Microsoft is pivoting its company culture to make security a top priority, President Brad Smith testified to Congress on Thursday, promising that security will be “more important even than the company’s work on artificial intelligence.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, “has taken on the responsibility personally to serve as the senior executive with overall accountability for Microsoft’s security,” Smith told Congress.
His testimony comes after Microsoft admitted that it could have taken steps to prevent two aggressive nation-state cyberattacks from China and Russia.
According to Microsoft whistleblower Andrew Harris, Microsoft spent years ignoring a vulnerability while he proposed fixes to the “security nightmare.” Instead, Microsoft feared it might lose its government contract by warning about the bug and allegedly downplayed the problem, choosing profits over security, ProPublica reported.
This apparent negligence led to one of the largest cyberattacks in US history, and officials’ sensitive data was compromised due to Microsoft’s security failures. The China-linked hackers stole 60,000 US State Department emails, Reuters reported. And several federal agencies were hit, giving attackers access to sensitive government information, including data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Institutes of Health, ProPublica reported. Even Microsoft itself was breached, with a Russian group accessing senior staff emails this year, including their “correspondence with government officials,” Reuters reported.
Lol, Microsoft will focus on profits and shareholders, and shareholders want AI cramed into everything.
Why in the absolute fuuuuuck would a “secure” computer with sensitive data be running motherfucking Windows?! Linux is easy enough for pretty much any Windows user in an office environment to handle these days. There’s just no excuse for sensitive business to ever be done on Windows at this point.
The company I work at “supports” Linux in the sense that you’re allowed to use Linux but then you’re essentially on your own when it comes to solving problems. I asked why there’s no proper Linux support and the short answer was “it’s too much trouble”. The long answer was “don’t ask. I don’t want to get into it”.
So my guess is that setting up a company wide policies and support for Linux is significantly more work than it is for Windows or Mac.
Again, just install Linux.
Dump your windows, install Linux, be done with this nonsense.
Sadly, I cannot do this for my work computer.
You switching is like turning around a rowboat.
Them switching is like turning around a cruise ship.
In today’s news, Microsoft commits treason against the United States Government.
!remindme 6 months
I wonder what the outcome will be.
Things like this that make me wish we still had the pillory punishment.
Look at his smug little smile. He knows they are not going to do shit. The smile would fade quickly if he faced 6 hours locked up being pelted with rotting vegetables and fruit in 90° heat.
Microsoft is pivoting its company culture
Oh yes, the thing they’re well known for succeeding at.
They excel at pivots
So we start…click on the paint brush icon…that tiny colourful thing right under the big ass “W” Icon. Now hit agree on the window asking if you’re secure. Wait a few moments and agree you your 2FA app on your phone. You might have to ask your wife to agree if you are married and bought the license for your spouse only. Cheapskate! Now stay here for a few minutes, we’ve called the 🚓🚨 police.
Seriously, why are governments using Microsoft software?
Don’t give me the nonsense line of “they need support”. There is support for Linux too, and Linux, sorry, works, is reliable and most importantly: a hell of a lot safer than windows. This is example #346269 where Microsoft not only fails to keep windows even remotely safe, but actively sabotaged their customers (in this case the US government) for their own profit.
And again, “wwheeeyyyrreee sooowwyyyy, pleeeaaasseeee forgif us?” Look! Look! Even our CEO will now be interested in secuwity!
Seriously I’m so tired of having to read this over and over and he government will just contoi to pump millions over millions into that piece of crap company.
Switch to Linux already and have computers that you can trust have no known issues that are not being resolved to cover for a few rich assholes!
Political leadership isn’t technically knowledgeable. It is focused on building large social networks of agreeable people. And Linux is an application by and for techies, not CEOs or social clubs. Consequently, when you’ve got six old white Harvard Alums in a room discussing how to run the country, one of them is going to be a Microsoft C-level and none of them are going to mention an alternative OS (except maybe Apple, in so far as they want their phone to magically integrate with a hostile OS rival).
Switch to Linux already and have computers that you can trust
A lot of these Microsoft features are about internal surveillance of staff and accumulating behavior patterns for future automation of service. This is not intended to be about building trust in the OS from the perspective of system security. Its more about finding patterns in human behavior that can be leveraged to reduce the size and pay-scale of your work force.
To that end, Microsoft is a highly valued partner while the Linux developers are an outright threat.
When I worked with defense contractors in Canada, Microsoft would sue the government whenever it didn’t get awarded a contract it applied for.
A lot of the ‘big establishment’ companies will imediately sue when they lose a contract.
A few years back, the JEDI acquisition triggered Oracle and IBM:
- https://fedscoop.com/oracle-petitions-supreme-court-over-10b-jedi-protest/
- https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2018/11/26/ibm-adds-to-its-jedi-cloud-contract-protest/
I imagine it must suck to be involved in a big government procurement, because you are pretty much guaranteed to have to get pulled into legal proceedings by one or more of the losers.
A much much larger proportion of users are computer illiterate, especially federal employees. On top of that, the vast majority of basic software applications used are the Microsoft suite of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. How do you
- Retrain an aging workforce to use a new OS.
- Retrain to use new software suite for email, docs, etc.
- Or rebuild existing software to run on Linux
- …there’s more but I’m short on time…
The ENTIRE US govt runs on Microsoft. That’s a very big pie to rebake. Where do you even begin. I do agree with you, it just feels unsurmountable.
Microsoft is pivoting its company culture to make security a top priority
Didn’t they already do that a decade or two ago??
You mean they have been letting it slip?
To reinforce the shift in company culture toward “empowering and rewarding every employee to find security issues, report them,” and “help fix them,” Smith said that Nadella sent an email out to all staff urging that security should always remain top of mind.
Yeah that ought to do it.
Lol. Considering it was senior management that ignored staff, this statement is even fucking dumber than it sounds.
That’s just barely thoughts-and-prayers level. They could at least schedule a mandatory meeting that interrupts everyone’s day for half an hour.
Usually they set up a hotline which may or may not get you fired.
Happy cake day!
Using the hotline won’t get you fired, but somehow - for totally unrelated reasons - after using it you’ll end up on a PIP with untenable goals, and that will get you fired.
"Of course, fixing these kinds of issues won’t push your product deadlines back at all. But we’ll be thankful to you! "
“Next week to improve employee morale we will have a pizza party” - Nadella, probably
they could throw a pizza party for their government clients. Less work than fixing the problem
Same energy as “You have unlimited PTO here, but we also have this nifty little thing called performance metrics”
the funniest part of the fall of MS for me has been the cunts getting so excited about fucking off the home users they forgot one vital thing: C-suite and beancounters run at a home user level. And most infrastructure techs will happily flick to a linux distro come server build time.
Their current direction has also pretty much killed their use in anything related to media distribution, it’s virtually a detailed list of TPN violations
Their current direction has also pretty much killed their use in anything related to media distribution, it’s virtually a detailed list of TPN violations
Eh, that’s actually kind of a selling point.
This is like that psychopath GF that lies and pushes you around to test your limits with the evil plan to manipulate you. Every once in a while you can complain about her behavior and then she will bombard you with fake love and forgiveness to push later in the future again.
Ms has always been a shitty company, from the time it was formed
It wasn’t even Bill’s software iirc.
Don’t take any of their words for granted. They know exactly what they’ve been doing, and what they’re doing now
