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Canadians have a historic opportunity to punch Microsoft in the face (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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In peaceful times, people cling to broken systems simply because "that's how it's always been done". Comfort is a prison.

This crisis is a great opportunity to screw Microsoft.

Chaos isn't a pit. Chaos is a ladder.

Canadians should be agressively lobbying their politicians to embrace Linux and the open source ecosystem. Call your representatives. Write to your city council. Contact your town IT department. Do it now.

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[–] 18 points 1 month ago (6 children)

We should. My university has a specific contract with MS that says our data cannot leave the campus or the country. I had a MS teams meeting with a lab in Toronto in which we discussed very specific chemical compounds that were unusual. With 48 hours, everyone at that meeting got emails from a chemical synthesis company soliciting to sell us these compounds.

I have seen this happen repeatedly as the result of a MS Teams meeting.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago* (3 children)

    That's awesome. If I had to guess, the data of the Teams call might not leave Canada but it might be stored temporarily in a Canadian Azure dc where it's STT-ed, transcript analyzed and matched to whoever's bid to be called up. The bidder could be an American firm and the call to it isn't the Teams data so "no foul" been committed. 🤭

    E: some might call this industrial espionage.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Of course it is.

    Just like all universities in Canada teach AutoCAD software, and any designs are hosted on foreign servers.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    I recall how a few of us who highlighted this risk (as well as the cost increase risk) back in the early 2010s when UofT was starting to migrate from on-prem (sovereign in newspeak) services to Microslop's cloud. We were called crazy paranoid, etc.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    I'm still being ignored on this by university admin. Software deals in education are rife with corruption. I lost a 6 month battle to even have our computing service post links to Open Source software.

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