Great. Just great. This is days after I learned about the new Germany-wide deal with Microsoft for licensing their software and services, so it perfectly fuels my fears. Before, it was mostly just a volume license for Windows and Office, but now it's the full arsenal, M365, Teams, and, announced very proudly by our University, we'll be moving our Active Directory to the hybrid cloud. Every Student and Staff will automatically have their personal data deployed to the Azure cloud. Isn't that great? Finally Germany is working on tech incompet^Windependence!
What could go wrong?
I mean, they assured they'd form a working group with other Universities about remaining concerns regarding privacy issues in Windows 10 and planning to confront Microsoft about them. I guess Microsoft is shivering with fears and busy removing all telemetry right now.
Other great changes form this new deal are that Universities now have to pay a full Windows license for every employee, no matter how many hours they work; before you'd pay by how many full-time jobs all the employees would make up for. That means most Universities pay twice as much now. And did you know the new deal explicitly forbids remote access to any Windows machine under this license? You have to pay extra for that. What a strange coincidence regarding the current epidemic. Universities' legal departments are clueless whether this only applies to RDP, or alternative 3rd party tools as well (or rather whether this would hold up in court).
This is the first time the deal is made nation-wide, you'd think this puts our Universities in a better position, but we got fucked in every way possible.
I realize this is only marginally related with the original post, but 1) sorry, I just had to vent somewhere, this seemed just like the final straw, and 2) am I the weird one for seeing a problem in this trend? Universities were once driving innovation in technology, students were fiddling with emerging and expensive tech, but today we already have some Universities that don't even have their own datacenter anymore, everything is hosted elsewhere and maintained by contractors. Students access SaaS via a Browser. Walled gardens everywhere. This doesn't help.
I'm not at all shocked. The popularity of such SW is direct proportional with the bribe money paid to government officials. Remember the trip MS made to Münich ?
That's why I laugh and laugh about people here,reddit or twitter jerking off about how what a wonderful human philanthropist Bill Gates is, as if among the other awful things MS did is not to have created enforced monopolies in almost all third world countries governments by bribing their officials to accept MS products, and funding FUD campaigns against any movement to open source/free software.
that is a stupid comment. the techies inside unversities are horrendously underfunded. m365 at least will bring consistency and will probably also make your date more secure to third party actors.
it also comes with a5 licenses with a special and cheap deal so it's basically ridicolous that all other customers are paying for this.
> but today we already have some Universities that don't even have their own datacenter anymore, everything is hosted elsewhere and maintained by contractors. Students access SaaS via a Browser. Walled gardens everywhere
tons of software was already from external contractors.
I'm not sure but some people like you are living in bubbles.
of course it would be possible to have everything open source. BUT with our current governement M365 is the best solution. the cdu sleeped for over 20 years to have a great open source solution. so it would be impossible to have something integrated ready within a short window, it would also blow a huge budget.
the only thing you can be mad about is our government, the m365 is the best thing that could happen.
btw. I hate the strange bashing against american companies, as if german companies are any better (they are not).
btw. I'm german and everytime I see something like that I'm mad, we do everything to even have a SaaS vendor, with ridiculous data privacy (only if you are an american company, for german company's the authoritis are looking away or making special rules) and than our governement fucks every citizen by making rules that don't even work together with the privacy rules.
time to relocate. everything starts to be stupid and the wrong questions are asked.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'"
> the techies inside unversities are horrendously underfunded. m365 at least will bring consistency and will probably also make your date more secure to third party actors.
True, but no reason to dig an even deeper hole.
> of course it would be possible to have everything open source. BUT with our current governement M365 is the best solution. the cdu sleeped for over 20 years to have a great open source solution. so it would be impossible to have something integrated ready within a short window, it would also blow a huge budget. the only thing you can be mad about is our government, the m365 is the best thing that could happen.
You're completely ignoring that I'm complaining about the move to the cloud, and the restrictiveness of the contract. Even just continuing the old contract and staying with offline-Office would have been better.
> btw. I hate the strange bashing against american companies, as if german companies are any better (they are not).
I never even hinted at this being about Microsoft being American. I don't want my University to upload my PII to "the cloud" so I can use Word in a Browser.
You're basically saying we shouldn't even be trying anymore. Why not shut down the CS departments of universities entirely and just hand out accounts to Skillshare et al., so those still interested in CS can learn from there? There's nothing left a University could offer that you can't access from there. Maybe a couple credits for the Azure cloud if you need to do something computationally intensive. Your University surely doesn't have anything left in-house for this anyways.
I worked at a company where they from the start were building all their internal tools like their own Jira-like system, their own Slack and so on. When you started working, for the first three to six months you were only working on those tools and also learning the internal culture. Then when the company had idle time or if you wanted you could continue working on them.
I am thinking that universities have missed huge opportunity to build their own m365. If they started 20 years ago, by now they would have mature system tailored for their own organisation. But you needed people with vision and able to get others on their side. Something like this would be perfect for CS students, to have a taste of the corporate real world before even starting their professional life.
Unfortunately these days I don't see much value in universities when it comes to CS. It may be useful for networking as you get a chance to meet like minded people and spend time with them, but other than that you can learn everything online mostly for free these days.
Something like 20 years ago universities had advantage that they had resources you wouldn't otherwise get, but now that advantage is gone.
Many people just see it as a fun time outside of parents' home and don't take it seriously.
The universities did build such systems. See Andrew at CMU or Athena at MIT. They built a ton of infrastructure, from distributed file systems (afs) to chat systems (zephyr), word processors (ez), multimedia email (messages) and so on.
Some developments from those projects live on today, such as Kerberos. But most of those innovations had crappy user interfaces and never made it outside the university. Commercial companies took their ideas and built products mere mortals could use. Now there is no reason not to use the commercial products that are more stable, more secure, and have more applicability outside the university. Plus you have to serve students who aren’t there for CS with the same network.
Isn't the fact that these product were not of commercial quality an indication that maybe the courses were not that great? How people can learn building something that is useful, easy to operate and adding value if at a place where they supposed to learn it, they are not taking it seriously or don't have enough skill to teach it?
I hope this doesn't look like an attack, I am genuinely interested.
Like most things, I believe the issue comes down to incentives. If you are a university student studying CS, what’s your incentive? To get the best grade possible in your course, most likely. What is your shortest path to a great grade? Is it adding user friendly features? Or demonstrating mastery of applying theoretical principles in software, for example by implementing a novel distributed consensus algorithm? Plus your course lasts at most a semester, to perhaps several years if you are lucky to work on the same project the entire time you’re paying to attend university.
The incentive for commercial companies on the other hand is entirely opposite. Their incentive is to build a product that appeals to the widest population faster than their competitors. They optimize for user friendliness and eschew the untested in favor of hacky solutions that work now. From the developers perspective, they are now paid to work so they have more of an incentive to do things that may not be as attractive to them personally such as fixing bugs.
Also, there is a difference between university and apprenticeship. Traditionally university focused on teaching the soft skills, the “liberal arts”, providing a broad base of knowledge from history to widen the mind of those who attend. It’s not meant to be a job training center. Unfortunately these days it seems that most employers are uninterested in mentoring and apprenticeships, looking for the public to subsidize job training for them. Universities in my opinion are poorly set up for this, but alas this is what most expect.
University programs manned primarily by 18-21 year olds are supposed to compete against for-profit companies with highly experienced and specialized engineering talent?
> You're completely ignoring that I'm complaining about the move to the cloud, and the restrictiveness of the contract. Even just continuing the old contract and staying with offline-Office would have been better.
a cloud is a necessity. it's basically impossible to have a local solution, for every fucking university and most stuff is basically serices built together with closed and open source software, which is a managemend disaster.
> I never even hinted at this being about Microsoft being American. I don't want my University to upload my PII to "the cloud" so I can use Word in a Browser.
your PII is uploaded to so many companies, besides microsoft. microsoft is probably the lesser evil of all these.
> You're basically saying we shouldn't even be trying anymore. Why not shut down the CS departments of universities entirely and just hand out accounts to Skillshare et al., so those still interested in CS can learn from there? There's nothing left a University could offer that you can't access from there. Maybe a couple credits for the Azure cloud if you need to do something computationally intensive.
we should but as of now we should have a intermediate ms solution. btw. the cs departments most of the time do managed services, they do not develop stuff. often they already manage microsoft solutions, so they already use microsoft active directory and exchange.
most of them were also breached by hafnium.
what we should do is built a edu cloud (SaaS/PaaS/IaaS) with services (open source) for students and profs, which has a central mail system and is managed centrally. but until this is built you need a working solution.
> Your University surely doesn't have anything left in-house for this anyways.
I'm not a student anymore, but most universities do not have that much selfbuild code lying around anyways. I mean most people working at universities don't care what they os is, they want to use their ms outlook or ms word. of course some universties are way more science oriented and thus more personal wants to use linux & co or write stuff in latex, but that is a minority.
also as soon as you are leaving your university, there are only a handful of corporations where you won't be using a ms product. after hafnium tons of them are also moving to m365.
If the email is based on the Exchange/AD paradigm then o365 is undoubtedly far more secure. An expertly administered postfix system might deliver mail more securely but probably has a weak web frontend.
I too prefer offline Office install for my own use, but they are systemically less secure. Just rampant exploitation.
Do you have a link (German or English)? I couldn’t find anything, and at first glance it doesn’t make any sense. There is no single agency, group or person MS could negotiate with nationwide, universities are pretty independent and education is on the state level.
Yes, Universities can simply refuse to participate in this deal, but it puts them in a worse position, as previously, the deal was usually made on state level, which afaik no state does anymore. I'm in BaWü and now the choice is either negotiating with MS individually or taking the Bundesvertrag. I think technically they are still considered individual deals per state, but they are effectively the same everywhere ("Campus und School-Rahmenvertrag").
MS full disk encription is like FBI (or MI6) full disk encription. If your wife does not know the key it does not mean it is secure when everybody else knows it.
I find it bizarre that after Stasi and other stuff, German people are not opposed to massive personal data collection.
It's the same thing, except that instead of the state your data is owned by private entity that can technically do anything they want with it. It is scary.
I mean ... Stasi and Gestapo kept different kind of data. You would have to do a more and different kind of analysis to make it into argument that makes sense. And seems like the people who throw around Stasi dont really know what that organization done.
Foreigner's two cents: it's not that they don't care---the abysmal availability of Google Street View attests to that among others---but rather a combination of (a) masses (and hence bureaucrats) not having as comprehensive a definition of "personal-data invasive" as those that work in tech and (b) this German trust in any document that can be ratified/made into a legal proclamation.
(a) isn't really uniquely German, of course. Most people not in tech, though privacy-conscious, won't really bat an eyelid on Windows 10 telemetry, Instagram's excess of data gathered, etc.
With (b), I bet the Universities are satisfied that Microsoft has all clearances/certifications to be GDPR-compatible or whatever else. That pacifies their cynicism. If shit hits the fan, the courts can worry about it. The important thing is they checked all the boxes in the paperwork with sufficient diligence.
Again, just my two cents. I'm not even European but it seems to me Switzerland in real-life is what Germany is in most people's imaginations. But again, that's just more of my opinions.
> Universities' legal departments are clueless whether this only applies to RDP, or alternative 3rd party tools as well (or rather whether this would hold up in court).
How about IP KVMs? How about non-IP KVMs? How about a long usb cable?
I mean, they assured they'd form a working group with other Universities about remaining concerns regarding privacy issues in Windows 10 and planning to confront Microsoft about them. I guess Microsoft is shivering with fears and busy removing all telemetry right now.
Other great changes form this new deal are that Universities now have to pay a full Windows license for every employee, no matter how many hours they work; before you'd pay by how many full-time jobs all the employees would make up for. That means most Universities pay twice as much now. And did you know the new deal explicitly forbids remote access to any Windows machine under this license? You have to pay extra for that. What a strange coincidence regarding the current epidemic. Universities' legal departments are clueless whether this only applies to RDP, or alternative 3rd party tools as well (or rather whether this would hold up in court).
This is the first time the deal is made nation-wide, you'd think this puts our Universities in a better position, but we got fucked in every way possible.
I realize this is only marginally related with the original post, but 1) sorry, I just had to vent somewhere, this seemed just like the final straw, and 2) am I the weird one for seeing a problem in this trend? Universities were once driving innovation in technology, students were fiddling with emerging and expensive tech, but today we already have some Universities that don't even have their own datacenter anymore, everything is hosted elsewhere and maintained by contractors. Students access SaaS via a Browser. Walled gardens everywhere. This doesn't help.