Gotta LOVE the EU, they're working at a glacial pace but sooner or later (most likely later) it changes the landscape for the better.

If only enshittification would happen slow enough for the EU to catch up to.

I'm morbidly eager to see how they'll handle the Win 10 EoL (yeah, yeah, it ain't dyin', just not getting updated, same thing to me tbh) in October. I bet it'll be a shitshow.

I reeeeally wish they would just embrace and find open source software as a public good and get it over with. The equally glacial pace of adoption of OSS to avoid vendor lock in with MS is not exactly giving the OSS world the boost it deserves.

And local (offline) accounts when?

Yeah, well the DMA wasn't going to cost most EU politicians much of their good ol' corporate lobbying monies. But switching the EU off of Micro$oft would definitely not only lose those funds, but also introduce way more vigorous counter-lobbying.

One pro of the EU's glacial pace is that they frog-boil the shareholders, meaning most counter-lobbying activities are relatively tame.

But damn, do I wish they would just give the finger to all those american corporations and start a 4-year transition to OSS.

So.. they’re doing exactly what apple was forced to do.

No more security patches. That should be dead to you if you don't want to host thousands of parasitic bots & malwares

The EU is pumping a lot of money into FLOSS, often not even for administrative use (like, say, lemmy gets EU funding), but at far as adoption rate in administration is concerned well the Commission is one of the worst offenders. As in municipalities realising they can't fully switch to LibreOffice because they need to apply for EU funds and the commission only accepts .docx. Parliament happily spending money on something and the executive getting around to getting its shit together are two different things.

OTOH it's not all about Microsoft and the like, a lot of administrative software is special-purpose, written by private companies according to specs, paid for by public money. Making that kind of thing open source is a no-brainer. It's also a way better use of money to improve and customise some open source ERP than to go to SAP and get a customised solution there.

And a lot of that has to do with lacking competency in administration -- outside of police, specifically IT forensics, it's usually quite dire. States have no issues figuring out whether a blueprint makes sense when they're issuing building permits, road and railroad engineering, of course they can do that, but IT? Nope. Bring in the private consultants and private consultants are basically the marketing arm of big software companies.

If the EU could borrow some texans, release them in the european parliament, and tell them "lobbyist" means homosexual in european (since apparently that's all they need to start shooting someone), the EU would work a lot faster

I wish we could join soon, but that's also happening at the glacial pace

Since this sublemmy doesn't have any requirement for the title to be the same as the source, can we actually have a correct title: "Microsoft abides to laws in EU and does <...>", or even better "Microsoft is forced under EU law to <...>".

The title makes it appear as if it's out of charity and goodness of their corporate heart. (Fabrication)

THATS RIGHT MICROSOFT

Windows users are a revenue stream, not customers. M$ views it's users as a sort of raw material that can be processed with dark patterns for ads and subscriptions. And like everything else, Americans are treated with the most disrespect and coercion.

I agree it feels very slow, but identifying the correct action and then building consensus around that action takes time. Once consensus is built it is very stable though. That is supposed to be the biggest benefit of democracy; stability built through coalition.

Too little too late? Some European businesses have already made the change to open source. Shit should be free to anyone doing business with it anyway.

I'm convinced the whole "your computer will instantly turn into a botnet that cripples children's hospitals the moment you disable Windows Update" thing is part of Microsoft's internet propaganda.

Like there are sysadmins for pretty big industries that schedule updates, sometimes once a month or even less frequently. Why aren't they worried about all the 0-day remote code execution exploits that supposedly exist every single day?

Microsoft: "Suck it, Americans"

<sigh> I used to be one of those sysadmins, and the short answer is appropriate risk management, better network controls a locked down OS and immediate action to push out the patches for serious issues.

I quite frankly detest M$ but keeping your pc patched isn't propaganda.

If you know enough to manage the risk (including proper network firewalls and good internet hygiene) then sure, keep going for a while. Zero days aren't daily, they're a handful per year.

On the other hand if you have no clue about ITSec then you genuinely need to upgrade asap because you're metaphorically running around with your genitals exposed.

Your comment leads me to suggest you probably dont have the skills to do an appropriate risk assessment.

But you do you. I'm not your Dad

Please let them also remove all the XBox nonsense. The other day my laptop from work that runs Windows 11 Pro gave a big ass prompt if I didn't want to try XBox Game Pass with the new Doom game. It's basically an ad for games on a Pro machine, ridiculous.