International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb The International Criminal Court (ICC) is ditching Microsoft Office for a European software alternative amid mounting fears about being reliant on US technology. The ICC will switch from Microsoft's productivity wares to openDesk, an open source office and collaboration suite provided by the Center for Digital Sovereignty ( …
regardless of opinions about software needs vs gummint policies, the OBVIOUS elephant in the room is not political, but ECONOMICAL and pure common sense.
* Open Source equivalents are likely to have lower cost of operation
* Open source equivalents cannot be 'canceled' and thereby caused to stop working [or have a toll booth imposed, for that matter]
So for critical government agencies, it has the potential of ALL SUPPORT being "self-contained" if the need ever arises. This is just prudent planning.
I am QUITE SICK of the slow bulldozing of prior releases into a BIG PILE of SUBSCRIPTION-BASED CRAP. How long before Windows 12 is SUBSCRIPTION-ONLY???
I have thought & warned about over reliance on US proprietary tech since cloud emerged. Even politically I have advocated a pull back from USA. Unfortunately, I did not foresee that Europe & UK would become more dystopian than the US. So what we are seeing is a European attempt at control as much as data sovereignity. People should remember when the EU talks sovereignity they do not mean individual, they mean collectivist, i.e., bureaucrats taking all power. Look at Germany, that once powerhouse of Europe arresting and charging people for memes about politicians. The UK with hate speech arrests of frankly often pathetic weak people and two tier judical standards. Not much fuss in the media is there? Look at the media, one day you'd think Farage is the next Hitler and the following getting good publicity as a potential PM. To switch like that is not the mark of a free press.
Everybody did know that, and would admit it behind closed doors in trusted company. But there's a big difference to saying it out loud and acting upon it which might attract repercussions from Epstein's thin skinned orange buddy. In the case of the ICC they've nothing to lose, likewise a few local authorities or smaller EU nation governments.
But if say the UK government announced a plan to exclusively use software and services that weren't vulnerable to US oversight, can you imagine how that would go?
... can you imagine how that would go?
Perfectly well.
It is about time the UK government grew a spine.
Or does HRH have to do everything himself?
Now that the the ex-prince has been dealt* with, it is high time to do the same thing with the rest of the bloodsuckers vying to take control of the UK's economy.
* yes, I know: the how will be a contentious issue for decades but undoubtedly better than the previous status-quo.
.
America is powerful enough to hurt the UK, and its leader is thin-skinned and vindictive enough to do so for the pettiest of slights. Rich people are literally bringing him lumps of gold to curry favour. And you think if the UK’s government publicly rejects products and services of a global company because it is American it would go “perfectly well’?
Rich people are literally bringing him lumps of gold to curry favour.
Joke's on them, too, because no amount of bribery or kow-towing will inspire any loyalty in President Cheeto. The moment they make a single decision that doesn't benefit him (even if it has nothing to do with him), he'll turn on them faster than guacamole sitting out in the sun on a summer day.
Love him or hate him, when you look at what Trump has been through, he's not thin skinned. It's like calling suicide bombers cowards. Takes some balls to kill yourself for a belief even if wrong. We need to stop discounting adversaries, it doesn't help oppose them only makes you unprepared.
We should do it anyway. Things are heading downhill, we are what ~£3T in debt? Labour want to tax the last squeak of life out of the economy so spending is going to fall off a cliff. We have law and order falling apart for violent crime. Job market declining and will fall off a cliff as well with spending. The highest tax payers doing runners. We're in a debt spiral and everyone hates Truss & Kwarteng for at least trying to halt it because the media told us to hate them.
So, if I was (god forbid) in charge I would be thinking the world is about to explode somehow I want as much self reliance as possible; IT, energy & food. But what we are doing is the exact opposite. The big question is why because the provided explanations do not hold water, followed by who is actually in control and demanding the destruction of the UK? I do not buy the incompetence excuse.
If government was any form of traditional business, and the overheads had reached 500,000 employees, whole departments would have been gone years ago. We once ran an empire with 10,000 and one building; Somerset House. Now we have a half million and we simply cannot afford them any more. There is only one simple thing that will bring down the debt levels; cut the overhead of the nation. As my headline states; Never a word about reducing the cost of the civil service.
Re: ICC's Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email account. Microsoft President Brad Smith denied the company had done this, telling reporters "at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC."
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
"Sure, we did in fact knowingly and deliberately cut off digital services to the ICC's chief prosecutor after the Trump administration ordered us to do it... but we didn't cut off digital services to the *entire* ICC as an *institution*, which is something the Trump administration never ordered us to do, even though we probably would've done that in a heartbeat if they *had* given us that order."
You do know that Karim Khan is sanctioned by the US?
Pretty certain MS doesn't have a choice:
"The sanctions, imposed in February 2025 via an executive order by President Trump, include travel bans, freezing of U.S. assets, and prohibitions on U.S. persons providing financial or other support to Khan. These measures extend to his immediate family and prohibit their entry into the United States. The sanctions have severely affected Khan’s professional activities and personal banking facilities."
We don't really know what would happen in Microsoft defied U.S. sanctions on Khan, because there's never been a mass-scale institutional effort to defy these kinds of sanctions before.
Up until now, everybody seems to have taken it for granted that it'd be totally fine for the U.S. executive branch to have 100% unchecked power to essentially revoke a person's membership in global society on a whim, because surely the U.S. can be trusted to only use such power to go after people who "really" deserve it, right?
All these institutions need to ask themselves where they'd draw the line of open defiance, or next thing you know they'll be helping enforce U.S. sanctions on some random guy at Trump's golf club who took too long to finish the hole ahead of him or whatever.
Pretty sure Presidential Executive Order is the law, in the absence of someone challenging it, and that might only happen if their bottom line was adversely affected. US multinationals aren't known for putting morality above profit.
Although not directly applicable to this case, ZTE was fined $1B for breaking US sanctions by selling to Iran and North Korea. MS won't be risking that. Ever.
True, but Congress has passed many laws granting the Executive powers it can exercise with the force of law, because the law says so. These funding bills they're always passing (remember the One Bloated Butterface Bill?) or not passing (see the current shutdown) are in no small part made up of money stuffed down the Executive's blouse for this or that purpose, thus making the execution (aha! see?) of those tasks by order of the President a matter of law.
Of course, over the centuries we've increasingly granted the President more and more latitude in interpreting those legally-obligated tasks and in deciding how exactly to go about them.
Or NOT go about them, because the argument has been made, and.came up again during Obama's first term, that if any part of the office's obligations under the law are likely to be deemed Unconstitutional by the Supremes, then the President has an obligation NOT to carry out that task.
Because when a law is struck down as Unconstitutional, it doesn't become invalid only at that point. A law struck down by the highest court was NEVER valid to begin with, and any actions that the Federal government took in implementing that law were unlawful acts
(Not that anyone involved would be likely face criminal charges. The government's actions are unlawful, not the actions of any civil servants obeying the law as it was understood at the time. You need some seriously exceptional circumstances, like the Nuremberg trials, for civil servants to go down because they followed the law and did the job as defined to them.)
...Getting back on track, tho: Problem is, we all know THIS Supreme Court isn't going to be slapping any of Trump's executive powers out of his hand -- real OR imaginary.
Sure, it's just a question of whether the government in question has the political and economic muscle to force companies to obey it. When (for example) a court in Ecuador rules that Chevron owes the Ecuadorian people billions to compensate for damages caused by pollution, Chevron decides to fight back, because it decides it can and it's worth it. If Microsoft and other companies/institutions in the same situation decided they had the collective leverage to force the U.S. government to back down, nothing stops them from trying, especially if they can credibly argue that the Khan sanctions could end up becoming the tipping point that costs U.S. tech companies billions of dollars' worth of international business.
"Re: ICC's Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email account."
Email is dead simple and to outsource it to somebody such as M$ or Google is madness.
I don't manage my email with a web browser which seems to be what many do as that's all they can figure out how to use. I do have an orphan gmail account that I use to access the Play Store and access to that lives on its own phone that needs wifi access to get online (no SIM). That phone is for a scanning app and I keep a copy of DJI software installed to control my drone if my tablet dies, as a backup. Other than that, all of my email goes through a hosting provider where I control the backend. No phantom filtering and I can access the email multiple different ways if needed.
The way I see it, if you outsource critical business tools to a company that's a gazillion times larger than you are, you are not important to them. You can stamp your feet and yell and it's no more than the cries of a kitten in a box, next to a busy highway. That company is too big to care and too big to be able to afford caring if they wanted to. The hosting company I use is bigger than me, but they aren't so big that they don't have to worry about negative reviews and complaints. Lots of people complain about M$, but they are so big and have a lock on so much that another negative comment means nothing.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Indeed.
But seeing that we are referring to Microsoft, I'd say that it is the other way around.
ie:
Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice.
It makes you look incompetent.
And rather daft.
.
Collabora is mainly the document editing component of openDesk, with many others such as NextCloud and XWiki providing other components. Both outfits acknowledge Collabora's active support for openDesk. Collabora in turn is built on top of LibreOffice, to which they also contribute substantially, along with German outfit allotropia.
None of this changes the fact that it is ZenDiS, the German Government-owned Center for Digital Sovereignty, that pulls openDesk together as a coherent deal and makes it available.
A splendid example of Anglo-German cooperation, IMHO. Long may it continue.
>” ZenDiS, the German Government-owned Center for Digital Sovereignty, that pulls openDesk together as a coherent deal and makes it available.”
Something The Cabinet Office could have done (for UK government), hence why it captured by Microsoft via its “independent” partners.
Bet it would have cost significantly less than the latest MS licence/subscription agreement.
> Bet it would have cost significantly less than the latest MS licence/subscription agreement.
You may very well think that. There are those of us here who couldn't possibly comment.
The real fear in HMG circles is over long-term support. According to the global shitopolies*, you cannot trust these here-today-gone-tomorrow open-source scallies, you need the reliable presence and usurylending power of an established global shitopoly. Sadly, the FUD works all too well on the British bureaucrat.
* P.S. "Enshittification" is now official. The current New Scientist carries an article by Tim Berners-Lee on the subject, and even the issue's editorial lead explicitly refers to the coining of "enshittification" by Cory Dctorow.
Long term support is a valid concern. But in coming days of political and economic turmoil self reliance is more important. One would've thought the UK government, possibly in collaboration with other concerned parties would be able to setup a means of developing a suite and support process that does not rely on an out of nation 3rd party.
Also to host stuff not reliant on services and datacentres in another nation!
Globalism is in its death throes. Long live the nation.
(No that doesn't mean you can't go to Tuscany on holiday, it means it stays Italy not some amorphous grey region)
Austria's Federal Ministry of Economy, Energy and Tourism switched from MS to Nextcloud in four months, although Teams is still used for external meetings with organisations use Teams.
Good News! Austrian Ministry Kicks Out Microsoft in Favor of Nextcloud
The article also mentions three other recent migrations in Germany, Denmark, and Austria. Looks like things are starting to move forward.
Linux Mint...heretic, the only true distro is......<insert preferred version here>; burn them!
But seriously, you’ve missed the point, it’s not what is running on the desktop, it’s the entire backend system.
And here is where I rack up the downvotes, please, please understand that just knee-jerking ‘switch to Linux’ as the answer to every issue, really isn;t doing your cause much good.
Turns out so many linux counterparts don't play nice with windows versions even supplied by the same company. I tried a simple media server migration from windows to linux, it was quicker to rebuild the entire library from scratch after spending a couple of days trying to transfer user accounts, re-point file locations, etc . I dread to think how more complex backend software migration works, or rather doesn't.
He says to drop Microsoft!
https://youtu.be/C44iCr6czAo
Actually, he says a lot of stuff that I already do, except he has reasoned rationale whereas I have, what, instinct or something.
He says don’t use antivirus, just use snapshots.
He says put your data on a separate device, yes I follow this religiously.
He says, don’t use the TPM or the SecureBoot. I wouldn’t know how to use those things!
Anyway, time to Linux Up, fellas.
Boycott:
Microsoft Apple Google (to the maximum extent you can) and EVERY COMPANY involved with forcing A.I down our throats (this is a foie gras technique intended to give us a delicious fatty liver that they intend to enjoy “any day now.”)
I really like Rob a lot and follow many of his strategies; however watching his videos kind of depresses me due to how he shows the level in which companies and governments are collaborating to take away every thread of privacy an control you have over your digital life.
We don't even know what we don't know about what they are doing to us.
@theregister, - You folks should consider engaging with Rob to create some articles on digital protection and privacy.
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