this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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Look, we all knew it was coming, but now it's official. Microsoft just handed middle managers the ultimate weapon. Their new update for Microsoft 365 allows companies to track exactly where you are, and the days of pretending to be at your desk are over.

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[โ€“] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 100 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (16 children)

While making this easier to access isn't a positive, there are a ton of ways that this can, and already is, being done at companies that actually care about this shit.

Yeah you're totally in the office, but your laptop just magically has an IP from the subnet for devices connected over VPN ๐Ÿ™„

Once again I must insist that people need to stop expecting any privacy on work devices. It is possible to find out anything on them, including location, it's just a matter of how much effort your workplace is willing to expend on looking.

Edit: While I appreciate the article being short and to the point, a link to any documentation on this would have been nice. The claim is that it will display the SSID of the Wi-Fi AP you're connected to. While being able to get that from your phone is a new bit of reach, it's possible to gather that from work devices easily.

[โ€“] thisbenzingring@lemmy.today 9 points 6 days ago (6 children)

just use vpn all the time, even when at your desk in the office

[โ€“] TipRing@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago (2 children)

This will break a lot of applications.

[โ€“] thejml@sh.itjust.works 22 points 6 days ago (1 children)

This is literally how our corporate network is setup. You MUST be on vpn or you cant get to anything. Makes the access permissions super simple. Prior to this setup there were authorization settings that differed between on-prem/off, on vpn or off, which office you were in, etc. now they just deny all unless you vpn in and then it uses your vpn account to validate access there, in one place. Saved a lot of headaches.

[โ€“] TipRing@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That is certainly a direction. I hope you have robust redunacies on the concentrator.

[โ€“] rainwall@piefed.social 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

The above is just modern network security. The model is called zero trust.

Zero trust assumes there is no implicit trust granted to assets or user accounts based solely on their physical or network location (i.e., local area networks versus the internet) or based on asset ownership (enterprise or personally owned). Authentication and authorization (both subject and device) are discrete functions performed before a session to an enterprise resource is established. Zero trust is a response to enterprise network trends that include remote users, bring your own device (BYOD), and cloud- based assets that are not located within an enterprise-owned network boundary. Zero trust focus on protecting resources (assets, services, workflows, network accounts, etc.), not network segments, as the network location is no longer seen as the prime component to the security posture of the resource.

Google pionerred it in the 2000s I believe, but its very normal now. A commom deployment will have an always on vpn agent on each device, which will then use mesh vpn tech like wireguard to do peer to peer connections between the client and server. There is no need for a central vpn controller. At most their is a dns-ish directory service that runs to let each agent queiry to get public keys for the other agents. Access is gated with RBAC and ACLs.

Tailscale is well known name that provodes this model. Netbird is a FOSS example.

[โ€“] Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

That really depends on how the VPN is setup and configured on the company side. And possibly how the applications it their servers are configured as well. In our case, absolutely nothing breaks and it just works.

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