6 ms·

> Adair said he’s fielded dozens of calls today from state and local government agencies that have identified the backdoors in their Exchange servers and are pl

> Adair said he’s fielded dozens of calls today from state and local government agencies that have identified the backdoors in their Exchange servers and are pleading for help. I can imagine they are sending an email to support@microsoft.com pleading for help. A future attacker would be well served to deny email to be sent to any mailbox @microsoft.com EDIT: I'm now realizing that this follows the Microsoft-angle of the Solarwinds' attack. These customers are not going to be happy with $MS

mschuster91 6y ago
> EDIT: I'm now realizing that this follows the Microsoft-angle of the Solarwinds' attack. These customers are not going to be happy with $MS Won't hurt MS in the long run. There is no viable alternative to switch to, for any of their products: * OS: macOS runs only on expensive Apple hardware, Linux can't run business software, plus both have retraining costs for employees * Office software: Libreoffice just... doesn't cut it, let's be honest. Apple's stuff only runs on Macs. * Exchange: Lotus Notes is dead, and while there are open source solutions, there is no comprehensive single solution.
- koprulusector 6y ago
  I’ve been using Linux for work and personal for 4 years. Almost everything used in the enterprise today has a web app/electron version or runs natively. Including MS products themselves. I laugh maniacally every time I’m working in Word online... muahahaha
  - Shared404 6y ago
    When Microsoft starts writing apps for Linux...
    - EvanAnderson 6y ago
      There's Teams... >snicker<
      - kaliszad 6y ago
        @Shared404 has written applications not garbage. /s
        Shared404 6y ago
        Lol. TBF, Linus never specified that they had to be good applications :P . They (did? / are doing?) Edge for Linux though, for some reason.
      - hpcjoe 6y ago
        Teams ... is terrible. Doesn't matter the platform.
      - Lucasoato 6y ago
        I've been using Teams for a couple of months in Linux Mint, works fine kinda. It froze only once and it was ok after a restart.
  - eterm 6y ago
    How many employees do you have?
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  Hm.. I find it funny that organizations use MS products and stay in business. The amount of downtime and ridiculous failures I saw regularly as a consultant were astounding. My coworkers used Macs which really don't cost anything given hardware lasts 8+ years now. Most companies using Windows have a large budget for laptop IT that costs more than replacing expensive machines often if that were necessary.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    If a place's main problem with their laptops is what type of hardware they selected they are doing extraordinarily well in my book. It's usually the 10,000 lbs of bullshit apps in the standard image and grossly inefficient means of dealing with users issues that create the performance issues or drive up department costs in the long run. Few workers really have much of a local performance need that they wouldn't notice if a raspberry pi came in as long as it was well maintained and behaved the same functionality wise. At my previous employer they started to allow Macs and people were clamoring for them because they ran GREAT but after the first few thousand went out they started building up the amount of BS loaded approached being equal to the Windows ones and suddenly the satisfaction levels started to even out with the standard build. Chromebooks actually became very popular because they were even harder to be loaded with crap than Macs.
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    I've found Macs don't really last that much longer. The previous Mac I had, I actually begged for it to be replaced as it had a spinny HDD and recent versions of macOS run very poorly on these. Luckily it turned out it was close to being sent back to the leasing company. $EMPLOYER policy (as often is the case in larger employers) don't allow me to replace the HDD with the SSD. The newer one I now have which has a SSD is now performing poorly so I am already looking forward to a replacement already and it's still under the 3 years window. My colleagues with PCs (as we are issued PC or Macs depending on the location we work at at the time) seem to be happy with even the older PCs. I had a oldish temp PC for a while when my Mac needed repairs and it ran Windows fairly well. I used to be a big advocate for Macs but not any more.
    - 6y ago
- PascLeRasc 6y ago
  The macOS hardware is a little more expensive but over the long run it's significantly cheaper: https://www.vox.com/2016/10/20/13337652/mac-ibm-business-cheaper https://www.vox.com/2016/10/20/13337652/mac-ibm-business-che...
  - kiwijamo 6y ago
    Apple hardware have some downsides though. One big advantage of HP, Dell, etc is their support. Apple repairs takes weeks (especially here in New Zealand) as they expect devices to be sent long distances to wherever they repair them. HP, Dell, etc can do on-site repairs in <24 hours in many cases. If it's just your personal device then a few weeks may be an inconvenience. But for businesses it can cost them enough that getting a support contract from HP, Dell, et al can be worth it.
    - lysium 6y ago
      I’m sorry, what are you talking about? You boot your new Mac laptop from your time machine backup and are back working within hours, not weeks.
      - mschuster91 6y ago
        That's bollocks. Time Machine performance over network is atrocious. With a HP/Dell Enterprise line model all you need is a decent set of screwdrivers (and if you're touching anything that requires taking off heat pipes, skme thermal paste) and you can literally replace any part in a hour or two from a spare laptop - or you just swap the disk in a spare. With Apple's newest shit you can't even do that since everything is soldered. I'm a die-hard Apple fan, but for large shops professional machines are lower in maintenance cost.
        matwood 6y ago
        It's been awhile since I was in a big org, but when I was, no one was replacing laptop parts. The deals we had with Dell/HP were basically overnight replacements (this was different from servers where we had 4 hour on-site support). Then we would send them broken machines that would eventually come back fixed. So do big orgs actually have people internally swapping random parts in a laptop to see if they can fix it? Doesn't change the point that Apple was more expensive, but mainly because Dell/HP prices go way down at volume.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  The viable alternative is Google Workspace. At most companies, a small percentage of employees will still need Excel for really complex/large spreadsheets, or Word for complex formatting destined for publication. But for 95% of people Google's good enough or better. Year after year, Google keeps stealing more of Microsoft's customers, and it's extremely common for new companies to adopt Google rather than Microsoft.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    It seems MS is winning in the Education space - the existing mindshare for MS Office means it's hard to accept free Google Workspace and the learning curve that might come from that vs. M365 with the free desktop Office licenses they give out to every student and teacher.
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      > It seems MS is winning in the Education space Which country, and what level of education? In the US, cheap Chromebooks with GSuite have taken over K-12
      - fh973 6y ago
        Germany. Since Corona, Teams is suddenly everywhere.
    - roody15 6y ago
      Google is absolutely dominating the K-12 education market.
      - ahepp 6y ago
        I would think tertiary matters a lot more than k-12
        arcturus17 6y ago
        I’d agree, as it is one step closer to the labor market, and Enterprise is the goose with the golden eggs. But is Microsoft really dominant in tertiary?
- kaliszad 6y ago
  There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. If your corporate application doesn't run with a useful web interface, you probably have other issues too. Word is an application that puts looks, thousands of mostly useless features and pixel-pushing up front. Excel at least really enables normal people to do some advanced calculations on data but the former still applies. Both are very complex tools mostly hindering any kind of value-added thinking and creativity but give you enough foot-guns and are really "fun" to support if you count Outlook in as well. I mean, how do you program an application that regularly crashes and corrupts the email database? LibreOffice is the same kind of thinking, because it mostly is a copy of the ideas in Word, Excel etc. Actually, when we are at it, Google Docs is more or less as problematic as the other tools. Actually, just opening any of these applications seems a bit overwhelming. Why should you care that the readable font is 11 or 12 px big (it actually isn't that comfortable to read, but ok)? Why should you care that the default font is called Calibri or whatever? This is information and complexity that is shown by default that usually adds exactly nothing to your business. The same is with colours. Why should you want to have the option to select custom colours with two clicks or so when most people choose colours badly? The default colours offered are really not that great either.
  - macintux 6y ago
    You’re arguing against decades of experience to the contrary. I certainly would prefer plain text for most content a business generates, but the market has overwhelmingly voted in the other direction. I believe for some interactions with the U.S. government Word is even mandatory. And it’s effectively mandatory for collaboration with everyone else.
    - futuretaint 6y ago
      many industries are dependant on Excel also. entire industries. Accounting, finance etc...
      - kaliszad 6y ago
        You mean the industries, that are liable for most of the initial suffering during the 1930s, 2000s and so on? A case could be made that some of it lead more or less directly to wars. Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)
- adjkant 6y ago
  > Office software GSuite seems like the answer here. Mail, Docs, Sheets, Slides will work for a vast majority of businesses.
  - ThinkBeat 6y ago
    If you wish to compare MS offerings to GSuite then you should not compare it to on prem but to Office365. I do not believe without data that switch from one closed source proprietary software provider to another one will guarantee you from hacks. Switch to open source most certainly does not. Nor is switching from one proprietary provider for your software from Microsoft -> google
    - adjkant 6y ago
      It's not a guarantee but I'll trust Google for application security over Microsoft every time. That said, it's not the question. The question is if a company wanted to switch away from Microsoft here, what is their option? It's not an inherent statement that one is actually better, but that there is an option if one feels burned by Microsoft here.
      - arcturus17 6y ago
        I’d trust them marginally better, but certainly not orders of magnitude more. We don’t know if Google would do significantly better if they operated at the same scale as MS in Enterprise. Google operates some consumer properties at an even larger scale, but I get the feeling that Enterprise is particularly attractive to hackers for the potential rewards. Last week Firebase sent me a notification that several of my properties (some of them enterprise apps) had lost domain name verification. The panel in the console was clearly glitched when I inspected it. Two days later they sent a correction saying that this had been a mistake. No big deal, but it goes on to show that Google is not perfect.
        adjkant 6y ago
        I'm not sure what scale would affect this that Google hasn't already hit? I've already had GSuite for my high school, my college, and my work. What additional scale would open up massive security holes? This seems like it's very much just horizontally scaling the same product. Not to mention that GSuite already has 6M different customers/tenants. They're already at a comparable scale, and that doesn't mention that the free versions have the same application security model, with zero incidents (knock on wood). "but scale" feels like it's ignoring the already existing track record and scale and just making excuses for Microsoft.

mschuster91 6y ago

> EDIT: I'm now realizing that this follows the Microsoft-angle of the Solarwinds' attack. These customers are not going to be happy with $MS Won't hurt MS in the long run. There is no viable alternative to switch to, for any of their products: * OS: macOS runs only on expensive Apple hardware, Linux can't run business software, plus both have retraining costs for employees * Office software: Libreoffice just... doesn't cut it, let's be honest. Apple's stuff only runs on Macs. * Exchange: Lotus Notes is dead, and while there are open source solutions, there is no comprehensive single solution.

koprulusector 6y ago
I’ve been using Linux for work and personal for 4 years. Almost everything used in the enterprise today has a web app/electron version or runs natively. Including MS products themselves. I laugh maniacally every time I’m working in Word online... muahahaha
- Shared404 6y ago
  When Microsoft starts writing apps for Linux...
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    There's Teams... >snicker<
    - kaliszad 6y ago
      @Shared404 has written applications not garbage. /s
      - Shared404 6y ago
        Lol. TBF, Linus never specified that they had to be good applications :P . They (did? / are doing?) Edge for Linux though, for some reason.
    - hpcjoe 6y ago
      Teams ... is terrible. Doesn't matter the platform.
    - Lucasoato 6y ago
      I've been using Teams for a couple of months in Linux Mint, works fine kinda. It froze only once and it was ok after a restart.
- eterm 6y ago
  How many employees do you have?
foolmeonce 6y ago
Hm.. I find it funny that organizations use MS products and stay in business. The amount of downtime and ridiculous failures I saw regularly as a consultant were astounding. My coworkers used Macs which really don't cost anything given hardware lasts 8+ years now. Most companies using Windows have a large budget for laptop IT that costs more than replacing expensive machines often if that were necessary.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  If a place's main problem with their laptops is what type of hardware they selected they are doing extraordinarily well in my book. It's usually the 10,000 lbs of bullshit apps in the standard image and grossly inefficient means of dealing with users issues that create the performance issues or drive up department costs in the long run. Few workers really have much of a local performance need that they wouldn't notice if a raspberry pi came in as long as it was well maintained and behaved the same functionality wise. At my previous employer they started to allow Macs and people were clamoring for them because they ran GREAT but after the first few thousand went out they started building up the amount of BS loaded approached being equal to the Windows ones and suddenly the satisfaction levels started to even out with the standard build. Chromebooks actually became very popular because they were even harder to be loaded with crap than Macs.
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  I've found Macs don't really last that much longer. The previous Mac I had, I actually begged for it to be replaced as it had a spinny HDD and recent versions of macOS run very poorly on these. Luckily it turned out it was close to being sent back to the leasing company. $EMPLOYER policy (as often is the case in larger employers) don't allow me to replace the HDD with the SSD. The newer one I now have which has a SSD is now performing poorly so I am already looking forward to a replacement already and it's still under the 3 years window. My colleagues with PCs (as we are issued PC or Macs depending on the location we work at at the time) seem to be happy with even the older PCs. I had a oldish temp PC for a while when my Mac needed repairs and it ran Windows fairly well. I used to be a big advocate for Macs but not any more.
  - 6y ago
PascLeRasc 6y ago
The macOS hardware is a little more expensive but over the long run it's significantly cheaper: https://www.vox.com/2016/10/20/13337652/mac-ibm-business-cheaper https://www.vox.com/2016/10/20/13337652/mac-ibm-business-che...
- kiwijamo 6y ago
  Apple hardware have some downsides though. One big advantage of HP, Dell, etc is their support. Apple repairs takes weeks (especially here in New Zealand) as they expect devices to be sent long distances to wherever they repair them. HP, Dell, etc can do on-site repairs in <24 hours in many cases. If it's just your personal device then a few weeks may be an inconvenience. But for businesses it can cost them enough that getting a support contract from HP, Dell, et al can be worth it.
  - lysium 6y ago
    I’m sorry, what are you talking about? You boot your new Mac laptop from your time machine backup and are back working within hours, not weeks.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      That's bollocks. Time Machine performance over network is atrocious. With a HP/Dell Enterprise line model all you need is a decent set of screwdrivers (and if you're touching anything that requires taking off heat pipes, skme thermal paste) and you can literally replace any part in a hour or two from a spare laptop - or you just swap the disk in a spare. With Apple's newest shit you can't even do that since everything is soldered. I'm a die-hard Apple fan, but for large shops professional machines are lower in maintenance cost.
      - matwood 6y ago
        It's been awhile since I was in a big org, but when I was, no one was replacing laptop parts. The deals we had with Dell/HP were basically overnight replacements (this was different from servers where we had 4 hour on-site support). Then we would send them broken machines that would eventually come back fixed. So do big orgs actually have people internally swapping random parts in a laptop to see if they can fix it? Doesn't change the point that Apple was more expensive, but mainly because Dell/HP prices go way down at volume.
crazygringo 6y ago
The viable alternative is Google Workspace. At most companies, a small percentage of employees will still need Excel for really complex/large spreadsheets, or Word for complex formatting destined for publication. But for 95% of people Google's good enough or better. Year after year, Google keeps stealing more of Microsoft's customers, and it's extremely common for new companies to adopt Google rather than Microsoft.
- judge2020 6y ago
  It seems MS is winning in the Education space - the existing mindshare for MS Office means it's hard to accept free Google Workspace and the learning curve that might come from that vs. M365 with the free desktop Office licenses they give out to every student and teacher.
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    > It seems MS is winning in the Education space Which country, and what level of education? In the US, cheap Chromebooks with GSuite have taken over K-12
    - fh973 6y ago
      Germany. Since Corona, Teams is suddenly everywhere.
  - roody15 6y ago
    Google is absolutely dominating the K-12 education market.
    - ahepp 6y ago
      I would think tertiary matters a lot more than k-12
      - arcturus17 6y ago
        I’d agree, as it is one step closer to the labor market, and Enterprise is the goose with the golden eggs. But is Microsoft really dominant in tertiary?
kaliszad 6y ago
There just isn't much you really need e.g. Word or Excel for. If your corporate application doesn't run with a useful web interface, you probably have other issues too. Word is an application that puts looks, thousands of mostly useless features and pixel-pushing up front. Excel at least really enables normal people to do some advanced calculations on data but the former still applies. Both are very complex tools mostly hindering any kind of value-added thinking and creativity but give you enough foot-guns and are really "fun" to support if you count Outlook in as well. I mean, how do you program an application that regularly crashes and corrupts the email database? LibreOffice is the same kind of thinking, because it mostly is a copy of the ideas in Word, Excel etc. Actually, when we are at it, Google Docs is more or less as problematic as the other tools. Actually, just opening any of these applications seems a bit overwhelming. Why should you care that the readable font is 11 or 12 px big (it actually isn't that comfortable to read, but ok)? Why should you care that the default font is called Calibri or whatever? This is information and complexity that is shown by default that usually adds exactly nothing to your business. The same is with colours. Why should you want to have the option to select custom colours with two clicks or so when most people choose colours badly? The default colours offered are really not that great either.
- macintux 6y ago
  You’re arguing against decades of experience to the contrary. I certainly would prefer plain text for most content a business generates, but the market has overwhelmingly voted in the other direction. I believe for some interactions with the U.S. government Word is even mandatory. And it’s effectively mandatory for collaboration with everyone else.
  - futuretaint 6y ago
    many industries are dependant on Excel also. entire industries. Accounting, finance etc...
    - kaliszad 6y ago
      You mean the industries, that are liable for most of the initial suffering during the 1930s, 2000s and so on? A case could be made that some of it lead more or less directly to wars. Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)
adjkant 6y ago
> Office software GSuite seems like the answer here. Mail, Docs, Sheets, Slides will work for a vast majority of businesses.
- ThinkBeat 6y ago
  If you wish to compare MS offerings to GSuite then you should not compare it to on prem but to Office365. I do not believe without data that switch from one closed source proprietary software provider to another one will guarantee you from hacks. Switch to open source most certainly does not. Nor is switching from one proprietary provider for your software from Microsoft -> google
  - adjkant 6y ago
    It's not a guarantee but I'll trust Google for application security over Microsoft every time. That said, it's not the question. The question is if a company wanted to switch away from Microsoft here, what is their option? It's not an inherent statement that one is actually better, but that there is an option if one feels burned by Microsoft here.
    - arcturus17 6y ago
      I’d trust them marginally better, but certainly not orders of magnitude more. We don’t know if Google would do significantly better if they operated at the same scale as MS in Enterprise. Google operates some consumer properties at an even larger scale, but I get the feeling that Enterprise is particularly attractive to hackers for the potential rewards. Last week Firebase sent me a notification that several of my properties (some of them enterprise apps) had lost domain name verification. The panel in the console was clearly glitched when I inspected it. Two days later they sent a correction saying that this had been a mistake. No big deal, but it goes on to show that Google is not perfect.
      - adjkant 6y ago
        I'm not sure what scale would affect this that Google hasn't already hit? I've already had GSuite for my high school, my college, and my work. What additional scale would open up massive security holes? This seems like it's very much just horizontally scaling the same product. Not to mention that GSuite already has 6M different customers/tenants. They're already at a comparable scale, and that doesn't mention that the free versions have the same application security model, with zero incidents (knock on wood). "but scale" feels like it's ignoring the already existing track record and scale and just making excuses for Microsoft.