The “new Outlook” is just a cover for MS to have complete, ongoing access to all email services a person uses. It’s a massive invasion of privacy. Their “email client” is a misnomer. The actual client becomes the MS “cloud,” and it retrieves and processes 100% of your mail, even storing your credentials. Outlook no longer makes any connection to your actual email provider. https://www.xda-developers.com/privacy-implications-new-micr...
Microsoft replaced the old Mail app in favor of the new Outlook Desktop app, and I can't even login despite reporting the issue for a year now. (At the time, I was even a Microsoft MVP getting briefed on the stuff way before launch.) That got me to finally stop using Outlook for good. Users beware.
After Windows 10, Microsoft's policy seems to be "I will give you free updates, but in return, you will be a Windows tester, watch ads, and provide your privacy."
Then they will have the users by their balls.
Charge money for every click.
Insert ads where they see fit.
Dynamically adjust prices to squeeze the max amount of money.
Time for quarterly reports?
“Sorry our Excel servers are under ‘heavy load’,
Excel now costs 4x the usual hourly rate…”
"The prize-winning Excel service is in high demand right now. We apologize for any delay this might cause. Do you want to become an 'Excel Prime Plus User' with preferential treatment? Just upgrade your subscription now and increase your productivity!"
“I’m sorry, in order to multiply you will have to purchase a subscription to our multiplication extension. Please click HERE to have your credit checked.”
A friendly reminder that legally even if you buy Windows using a pirated copy is the same offense as pirating it without buying that other version in the first place.
Sooo don't waste money if you decide to pirate LTSC :)
To be fair hardware sales have slowed down quite a lot because nowadays even a 10-year-old computer is fine for most people. Since it is pretty hard to sell OS software without new hardware this is their solution to this "problem".
Their primary competitor, Apple, chose the route of programmed obsolescence for the hardware bundled to their OS software and also extreme price hikes for a given hardware performance level.
So, I don't know, pick your poison, I guess. I think it's easy to shit on Microsoft, but still most people prefer their shenanigans to Apple ones from what I see, because at least it's a lot easier on the wallet at the end of the day.
As an historical Apple user, I somewhat prefer this behavior because at least I can work around it. You don't have to use Outlook and all of the Windows "ads" can be turned off, especially if you are willing to pay a bit for a "pro" version.
On the other hand, good luck working around Apple extortionate pricing on soldered SSD and RAM. Privacy may be valuable, but that's only true if you are rich enough in the end...
Microsoft isn’t exactly struggling to turn a profit, though. They have reached the stage of market maturity (and capture) where their primary focus is on milking their “legacy” products like Windows and Office for cash.
I know, I'm not saying the bullshit they are trying to pull is good. But you have to look at the market as a whole, Apple makes even more profit while providing much less "services" to the world and their incentives are even more perverse (sell more hardware at higher price).
Microsoft always ends up looking like the bad guy, but considering how many people depend on them for easy cheap access to computing (including a lot of government/institutions) it could be much worse.
In fact, my point is that if it was Apple, we would be in big trouble we even less money in the bank while they would try to impose even more restrictions on their products to extract even more cash. At this point you realize that some shenanigans with ads are really not that big of a deal...
I used to use Evolution until MAPI was removed, then Thunderbird+Exquilla for a bit, but now Thunderbird+IMAP is the sensible way to go. I make all my email rules server-side using OWA, and Thunderbird has had most of the OAUTH2 growing pains sorted out for a while now.
We use Teams, which handles all the calendar stuff I used to need my mail client to do for me. The only risk seems to be Microsoft silently changing something and Thunderbird being left to figure out what to fix. I no longer need to access proprietary Public Folders, as that functionality has been swallowed up by Sharepoint Online.
I've used Linux at work for the past decade, in spite of it being a Microsoft shop -- some days I would wrestle with HyperV or whatever ricketysticks thing Microsoft bolted on top of HyperV, some other rare days I'd get to play in the terminal all day.
I could tolerate using Windows if I was forced to. But I absolutely love using Linux. Who even needs Outlook specifically these days?
> I could tolerate using Windows if I was forced to.
I couldn't. I reinstalled windows on a laptop I was giving away a few months ago and it literally took me 25 minutes to figure out how to install Chrome. Windows refused to download it in Edge, stating it was a security concern, and it was endless googling to find out how to disable this setting, and none of the instructions seemed to work. Several restarts later and toggling a million things, it finally worked, but i'm not even sure specifically what it was.
If I can't install the absolute bare minimum software without issues like this, I cannot tolerate it.
Since windows 7 there has only been one usable version of windows: Enterprise/LTSC. After finally being forced to upgrade to windows 10 because I was starting to have too many issues with outdated drivers, it’s serviceable with a few scripts that disable the telemetry and other annoyances in group policy.
Windows makes you click "Keep" AND "Download Anyway" then when you try to run your downloaded executable it says no, but there's a "hidden" menu that lets you say run anyway. It's super annoying lol
As someone considering switching to Linux for work, why not use OWA always? It's a full PWA, so you can access your data offline, and it's flowing through Exchange anyway.
Someday I should really look into emacs since it can be literally anything my workstation needs it to be lol vi VS emacs seems like comparing Notepad++ to BSD. They may have similar functions built in but can do very different jobs.
OWA is fine for quick emails, usually, but I like old fashioned stuff like being able to view my message headers. Also, I use Firefox instead of Chrome so I don't get the PWA benefits.
It's gonna suck when Microsoft finally kills connectivity or login support for the Teams for Linux Electron app lol
I know that was just one example, but I think you can view message headers in OWA by clicking the ellipsis on a message, then "View" > "View message details".
Also, my mom preferred Safari but kept Chrome around for installing and opening PWAs. I understand if there's a philosophical reason this won't work for you though :)
FWIW, Evolution works quite well with O365 when using the EWS provider these days. You might want to give that another look if you aren't wedded to Thunderbird.
I had a time on a 13-00 phoneline today which said your call is important to us, you are "undefined number" caller on this queue and it made me very happy. I suspect 766 is "suspiciously accurate" and some of them are JV with Microsoft.
Imagine being the voice over artist having to say:
"undefined number"
"not a number"
"floating point overflow"
"the back-end ESS-QEW-ELL server has returned an error"
"missing semicolon or comma on line [1,2,3,4,..... 1231,1232,1233...]"
Many games, including Portal and Portal 2, have subtitles. I like having them on because I often find it difficult to understand spoken text in games (and movies).
Cheers! If you don't mind me asking, could it be due to the "buzziness" they add to Glados voice? I have a friend who received an eardrum patch as a kid, but it never fell off, so some frequencies resonate insanely loudly for him.
The parts I didn't understand where those spoken with a different voice, like "subject name here", and it's mostly because I'm not a native english speaker.
Many of those features are basic UI ones, not really email specific. Anyway, Outlook's entire selling point is offering everything a mail client could. If all you care about is reading emails there was never really a good reason to use such a heavy desktop client. For many others that heavy desktop client was the entire point of having Outlook.
These market forces really are great, they really made Microsoft to stop abusing dominant positions to get advantage in other segments, stop showing ads, etc. hooray for deregulation and innovation
Market forces are great. Everyone for whom it was important spent the extra money and went to macOS. Don’t remember seeing Candy Crush in my start menu on macOS for one decade, and I distinctly remember the quality of browsing (no obnoxious popups, no Askbar, not having to download software like 7zip or Notepad++ from dodgy websites) was my argument back then.
Maybe it’s not so important to you that you’d spend the extra money.
I wasn't an Android user for 13 years because I couldn't afford an iPhone. I was an Android user for 13 years because I despised Apple's vision of mobile computing, specifically more paternalistic tendencies like "not allowed to side-load apps", "no filesystem access for you", "lol what are standards, let's use Lightning for everything".
Don't pretend that Apple and quality of computing go hand in hand. They only do if you buy into their mindset wholesale, warts and all.
The point being that even the “Google version” is subject to carrier enshitification, which casts a bad light on android as a whole compared to Apple, who has never compromised on their “take it or leave it” stance with regards to their vision and product in discussions with carriers.
I'll criticize Apple when it's due, but I'm glad the OS isn't filled with absolute trash all over the place on a fresh install.
I can't even bring myself to build a new PC for gaming, because whenever I turn on a Windows box I get disgusted by what it's become.
Well, Windows still has that trick where you can launch some other program as the shell instead of explorer.exe. Perhaps your newly built system should just launch to Steam as the primary OS shell directly ;)
Lol. We're all at the same clown show. You just paid more for your seats.
The bloatware isn't even a blip on the radar for these companies. Everything is about gaining as much control as possible over everything. MS wants to make everything Office related web based so we have no control over our own documents and communication. Apple wants us to use iCloud for our photos and the app store for apps we need so we become dependent. Google dominates with Chromium because they don't want you to access the internet unless you're doing it the way they want.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft would be split into 20 companies each if regulations were working properly.
But apple is just a different set of problems. They do things in their own interest just as much.
When you get a iphone, their privacy policy is right there at the beginning, thousands of pages long. "Privacy is a right!" But they still snoop on every little thing you do in their own way. And they have no buttons. Definitely do not have a "Reject All" button. sigh.
I can’t use Thunderbird with my university email, because the Owl plug-in developer cornered the market on an Outlook plug-in with a subscription model.
I sorta feel similar about BIG subscription software. Little subscription software (from small companies/developers) I see almost benign. If i needed this i would pay for it.
No way! That kills of so many long term inboxes I know of. Over a decade of customer conversations in there in some cases. This will kick off a painful set of IT department phone calls and an even more painful migration if needed
On the other hand I can’t wait for PST files to disappear, along with their syncing, backup and migration problems. Would have been nice if they had one version of Outlook in between though that didn’t automatically create these deprecated files (looking at you, autoarchive).
Also good riddance: Word, the shitty html editor/viewer.
Do yourself a favor and use eM Client instead. It works extremely well, including playing nicely with Exchange. It was the only Window client I found that could completely replace Outlook.
the funny thing about outlook is not even mentioned here, it seems that they have absolutely no spam filter? I get more spam (and the stupid obvious one, like 2004 phishing methods) into my outlook inbox than into my gmail throwaway email intentionally created to receive spam and crap signups, it just baffles me
They definitely have anti spam. It's great at triggering on emails from a self hosted email server.
I've been maintaining one for a few years and have pretty good deliverability. 95% of the time when there's an issue it's Outlook/Hotmail marking me as spam. And no I don't do email marketing or newsletters.
Yeah, love all the innovation and competition in the mail clients nowadays.
You sell your data to big companies or you get spam blocked by these companies, if you self host.
Why google would invent better email sender validation procedures and encryption, if the current system works pretty well for them.
We use outlook for work. The only emails that go to my spam are new sales appointments from Salesforce. Just the most important, time-sensitive emails that I recieve. No matter how much I mess with the settings nor how many I flag as not spam, Microsoft is adamant that it's spam.
Salesforce meeting requests are spam. I get several dozen unsolicited first-contact meeting requests per week from sales weasels at companies I’ve never done business with. Most have salesforce or pardot references in the headers.
A CRM system has no business sending these out to leads who’ve never consented and are simply imported from Zoominfo or whatever. I’m glad MSFT finally started spam-binning them.
Our office staff takes phone calls, emails, and website submissions from prospects -- they then have to let a salesman know that someone wants an inspection and estimate. The best and easiest way to do this is by creating an appointment for the salesman best suited for the job which will block off some of their schedule to connect with the prospect and set up an on-site meeting. This also sends an email to the salesman assigned to the new prospect [This is the part where MSFT spam filter tells me to GFY]. We don't send out emails to prospects until they give us their email directly.
If you would've actually read my comment, you would see that you didn't respond to anything I said but just made up your own idea of what I said then talked past me.
I think websites started competing who can round up most third parties. At least finally "Reject all" button is not hidden and is prominently displayed.
Using a different identifier isn't sufficient to satisfy a right to be forgotten request. The user's identity could still be inferred from comments, for instance.
So does that mean that if we request Dang will nuke our accounts (honest question, because it's something I've been thinking about. Maybe or maybe not write a Tell HN)
Maybe it is time to write that manifesto. I love the community but the environment has changed underneath us and faster that I, even someone in ML, expected.
Which law(s) do you think they are not on the legal side of?
The most common law people cite for deletion rights is GDPR but I'm not sure GDPR applies. GDPR's territorial scope is defined in Article 3.
For controllers or processors not "in the Union", which I think is the case for YC, GDPR applies if the processing activities are related to:
"(a) the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union; or
(b) the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union."
People in the Union can make HN accounts and post, but that doesn't mean that YC is offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union. Recital 23 of GDPR elaborates on offering goods or services (edited to split into two paragraphs to make it easier to read):
> In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union.
> Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union.
I think YC could make a decent case that they do not envisage offering such services to people in the Union.
> > Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union.
> I think YC could make a decent case that they do not envisage offering such services to people in the Union.
I very much doubt it. YC has an explicit list of European-based companies in their portfolio; they have posted job ads on HN for positions that were based exclusively in EU countries, and continue to do so as far as I can tell. PG is on the record talking about using HN from the UK (no longer part of the EU, but it was at the time).
From what I have seen, the servers for hackernews are a bit delicate. At least when OpenAI does something stupid...if our usernames are a primary key ID a single update to remove the username is far less costly than actually dropping all the comments.
Or they just want to have an archive for some background monetization scheme, anything is possible!
It's the sort of cookie notice (which also attempts to embed gdpr consents and notices) used by a lot of sites, I haven't checked who the vendor is but they began declaring the number of third parties a few days ago.
I think I ran into it five times so far, three of which had a party count similarly around 700, and two above 2000.
The counts maybe include the third parties to which the third parties relay data etc.
I haven't checked if they've done it for some upcoming legal requirement or out of their own good heart (the legal requirement would in all likelihood be an nth draft of the ever "upcoming" ePrivacy regulation).
This. There's a choice regarding data identifying you that's made by someone who's not you.
I'm also thinking of 2FA things many corporations mandate, requiring the use of a phone number, application or both, without them handing you a work phone. Under no circumstances will I give my personal phone number to Google or Microsoft because I don't want them to link my work and personal stuff. Right now, I'm locked out of a corporate account at Google due to such refusal.
Just pay for one which sees you as a client, not eyeballs. Enable pop3 or redirect on old account. Change as many web sites as possible.
Bonus point if you get your own domain. Bitwarden and others allow creation of individual users on the fly on your domain, while a catchall on the email server collects this.
I’m pretty sure it’s a forgery (though to what extent, I wot not), in part because of the mentioning of 766 third parties, but more because the entire thing seems significantly legally incoherent. It mixes elements of GDPR and ePD in technically nonsensical ways (e.g. “We […] process data to: store and/or access information on your device”).
