Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Tag: technology

  • Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

    We are in a world where most of us use American “Big Tech” these days for our online presence and social interactions. However, as a recent article in The Guardian says:

    There’s not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them.

    I’ve tried to extract myself as much as possible from their grasp – I left Facebook years ago, left Twitter once Musk got his hands on it, and never wanted to open Instagram or Tik Tok accounts. Wherever possible I don’t use Google – I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine – but since I have an Android smartphone (an ancient Microsoft Surface Duo 2), I’m still enmeshed in their services to some extent. And unfortunately, despite using Signal, I still have to keep a WhatsApp account open because the majority of my smartphone contacts use it.

    And while I try and minimise my engagement with Meta and Google, I am currently firmly in the grip of Microsoft. Not just with my PCs’ operating systems – they all run Windows 11 – but with the applications I use daily: mail (Outlook), chat (Teams), word processing (Word)and spreadsheets (Excel). Not only that, but my online storage is all in OneDrive. The applications and online storage are all bundled together in the Microsoft 365 product.

    To be honest, I don’t really have any enthusiasm for switching from Windows 11 to a Desktop Linux world – too many of the other applications I use are Windows-based – I’ll just continue to hold my nose and disable as much of Microsoft’s data gathering and AI interference (CoPilot is even more irritating than Clippy was) as I can. I could switch from the use of Microsoft’s Office applications to use LibreOffice, but there will be a relearning cost involved. My muscle memory of Word is the product of years of use… And there are alternatives to Outlook and OneDrive available.

    So the big question becomes should I stay with Microsoft 365 or go with the alternatives?

    It’s not just individuals pondering this question – since the arrival of Trump, many European organisations and governments are doing the same. The trigger was the Trump administration’s sanction of Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the ICC. That resulted in the ICC removing Khan’s access to their Microsoft 365 system. The Volkskrant reported last month that Microsoft had told the ICC the sanctions meant it had to deny Khan access to its services. The report said the ICC would have to end the chief prosecutor’s access to the services, otherwise Microsoft would end the email services for the whole organization. The ICC then decided to suspend Kahn’s email services. The ICC has since cut their ties with Microsoft and Microsoft 365 and now uses openDesk, an open source office and collaboration suite provided by the German Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS).

    In April last year, Microsoft announced a European Digital Resilience Commitment which it said would include in all of its contracts with European national governments and the European Commission.

    “We will make this commitment legally binding on Microsoft Corporation and all its subsidiaries,” it said in a blog post. The company said it would “continue our fight to protect the rights of European customers.”

    That sounded all fine, until Microsoft later admitted that it couldn’t actually guarantee data sovereignty.

    This should be a wakeup call to European organisations and governments.

    Is it also a wakeup call for me?

    I’m trialling Proton Mail (an alternative to Outlook) and Proton Drive (an alternative to OneDrive) to find out. Watch this space.

    Addendum: This report by the Norwegian Consumer Council on “Enshittification” describes the situation very well.

  • Microsoft Strikes again

    We’ve had a Home Theatre system for years. It uses a Denon 3808 AVR and a home-built HTPC running Plex on Windows.

    Last year, I replaced the the original 6th generation Intel NUC that was the HTPC’s hardware with a new 13th generation ASUS NUC and installed Windows 11 on it.

    This week we sat down to watch something on it, but the video would not play, it just froze. I tried playing it on my Desktop PC (also running Windows 11 and Plex), and that was fine, no problem.

    Scratching my head, I wondered whether it was a problem with the versions of Plex I was using – on the HTPC I use the version of Plex designed specifically for HTPCs, while on the Desktop PC, I use Plex for Windows (i.e. mouse-driven).

    So I installed and tried Plex for Windows on the HTPC. This time, the problem video would play, but there was no sound…

    It then occurred to me to see what audio codecs were being used in this video – and it was using the EAC3 codec.

    A search on the web quickly found the culprit – bloody Microsoft again. They’ve removed the EAC3 codec from newer versions of Windows 11, apparently in the belief that it is installed by PC manufacturers these days. Well, hello, I was this particular PC’s manufacturer, and you never bothered to tell me that I needed to explicitly install the codec. My Desktop PC was originally running Windows 10 (which had the codec supplied by Microsoft) and the codec was retained when I upgraded to Windows 11. That was why the video would play on my Desktop PC but not on the HTPC.

    Another hunt on the web turned up a source for the codec, so it was downloaded and installed on the HTPC. It just took hours of frustration before I found what the problem was: Microsoft – as usual.

  • A Supply Chain Story

    I’ve just purchased a Microsoft Surface Pro 12 and keyboard to replace my aging Surface Go 2.

    The experience of buying the Surface tablet has been illuminating of just how complex, and data-driven, supply chains have become.

    The Surface comes in three available colours: platinum, violet and ocean-blue. The online Dutch Microsoft store only offers the platinum version, with a black keyboard with the US International layout. Naturally, I wanted a violet Surface and keyboard… So I went looking for other online sources for that combination. All the alternative online stores in the Netherlands were only offering the same combination as the Microsoft store. The online German Microsoft store did have both items in violet – but the keyboard was the German QWERTZ version – not what I wanted at all.

    I returned to the Dutch store and explained what I wanted to a Dutch support person via Chat and after some research he confirmed to me in an email that we could source the Surface from the German store (because it was 50 euros cheaper – special offer) and the keyboard from the Irish Microsoft store. The only snag was that the keyboard would be the UK layout, rather than US international, but at least it would be better than the German QWERTZ layout. I replied to his email confirming that I wanted to place the order.

    I attempted to reach him again via Chat, but that was not working, so after I sent him my phone number, he phoned me. After verification checks, he proceeded to place the order via the German and Irish online stores on my behalf. I got email order confirmations for the tablet (in German) and the keyboard (in English).

    Because we had placed the orders in two different EU countries from where I actually live (the Netherlands), I was expecting shipment and delivery to take at least a week. However, the following day I got emails from both Microsoft and the courier that the goods were on the way and would be delivered the same day.

    Bizarrely, although the orders were placed in the online stores of different countries, they both turned out to be fulfilled by the Irish operation. Even more bizarre, there’s apparently a warehouse in Venlo (in the Netherlands just 80 km from here) that bears the title Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd. That had the items in stock and so they were shipped locally to me…

    And a coda to this story is that before I had even set up and signed in to the Surface with its keyboard, Microsoft knew that I had bought them and had included them in the list of my devices in my Microsoft account. I think they must immediately track their serial numbers from the moment of placing the orders.