Universities

Microsoft confirmed this week that it hands BitLocker encryption keys to the FBI on receipt of a valid legal order. Windows 11 uploads them to your Microsoft account by default, without asking. For European universities that handle research data, student records, and HR information under GDPR, this is not an abstract concern. It is a structural problem. The answer is not a technical workaround. It is sovereign, publicly funded, openly licensed software — and a principle that the EU has articulated but not consistently practised: public money, public code.

Education is supposed to be the great equaliser. The evidence says otherwise. Bourdieu called it decades ago: schools reproduce the social order they pretend to transcend. Privilege is the entrance fee that nobody admits is being charged.

In June 2022 I presented on educast.nrw at the Tag der Lehre at HfMT Köln. This is the longer argument behind that talk: why universities should not outsource their video infrastructure to commercial platforms, and what a better alternative looks like in practice.