The new terms of conditions for Microsoft services released on October 2023 caused an outcry in the IT world. The reason was a paragraph who said, that now all Microsoft Services are powered by artificial intelligence. This A. I. supposed to be used to detect copyright violations. This includes things like Music, Movies, Graphics, E-Books and Software. In the case this A. I. Detect copyright violations on your system, those files supposed to got deleted automatically from the ‘system’. At this time it is not clear if this rule applies to your own local disk storage or just to the files on the Microsoft Cloud. Microsoft also declared that user which violates the copyright rule will be suspended from all Microsoft Services.
This exclusion has different flavors. The first questions rise up to my mind is what will happened with paid subscriptions like Skype? They will block me and refund my unused credits? A more worst scenario is may I will loose also all my credits and digital properties like access to games and other things. Or paid subscriptions will not be affected? Until now this part not clear.
If you are an Apple user my you could think this things will not affect you but better be sure you may use a Microsoft Service you don’t know its Microsoft. Not every Product include the companies name. Think about it, because who knows if those products spying around on your system. Some applications like Skype, Teams, Edge Browser and Visual Studio Code are available for other platforms like Apple and Linux.
Microsoft also owned the Source Code hosting Platform GitHub and an social network for professionals called LinkedIn. Whit Office 360 you can use the entire Microsoft Office Suite via Web Browser as Cloud solution and all your documents will be stored in the Microsoft Cloud. The same Cloud where US Government institutions like the CIA, NSA and many others keep their files. Well seems it will be a secure place for all your thought you place inside a office document.
This small detail about Office documents leads us to a little side note in the new terms of condition from Microsoft. The fight against hate speech. Whatever that means. Public insults and defamation have always been strictly enforced by the legislature. This means that it is not a trivial offense but rather a criminal offense. So it’s not clear to me what all this talk about hate speech means. Maybe it’s an attempt to introduce public censorship of freedom of expression.
But well back to the side notice from Microsoft term of conditions about hate speech. Microsoft wrote something like: if we detect hate speech we will warn the user and if the violations occur several times the Microsoft account of the user will be deactivated.
If you may think this is just something happen now by Microsoft, be sure many other companies working to introduce equal services. The communication platform Zoom for example included also A. I. techniques to observe the user communication for training purposes.
With all those news is still a big questions needed to be answered: What can I do by myself? The solution is simple. Move back from the digital universe into the real world. Turn the brain back on. Use pen and paper, pay in cash, leave your smartphone at home and there never on the bedside table. If you don’t use it turn it off. Meet your friend physically when ever it is possible and don’t bring your smartphone. There will be no government, no president and no messiahs to bring a change. It’s up to us.
February 22, 2024
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February 23, 2024
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Schulung / Training / Kurs / Seminar – 2 Tage remote
In dem Seminar “Git für Entwickler” erlernen Sie die Grundlagen und die Verwendung von Git, dem führenden Versionskontrollsystem für Softwareentwicklung. Git ist für fast alle Sprachen nutzbar und kostenlos verwendbar.
Durchführungs-Garantie: der Kurs wird auch bei nur einem Teilenmenden durchgeführt
Sollten Sie zu den angebotenen Terminen nicht können, beziehungsweise für Ihr Team einen individuellen Termin wünschen, um beispielsweise in einer geschlossenen Runde auf konkrete Problemstellungen eingehen zu können, besteht die Möglichkeit zusätzliche außerplanmäßige Termine zu vereinbaren. Nutzen Sie bitte hierzu mein Kontaktformular unter der Angabe welchen Kurs Sie wünschen, mit Terminvorschlägen und der zu erwartenden Teilnehmerzahl.
1989 was a historic year not just for Germany, it was for the whole world, when the Berlin wall teared down. A few months before, many people had wished that this event happen. But no one imagined it will become true. And even no person had in mind that everything goes so fast. Even me. Grew up on the side were we wished to touch the “always more green grass” of our neighbors. The Scorpions captured the spirit of this time with a song “Wind of change”. The unofficial hymn for the reunion of Germany.
Before I continue I need to clarify that this post will not mention anything from the Apple universe. Till today I never owned or used any Apple device. Why? Because there is no reason for me.
Conference Talks – Linux Tage
Similar to me it was with the strong dominance of Microsoft Windows as Operation System when I went into those computer things. Never I thought there is coming for me a time without Windows. Windows XP I had loved, after they fixed some heavy problems by Service Pack 1. Also Windows 7 an OS I really was liked to use and never I thought about a change. Really I always defended my Windows OS till this time. Because it was a really good system. But some years ago I changed my opinion – dramatically. Another wind of change. Let me give a brief history about decisions and experiences.
Everything began as I bought my Microsoft Surface 3 Pro with Windows 8.1 OS. In the beginning I was happy with the compact system and the performance. Very portable. A very important fact for me, because I travel a lot. I toked it also to my pilgrimage to Spain on the Camino de Santiago, to write my blog posts whit it. Unfortunately in the last week in Portugal the screen got broken. I was only be able to use it with external mouse. So I was forced to send the device to the Microsoft support. For a very shameless amount, close to a new buy – I got a replacement device with Windows 10. In between I also installed on my ThinkPad 510p Windows 10. I had felt like back in the year 2000 with my old Fujitsu Siemens Desktop and Windows Millennium. Almost every 3 months a re-installation of the whole system was necessary, because the update had broke the system. The most of my time I had spend to sit in front of my machine and wait that my Win 10 system got done whit the updates. During the updates, Windows 10 performance goes dramatically down and the system was not usable. If the device have more than 6 months no internet connection, it also close to impossible to turn on and start work with it. But this is not the whole drama. Every mayor update is breaking the customized configuration. Apps of the MS store already was deleted appeared again, additional language settings get broken and deactivated unwanted features was activated again. Another point is when you haven’t enough disk space for the Windows 10 update. All those things costed me a lot of pain and frustrations. Till today the situation is not really changed. By the way Ubuntu Mate can also be run on a Microsoft Surface 3 PRO device. If you own some of those old machines and you wish to know how to install there Linux to got a better performance write a comment if I should make tutorial how to run Linux on old Microsoft Surface devices.
The best you are be able to do with a Surface 3 PRO and its Windows 10 installation.
After I decided to run away from the Windows OS, I was needed to chose my new operation system. Well Linux! But which distribution? Usually in my job I only got experience with server and not by desktop systems. I remind me to my first SUSE Linux experiences in the early 2000. I think it was the Version 7 or something. I bought it in a store, because it came with a printed documentation and the download of more than a Gigabyte with my 56k modem was not an option. Some years later I was worked with Ubuntu and Fedora. In the beginning Ubuntu I was not wanted to use for my change, because of the Unity engine. The first installation of Fedora was needed a lot of hands on to establish services like Dropbox and Skype. I was in search for a system I can code with it. For this requirements many persons recommended Debian. But Debian is more for experienced user and for the most people get first time in touch with Linux not an good advice. After some investigations I found Ubuntu Mate. A Gnome Desktop based on Debian whit a huge software repository. This was sounding perfect for my necessities. And its still today the system of my choice.
After I installed Ubuntu Mate on my machine I really liked it from the first moment. Fast and simple installation, excellent documentation and all application I was needed was there. Because of my travels I bought some years ago an Asus ZenBook UX and I run also Ubuntu from the first unboxing on it. Always when people see my system they are surprised because everything looks like an iBook, but is much better.
The change to Linux Ubuntu Mate was much easier than I expected. With some small tricks a re-installation of the whole system takes me now less than 2 hours. The main concept is always clean and backuped the bash history file. Then I be able to rerun all needed commands for installation and configuration. Some of the applications like my favorite IDE Apache NetBeans, I backuped the configuration settings. The prefix of the filename is always the date when I perform the settings export. For example the NetBeans backup file is named as 2017-03-31_NetBeans. Those backups I do currently manually and not scripted. The time to develop a full automatism takes me in the moment too much time and the services I have to backup are not so much. For this reason is a manual action sufficient. Typical services are e-mail, SFTP, Browser favorites and so on as part of my manual backup procedure.
Since Firefox changed his API 2018 a very useful tool for export and import passwords is not available any more. To avoid the usage of a cloud service you should not trust to store all account passwords online, I decided to use the crypto tool KeePass. After I add all my web accounts to this tool the storage of the passwords is also more secure. With the browser plugin the accounts can be shared between all popular browsers like Firefox, Chrome and Opera. The KeePass file wiht my stored passwords is automatically included into my backup. The only important procedure of password storing is to keep the password database up to date.
One thing I was used heavily on Windows was the Portable Apps ecosystem. My strategy was to have a independent installation of many well configured services for work I just need to include to my current system. Something like this exist also in Linux. Just without the Portable App environment. My preference is always download the ZIP version of a software which not needs an installation. This I store on a second partition. In the case of a virgin OS setup the partition just need to linked back to the OS and its done. The strategy to deal whit an separate disk partition offers also a high flexibility, we can use for another step, virtualization.
I don’t want to remind myself how much time I spended in my life to configure development services like web server and database. For this problem is Docker now the solution of my choice. Each service is in an own image and the data got linked from a directory into the container. Also the configuration. Start and stop of the service is a simple command and the host system stays clean. Tryouts of service updates are very easily and complete conflict free. A rollback can performed every time by deleting the virtualization container.
The biggest change was from MS Office to Libre Office. Well with the functionality of Libre Office I already was fluent. The problem was all the Presentations and and Word documents I had. If you tried to open those files in both office applications the formatting getting crazy. To avoid this problem, I had find out it is often just a problem of the fonts. I decided to download from google a free and nice looking font. This I installed on the old Windows machine to convert all my office document away from MS Office.
My resume after some years of Linux usage, today I can say absolutely honest I do not miss anything. Of course I have to admit, I do not play games. After some hours every day working on a computer I prefer to move back into reality to meet friends and family. Its nice to explore places during my travels or simply read a book. With Linux I have a great performance of my hardware and as of now I did got any issue with drivers. All my Hardware is still working under Ubuntu Mate Linux well as I expect. With Linux instead of WIndows I save a lot of lifetime and frustrations.
