Could they do it? Deactivate Windows licenses, block Cloud services, access to Office 365 and whatnot?
It would be the biggest self-own in history but apparently the yanks are into that these days.
That, yes, and maybe Microsoft wouldn’t be the one pulling the trigger? I mean, with prism the NSA had access to most internet traffic between the US and the rest of the world, I think. Who knows what mechanisms there are in place, and what this government might decide to do?
Yes, IIRC they already did this for Russia.
Can we ask them to turn off all the Xbox services and Activision-Blizzard games in russia as well? Overwatch should be illegal in there anyway because of the “gay propaganda”
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That would clear them out very quickly indeed. Most russians I’ve encountered on the internet are either quite ashamed of what their government is doing and try to blend in with the English speaking crowd, or are so loud and obnoxious you can’t possibly miss them.
Overwatch should be illegal in there anyway because of the “gay propaganda”
Good luck with that one. As long as Overwatch is free to play, they can just make new accounts with an EU VPN. No way to tie the account owner to their country of origin unless they fork over that info voluntarily, such as by having to make an online purchase.
I think they have to register a valid phone number to play ranked, unless that restriction got removed
Not really, they just made it harder to get windows and office
You can install and use windows just fine, but you can’t download it from Microsoft
The online office installer will not work in Russia (it also adds a registry key, so it won’t work even with a VPN)
The offline office installer works fine
Activation seems fine
Microsoft has the ability to do this if they really wanted to. It would completely destroy their business if they did, though, so they won’t. I mean, who would keep using Microsoft products if the company was willing to just take it away from you at a moment’s notice?
The US government cannot do it so easily. They’d have to order Microsoft to do so. Microsoft would resist and take it to court. The US Court system makes a LOT of really fucked up rulings, but the one thing they do reliably is side with big business. I’m inclined to think that in this hypothetical showdown, the courts would side with Microsoft.
Maybe if we ask nicely.
Microsoft is an Eldritch hydra monstrosity. I think it has become its own civilization. I think it’s so large that it just exists as a self sustaining chaos phenomena. I don’t think the organization can make a decision. One department of thousands makes a decision. And they all jostle about breaking each other’s shit every other day.
Of course they could. One update could render the system worthless or come with malware that infests systems in the network.
Oh, so just another Patch Tuesday then.
Yep. The idea that microsoft can “do nothing” to a system that isn’t hosted on their servers is pure delusion - or ignorant. They haven’t thought more deeply about being evil, which is quite cute actually.
Yes, technically they could cause massive disruptions. Not likely they will.
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They would not get paid.
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Europe would suddenly have a very good reason to spend billions of euro on funding competitors.
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Sure, but they like money, so not happening.
Stopping Windows from running, probably not. MS could stop sending updates and could deactivate it, but it would mostly keep running. And, if any EU/Russian systems were not connected to the internet (yes, this sort of thing still happens in 2025), nothing MS did would matter. Office/Azure and other cloud based services are more vulnerable. Yes, Microsoft could geo-fence those services such that they did nor work if you were coming from an IP address in EU/Russia. Though, the simple workaround for this is to install a VPN. And given US sanctions on Russia, this is probably happening right now anyway.
As much as the tin-foil hat crowd likes to think about MS having some master control switch, it’s incredibly unlikely. The problem with backdoors is that hackers are constantly looking for ways to attack systems, especially Windows. If there was some sort of master “off switch” baked into the code, it’s likely some one would have stumbled upon it by now. Even if it’s that well hidden, it’s a “one use” item with high reputational damage attached. Stop and consider for a moment, what happens when that kill switch gets used? It’s going to be picked up on. People record internet traffic for fun. As soon as that kill command went out, security researchers, the world over, would be dissecting logs to find the command, and then it would be reversed engineered. That MS had such a kill switch in their codebase would cause massive distrust in MS software going forward. No one would want to take the risk of having that kill switch running in their environment, certainly not on anything critical. Also, given how bad people are at updating Windows, we’d probably see a lot of systems killed by hackers just doing hacker things. Since the versions with the kill code would be know, you’d get bored teenagers searching Shodan for vulnerable systems and sending the kill command for fun. And all of this would be “Microsoft’s fault” for having the backdoor. It would be a PR nightmare. And since everyone would now know what the kill command looked like, anyone who mattered would install filters to block it at the firewall. So, it got used once, caused some damage with a lot of damage to MS’s reputation but is now neutralized. Was it worth it? Probably not to Microsoft.
Without security updates it would quickly be a nightmare to use windows.
Anyone remembers installing xp from a CD? It didn’t have security updates, and accepted all kind of trash right in from the internet right away by default lol.
I mean, yes, but there are ways around it. Windows could have a public key embebed somewhere and the private counterpart gives access, the command could depend on the time it’s received, so it’s never the same and without the private key it’s impossible to reproduce, and the Killswitch could be non-instantaneous, combine all of that and you have a Killswitch that:
- It’s very hard for you to realize something happened, because by the time it happens the trigger is lost in a sea of other requests
- Even if you were to fine comb through all of that and spot it, it’s encrypted
- Even if you were to resend it it would do nothing, because the time has changed
- Even if you managed to find the public key and decrypt it the actual content could be inocuos, like a random looking string
- As long as the private key is secure enough it would be impossible to crack
- Even if you somehow managed to crack it and send anything you want to the PC you don’t know the protocol to generate the random strings and you only have the one example of the message (which no longer works)
- Even if several people did this the content could truly be random (in the common sense of the word, i.e. pseudo-random), since Microsoft controls the RNG on Windows they can use that to ensure that random data gets generated equally
And I’m not even a cryptographer, people who come up with new encryption protocols can surely do a lot better than my naive example above which would make it almost impossible for someone to figure out.
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Don’t threaten me with a good time!
I can’t imagine a better result.
They can send all of their online services like Office 365 and Copilot, as well as sales or registration of Windows very quickly. I wish they would! I’d love to see Linux and Libreoffice take over, and maybe a new European player on the market. That would be a boon for consumers worldwide.
Technically, yes. But it would be the end for Microsoft.
A large part of what makes Microsoft products better then the alternatives is everyone else uses them. LibreOffice is good enough, as are a few other options. However everyone you work with is using Microsoft office and the differences are just annoying enough as to make it better for you to get on the Microsoft train. Likewise KDE and GNome are both good enough desktops (on whatever kernel), as is MacOS, but since everyone else is on Windows it will be easier for you to be as well. If significant numbers of people were using something else then it would no longer be easier for you to choose Microsoft. Europe is large enough that forcing them to switch will for large parts of the rest of the world to rethink. My company as offices in Europe, if those offices are no longer on Microsoft it becomes easier for IT to say lets move everyone to something else.
I disagree. That was the situation 10 years ago.
Now what makes Microsoft products better is integration.
As a business, you could research, buy, deploy, configure and maintain an office suite, a messenging app, a collaboration tool, an SSO provider, a cloud storage solution, an intranet presence, an MDM system, and a PBX, host all of that on your own servers, which you keep patched, watch over resources, storage, etc.Or you just get an M365 license for every employee.
If you have major downtime with the first option, you risk your job.
If you have major downtime with the second one, you can blame Microsoft, knowing that half the companies in the world are having the same issue right now.Right but that integration only works because everyone has it. If your company has people in europe you lose all that for such people and so you have to do it anyway and get blamed
Time to enjoy free open source clones
I’d leave the clone part out
