5 ms·

I thought this was going to be a Clippy joke, but the truth was much more disturbing. Why is Microsoft sharing this level of information (from a corporate accou

I thought this was going to be a Clippy joke, but the truth was much more disturbing. Why is Microsoft sharing this level of information (from a corporate account) with third parties?

IgorPartola 6y ago
Well I think we all know why. They make money from it. The question that’s more relevant is how many of you are going to cancel your Azure accounts and move to a different host after seeing this and will it lose MS enough money to stop the practice. I’m taking bets that not enough will at 50:1 odds.
- toyg 6y ago
  Do you really think Ubuntu doesn't already have similar agreements with other cloud providers...? Azure is a big fish. If they managed to get that, they definitely got smaller ones.
  - IgorPartola 6y ago
    Then time to move off Ubuntu? I’ve been a big fan of it for a long time but it seems my servers will be moving to a BSD sooner rather than later.
    - petschge 6y ago
      You could also just use Debian instead of Ubuntu.
      - IgorPartola 6y ago
        But systemd :). Honestly the main servers I am thinking of moving use zfs and zfs on FreeBSD is more of a first class citizen than on Linux.
        jkaplowitz 6y ago
        The zfs reason makes sense, but in recent releases Debian and Ubuntu take the same approach to systemd, so switching between those two wouldn't meaningfully change the init system situation. (I did see the smiley face; this comment is just in case that smiley is more self-deprecation than sarcasm, or for other readers.)
        IgorPartola 6y ago
        I put the smiley there because just the other day I was defending systemd on a different HN discussion as a perfectly usable piece of software. I meant that I wanted to move off a system that uses systemd which would mean both Debian and Ubuntu. It has been a while since I’ve run a non-Linux server so part of it is to stretch my stead in muscles. Don’t want to get rusty.
        jkaplowitz 6y ago
        Gotcha! Keeping skills fresh and broad is a good idea.
        mamcx 6y ago
        How good is freebsd to host a typical PG + nginx + docker + Rust/Python backend? ie: Can I use last versions of everything and expect to work? I have always used ubuntu.
        andrewzah 6y ago
        If you use docker heavily, *bsds are not an option. You do not need a *bsd just for ZFS, although it is supported quite nicely. I use zfs with proxmox for my server, which is debian based. I would recommend using debian buster. People lose their minds over systemd and it's ridiculous. Debian has been the best experience of any distro that I've used, and I've tried most of them. For my router I use openbsd.
        IgorPartola 6y ago
        BSD has jails which are roughly equivalent to Docker and are older and more stable tech. I am also a big proponent of not needing Docker nearly as much as most people seem to think it's needed. Sure, if your stack revolves around a custom-compiled nginx version downloaded off some guy's FTP site then Docker is nice, but also why does your stack revolve around a custom-compiled nginx version downloaded off some guy's FTP site? The rest will run as well or better. FreeBSD is a more cohesive unit and by some claims is more performant than Linux. tl;dr: no it won't be a seamless move because the only seamless move would be from Ubuntu to Ubuntu. But if you are willing to explore tech that isn't the current in-vogue stack you will find some really cool stuff in BSD-land. And their rc.conf is a pleasure to work with compared to to the million config files you need to use on Ubuntu/systemd.
    - 95e702cdcbd7d09 6y ago
      Other good reasons to move away from Ubuntu: * They show you ads on login * They periodically phone home with: Ubuntu version, kernel version, architecture, CPU model, curl/wget version, cloud (if applicable; aws/openstack/...). This is part of the delivery system of the ads mentioned above. See /etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news for the actual script.
      - BelenusMordred 6y ago
        * Snap breaking all the things
  - hvis 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's the other way around, and Microsoft has similar agreements with most of its partners. Ubuntu's however, is a free OS, so any cloud hosting can use it without major repercussions even without any support contract with Canonical. Any cloud provider that doesn't like this agreement, doesn't have to make it.
  - TameAntelope 6y ago
    We're all a bunch of tech folks here, so has anyone gotten an email from Canonical after spinning up an Ubuntu instance in AWS or GCP? I've at least done this on AWS and have never seen anything from Canonical.
    - rchaud 6y ago
      Your data is still on their CRM. Perhaps a salesperson looked you up and decided to pass?
      - TameAntelope 6y ago
        Right, hence the open question.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  It will definitely keep me avoiding marketplace offerings. All we do on Azure is spin up VMs / K8S deployments / Connections to on Prem. The one time we tried to set up SendGrid "from the marketplace", it failed horribly.
  - atraac 6y ago
    We tried making three Sendgrids for every environment but we werent aware that Azure has a limit of two per subscription... We got 'banned' and cannot change any of their passwords, cannot login, remove them, reset in any way, Sendgrid support sends us to Azure support. On Azure support we got an guy who barely spoke english and prolonged the case with meaningless messages for over six months after which we gave up, issue was not resolved, we're stuck with two banned Sendgrid accounts within subscription. I guess spendings of 18k eur/month is not enough to get proper support.
    - throw1234651234 6y ago
      Thanks for that story - now I am really glad it didn't work for us from the start.
- api_or_ipa 6y ago
  It's enough for me to have an extremely bad taste in my mouth, that goes for both Azure and Canonical. On the topic of linux distros, we do use Ubuntu, mostly because that's often the least effort distro to spin up, but the choice of distro is fairly arbitrary nowadays, especially for Ubuntu. My current employer uses AWS so the question of switching platforms probably won't arise now, but whether it's at this company, a new company, or my own side projects, you can bet the decision over which platform to use will come up, and horror stories like this aren't easily forgotten.
agilob 6y ago
> Why is Microsoft sharing this level of information (from a corporate account) with third parties? Because why not, it's allowed by T&C
- temac 6y ago
  Then why do the T&C contain such garbage, and why do people "accept" them (the answer to the last question being that most probably don't read them... well that strategy has its limits, for both parties apparently...)
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
It’s not a „third party“. The image spun up by the user is published to the Azure marketplace by Canonical.
phreack 6y ago
It definitely gave me Clippy vibes, and suddenly thrust me into a Black Mirror type of situation where a current day Clippy would literally forward all of your work (keystrokes, open programs, files) to sales and ad representatives so they can sell you more stuff. Every day I'm more and more paranoid of big companies now!
- jlgaddis 6y ago
  You realize that pretty much all of that happens when you use Windows 10, yes?
ohthehugemanate 6y ago
The MS response in TFA is illuminating: terms for publishing an image on the marketplace are that MS will make certain information available to facilitate user support. Sales and Marketing are explicitly forbidden uses of this information. Canonical violated their Terms, in what is probably a GDPR violation of some kind if the user is in the EU. What's interesting is whatif any enforcement action comes of this. It's not like MSFT can restrict Ubuntu image use on Azure; Linux is literally the majority of their usage. Can they sue?

I thought this was going to be a Clippy joke, but the truth was much more disturbing. Why is Microsoft sharing this level of information (from a corporate account) with third parties?

IgorPartola 6y ago

Well I think we all know why. They make money from it. The question that’s more relevant is how many of you are going to cancel your Azure accounts and move to a different host after seeing this and will it lose MS enough money to stop the practice. I’m taking bets that not enough will at 50:1 odds.

toyg 6y ago
Do you really think Ubuntu doesn't already have similar agreements with other cloud providers...? Azure is a big fish. If they managed to get that, they definitely got smaller ones.
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Then time to move off Ubuntu? I’ve been a big fan of it for a long time but it seems my servers will be moving to a BSD sooner rather than later.
  - petschge 6y ago
    You could also just use Debian instead of Ubuntu.
    - IgorPartola 6y ago
      But systemd :). Honestly the main servers I am thinking of moving use zfs and zfs on FreeBSD is more of a first class citizen than on Linux.
      - jkaplowitz 6y ago
        The zfs reason makes sense, but in recent releases Debian and Ubuntu take the same approach to systemd, so switching between those two wouldn't meaningfully change the init system situation. (I did see the smiley face; this comment is just in case that smiley is more self-deprecation than sarcasm, or for other readers.)
        IgorPartola 6y ago
        I put the smiley there because just the other day I was defending systemd on a different HN discussion as a perfectly usable piece of software. I meant that I wanted to move off a system that uses systemd which would mean both Debian and Ubuntu. It has been a while since I’ve run a non-Linux server so part of it is to stretch my stead in muscles. Don’t want to get rusty.
        jkaplowitz 6y ago
        Gotcha! Keeping skills fresh and broad is a good idea.
      - mamcx 6y ago
        How good is freebsd to host a typical PG + nginx + docker + Rust/Python backend? ie: Can I use last versions of everything and expect to work? I have always used ubuntu.
        andrewzah 6y ago
        If you use docker heavily, *bsds are not an option. You do not need a *bsd just for ZFS, although it is supported quite nicely. I use zfs with proxmox for my server, which is debian based. I would recommend using debian buster. People lose their minds over systemd and it's ridiculous. Debian has been the best experience of any distro that I've used, and I've tried most of them. For my router I use openbsd.
        IgorPartola 6y ago
        BSD has jails which are roughly equivalent to Docker and are older and more stable tech. I am also a big proponent of not needing Docker nearly as much as most people seem to think it's needed. Sure, if your stack revolves around a custom-compiled nginx version downloaded off some guy's FTP site then Docker is nice, but also why does your stack revolve around a custom-compiled nginx version downloaded off some guy's FTP site? The rest will run as well or better. FreeBSD is a more cohesive unit and by some claims is more performant than Linux. tl;dr: no it won't be a seamless move because the only seamless move would be from Ubuntu to Ubuntu. But if you are willing to explore tech that isn't the current in-vogue stack you will find some really cool stuff in BSD-land. And their rc.conf is a pleasure to work with compared to to the million config files you need to use on Ubuntu/systemd.
  - 95e702cdcbd7d09 6y ago
    Other good reasons to move away from Ubuntu: * They show you ads on login * They periodically phone home with: Ubuntu version, kernel version, architecture, CPU model, curl/wget version, cloud (if applicable; aws/openstack/...). This is part of the delivery system of the ads mentioned above. See /etc/update-motd.d/50-motd-news for the actual script.
    - BelenusMordred 6y ago
      * Snap breaking all the things
- hvis 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's the other way around, and Microsoft has similar agreements with most of its partners. Ubuntu's however, is a free OS, so any cloud hosting can use it without major repercussions even without any support contract with Canonical. Any cloud provider that doesn't like this agreement, doesn't have to make it.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  We're all a bunch of tech folks here, so has anyone gotten an email from Canonical after spinning up an Ubuntu instance in AWS or GCP? I've at least done this on AWS and have never seen anything from Canonical.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    Your data is still on their CRM. Perhaps a salesperson looked you up and decided to pass?
    - TameAntelope 6y ago
      Right, hence the open question.
throw1234651234 6y ago
It will definitely keep me avoiding marketplace offerings. All we do on Azure is spin up VMs / K8S deployments / Connections to on Prem. The one time we tried to set up SendGrid "from the marketplace", it failed horribly.
- atraac 6y ago
  We tried making three Sendgrids for every environment but we werent aware that Azure has a limit of two per subscription... We got 'banned' and cannot change any of their passwords, cannot login, remove them, reset in any way, Sendgrid support sends us to Azure support. On Azure support we got an guy who barely spoke english and prolonged the case with meaningless messages for over six months after which we gave up, issue was not resolved, we're stuck with two banned Sendgrid accounts within subscription. I guess spendings of 18k eur/month is not enough to get proper support.
  - throw1234651234 6y ago
    Thanks for that story - now I am really glad it didn't work for us from the start.
api_or_ipa 6y ago
It's enough for me to have an extremely bad taste in my mouth, that goes for both Azure and Canonical. On the topic of linux distros, we do use Ubuntu, mostly because that's often the least effort distro to spin up, but the choice of distro is fairly arbitrary nowadays, especially for Ubuntu. My current employer uses AWS so the question of switching platforms probably won't arise now, but whether it's at this company, a new company, or my own side projects, you can bet the decision over which platform to use will come up, and horror stories like this aren't easily forgotten.

agilob 6y ago

> Why is Microsoft sharing this level of information (from a corporate account) with third parties? Because why not, it's allowed by T&C

temac 6y ago
Then why do the T&C contain such garbage, and why do people "accept" them (the answer to the last question being that most probably don't read them... well that strategy has its limits, for both parties apparently...)

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

It’s not a „third party“. The image spun up by the user is published to the Azure marketplace by Canonical.

phreack 6y ago

It definitely gave me Clippy vibes, and suddenly thrust me into a Black Mirror type of situation where a current day Clippy would literally forward all of your work (keystrokes, open programs, files) to sales and ad representatives so they can sell you more stuff. Every day I'm more and more paranoid of big companies now!

jlgaddis 6y ago
You realize that pretty much all of that happens when you use Windows 10, yes?

ohthehugemanate 6y ago

The MS response in TFA is illuminating: terms for publishing an image on the marketplace are that MS will make certain information available to facilitate user support. Sales and Marketing are explicitly forbidden uses of this information. Canonical violated their Terms, in what is probably a GDPR violation of some kind if the user is in the EU. What's interesting is whatif any enforcement action comes of this. It's not like MSFT can restrict Ubuntu image use on Azure; Linux is literally the majority of their usage. Can they sue?