Kerberos solves the problem that doing public key authentication is slow on a i386

Memory safety or type safety are the least of Kerberos' issues. The protocol itself is fundamentally flawed.

What issues on Linux would this actually solve?

Ask IBM/RedHat. They did a lot of foundational work with SSSD (aka "too many 'S' D").

Kerberos is not a great protocol, though.

Did you respond to the wrong comment?

Check out the Microsoft baseline security guidelines for Windows 11. It's about 400 entries. 400 settings that Microsoft themselves recommend changing from the defaults to achieve a baseline security.

Why does windows 11 show stock values in the task bar by default? Why does it show ads, games and yellow press headlines when you click on it? On the enterprise edition! Xbox services are installed and running by default. Why?

Direct Send was my favorite. Direct Send allows devices to send unauthenticated email to internal recipients using your organization’s domain, which can expose you to internal emails for phishing etc. It bypasses user authentication, making sender identity difficult to verify or audit. For all orgs made before mid 2025 it was enabled by default.

I saw a great Blackhat talk this year about Entra misconfiguration that got Microsoft's own sensitive internal services owned by a researcher, one of them owned by their security team. After the report they reconfigure their services, didn't pay a bounty and considered the problems solved. What about their customers making the same config errors as the Microsoft team... no changes planned.

There's much much more...

One not-so-obscure problem is how hard it is to only elevate yourself to admin when you need it (and run as a regular user the other time).

Essentially you need to pay double license for admin users so they can have two logins; and it's a pain to quickly elevate privilege to do day to day admin tasks.

So if your friendly domain admin clicks the wrong link, your entire network is owned.

Everything on by default in general has plagued them, because they don't want users to complain it doesn't work.

Have you admined a Google Apps account and an MS365 account? I'm curious why you think Microsoft is more secure? For me they are completely different, Google is secure by default, Microsoft is not. Do you have "Direct Send" enabled on your account for example?

The usa couldnt handle Aghanistan. Now they are invading continental Europe?

As I said, still licking the car battery.

Only invasion, or a real threat of invasion, from Russia, US or China can shook Europe into real change.

The EU has - just like the US - a generation of boomer senators and presidents in (voting) power for more than 2 decades at this point.

In the coming decade, that will change.

Hopefully for the better.

We're talking about running a few mail server, network shares, and an office suite (LibreOffice if you want). Any university's in-house IT department should be able to pull that off, and it's exactly what many did for a very long time.

It's not as much about complacency as it is about the lack of funding and resources. We're talking about countries with government budgets as low as 20 billion USD. Looking at common election promises, people here would rather see that money spent on non-profit housing, healthcare, infrastructure, than some ambitious AI or tech project that they likely wouldn't directly benefit from - at least compared to the things mentioned before - so there's little money left for "developing our own MS Office / LLM / Google".

Whereas China not only has a much bigger budget than individual EU countries, but also central planning on a large scale, so they can just "force" things be done, no matter whether people like it or not. China giving 0.01% for such projects is way more money than a small EU country giving the same %. And it's not like they'll vote the party out for a failed project (which happens in EU countries quite often).

The problem is , there are very few Europeans or EUans. There are French and Germans and Spanish etc; they all want their country first and sure open markets but their country first. That is how they vote (certainly these days). Most people do not feel EU unfortunately. Language is one thing: it is getting better but having language not unified (English, Spanish, Mandarin; pick one) is a massive and real issue keeping people's minds and efforts local instead of, at least EU wide. It is slowly getting better but the EU should made easier accessible and far higher funds for pan EU projects. Currently it is a serious pain to get access to EU funds and many just get eaten by the few massive consultancy corps who have dedicated teams going for any funding and tender in any locality and language.

It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many).

I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.

This is true, but it's also a fixable problem.

The issue I've seen is that there isn't really the political will to fix it. Europeans broadly seem uncomfortable giving up national sovereignty when it comes to digital issues (including those that impact scaling businesses), so they implicitly choose the status quo that makes it hard for software/internet businesses to succeed.

Literally in this thread you can see Europeans who are against greater federalization. And their objections are entirely understandable, but at the same time, can't exactly have your cake and eat it too. If you insist on 27 different sets of regulations to protect certain interests, however valid, you can't exactly be surprised when that makes scaling businesses rather challenging.

> "Europe" is, unlike the US, not a single entity

It really needs to be, though, that's kind of the crux of it.

Federate or die off, it's time to get rid of old tribal thinking. We're all Europeans.

Right but as an entity it can also do quite the damage. Cookie popups come to mind.

Excuse denied. All they had to do was nothing. Instead they over-regulated way too early, before the industries could grow enough to support operating in such an environment. Now they are behind and will likely never catch up. The future of European tech is government handouts/scraps, collected by force from American companies.

if we talk beaurocracy EU is very well consolidated: "you can't do that", everyone says consistently.

A recent analysis of the Trump Tarrifs on the EU concluded that while “some regions and industries could suffer”, for Europe overall the hit may be “limited but not negligible.

The EU is quietly investing massively in diversifying away from the US market. there are trade negotiations or agreements in process (or being advanced) with countries/regions including India, the countries of the Mercosur bloc, Mexico, and Middle-East countries.

Yes. Unfortunately, the EU institutions have been designed during heyday of globalization and neoliberalism. So they are unable to adapt to (or even recognize) the end of it.

I feel like this sentiment comes at least partially from American companies(especially Microsoft) habit of buying successful European tech companies, making people believe they're American and not European.

There is plenty of European tech success stories, but plenty of them will be mistaken for American ones after Microsoft bought them(and more often than not ruined the product, see Skype for example)

Unfortunately part of it is that it likely goes both ways. For example illegal subsidies to Airbus. And US companies still buy Airbus. I think all of these go into the calculus of the decisions to purchase though. It’s likely you value open source much higher than they do based on your own principles.

USA does corruption and also does threatening if you try to not use their companies. I've read an interview to a mexican minister who basically got direct threats from the USA ambassador when the government decided to stop using windows.

I'd say Bell is the OG, which was founded about 40 years before IBM.

That is a tiny part of it though. Lots of government functioning depends on big tech clouds. The NHS depends on AWS. A lot of the private sector does too. Everyone depends on Apple or Android phones. Card payments (and the government is pushing a move to cashless) rely on Mastercard and Visa. Windows increasingly requires logging in with an MS account. In the meantime govt and big business are pushing people to use mobile apps more, increasing this dependence.

Moving to a different mail server and office suite keeps the ICC working, but does not really protect people at the ICC from US sanctions. Their lives can be made very difficult: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitall...

I think this bit of the article is a critical problem:

>By outsourcing the management of IT systems, these educational institutions are losing technical knowledge and control. As a result, they are becoming increasingly dependent on big tech, putting academic freedom and independence at risk.

All of this is fixable but its expensive to fix. No one is motivated enough to spend the money.

As much as I agree with the need for digital independence and the fact that universities (and governments) in Europe are over reliant on US tech, it is not as simple as you describe.

There is a lot more happening in the administrative and infrastructural side of things in most universities that one barely observes as student. So every change needs to take also that into account, the management and maintenance of services and infrastructures that must reliably support thousands of users, with relatively strict privacy and security standards, and their migration.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46080495

Companies can pay to train their employees on the software that they use. This is neither the responsibility of the secondary education system nor the Dutch taxpayers.

My first experience with an original IBM PC, I wondered what this thing called Microsoft was.

It just didn't seem right. Why would you need that?

What if you just wanted a plain IBM computer? Why isn't that the mainstream without need for any third party software? Or is it software? How do people do without it? What if you just want to compute? Not use the PC as an office machine or do any gaming?

Is this Microsoft content really essential?

Isn't the hardware any good without a Microsoft?

How would you go about doing that?

I guess Linus eventually asked himself the same kind of things and drove it home :)

Yes, chrome gives me a little “PWA” so I can even have an icon in my dock, but it’s not as nice

Yes, and the same can be done with Teams. That's what I do on my Linux laptop.

Would this procedure work with the certificates you need to use?

https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/lab-infrastructure/install...

At 4 european universities i studied/taught this has never been the case. Most universities are used to run their infra, they ran their email servers way before google existed and they run big fleets of servers for thin clients. Afaik they still kept their own internal messaging as backup but it was still email servers hidden behind web gui.

What happened was that the big tech came in and made everything for them free. It is really hard to compete with free. They get windows for free, they get gmail for free at some point even unlimited google drive for free.

Now the situation is changing as the corps are tightening. I've seen 40k student university switch from gmail to office360 in two months because google suddenly wanted money and microsoft didn't. Now Microsoft also wants money. And it's not small money. So the school is doing cost assesment - you can give it to european third party provider that will be way cheaper tham microsoft. Or you go back to your own infra.

Turns out that what to be really expensive when google was giving people 30gb of free space to everyone in 2012 now is actually not that bad and you own your future. My guess is they will pay Microsoft for a year while they transition their email to their infra. The other parts gonna come later. But the students are required to use libre office (or latex) for writing their thesis so i don't think they see google docs as big blocker.

How much is the typical dutch university paying MS/Google? Maybe 10k students x 200EUR/year = 2 million EUR/year.

Twenty universities come together to move to make Collabora+NextCloud work for them. That's 40 million EUR/year. How much do they need to actually spend on developers + infrastructure to make it happen?

IIRC, Dutch unis have another account managing system, run by SURFnet. OAuth2, I think.

Most people barely know what OS they are using. its just a way to start apps.

As long as they have an obvious way of opening a web browser, an office suite, and maybe an email and calendering client, the average office worker will barely notice the OS.

How I can imagine it works: Amazon only provides the packaged software, the infra and the ops are officially driven by a 100% European company. AWS probably provides support, but they don't have the encryption keys not any access to the installation.

In theory Amazon could license the stack to a European Operator while having no operative access themselves.

I think this is already done in some cases altough the political reliability has not yet been tested.

By providing the software to be installed in clusters owned and operated by European companies.

The sovereign cloud spec designed by the folks at France's ANSSI agency is tight.

The US CLOUD Act says that if Amazon has the technical ability to access those machines, they must do so if the US government asks them to.

So, unless it’s a separate legal entity, and also shares no authentication, software deployment, or related infrastructure with the US part of Amazon, it’s either not providing sovereignty or is being offered in violation of US law.

It’s unclear to me if they’d have to comply with requests to (for example) backdoor their IAM service backend and push the binaries to Europe, or not. (I’m not a lawyer.)