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A Microsoft team racing to catch bugs before they happen
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hulitu 4y ago> A Microsoft team racing to catch bugs before they happen Is there a Microsoft team "racing to catch bugs after they happen" ? Because there are a lot of ugly bugs not fixed for years.
- aliqot 4y ago
- drewda 4y agoEh, well, Microsoft Teams is so much better than Skype for Business (originally known as Microsoft Lync). Now that was a horrible video conference application!
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoI always found Skype for Business pretty unreliable - it would drop out regularly enough and would struggle if too many people were on a call. I have no idea what the backend was like but I wondered whether it was due to poor self-hosting?
- smcleod 4y agoYeah Teams is probably one of if not the worst pieces of software I've had to use in the last 5~ years.
- jimbob45 4y agoThey have the clout to hire the best engineers in the world who could make fast native versions of Teams for each platform and instead they hired the Healthcare.Gov team from Oregon to write the garbage we currently have.
- smcleod 4y agoExactly, Electron is complete garbage but they could have at least thrown the same effort into Teams as they did Visual Studio Code (which is probably about the best or perhaps only "good" Electron app I've seen).
- mynameisash 4y agoI can't say I'm a huge fan of Teams, but my god, have you used Zoom?
- jbm 4y agoAt the risk of taking this off topic, yes, Teams is by far worse. Just the authorization process is shockingly bad. Here is a previous comment from k_sze about it. This is for a security process, so there is no excuse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30368431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30368431 > MFA fatigue wouldn't be such a big problem if their MFA and SSO implementation was not so utter shit. > Whenever I get a signin prompt, there is literally no way to tell what I'm signing in for. > When the MS Authenticator app receives a MFA request notification, there is, yet again, no way to tell what service the request is for. > To add insult to injury, when I need to signin again for a SharePoint guest account, it consistently fails to correctly redirect me back to the SharePoint folder. > Microsoft's MFA is just security theatre. Take MS Teams for instance. Why does it ask me to sign in again, and yet still allow me to read messages that are already on the screen? Worse yet, the MS Teams desktop app can still receive new message notifications and display them while I have not re-logged in yet.
- jiggawatts 4y agoIn case anyone is interested and can control their Azure Active Directory tenant, there are now fixes for the unbelievable lack of information in the MFA popup prompt: "How to use additional context in Microsoft Authenticator app notifications (Preview)": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/authentication/how-to-mfa-additional-context https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/auth... ... and: "How to use number matching in multifactor authentication (MFA) notifications (Preview)": https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/authentication/how-to-mfa-number-match https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/auth... But note the "PREVIEW" status, which seems to be the permanent state of affairs for any Microsoft security feature. This doesn't excuse Microsoft in any way, but for any customers that are security conscious, at least now there are some options!
- pastaguy1 4y ago
- imglorp 4y agoTeams is awesome at checking HR compliance boxes: surveilling, controlling, and driving employee conversations, and giving CIO's with low standards a win. It's not designed for effective communication.
- wozer 4y agoI think this is not about Teams. Probably more about security critical backend code.
- game-of-throws 4y agoThis article isn't about the app called Microsoft Teams. It's about a lowercase-T team of people.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- iasay 4y agoGreat job here. But what about the rest of the platform? It's knee deep in layers of crap accumulated over 20 years due to schizophrenic product management. Nothing is finished. Everything is broken or limping or painful to use. Every major release just adds another layer of crud. I want to come back to the platform but it hurts me. Every bloody day I have to use anything Microsoft it is literally a productivity draining nightmare.
- pathartl 4y agoI personally feel like Windows in the past 3-4 years has been slowly unifying to at the very least be more consistent. Part of this was the introduction of Windows Terminal, the rebuild of Notepad, tweaks to Explorer, rebuild of Task Manager coming in 22H2, and the huge overhaul to Settings which is slowly rendering Control Panel obsolete.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago"the huge overhaul to Settings which is slowly rendering Control Panel obsolete." I bet we'll have nuclear fusion before the Control Panel is obsolete.
- iasay 4y agoThese things are pretty much just bike shedding though in the scale of the problems with Windows. They are very easy to market as improvements though and MSFT is entirely driven by marketing now rather than quality and engineering.
- azinman2 4y agoThat they have released any version of windows without 100% consistency is itself an abomination. We’re not even talking about a nit, there are literally completely different paradigms within Settings itself as you click around, and that’s just one example of many. Perhaps it’s my Apple-bias, but every time I go to use Windows I just go “wow how could they say yup ship it?!”
- pathartl 4y ago
- givemeethekeys 4y ago"Isn't that what QA is for?"
- muricula 4y agoIn a sense, finding security bugs is a very specialized QA sub-discipline, which often requires a far deeper understanding about security than many QA engineers or developers possess. However, there is also a part of that organization which does feature work to systemically address the kinds of security issues they find. Also, many large organizations like MS don't have many QA teams, preferring to push QA tasks onto developers, but still need specialized security teams. If you dig into the deep history of morse, they barely escaped being sacked when MS laid off the QA org circa 2017. (I used to work on that team, but now work at another company doing a similar job)
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoAgreed - none of the QAs I have ever worked with have done security testing (unless called out in the test plan). One of the companies I have worked for does annual penetration tests which seems reasonable.
- RyJones 4y agoYou mean, the job description they ended in 2006? Sure
- tremon 4y ago> At Microsoft, we have everything from silicon to compilers to the operating system In what way does Microsoft "have silicon"? They don't own a fab, FAFAIK. Do they design their own processors like Amazon does, or is this simply referring to the amount of datacenters Microsoft is operating for their Azure platform?
- LeonTheremin 4y agoXbox and Pluton, at least.
- gigel82 4y agoAlso, technically the SQ* chips (like SQ1 used in Surface X) are also Microsoft chips, though they look more like slightly tweaked / rebranded Qualcomm devices.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoBoth are specs though. AMD does the design according to Microsoft's requirements but you can't really call that silicon design on behalf of Microsoft.
- colinmhayes 4y agoGotta be thinking they’re working on their own graviton given how much aws claims it’s saving them.
- mhio 4y agoI believe the Hololens is custom silicon https://www.anandtech.com/show/14775/hot-chips-31-live-blogs-microsoft-hololens-20-silicon https://www.anandtech.com/show/14775/hot-chips-31-live-blogs...
- yyyyyr 4y agoThey have custom FPGAs in Azure to offload networking and storage from the host CPU. There's an internal team designing and deploying all these, and the eventual goal is to have all this on ASICs for even more efficiency. Though you are right that they'll be subcontracting out the actual fabrication.
- jrm4 4y ago
- boomboomsubban 4y agoDoes Microsoft pay for this kind of story, or is more one of those quid pro quo kind of things? As a real interview with the security team would be somewhat interesting, but this empty praise reads more like a press release then any kind of article
- spr93 4y agoThis kind of piece usually happens because of the following common industry practice: A company's PR department (usually via an outside publicist) approaches a friendly (or likely friendly) journalist with an idea for the story. They promise special access to company information and lots of quotes for the story. Serious outlets won't let the company "help" with the drafting, but sometimes the company will provide proposed language for all or some of the story. It's a good arrangement for the company and journalist. The company controls the narrative and plants stories that fit its current PR goals. The journalist gets an easy piece--more or less pre-packaged and with minimal need to do their own investigation. Journalists have an incentive not to pose difficult questions or push back too hard: Those who do get a "bad" reputation with publicists, leaving them out of the running for future pre-packaged stories. There are lots of variations on the above. Some aren't nefarious and the result is still good journalism. And sometimes the result is a transparent puff piece.
- throwawaymanbot 4y ago
- tmpz22 4y agoI'm inclined to believe this is an unpaid story by a naively passionate technologist. Parents name their kids after Apple products. Reason dictates some of them would be passionate enough to write about it, and if it gets clicks it'll end up on one outlet or another - this time its Wired. I do believe people pay for stories and awards and all kinds of stuff to hype their brand, startups in particular.
- anotheruser092 4y agoI also think it's unpaid, because the consequences are too significant if it's leaked that there was collusion for Wired to publish a puff piece in exchange for money from Microsoft, and Wired didn't mark it as "sponsored content" or similar. It's bad for the writer because it shows the writer can be bought, reducing the credibility of previous and future work (though this does happen). It's also bad for Wired as it will be seen as biased for future reports on Microsoft. And it's bad for Microsoft because unpaid positive articles are worth more than positive articles that are suspected to be paid for. At the most cynical, it's possible the writer wrote this in exchange for building relationships with the sources for future interviews and getting scoops (payment in a different way). More optimistically, the writer was naively passionate as you rote. Still, in any case, the writer could've asked at least some hardball or technically interesting questions for the report.
- ncmncm 4y agoHaha, as if Microsoft cares whether bugs happen! Any that do and affect Microsoft profits can be fixed later. Most never end up obviously affecting Microsoft profits, however badly they might harm somebody else. Some of those might get fixed eventually, if a reason ever turns up. More commonly, whatever they are in gets retired or anyway superseded first. It is a waste of profits to spend time fixing what might not end up needing to be.
- AraceliHarker 4y agoEvery time Microsoft issues a patch for Windows, there're bugs.
- Someone 4y agoNot necessarily. For example, the official name of Turkey recently changed to Türkiye. That may require issuing a patch, but I wouldn’t call having outdated information a bug. The same may happen with the time zone database. Of course, they may have a different mechanism for keeping such lists up to date, but even then, they can be caught by surprise. Let’s say some country decides to move to X hours and 5 minutes relative to GMT, while the built-in mechanism assumes that’s done in 15 minute intervals.