France, Germany and Denmark replaced Google, MSWindows and MSOffice on millions of computers in the past 18 months. Here's exactly what they replaced it with, and how to do the same tonight: (good 7 part list of replacements)

X.com ^ | September 1, 2026 | Jimmy @mahim_aibrief

[ransomnote]

Jimmy

@mahim_aibrief

France just wiped Google and Microsoft off 2.5 million government computers.

Germany moved 30,000 PCs off Windows. Denmark binned Microsoft Office. All of it in the last 18 months.

Here's exactly what they replaced it with, and how to do the same tonight:

Sep 1, 2026
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Jimmy

@mahim_aibrief

·
11h

1/ Swap Out Gmail

Gmail's AI reads your emails by default. There's a class action running over precisely that.

Swap to: ProtonMail. Free, Swiss, encrypted end to end. No AI reading it, and outside US jurisdiction entirely.

Search "Proton Mail" → sign up → start moving anything sensitive over.

 

Jimmy

@mahim_aibrief

·
11h

2/ Swap Out Google Search

Every search builds your ad profile. That profile goes on to train Google's AI.

Swap to: DuckDuckGo. The same results for everyday searching, with no tracking and nothing stored.

Open your browser settings → Search engine → make DuckDuckGo your default

 

 

Jimmy

@mahim_aibrief

·
11h

3/ Swap Out Google Drive

Anything sitting in Google Drive falls under the CLOUD Act.

Swap to: Proton Drive (encrypted, free tier), or keep the sensitive files on a local drive or an encrypted USB.

Keep Google Drive for things you wouldn't mind a stranger reading.

 

Jimmy

@mahim_aibrief

·
11h

4/ Swap Out Chrome

Chrome tells Google every site you open. And it now ships with a 4GB AI model nobody asked for.

Swap to: Brave or Firefox. Both block trackers from the moment you install them, with nothing running in the background.

Download either → import your bookmarks when it asks. Two minutes.

 

Jimmy

@mahim_aibrief

·
11h

5/ Swap Out WhatsApp And iMessage

Both belong to US companies. Both fall under US law.

Swap to: Signal. End-to-end encrypted, open source, nothing stored on their servers. Free and no ads.

Download it → move your private conversations over.

 

Jimmy

@mahim_aibrief

·
11h

6/ Swap Out Microsoft Office

Everything you type into Word, Excel or PowerPoint passes through Microsoft's servers.

Swap to: LibreOffice. Free, open source, works offline. Your documents stay on your own machine.

Download it → every file you already own opens straight away.

 

Jimmy

@mahim_aibrief

·
11h

7/ Swap Out Google Maps

Google Maps records every route, every stop, every search you make.

Swap to: Organic Maps (completely offline, no tracking) or OsmAnd (open source).

Both run on OpenStreetMap data and neither needs an account.

 

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TOPICS: Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: duck; google; libreoffice; microsoft; morenonsense; qanon; randomnut

[SmokingJoe]

Grok:

Alphabet (Google's parent) reported Q2 2026 results (quarter ended June 30, 2026; announced ~July 22, 2026):

Revenue: $119.8 billion (up 24% year-over-year, or ~23% in constant currency).bc5def
T

Operating income: $40.8 billion (up 30%; operating margin ~34%).

Net income: ~$112.1 billion (up ~298%; diluted EPS $9.11)

The large jump in net income was driven primarily by ~$98 billion in other income (mainly net unrealized gains on equity securities), not core operations.

[Merrick]

Going through his list:

I don’t use GMail for personal emails - work does - oh well. Not my problem.
Haven’t used Google for years - many years.
Haven’t EVER used Google Drive.
Never used Chrome. I’ve used Brave since it’s been available - what - 5 years now?
Have never used WhatsApp or iMessage.
“everything you type into Word, Excel, or Powerpoint passes through Microsoft’s servers.” Bullshit!! If you use 365 and STAY LOGGED ON all the time, you’re a dumbass. I don’t use 365 and I am NEVER logged in, so this doesn’t happen. Nice BULLSHIT lie, though.

Ok - this is getting boring. The moral of the story is, use whatever the hell you want - just don’t be a dumbass.

[z3n]

Proton: Done
Duck duck go: Done (been using it for 5+ years)
Firefox: Done (don’t use chrome or edge)
Signal: N/A (don’t use Whatsapp either)
Libre Office: N/A (hate it. I only use MS office at work & if my IT department doesn’t care what gets shared with microsoft then neither do I. I don’t use personal info/data on work hardware)

[Eli Kopter]

Protonmail is my second largest platform. I still use Google and MS because I have been a bit too lazy to convert everything at this time. Very happy with Proton, and it is everybit as powerful as Google and MS.

[packrat35]

I used to love firefox but it is a memory hog that they could never fix. I haven’t used it in years.

[packrat35]

The moral of the story is, use whatever the hell you want - just don’t be a dumbass.

Words to live by...

[Resolute Conservative]

I only use what they give me at work 99% of the time, their problem.

I have a simple phone (not apple) with minimal apps. I uninstall as many as I can and a Faraday bag. A throw down email address when I have to give one that I never check or send anything on. I don’t opt out of snail mail contacts for internet only with any business I personally use. I buy in stores 90% of the time and use cash. If they don’t take cash, I tell them they are stupid and lost my business (not that they care) and walk out.

[sit-rep]

sorry... I stopped reading when it said all mail is outside US jurisdiction.

I’m not to trust microsoft, but I am supposed to trust some other country’s security!! smh...

I’ll just not send anything in e-mail that may incriminate me... problem solved...

[maddog55]

Only thing I haven’t done is gmail and in reality any email can be read by AI regardless of what encryption you think you have.

[maddog55]

I still have office 2016 pro so it stays on the computer when I used it but I also have libre office which is great plus Swifdoo for PDF files...took awhile to get used to it but pretty good overall.

[yuleeyahoo]

Swapped out all of these years ago.

[Merrick]

I don’t have any idea how you buy in stores 90% of the time. I mean, I get all food in stores. I get as much else as I can in stores. But *no* electronics store (such that they are) carry anything I want. Home Depot and/or Lowes have what I want *maybe* half of the time. I could extend this list for the next half hour. I wish I could reach your numbers.

And that started 25 years ago when I’d walk into Circuit City or Best Buy looking for movie - which they invariably didn’t stock - and they’d say, “we can order it for you to ship to your house right now.” I’d thank them, no, and tell them if they don’t start pushing back now they’ll all be out of jobs in 10 years. Oh well.

[Merrick]

To be fair - this is a post about moves in Europe...

[Carry_Okie]

Everything you type into Word, Excel or PowerPoint passes through Microsoft's servers.

When did Microsoft start doing that? Which version?

[sit-rep]

oh...

lol...

Btt!!

[Alas Babylon!]

Yup, and more Europe punishes nasty United States of Trump companies.

Yawn.

Wait until they have to replace all that with Cresent Caliph Office, the “Allah is the Only One God” Operating System (apostates are beheaded and their computers graphics cards ripped out) and of course, the browser, “Death to the Infidel”.

[Carry_Okie]

Also from Grok:

1. Usage telemetry (what you open, not the text)

Office 2013 (announced 2012, shipped 2013). Built-in Telemetry Log / Dashboard recorded that a document was opened, closed, or threw an error, plus file name, add-ins, and machine info. Microsoft said this was not the file contents. An agent could also inventory recent files on Office 2003–2010. That is inventory and crash data, not a copy of the prose.

2. Features that send document content to Microsoft

That is the “connected experiences that analyze your content” layer: Translator, Editor/cloud grammar, PowerPoint Designer, Dictate, Analyze Data, automatic alt text, and similar.

Piecemeal cloud features existed earlier (online templates, Research pane, some translation) in Office 2010 / 2013. Designer and other content-using services became normal in Office 2016 and then Microsoft 365.

Microsoft named and documented the category clearly when subscription Office became the default.

Enterprise privacy controls to turn off “experiences that analyze content” arrived with Microsoft 365 Apps version 1904 (April 2019). If you never set those policies, those experiences stay on.

What Microsoft still claims

Required diagnostic data is not supposed to include the text of your files. Optional/connected features do send selected text or whole passages to Microsoft’s cloud to run the feature. Most of that is deleted after the job; a few services (parts of Editor) keep snippets to personalize suggestions. Practical line

Perpetual Office 2010 and earlier, offline, no Microsoft account: no routine content upload.

Office 2013: usage telemetry exists; content upload only if you use an online feature.

Office 2016 / Microsoft 365: content-analyzing cloud features are normal unless you disable connected experiences. M365 1904+: you can officially block content analysis by policy.

If you mean Copilot reading the whole document, that is later still (2023 onward) and only when Copilot is enabled and the file is in a connected tenant or you invoke it.

Can they still do that when Windows runs within a virtual machine on Linux?

Yes. A Linux host does not hide Office from Microsoft. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint run inside the Windows VM. If that VM has a network path—NAT, bridged, or shared—those apps can still send telemetry and, if connected experiences are on, send document content to Microsoft the same way they would on bare metal. VirtualBox (or any ordinary hypervisor) does not intercept or strip that traffic.

What actually stops it:

No network on the VM, or a firewall that blocks Microsoft Office / M365 endpoints

Office privacy settings or Group Policy: turn off connected experiences that analyze content, optional connected experiences, and optional diagnostic data

A perpetual offline Office license with no Microsoft account signed in, and those features disabled

Not storing files on OneDrive

The Linux host only helps if you use it to cut the VM off the internet or to filter outbound connections. Running Windows “inside Linux” by itself does not.

/Grok

My plan is to run Word and PowerPoint 2007 on Win7 within a VM on Ubuntu. The email is now Thunderbird, as I went through the VERY painful process of translating 260,000 emails from Outlook.pst through EML files into MBOX. IOW, I put a cage around Microsoft products that actually run better than the current versions.

[Snowybear]

I usually use Apache Open Office. I’ll check out Libre.

-SB

[ransomnote]

In the General/Chat forum, on a thread titled France, Germany and Denmark replaced Google, MSWindows and MSOffice on millions of computers in the past 18 months. Here's exactly what they replaced it with, and how to do the same tonight: (good 7 part list of replacements), Carry_Okie wrote:

Everything you type into Word, Excel or PowerPoint passes through Microsoft's servers.

When did Microsoft start doing that? Which version?

According to GROK:

It did not begin as a single event where all typing in desktop Word, Excel, or PowerPoint automatically routed through Microsoft servers. The claim is an overstatement for fully offline or locally saved use, but it has become increasingly true for many Microsoft 365 users due to default cloud integration, optional “connected experiences,” and AI features.

Key timeline and products

• Office Online / web versions (roughly 2010–2011 onward): Content has always lived and been processed on Microsoft servers. Office Web Apps evolved into the browser-based Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that shipped with the Office 365 launch in 2011. Any typing or editing there passes through Microsoft’s infrastructure.
• Desktop apps + cloud storage / co-authoring (mid-2010s): Real-time collaboration and syncing when files are stored on OneDrive or SharePoint became available and expanded with Office 2013 and especially Office 2016 (around 2013–2016). Changes are sent to servers during co-authoring or AutoSave.
• PowerPoint Designer and early content-analyzing cloud features (2015): PowerPoint Designer launched in November 2015 as a cloud-powered recommendation engine. It (and similar features) send images or content excerpts to Microsoft servers for processing to generate design suggestions. Other “connected experiences that analyze your content” (e.g., Translator, Analyze Data in Excel, dictation, later Microsoft Editor grammar/AI suggestions) followed and expanded in subsequent years.
• Default save location change (February 2019): For Microsoft 365 (then Office 365) subscribers on Windows and Mac, OneDrive or SharePoint Online became the default save location for new Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Combined with AutoSave, this means document content is routinely stored and synced on Microsoft servers unless the user changes the setting.
• Formal privacy controls for “Connected Experiences” (around 2019): Microsoft began more explicitly categorizing and allowing control over cloud features that analyze content versus those that download online content. These can be disabled, but they are on by default for many users.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot (2023 onward): AI features that process document content, prompts, and context on Microsoft servers. This makes the claim especially accurate when Copilot is enabled.

Important distinctions

• Telemetry / diagnostic data (usage stats, crashes, feature usage) has been collected for years (noticeably heavier from the Office 2013/Windows 10 era onward), but this is generally not the full text of what you type.
• Perpetual-license versions (e.g., Office 2019, Office 2021, or LTSC) support more offline/local-only use and have fewer mandatory cloud ties than Microsoft 365 subscription apps.
• Users and admins can turn off many connected experiences that analyze content, choose local save locations, and disable AutoSave. Fully offline desktop use without cloud features does not send document content to servers.
• The strongest version of the claim applies to default Microsoft 365 setups with cloud save, AutoSave, connected experiences, or Copilot enabled—especially since the late 2010s and accelerating into the 2020s.

In short, cloud processing of document content in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint grew gradually with Office 365 (from ~2011), key intelligent features (from ~2015), the 2019 default-to-cloud change, and AI/Copilot (from 2023). It is configuration- and feature-dependent rather than an all-or-nothing switch that applied to every keystroke starting on a single date.

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