Posts by jimbot 9 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2013
It's slightly mindboggling how random parts of Windows seem to be tightly coupled to each other. Here we have the presence/absence of a language pack changing the behaviour of a legacy authentication protocol and triggering a bug.
A few years back I remember investigating an issue with either graphics or wifi (I forget which), and the root cause turned out to be in BitLocker! Do these folk ever do design or code reviews?
I wonder if the screenshot blocker has an "elephant in the room" limitation they forgot to mention, e.g. it only works with the screenshot tool included in the OS and not third-party screenshot tools. Other workarounds that spring to mind are running the OS in a VM and accessing it through an RDP session. ...or just using a different browser.
I suppose it might block the casual, non-technical, non-malicious/accidental snappers as part of a wider solution if their machine and the web site they connect to are thoroughly locked down.
This might be a useful change for organisations whose staff access Office 365 through firewalls and proxy servers. Microsoft recommend allowing direct (non-proxied) connectivity to their service endpoints in order to minimise latency and give the best user experience, or at least disable proxy authentication when accessing them. If your browser traffic goes down a corporate VPN connection then Microsoft recommend configuring a split tunnel for Office 365. Yes, they are that pretentious. No, for the most part it isn't actually necessary. The exception is Teams, which needs its media streams to be firewalled through in order to work adequately. If this isn't done it will fall back to encapsulating the traffic within HTTPS which doesn't tend to work very well.
Microsoft publish an updated list of endpoint host/domain names and IP addresses each *month* that admins of such organisations should supposedly use to update their firewalls/proxies/PAC files/group policies that control the flow of Office 365 traffic. Mercifully the list is available in machine-readable (JSON) format, but it's very helpfully left as an exercise for you to figure out how to script it into place. See here for the gorey details:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/urls-and-ip-address-ranges?view=o365-worldwide
The list of domain names gives me the distinct impression of a bunch of people working on Office 365 without any coordination, throwing the product back-end together at random with no real plan. If all that rubbish can be simplified down to *.cloud.microsoft then that would be useful. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft found it a burden to keep track of it all too. This just leaves the IP addresses, which is more forgivable as it hopefully provides some redundancy/resilience.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
