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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/atrox#Latin https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/atrocity
I don't buy duality as you present. Two points is just an invitation and opportunity to envision interpolations, extrapolate some spectral scales, wondering about additional dimensions, and fathom how it might interfere with the rest of our representations.
Rights and left are just two points. Intimate mind experiences can modulate interpolations in-between.
Duty and rights are all parts of the same object, it's just a matter of perspective that can make them appear to be separated consideration. Just like creation and constraints. Nothing exists without ontological restrictions that allows its form to happen.
The person banned from Skype could have been an American dual citizen, nondenominational Christian, calling the Gaza strip from a phone with an American flag case, while listening to country music, from a pickup truck, with multiple bald eagle tattoos, while holding a can of American light beer. Or could have been someone else. There is no way of knowing.
Not all banks in all countries do this. One of my banks required me to email my passport, drivers license, and case number to the person I was talking to over the phone in order to prove my identity.
My passport was 1000 miles away. My drivers license was expired (was living in NYC at the time, and not driving). My bank had no physical branches outside of the state of Louisiana.
All of this after answering the security question, and providing my SSN. How I eventually was able to re-enable my account was calling a friend who worked in the mortgage department to have my account reset. If I didn't have a friend at the bank, I wouldn't have been able to reset my account without flying either back to NYC or having a family member drive me from Texas to Louisiana.
One of the other individuals in the article lives in Saudi Arabia, which has a very highly developed banking system.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/icann-still...
Yesterday we had the discussion on FCC rules, and CE marking, from which small players are not exempt. There's no reason to assume there would be de minimis exemptions, there aren't for the GDPR.
This specific statement was less than a year ago, from the IDF, about instituting a complete siege.
It seems to me you're trying to nitpick on a minor choice of words instead of the substance of what I said.
Well before that point, they can just go through a normal court process because the EU has been empowered by the governments of each member state to write such legislation.
Example where GDPR tries to resolve the problem, but unfortunately not strongly enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation#European_...
FTA: “ In its most recent evaluation, carried out last month, the IPC said Gaza remains at “high risk” of famine as the war continues and aid access is restricted, but stopped short of classifying conditions as a famine.
somehow they can't get their people in, because big bad Israel, and at the same time, they seem to know exactly what's going on on the ground, and can make such claims. gaza seems to be the land of logical contradictions...
[1] https://reliefweb.int/attachments/c6421cb7-c936-4145-af54-b7...
> Firstly, all stakeholders who use the IPC for high-level decision-making must understand that whether a Famine classification is confirmed does not in any manner change the fact that extreme human suffering is without a doubt currently ongoing in the Gaza Strip and does not in any manner change the immediate humanitarian imperative to address this civilian suffering by enabling complete, safe, unhindered, and sustained humanitarian access into and throughout the Gaza Strip, including through ceasing hostilities. All actors should not wait until a Famine classification for the current period is made to act accordingly.
> Secondly, the FRC would like to highlight that the very fact that we are unable to endorse (or not) FEWS NET’s analysis is driven by the lack of essential up to date data on human well-being in Northern Gaza, and Gaza at large. Thus, the FRC strongly requests all parties to enable humanitarian access in general, and specifically to provide a window of opportunity to conduct field surveys in Northern Gaza to have more solid evidence of the food consumption, nutrition, and mortality situation.
A seige means the borders are closed. The current situation, for at least 6 months now is that Israel is letting food trucks through the border, more and more every day.
A problem exists for that last mile inside Gaza where no one wants to distribute it because militants will straight up beat truck drivers with sticks to steal the trucks and the food.
You'd think the UN would step in and do something but so far they mostly just sit on their hands bleating.
So to summarize: there are huge piles of food just inside the Gaza border that are not being distributed efficiently/at all.
I also want to point out that it's not in Israel's best interest for there to be food shortages inside Gaza. The first people who will be starved are the hostages, so Israel wants to flood the strip with so much food that some trickles down to her citizens held there against their will.
There are not much of them doors left anyway.
>A seige means the borders are closed.
Yes, practically for close to two decades now. Sea, Air and Land.
Where are your sources about "huge piles of food just inside the Gaza border?"
> Aid groups say coordinating their movements with the Israeli military inside Gaza remains a complicated and time-consuming process, sometimes requiring hours to coordinate safe access to the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom border. And despite these efforts, Israeli airstrikes have hit aid workers on multiple occasions.
I haven't found anything on the investigation that is supposedly investigating the WCK workers murder. Unless the people who did that receives exemplary punishment, what sort of NGOs could distribute that aid? And ITF forces are still on the ground, and air.
Same is of course true for Chinese companies deciding to not bother operating in the USA, or UK companies deciding it's not worth the effort to operate in Argentina.
But it's not likely to be a big deal if it does, because software … how can I put this?
The saying goes "the first 90% takes half the time, the second 90% takes another half of the time, the third 90% puts you over-budget", etc. but that same effect also means it's easy to catch up most of the value even with something relatively mediocre.
Food is still scarce, with far fewer trucks let in versus pre invasion (which was 500 trucks a day), which was already calibrated according to Israeli officials to be "the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis". https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-israel-intentionally-...
Nowadays (as in the last few months) a minimum of 250 FOOD trucks enter Gaza daily. Sometimes as high as 350.
Source, with occasional pictures https://twitter.com/cogatonline
This also means that the embarrassing US floating pier brings in approximately nothing compared to the land crossings.
Those were both banned. The trucks were mainly food.
Also, the story was that they built rockets out of the pipes. In reality, they were remanufactured arms out of Israeli duds. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/world/middleeast/israel-h...
> Nowadays (as in the last few months) a minimum of 250 FOOD trucks enter Gaza daily. Sometimes as high as 350.
Current estimates are that 1000-1500 trucks a day are needed due to both the backlog of lack of food and the destruction of Gaza internal food production.
Power is out in specific areas because Hamas was in control of all civil offices and they're gone. So while the grid is back up, there's no engineers to connect the destroyed relays.
The trucks are back in. The problem is on the other side of the fence https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243752564/hundreds-of-aid-tr...
You can blame that problem on Israel too although this isn't something Israel can fix.
You're using a typical western POV which is severely broken and damaging to the people of Gaza. E.g.
"Hamas Leader Reacts to 3 Sons Being Killed: 'Thank God'" https://www.newsweek.com/hamas-leader-reacts-3-sons-killed-t...
There's a picture of him smiling as he brings the news to his wife where you also see her smiling. I can't imagine losing a child, just thinking about him losing a child makes me tear up. It's unimaginable. Yet Hamas leaders consider the death and suffering of their own children in the Jihad as a blessing.
That is fanatic religious insanity. But they understand that the West doesn't see it that way. So they use Palestinian children in the most heinous ways possible, as couriers between their tunnels and bait. An accidental death of a child is propaganda and they live on that. Recently they published a video of an Israeli army dog attacking an old woman. They literally kidnapped that dog and used it to stage an attack for propaganda.
I'm not saying that horrible things aren't happening there due to Israeli actions. On the contrary, they are. But they are happening there for the most part because Hamas is an enemy of the Palestinian people as much as it is an enemy of Israel. It is using Hospitals, Schools and Mosques as bases. They placed a huge weapons cache under a refuge sanction, then when it exploded it was easy to blame Israel and for 24-48 hours the media reported that it was Israel.
Western ignorant good intentions are prolonging the war and making it worse because they're giving Hamas false hope.
Current estimates are in fact only 500 trucks a day needed. This is directly from the UN.
I have friends of all religions although I'm personally an atheist. Religion has very little to do with this deep sorrow. It's not about them, it's about the personal loss. It's about the suffering prior to death. It's a deep visceral human emotion that separates out psychopaths.
Based on that logic Hamas should welcome Israeli bombs and consider that a favor. But they sacrifice others rather than themselves. Their terrorists hide in tunnels away from bombings and send child couriers to do the dirty work for them. They find the poor suicidal soles and instead of getting them help, put them in a suicide vest and send them to kill innocent people. That's insanity.