To work or study at my Univ, you have to give your phone number to Microsoft for the 2fa. They pay shitload of money for Office 365 and they are almist forcing us to use that stupid suite. This year I will give an special course on FOSS alternative to my students. Fuck that bullshit hail corporate.
At the place I work at, we all are given Azure Virtual Desktops, which we use for everything. I’m working remotely from another country, so there is damned input lag too. Copy/paste, any data transfer is disabled too.
The worst part is we need to use “Remote Desktop” app to connect to our VMs, and it is available for EVERY platform except linux. Like they got browser client, windows, mac os, android, iOS. BUT NOT FOR LINUX. So I use VirtualBox to open windows machine, and use that to connect to VM.
This is their choice not to configure it correctly. You can set up Azure RDP and use Remmina as a front end to FreeRDP or just FreeRDP by itself.
Also why are they using a browser “client”? That is also an odd configuration. You don’t need a special client. I use Firefox on Linux (with a container - love those) to connect to the Azure Desktops.
I do all my windows work from a Linux machine. Recently I traveled to another country and did all my clients Windows (Azure remote desktops) work from a Steam Deck (Arch linux), lol.
wow. I’ll look into this, but last time I tried, that VM discovery thing made it unavailable to setup on linux. The remote desktop app shows available VMs after you authenticate with MS account. This most likely is done deliberately to prevent us from using linux.
Yeah some of my University classes mandated the use of this “Lockdown Browser” last year. Pretty sure it’s just spyware that, conveniently, can render HTML
Maybe it’s because I don’t talk to that many people for it to seem significant, but is there an issue with just sending someone a standard text message?
Those are not private at all, whatsapp, as a protocol (so basically xmpp) is pretty good using E2E. Facebook/Meta collects your metadata, but not the messages.
Seriously though, using text messages these days means that inevitably you will encounter the green vs blue issue. Android and Apple phones don’t play nice with their text messages. Gods help you if you ever get into a group text message thread with multiple Android and Apple phones. Anytime an Apple user reacts to a message it’s sent as a separate text message, “John 🤣 to ‘Check out this meme’”
At least with WhatsApp it puts everyone in the same texting playground.
Saving this for later investigation. The idea of having a “middle man” for supposedly E2E encrypted messages seems skeevy to me though. Is it all open source?
This is such a bummer. Recently one of my friends started considering iPhone just because of this blue/green issue. I hate how big corps are trying their best to f*ck their users
Hey there! Totally get where you’re coming from. The struggle is real when all your homies are still on WhatsApp. It’s like that one check on WhatsApp has become the universal symbol of connection, right? 😅 But hey, change is constant, and who knows, maybe the squad will make the jump together someday. Until then, we’ll ride the WhatsApp wave! 🚀
They don’t even have to switch just install it, I have multiple clients for different people and it doesn’t really effect me negatively other than remembering what to message people on
Sadly my friends won’t even do that. Don’t know about family but knowing them they also probably won’t. I expect rhem to not even understand why i want to switch
Decentralised solutions will never be broadly accepted. People care about comfort and ease to use and centralized companies wiill always have the edge in this.
Such a waste of public resources, to not develop (or fund) free and open tools for everyone, instead of paying for temporary licenses for closed software.
Just wait until you enter the workforce and your company gives you a locked down work computer.
The joys of getting special permission from the IT department so that you can install a browser other than the ancient version of Internet Explorer (no, not Edge) that came preloaded.
Absolutely. I’m convinced that any company that asks employees to use their own devices simply doesn’t understand cybersecurity.
Best case would be giving employees a choice of hardware and software from a list of compatible products, but of course that’s expensive and more work for the business so it seldom happens.
At least in the EU, the GDPR should make some employers reconsider when asking to use personal devices.
The rules can be quite a bit stricter when using a software for professional purposes, and you shouldn’t risk an employee doing whatever they want on their device.
WhatsApp for example would only be legal to use if you have explicit, written consent of all the people you’re going to save to your contacts.
In this day and age they should expect you to bring your own device. But they should also not expect you to install any of their software on your device. You simply remote to their machine. They keep it locked down, you get to use your own equipment for all the things you like (music, your personal email, internet, etc).
Or your tasks should be set up so you can do your work using a web browser (in a container - thanks Firefox) and call it a day.
I use Linux for everything and just remote into the works computers to do theirs. I am happy with that. When I went to another country recently I only brought a Steam Deck and was able to do all the work I needed to do.
I remote to all our windows machines from my Linux box which is fine with me. They can lock down their computer, I am just supposed to use what they give me. They pay me, they put the malware on their own machines, so… whatever.
I’m going through this after my work was bought out. They forced us onto their locked down computers, and they’re so locked down we literally can’t do our work on it. Execs are trying to come up with a solution, thankfully at least for now they’ve gotten corporate to agree to let us use our old laptops until they do. I think mostly because we’re extremely high value low cost, so if we’re not working, they’re losing a lot of money.
If they want you to use WhatsApp they can provide you with a device to use it on, then at least it’s completely isolated from your own data and can’t do too much harm.
Ah fair point. You could run WhatsApp in a work profile or on a second device, but you’d probably have to jump through some hoops with a second phone number.
Btw oficially, in my state, schools use their own forked version of ubuntu (KITE Ubuntu), spevifically designed for school use and has foss programs installed and syllabus teaches only that. But still, since the online class started in 2020, google meet, whatsapp and all of them are “required” by students. The problem is that none of the schools or teachers actually knows why “free software only” in schools were introduced
What’s easier from the teacher/teachers representative, use 1 widely distributed app, or download 100 different messaging programs/interfaces and make sure every student knows the proper channels to contact every other student?
There will always be someone unhappy, let’s try to keep that from being the person who has to do this dance day in and out for the rest of their underfunded lives?
It's like four or five. We did this back in the late 90s. Some people used AIM. Some used Yahoo Messenger. Some used ICQ. And some used MSN. We survived.
It was such a common thing that multi-protocol clients like Trillian were popular.
Fine, use one app but make it the Free Software one, then.
Regardless, it is completely unreasonable to dictate that people consent to onerous third-party corporate terms of service in order to access government services, especially ones enforced by truancy laws!
There will always be someone unhappy, but let's make them unhappy with mild annoyances and not serious privacy violations. I'd rather prefer the Whatsapp users to be unhappy than the Signal users. In a long run it's doing them a favor.
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