The original premise for getting away from their services is the PRISM slide. Microsoft is one organization in that list. The others are Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. To focus on one and pretty much leap into blaming them for ICE's abuses is unobjective and incredibly biased. ICE does not exist in a technological vacuum devoid of FB, iPhones, and Skype.
If author truly cares they should either drop all companies mentioned or do the civil thing and be objective in their assessment. I predict that the likely conclusion will be: all large companies are complicit and that it's entirely a gray area. It's entirely possible to be good and evil at the same time.
Large companies often work as a loose collection of departments most of whom don't know what anyone else is doing (the nature of growth), so they end up with situations where leadership has certain focus topics and some management has other focus topics. What changes over time is marketing and the narrative that companies want to push out.
But, their collaboration with NSA for illegal mass spying, is certainly a bad thing to do. They have "been letting the feds read whatever they like out of it without a warrant for the last dozen years", which is no good, and especially if their terms of service does not mention this. (But even if they mentioned in their terms of service, this still doesn't make it good.)
"It's entirely possible to be good and evil at the same time." Yes, I believe that, and unfortunately, too often people ignore this.
Navy vet here:
USS Yorktown (CV-10), an Essex-class aircraft carrier commissioned in 1943 (museum ship since 1975)
You mean:
USS Yorktown (CG-48), a Ticonderoga-class cruiser commissioned in 1984 (awaiting scrapping)
Article blithely suggests that support to the Navy is tantamount to mass murder. Vet calmly ignores that nonsense and simply provides an update for accuracy of ship and hull designation references.
By the way, thank you for, among other things, keeping shipping lanes safe, which in turn makes global trade a possibility, which in turn has lifted millions out of poverty worldwide.
And you and everyone who gave far more than I are welcome for all of the joy received.
We are asking for there to be negative consequences in general for companies who decide to operate with no moral or ethical compass. It's not about this contract: it's about sending a message to companies that collaboration with those who torture and murder is not okay, and will cost them business and retention.
Taking on customers entirely uncritically should not be without market risk. "I dunno man, I just sell hosting" is not an acceptable position.
Censorship isn't okay, but freedom of association is, and companies need incentives to exercise it to fire particular customers doing evil, and disincentives to turning a blind eye to how their products and services are being used.
To say this is just about "entities we disagree with" is to miss the point, I think. This isn't about "problematic speech", or the standard left/right claims of bias or censorship, or any other kind of the routine partisan tribal complaints you read about regularly. This is about concentration camps. Right here, in the United States.
Collaboration with US military for conducting mass murder
Collaboration with NSA for illegal mass spying on innocent people
Collaboration with ICE who runs concentration camps
Drop Microsoft. Drop GitHub. Drop LinkedIn. Drop Azure. Drop Windows.
I recently started the switch from GitHub to GitLab, both for myself and my company. Generally boiled down to a wider feature set for a better price.
Problem: is there are list of companies that are not providers to the US military and/or ICE, i.e. companies that do not take such jobs because of moral stances? If there are none then what are we left with?
A small inconsistency worth pointing out: the author has a linkedin link in his bio...
The profile at the link's text is getting removed this week, once I migrate my contacts.
What does that mean?
