Could they do it? Deactivate Windows licenses, block Cloud services, access to Office 365 and whatnot?
Yes but not legally. They are also legally bound to EU laws, which would protect the clients that bpught the software. But! Just like plenty of companies pulled out of Russia, if the US does not care and decides ro enable this behavior then they could do it without too much trouble.
But I doubt this would happen, the EU is a big part of their income, and money is what they care about.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
Maybe if we ask nicely.
Now with 365, they can ban you from your own computer by simply flipping a variable from 0 to 1.
And it wouldn’t matter if you tried to reinstall the machine, as long as the HW identifiers on the machine are the same the ban will stop the machine from be used after being connected to the internet.
I can’t imagine a better result.
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, 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.
To expand on point 2, Europe is already home to two major competitors to Windows (one headquartered within the EU) as well as competitors in other fields, so they would also have an easier time (as a bloc) than many other places, who don’t have local competitors I nearly as good a position.
What are the competitors?
The two I was specifically thinking about are SuSE and Canonical. There’s also Collabora and Nextcloud in the productivity systems space and plenty of others.
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Time to enjoy free open source clones
Sadly I’ve found nothing as good for spellcheck
How about a dedicated third-party service like Grammarly?
My family used that a lot but in trying to keep my research private I prefer to not use something proprietary. Which hurts me a little bit… :/
I think I understand. I don’t know how Grammarly compares to Microsoft Office in terms of privacy though.
What I mean is since I got into selfhosting services via my servers I try to keep as much data as I can in my own home. I know Microsoft Office calls to home so I try to stick to FOSS which I can guarantee doesn’t. I also don’t know but I bet grammarly does call home a lot since they use AI as well now.
It’s still a good recommendation, so thank you! I know it does help my family more than word typically, so it’s a good product.
I see, I misunderstood then. From your first post that I replied to, I assumed that you were using Microsoft Office. Sorry for the confusion. You’re welcome! I’ve never used it myself, but I get the impression that it works well.
Thanks! :) If I ever have a stressful paper my mother still helps me to this day and I think they go through that. So still inadvertently helping me lol
I’d leave the clone part out
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”
Id like russians to start getting banned for the same shit english speaking people do. In english the word “ho” is censored and met with a warning, meanwhile russians can string together 20 slurs and an legitimate, non joke call for genocide and nothing happens. And if you point that out you get called a racist.
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
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.
I mean, technically yes, but also no, because Microsoft is a private company, so it would be up to Bill Gates, and Bill Gates wouldn’t do that.
Wat.
Bill Gates will come and say “no!” and microsoft will make a sad face and say “okay.” and then bill gates will call my uncle at steam and ban microsoft from playing rocket league.
Its has already turned off all mainline windows but the worst one so.
