Security Breach at US Universities
Great. Just great. This is days after I learned about the new Germany-wide deal with Microsoft for licensing their software and services, so it perfectly fuels my fears. Before, it was mostly just a volume license for Windows and Office, but now it&#x27;s the full arsenal, M365, Teams, and, announced very proudly by our University, we&#x27;ll be moving our Active Directory to the hybrid cloud. Every Student and Staff will automatically have their personal data deployed to the Azure cloud. Isn&#x27;t that great? Finally Germany is working on tech incompet^Windependence!
What could go wrong?<p>I mean, they assured they&#x27;d form a working group with other Universities about remaining concerns regarding privacy issues in Windows 10 and planning to confront Microsoft about them. I guess Microsoft is shivering with fears and busy removing all telemetry right now.<p>Other great changes form this new deal are that Universities now have to pay a full Windows license for every employee, no matter how many hours they work; before you&#x27;d pay by how many full-time jobs all the employees would make up for. That means most Universities pay twice as much now. And did you know the new deal explicitly forbids remote access to any Windows machine under this license? You have to pay extra for that. What a strange coincidence regarding the current epidemic. Universities&#x27; legal departments are clueless whether this only applies to RDP, or alternative 3rd party tools as well (or rather whether this would hold up in court).<p>This is the first time the deal is made nation-wide, you&#x27;d think this puts our Universities in a better position, but we got fucked in every way possible.<p>I realize this is only marginally related with the original post, but 1) sorry, I just had to vent somewhere, this seemed just like the final straw, and 2) am I the weird one for seeing a problem in this trend? Universities were once driving innovation in technology, students were fiddling with emerging and expensive tech, but today we already have some Universities that don&#x27;t even have their own datacenter anymore, <i>everything</i> is hosted elsewhere and maintained by contractors. Students access SaaS via a Browser. Walled gardens everywhere. This doesn&#x27;t help.