewage airgap is -- I've had to pour vegetable oil down into them sometimes to keep that airgap from making data center work unbearable during renovations!!
Sewage and air can still transmit a lot of data if you know what I mean. oil in the drain is frowned upon... but so is retching in the summer when the building AC is off in a place that has bugs flying out of the data center floor vents due to a lack of proper care...
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday July 17 2019, @01:27AM
Old tech, bro. Secure installations in my office don't even have an "ls" command. If one doesn't know what's in there, one can't find out. At least that's the idea.
I am trying to tell them that in such an environment if a hacker does get in, they would never be able to find her, but to no avail.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:07PM (1 child)
It's even more fun when one tries to use a feature you've used for years but they updated the software last week without telling you and now it's a different mechanism to get the functionality you needed. It's happened to me quite a bit.
(Score: 4, Informative) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:15PM
Or, like Office 365 - the security options for the cloud environment are a SEPARATE LICENSE available to enterprise or premium accounts. Your ability to restrict access is fairly limited without it. You can't, for example, block someone in a foreign country from installing Office on your license without owning a security license to allow enforcement. You can't block logins to your account from IP address without a security license. You can't turn off (most) of the login protocols without the security license. Even with the security license, some styles of login are not covered by the GUI apparently, I haven't dug far into that yet.
Also, some of these features only work properly in Edge. A few options don't appear in other browsers at all ("we recommend a compatible browser").
You can do some of this with Powershell, connecting directly to Office 365, but there's no cmdlets for most of those functions.
When you turn on security options like country blocking, I haven't found a good way to show if it is actually doing anything, either. This might be on me though, I haven't had time to read all of the audit options just yet.
It's crazy. Nothing simple with Office 365. The company management likes the information on how users are making use of the programs though as (one source of) indirect measures of what is actually useful and who is making effective use of their assigned resources...
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday July 16 2019, @05:21PM (3 children)
LibreOffice is working on a cloud hosted version. Fortunately, a school, if they so desired, could host it on their own servers. Although I don't think it is quite ready yet.
This makes Chomebooks (and similar devices) even more attractive to education.
Nothing wrong with "cloud" hosting, as long as you can control your own cloud. The advantage is that the end user devices, especially for students, become cheap and easily replaced if one is lost, stolen or eaten.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 16 2019, @07:38PM
even better if a school would have the guts to buy the chromebooks or other 2nd hand and teach the kids to clean the scum off before using them.
(Score: 4, Funny) by srobert on Tuesday July 16 2019, @09:23PM (1 child)
"Nothing wrong with "cloud" hosting, as long as you can control your own cloud."
Great now all I can hear is Mick Jagger in my head.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:41AM
Have some Samuel L Jackson instead. Here's what was proposed as the department in the original submission:
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.