Comment on Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other Manifest V2-based extensions in Edge
rmuk@feddit.uk 1 day agoAll the people who bluster and huff about Microsoft’s stranglehold on enterprise, education, government, etc all absolutely fail to grasp how utterly manageable Windows specifically (and MS products in general) is/are. If you’re familiar with Group Policy, you know; if you’re not, your really, really dont. A moderately competent Windows admin with a single Windows Server can make ten thousand Windows workstations work seamlessley in fifty countries, twenty data protection doctrines and ten languages with hundreds of customisations, tweaks, automations and deployments tailored to each combination of device/user/location, if that’s what they need. I wish that was the case with any FOSS OS, but it absolutely isn’t and even MacOS and ChromeOS don’t come even vaugley close.
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is understandable, and also can see why FOSS would struggle, since a big part of the value is keeping the operators of the machines from doing the things they want or need to do. This is anathema to general FOSS thinking, to keep the user from doing things they would generally be empowered to do.
Which I can see as being great for the admins, but it is often maddening to be a user under that regime. For example, “officially” I must use the corporate load for my work, and it’s super locked down. Problem being is the lock down makes my job effectively impossible (unable to run arbitrarily new binaries, unable to connect to services without a proper certificate, unable to add my own certificates, must get all binaries and service certificates from IT who takes 2-3 weeks to turnaround a signature). So you have a few departments resorting to that naughtiest of naughty words “Shadow IT”, always looking for end-runs around the corp policy that explicitly blocks software development work because they wouldn’t be able to discern that from malware.
Ours also shot us in the head, by forcing automatic updates off (because they know better how to deploy patches than Micrsoft I guess) and then there’s a ransomware attack that cripples things because they didn’t realize they failed to apply security updates for two years on most systems. Fortunately enough people had been manually updating to keep things going.