Posted on 05/18/2020 10:46:01 AM PDT by dayglored
Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming
Microsoft president Brad Smith (pictured) has admitted that the Windows giant was "on the wrong side of history" when it came to open source.
While nowadays the born-again company seems unable to resist the embrace (if that's the right word) of the open-source world, it was not always so.
Former CEO Steve Ballmer memorably declared that "Linux is a cancer" back in the day. Goodness, how times have changed in Redmond.
"Microsoft," said Smith during a chat hosted by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), "was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century and I can say that about me personally."
He added: "The good news is that, if life is long enough, you can learn... that you need to change."
Indeed. Although judging by our response to our recent Name-a-Microsoft piece, the company still has a way to go before the sins of the past have been fully expunged.
Smith himself has penned a succession of hand-wringing articles over the years, from cheering progress on facial-recognition regulation to standing up for the Microsoft employees that are recipients of the US's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme. Heck, he even talked AI and ethics with the Pope (although we'd wager His Holiness was more interested in finding out how Windows 10 1809 managed to do that to his computer).
As a reminder, Microsoft has cheerfully flogged technology to America's controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, as has its newly acquired tentacle GitHub. Smith did not address this as he talked up the source shack: "We see our responsibility as its steward to make it a secure, productive home for [developers]."
The MIT CSAIL "Hot Topics in Computing" fireside chat also heard the resounding clang of a name dropping to the ground as Smith described a meeting with former US president Barack Obama.
Donald Trump's predecessor warned that a reckoning over surveillance and the data held on private individuals was headed the tech giants' way over the coming years: "There will be a moment when the demands that you're placing on the government will be placed on you as well."
"I thought that was a very insightful comment at the time and I wrote it down. I looked around and was struck that no one else was writing it down," said a modest Smith.
If only he'd thought to pass his carefully written notes on to the Microsoft team responsible for slurping data from customer's computers. That whole European nastiness could so easily have been avoided.
Lessons from the past aside, Smith did have sensible advice for those hoping that apps will be the panacea for the pandemic today. "It's a belt-and-suspenders approach," he said. "We still will need public health officers to interview individuals who test positive, even if they've been using an app on their smartphone."
"We can't base our planning on the assumption that everyone will have this app," he added, before highlighting the importance of data in the making of decisions related to public health during the coronavirus outbreak. This is something that lawmakers would do well to consider. ®
Open-source/FOSS Tech ping...
Updates on one laptop took a couple of hours on Sunday. Updates on another blocked me from connecting at work - I finally got in with a temporary account. At least this old Win7 machine runs fine. Can’t say as much for the Win10 laptops.
” America’s controversial Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency”
Controversial: a word meaning “people who hate America also hate this.”
I just went through another Microsoft experience this morning. Seems these things were rare when I first started in IT, but today take up just about all my time.
A staff member was having some issues with Outlook send-as permissions that I was unable to resolve. One of the solutions was to recreate the Outlook profile.
So, before I did her machine, I figured I’d do mine.
Turns out, I can’t create a new profile on my machine to duplicate my old one. There are two parts to this. Part 1 is Microsoft removed the ability to manually add an Exchange server profile in Outlook 2016. You can add every other type manually, except Exchange. You must use the Exchange autoconfigure feature to create the profile.
OK. Fine. So something I’ve done routinely for going on 25 years is now irrelevant because someone at Microsoft decided it should be that way.
But there’s a part 2. When Microsoft goes to check your email address that it gets from AD (or one that you put in) to get the autoconfig info, it checks O365 first, before it looks for a local server. And guess what. If you use your work email to create a Microsoft account, like to access VLSC for your corporate licensing, then that address gets comingled with the O365 universe.
So, under the default scenario and settings that Microsoft created, there is no way for me to recreate my previously-existing Outlook profile that points to my Exchange server account. Every attempt is redirected to an O365 account that I don’t have and a server which doesn’t have the correct autoconfig info that I can no longer adjust manually. I had to find an obscure registry entry that tells Outlook to forget O365 exists so that the whole process they forced me into would work as it’s supposed to.
It made me realize that when I first started in IT, if something was acting in a way that didn’t make sense, it was either because I had made an error in configuration, or there was a bug in the software.
Today, if something is acting in a way that doesn’t make sense, it’s nearly always traceable to some decision made in the bowels of Microsoft that is either for reasons counter to my needs or for reasons that are indecipherable. I spend way too much of my IT career of late cleaning up after messes Microsoft has made.
Sorry for the rant. Seems like a lifetime ago I was one of the first RedHat Certified Systems Engineers. I let it expire because nobody had a use for it back then. Fast forward to the post Windows 10 world and I’ve just started playing with Linux Mint on an old laptop. Looking promising. If I can’t get rid of MS at work, I can at least come home to a non-MS environment.
I know this is only peripherally relevant, but I needed to vent. And this sort of situation, day after day, year after year, is why, for me, it doesn’t matter how much navel gazing Microsoft does, I no longer care.
Tech Ping
Daughter bought me a new computer running Windows 10 for Christmas. Blue screen of death since January. Nothing is OK with Microsoft.
To see if anything is okay with Microsoft, just look at the current state of Win 10.
Microsoft was much more open then Apple over the years so why are they so apologetic?
I thought Open Source was initially aimed at generating one ever-improving version of Linux. Instead there are now a multitude of Linuxes. It was bad enough when there were two or three versions of Unix, but now there are dozens of boutique Linuxes. How is that an advancement?
The Open Source "community" is now overrun with SJWs. You aren't allowed to code unless you agree that transgendered men can compete against women in the Olympics. How is that a good thing?
Also, the Open Source community has always been a haven for Marxists who want everything to be free. It works well for the few evangelists who get to travel the world on someone else's dime, and for the true believers who are OK developing code just for fun. But what of those who want to make a living and get justly compensated?
Also, if no one gets paid for writing code, then the only way to make money is licensing. This leads to the creepy "you're only renting it" economy like where Tesla can deactivate a feature when the current owner sells the car to a new owner.
Open Source may have been a great idea, but it has devolved into an Open Sore.
LOL, not a problem, you're not alone. I've noticed that since the advent of Win10, any time I post a Microsoft/Windows thread, it draws stories of suffering and woe, almost regardless of thread topic.
I use Win10 daily (also Linux and MacOS) and have tamed it enough that I don't mind it any more than the others. But it would be unpleasant if it were my -sole- available environment.
I worked for Microsoft for a long time.
I can say for certain...
Steve Ballmer was a cancer.
And a stupid doofus.
Things got much better when he left.
Not at all. Open source software, free-as-in-speech software, was initiated by hobbyists in the mid-late 1970's with the advent of microprocessors and homebrew computers.
In the 1980's Richard Stallman took that idea and developed the GNU operating system (GNU == Gnu's Not Unix) because in those days Unix cost thousands of dollars and was proprietary.
In 1990 or so, Linux Torvalds wrote a kernel (called Linux) and grafted it onto the GNU operating system (which lacked, and still lacks, a viable kernel), and "Linux the operating system" was born.
Lots and lots of "open source" software was around two decades before the idea of "improving Linux" went mainstream.
Well, he was a maniacal, ruthless Sales Guy. Not whatsoever a tech visionary, nor was he corporate executive officer material.
I'll give him one thing: He was focused on making Windows the only thing in the universe. And to a large degree he succeeded, and it's still on most desktops.
But at a huge cost to Microsoft, and unfortunately, to everyone else as well.
Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming.
Yeah, just as Flynn!
Love Windows 7. Hate windows 10.
WinDoze 10 is a cancer, a virulent metastazing cluster-frack.
A couple of years ago we switched our main apps from WinDoze to Linux with the Gnome desktop (KDE and others were considered and no, I am not interested in your preference). Many internal issues disappeared and performance increased. I now have 5 linux systems in my office and a single WinDoze 10 laptop that I keep around to do my income taxes (TurboTax doesn’t provide a linux variant) and some accounting.
Microsoft loves open source the same way that wolves love sheep.
Its called open source because it is free! Microsoft wants a piece of the action, but they have been The Blob of software. Right down to the original ms-dos vs pc-dos! I have Open Office on my Thinkpad x201, and it is more efficient than either MS wordofficejunk, or, that one time Canadian Corel wordperfectjunk.
There is a great “text editor” called Rouhh Draft, and it is designed for writers, and is open source.
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