c4mpute

> The German law you cite about getting a password is applicable if you plan to or actually access data they are not authorized to. Which is not the case (assuming they do not).

Usually this is the case. The user and Microsoft are not the only parties involved here. The Email provider is also involved in that they provide an email account, often e.g. for work or educational purposes. In those cases, handing over account credentials is forbidden by the workplace or educational institution, providing other people such as Microsoft with access is usually forbidden as well. Other commercial email providers often have similar rules. Therefore either Microsoft is doing unauthorized accesses en masse (since they do know that the aforementioned clauses are widespread common practice) or the users are illegally providing access to Microsoft.

> GDPR deals with privacy. The user name is personal identifiable data. The password is only personal data. The emails themselves can be PII or just personal data.

There is no such distinction in GDPR. There is only personal data according to GDPR article 4. A password is personal data because it is "personal" in that it can be (and is almost always) tied to a person. "PII" is something that only occurs in US law. The definitions are different, "personal data" in GDPR is far broader.

> GDPR legally wise, the password is the least risky set of data here (as absurd as it is)

Depends on what else is in that Inbox and what else this password can access.

> And these properties are not mentioned in the consent but just are part of the process. This is nothing else, just that we are very worried about that the property is a password.

Interesting idea, and yes, GDPR allows for not informing the user about what the user already knows, i.e. a kind of implicit consent. However, the surprise that even experts on HN show about this news demonstrates that the average user doesn't know. So this doesn't apply, Microsoft should have explicitly informed and asked about permission to use username and password.

It is even worse.

MS doesn't need to do anything. They don't need to pay anyone off. EU bureaucracy is extremely strongly wedded to MS products like Windows, Office, Teams, Outlook etc. As are all EU national bureaucracies and public institutions.

There are firm opinions by e.g. the BSI (German IT security office, comparable to something between NSA, mostly NIST, DHS and ANSI) and other equivalent European national offices that it is practically impossible to operate modern MS products securely. E.g. there are guidelines from BSI like "we know that in that exact version (which is years old, because the guideline took ages to write) you need to set the following registry keys to prevent data exfiltration. Btw. this won't help you, because you also HAVE to upgrade within a few weeks of each available update". There are firm opinions by multiple European data protection offices that basically say the same about GDPR compliance in MS products. Practically impossible to achieve, there might have been that one configuration, "Once upon a time of writing the report, with that specific version of Windows and Office, when firewalling off half of azure, setting those 300 registry keys, manually deleting the following files, illegal telemetry could no longer be observed. Also, you are obliged by GDPR to follow good practice and update regularly, so good luck with that...".

Basically it is illegal to process any personal data using MS products in the EU if the processing system has any kind of outgoing internet connection. All the bureaucracies ignore this systematically, citing the "impossibility" of working without said MS products. Migration plans away from those illegal processes are regularly cancelled, ignored or never completed. MS is free to do whatever it wants, they are never really investigated, fined or held to any laws.

Meanwhile, other big IT firms like Meta, Google, Twitter/X and lots of others are held to far higher standards. Where tons of your local government's data about you like tax report, criminal records, school records and similar things are subject to being exported to the US via Azure, MS telemetry and what not. With FAANG there is complaining about comparably laughable stuff like "well, that IP address that Google Fonts could observe...".

The problem, why this doesn't change, is that the local government institution is responsible for their data processing (according to GDPR and other laws), MS being only their contractor. And those government institutions are usually (in almost all EU states) free from GDPR and other penalties, and those penalties would be left-pocket-to-right-pocket anyways.

This is why MS gets a free pass on everything. Imho this must end.

Because a DNSSEC attestation is usually public, except if you maybe use NSEC 3 and hide the RR behind some random name.

No. Ambiguous consent is no consent. And continuing to send DNT is ambiguous, because the tracker can not distinguish between intent and accident.

Would be irrelevant, because the DNT-header will be sent with every request, so for all practical purposes will be later than any other kind of consent.

GDPR specifies tracking to be necessarily default-off and opt-in anyways. Therefore the browser sending DNT:1 by default would just repeat the legal status quo. A tracker could not successfully argue that this is to be ignored, because the technical default that the browser sends is the legal default anyways.

Agreed. Torx might not be ideal, but it is widespread and (relatively) cheap. And miles better than anything else that is widespread and cheap.

If an attacker knows about some exploit involving someservice.com, which you are using. That attacker will try to find out where he can use that exploit of his. E.g. he might use something like shodan, google or DNS to get a list of users of someservice.com. Those potential victims that turn up in that list will get attacked first. Later on, if that list is used up, the attacker might then look at other means of getting new victims, like e.g. just trying out the exploit on targets where he doesn't know they are vulnerable. So in that case, not being "visible" to an attacker buys you time to fix the vulnerability.

On the other hand, if you are on the attacker's hotlist, he'll try you first and you gain nothing.

Ah, now I get it. Yes, that is a possible problem.

Even stupid age-old BIND zone files can be version controlled and commented. Anything inferior to that level of documentability should be an instant no-no.

This kind of thing is pointless against a targeted attack. But it can hide you long enough in case of zero-days/fresh unpatched vulnerabilities because attackers will first target the more easily visible victims.

You could use your DNSSEC signing key to sign a validation message (offline, because that doesn't work over DNS).

Double or triple that of a car, for a small plane, because of the higher fuel consumption.

But this only affects avgas, which is high-octane gasoline for propeller-driven aircraft. Jet-A1, which is light diesel fuel or kerosene-like for jets doesn't contain lead.