Israel is currently at "war" with Gaza and having Israeli employees of Microsoft having the ability to disable anyone's account calling civilians in Gaza is pretty horrible.
Is Microsoft via Skype and Hotmail participating in what Israel's leaders are call the "complete siege"? https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-ministe...
No appeal and no explanation available does suggest to me the shutdown orders may have come from Israeli security services or the Israeli army.
I would guess these shutdown orders came from Israeli security services and then were routed though Microsoft Israel to be enacted.
> The "complete siege" ended ages ago. Israel provides power, food etc.
Sure, whatever you say.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/10/is-there-famine-in-...
> “Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza,” 10 independent UN experts, including the special rapporteur on the right to food and the special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Tuesday.
...
Three conditions must exist to determine there is famine:
- At least 20 percent of the population in the area faces extreme levels of hunger;
- 30 percent of the children in the area are too thin for their height; and
- The death rate has doubled from the average, surpassing two deaths per 10,000 daily for adults and four deaths per 10,000 daily for children.
I think you answered yourself right there
I left LinkedIn before MS bought it, because it was clear it was being copied by all and sundry.
I left GitHub once MS bought it (and I thank God for that, ever time I see another story about MS being awful).
I never used Google - they were obviously evil and from quite early on.
I may be completely wrong, but I think large companies are completely amoral. Not in a malicious way, but in a can't-be-anything-else kind of way; that is is an emergent property.
All large organization have absolutely no moral sense, which is to say, doing things because they are ethical, regardless of costs or benefits, or possessing a capability to assess or modify their own actions on moral criteria.
Complaining MS do these things is like complaining a cat jumps on a mouse.
I'm not a fan of brutal mouse death, so I don't own a cat.
What's critical of course is knowing this, and before deciding to buy into what these companies offer, rather than discovering it after buying into what these companies offer.
And these companies will only tell you how wonderful their services are, and nothing about what they're up - nothing about how much and what data they collect, and what they do with it (give it to the State, sell it to all and sundry, with real-time updates included), or what's done with it (mandatory State mass interception).
For one, you are right, and two, they are actively incentivized to be immoral. Doing something in a moral way is to take something extra into account - morality. Taking into account, as an action, costs extra resources, which translates to money or risk, but then, risk also translates into money. So, what we end up with is that being moral is being handicapped. Money can be made by avoiding it.
The situation is especially worse when the other participants, the competitors, are also not moral. They can simply out-price a moral participants - people are less likely to buy the thing for its ethical "real price", if they can get a similar one for much cheaper. This can clearly be seen even in markets where being moral is a bonus, like, I'd say, how the current market is. "Morally superior" is a product differentiator, with labels like "bio", "organic", "fair", "ethical", "free from", "vegan" - even the ol' PU leather being rebranded as "vegan leather". So even in a context like this, non-morally-superior products sell way more than moral ones. So the incentives for companies are not really there, not just from an operational, but from a market standpoint as well.
>that is is an emergent property.
I agree, and I think it's part of the general human experience, especially with taking responsibility for anything that has impact. Attention and possibility of action is limited, so even if the perfectly moral course of action would be known, it might not be possible to enact it. And then, the arguments are endless as to what's moral and what not, and what part of that should people be engaged in. This is all too much to handle for an individual, so, even if morality is desired, sub-optimal decisions will be made on a daily, as part of life. Which is, in many ways, no different to when a company makes them - with respect to the size and impact though, of course.
Morality/ethics/religion/philosophy can't help but come to bear on any and all technology, once it becomes widespread, systemic and seemingly "too big to fail."
No SIM, don't want my location tracked.
Wifi only.
I use Linphone for POTS.
Another nice thing about having a catch-all on own domain is that you can sign up to each service with a unique email address, e.g. <microsoft>@<your-domain.com>, which makes it easy to see if any services ever sold your address.
Let’s note however that even "owning a domain" is an illusion of control, as IANA is ultimately a retainer of uncle Sam. I don’t know if there is any functional distributed alternative that promote more autonomy to end users that can works out of the box (or even just a few basic install steps away) in most digital terminal out there.
That’s not true. It’s definitely not complete control, but it’s far more “sovereign” and independent than having a user account with some corporation that can change its ToS overnight. To seize a domain, a lengthy legal process is needed. Not to mention, you can choose a domain that doesn’t fall under a specific country’s jurisdiction or choose a registrar company located in another country. For example, you can register a domain like .ch or .no, and a legal US order won’t be effective, especially if you didn’t use a US-based registrar. Furthermore, you can host your own domain name (1). It isn’t entirely safe, but the process and efforts to seize it are far more complicated than a click in an MS dashboard. Unless that person is doing something extremely illegal, no one will bother.
(1) https://blog.technitium.com/2022/06/how-to-self-host-your-ow...
Pro tip on this, use gibberish if you want a true canary. I know it's tempting to use microsoft@ or ms@ or msft@ etc, but companies are getting smarter about selling emails and filter those out.
This is true when services support sign-up with a password and you are an advanced user. I'm not sure that this is easy for many vulnerable people that need this. The advice you may need to add is that you should use these unique email addresses to create burner accounts on login providers (Microsoft accounts, Google accounts, etc.) because that's how you have to access some services.
You don't need your own domain for that. Gmail (and probably the other big ones) support it as well, just add a plus sign and whatever after your username: username+microsoft@gmail.com will end up in the inbox of username@gmail.com.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wg3w/paypal-tardigrade-err...
But you also imply that the gov't should punish BOTH types of errors, but I'm not sure that's fair. By extension it implies that the company should have a perfect system, with no errors of either type. That's not realistic, and a company should be punished for meeting an impossible goal.
Better is for the government to just be explicit about it: we're requiring companies to employ broad sanctions, and even if some innocents get swept up, we think it's worth it to stop the bad guys. Or the verse, if that's the gov't decision.
however, historically speaking, regimes of oppression have often been dismayingly stable, long outliving the states that establish them—consider that the traditional liberties eliminated by julius caesar in 049 bce, diocletian in the late third century, and constantine in the early fourth century were not regained until the late medieval or even modern era (the final end of the roman empire in 01453, the end of serfdom in the 13th through 19th centuries, the confederation of eight cantons in about 01315, the re-establishment of a senate in the us in 01789, the french revolution in 01799, etc.)
federated systems like mastodon (or email) are a step in the right direction, but we need a decentralized system, without single points of failure, rather than just a federated one
Which is concerning.
But it's probably for the best. Once it's unblocked, it becomes a tug of war on both ends to flood the site with propaganda.
Geico recently denied my renewal of insurance because they said their underwriters received notification that I use my vehicle for business. (I don't.) I have spent hours trying to explain to them that this is a mistake, but they have zero interest in providing me with insurance. I've heard this is common for people in CA.
I'm not sure what legal recourse the people in this story have. Hopefully they have a legal right to at least download an archive of their data so they can recover old emails, attachments, photos, etc.
In the recent months and with the increasing possibilities of surveillance with AI and how they are controlling the narrative of things, it made me feel incredibly uneasy. No more of these products on my devices.
NOYB has a list of what your rights are [1] and "My Data Done Right" [2] provides a handy tool for finding out who to contact and how.
If such use of tech that already exists since decades became spread ALSO the giant will learn to be good citizens not "state-like entity" acting as bully.
In the last 10 years, I've lost access to ~5 accounts, usually when the provider axed their free offerings (is fine). In every case, I had warning and time to switch.
If I lose access to one w/o warning, it would be a problem but not catastrophic.
In short: What is the trivial solution to not risking sudden catastrophic loss of email? I don't think there is one. The answers are high-effort, high-maintenance. Technical ability can lessen that some.
note: The reason I don't lean into self-hosted mail harder is spam filtering. I've hosted mail for small biz and have put many, many hours into reducing spam. On top of the usual edge solutions, I write scripts to help mitigate spam and malware campaigns.
But the more visible my domain, the more anti-spam work is required and that state only ever ratchets one way.Another reason why you should have your own domain and be independent from any services is that it can happen to anyone, never put your eggs in one basket.
For me the mass killing of children is completely unacceptable and there's absolutely no excuses, zero. And Microsoft's participation in that is a real shock for me.
Microsoft has an infuriating habit of doing this; its not just a one-off. They routinely lockout international github users and feign innocent compliance when caught.
Two Iranian co-workers have gone through some Kafkaesque bullshit with Github blocking them, even though both are living in Europe for more than a decade they got flagged and had their accounts suspended, taking months to re-activate them.
For example a major chain convenience store with few similar competitors could ban someone for shoplifting, but someone innocent caught by this should be able to sue and win if the store cannot convince a court that such an event actually occurred. A mom-and-pop store wouldn't be within scope of this.
And the same for online businesses.
Criminal liability for improper bans, and allowing citizens to directly charge the company with the crime (some states do this) would probably be more practical.
Alternatively, some variant of streamlined court (similar to small-claims court) could be established, where you could automatically use the court if the defendant had already been sued more than 10 times in the last decade for the last thing. The court would provide some sort of legal or financial resources to allow the customers to quickly sue without paying out of pocket, or spending much of their own time.
I would guess the shutdown requests came from Israeli security services. Thus it is final and not appealable and can also the reasoning can not be revealed.
The term "Facebook Jail" might be coined jokingly (and the consequences of being there are pretty trivial) but the mere existence of the term is a tacit acceptance of the idea of judicial oversight by a private corporation.
Yes, you can choose not to engage with meta or its products, or (less easily) Microsoft or Google - but we're close to the point where refusing to use the products of (and thus be defacto-governed by) one of the tech giants will have implications beyond self-imposed inconvenience.
Already you'll be excluded from a significant proportion of social plans if you don't have either WhatsApp or Messenger.
How is it that some rich Californian CEO with their own bias and agenda can decide to shut off service to entire groups of people in an active war zone? These decisions could cost people their lives! That's insane.
Case in point: gaza's area code isn't banned by us pots operators.
The real solution here is to use Signal (or something like it).
And I don't mean to criticize Microsoft or regulations. Microsoft is faced with an impossible task here, I assume they're doing the best they can.
That sounds an awful lot like simply being a Palestinian is being criminalized.
The article discusses that they are unable to contact their family over the internet because Israel is shutting off internet. So they were using Skypes Skype to Phone service to call their family's mobile phones over normal cell service in Gaza.
I think you mean “they’re doing the absolute minimum to barely meet their compliance requirements”
I shall have to add this to the list of counterexamples wherever anyone says "America has an inalienable right to free speech".
To be able to come up with a solution you’d first need to be aware of a problem, which in many such cases you wouldn’t be, until one day you are banned and lose all your accounts, and solutions in hindsight won’t help with that.
Similarly, big vertically integrated computing platforms should be broken up (in-house applications should have exactly the same access to APIs documentation, support, etc, as third party ones).
Instead the u.s. needs laws that protect user digital rights, and all companies should have to adhere to those laws, not just big ones.
Some people forget that when they signed up to a service, they granted the service provider the right to decide when to cease providing the service, at the service provider's discretion.
What are you trying to hide, you seditious terrorist, hmm?
Rights = Duties
If you break this symmetry, now we can look at YOU. Why should we all respect YOUR presumption of innocence if you don't respect others?
If the response is some stereotype related crap I don't want to hear it.
Come on. This is such exaggeration. Surely he has contacted the banks (note: plural as per article) and he can access his accounts. Not even one?
Banks routinely handle identification via phone to access your account and transact.
Unfortunately I suspect more and more people are making accounts at banks like that and storing significant amounts of money in them.
but if the bank is in another country … it might be literally impossible to recover it