The Backpage

This article (in French) appeared on my timeline with the implication that the use of MS Office and Google Docs was illegal in schools as they don't follow GDPR...

Turns out (with the ironical caveat that I used Google Translate) the response was a bit more circumspect than that... as in not quite illegal but 'deals' like that offered by US Cloud services should certainly be scrutinised for full compliance with local laws.

Another interesting read outlining some of the issues we face in our day to day choices in the IT sector. I'm not a developer and can't comment on the usability of the products in question however it has been noted that the original mantra of Microsoft of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is still a core tenet of their business model. In this case the enabler is the end-to-end control of an entire development infrastructure.

Give the Visual Studio Code article by Geoff Huntley a full read and ponder your options...

The Microsoft Product suite available to you as a a Government Agency under the MCSSA is not free as in gratis... The license costs may not appear on your balance sheet but make no mistake, someone, somewhere is sending a significant chunk of New Zealand Taxpayer dollars offshore to a US multinational never to be seen again. 

A reminder that linuxconf 2022 is coming up on the 14th, 15th and 16th of January. Unfortunately, thanks to some Global Pandemic that you may have heard about recently, this years conference is a mere shadow of its former self. Still has some pretty good speakers and staying fairly true to its origins as a grassroots driven technical conference though. Personally I really miss the IRL aspects of this conference though so here's hoping that we can get back to that in the near future. Details, times and tickets at linux.conf.au.

I'm sure you have all heard of it by now and there are pundits galore out there opining on this and that with a focus on keeping systems up to date and user education as being the major ways to stop it happening again...

Reseller News touts an extension of the MCSSA for another three years... This single agreement has been highlighted before as being one of the biggest impediments to the ideals of the NZ Govt Procurement rules.

A "Sponsored Story" has appeared in the NZ Herald written by Microsoft and touting how their new datacentre 'could' drive 'billions of euros worth of investment' and create 'thousands of new jobs'. It has received a lot of positive feedback on LinkedIn⁽¹⁾ of course. While I applaud investment in New Zealand I don't think these claims stand up to very much scrutiny for the following reasons.

A zdnet report on the Azure AD outage in mid march... Pretty ho-hum you might think... normal cloud/IT problems. The real issue with this which people don't seem to understand is that nearly all New Zealand Government public service agencies are in a headlong rush to run everything in Azure and as a result of this outage were unable to function... Couldn't log in, no Teams, no email, no documents, no calendar and of course, no contingency plan. A significant part of the New Zealand Government, dead in the water and relying on a single US multinational to get it going again.

I truly thought this old SCO lawsuit had been killed off, dead and buried, never to see the light of day again but no... It has risen again. ArsTechnica has the details here for those of you interested enough in reading it... Short form: nothing new and will fail again. Most likely an attempt by the venture capitalists at the helm to make a quick buck, which was the original SCO strategy as well... didn't work then. Won't work now.

Yet another tiresome example of why relying on a single company for your software suite is a Bad Thing(tm). The US Government has issued an urgent directive for all of its agencies to update their MS Exchange email systems after Microsoft was compromised, apparently by Chinese operatives...