A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.

  • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    That’s what you get for trusting Microsoft with anything…or Google…or Apple…or Facebook… stop tying your communication to these companies, they can pull the rug at any time.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    MS probably doesn’t care who calls who. I’d be surprised if this wasn’t a government issued order and they can’t disclose it.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      Governments don’t order such specificity. They would have, at most, told M$ that Skype is being used by Hamas and that there would be an audit on the situation, so M$ over-corrected to be better safe than sorry

  • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    This is a pretty misleading article. They cite the BBC “investigation” as a source, but if you go to the BBC article you’ll quickly see it’s not an investigation or anything near that. It’s just a reporting of the anecdotes of 3 individuals who happen to be Palestinians living abroad. You can’t establish any type of conclusions on a sample size that small.

    This isn’t a study, it’s not a survey, it’s not a poll, it doesn’t prove that Microsoft is intentionally making these bans, it doesn’t track down the actual reasons for the bans, or anything really. The BBC article is fine for what it is, just a reporting of a mildly interesting event, but this windoscentral article is just bad bait.

    • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      It’s not misleading. It’s reporting on the BBC article as it was originally published.

      https://archive.is/8Aefo

      The BBC article was subsequently edited down to remove key information while no comment or retraction was made. This isn’t surprising as many journalist who work for the BBC have accused their editors of bias.

      https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/as-israel-pounds-gaza-bbc-journalists-accuse-broadcaster-of-bias

      This is why media literacy is important. If you knew how media outlets operate it would be easy to figure out what happened in this case.

      • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        While that is a good catch, the only two differences between the original article and the edited one is that they removed the statement where they mentioned they’ve spoken to 20 Palestinians living abroad and added a little paragraph that mentions the number of causalities that were caused by the war. The contents of the article are still largely the same. The original article still isn’t an investigation like the windowscentral article claims. It’s just a reporting of the experiences of the 20 or so individuals they’ve spoken to, where again, only 3 individuals are highlighted. I don’t see anything wrong with the BBC article, my issue is with the way that windowscentral framed the BBC article.

        Also for the record, while the BBC has it’s biases, Al Jazeera is a Qatari state owned propaganda outlet. They’re not credible on most things, but especially when it comes to anything relating to the middle east. Take anything they say with a tub of salt.

      • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        wait so you’re telling me in addition to checking the cited material, I have to now check if the cited material was edited? no one fuckin told me that what the hell

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The corpos can fuck you over any time for any reason. If your data is not held on your own infrastructure, it’s not your data. If your computer runs Windows, it’s not your computer.

  • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    Genuinely shocking and disgusting. What is Microsoft’s problem with people just trying to live their lives? They absolutely need a class action lawsuit over this. I’m so glad I just switched to Ubuntu as my default and now really don’t want to give this sh*thole company another cent.

  • MisterFrog@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Holy balls we are living in the wild west era of the internet.

    Shit needs to be regulated.

    Just I’m not super confident regulation will come in the form of mandatory encryption at rest, end-to-end encryption by default and only not when necessary, banning selling data to 3rd parties, being able to quickly and speedily unban unjustly banned accounts by regulator intervention (like this one).

    Terms of service are bullshit when our entire digital identities are attached to emails.

    Looking around, the regulation we’ll see will instead be in the form “nothing to fear if you’ve got nothing to hide.”

    I can daydream, though.

    • AHemlocksLie@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      The problem is they lose their email address, which is tied to just about every digital account they have. Losing your email can royally fuck you. Many sites send an email to the old email of you try to change it, so you’ll have to get in touch with support to get it changed, and then support will want proof it’s your account somehow, and the whole process is gonna take days or weeks to fix all your accounts. God help you if you forgot any passwords because now you can’t login or even reset the password since that goes through email.

      • 2484345508@lemy.lol
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        4 months ago

        Everyone should own their own domain and have ownership of their digital life. If you don’t, then you are borrowing something that can be taken from you easily.

        No one can take my email from me. Even if the current provider goes out of business, I can always point it elsewhere.

        • foggy@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Holy shit, that’s a pretentious way to say you think you’re hot shit while showing you’ve barely got a chin above script kiddie.

          Where the fuck are you gonna cram billions of new DNS records? You trying to nuke the whole system?

          Billions of new IP addresses? From where, your ass? IPv4’s fucking dead and IPv6 is crawling.

          You want billions of shitty home servers? Why not just hand cybercriminals the keys to everyone’s data?

          No big email providers for spam filtering? Hope you like dick pills and Nigerian princes.

          Home servers for email? Great plan. Who needs reliability when the power goes out or your shit internet drops?

          You think everyone can afford this? Some people can barely pay rent, let alone run a fucking server.

          “Private” home servers? Please. They’d fold faster than a house of cards in a hurricane up against any direct persistent attack from any capable threat actors.

          Try running a big mailing list on your puny home setup. Watch that shit crash and burn.

          Good luck explaining to the feds why you can’t cough up subpoenaed emails.

          You really think billions of clueless users can handle this? It’s like giving toddlers chainsaws.

          Everyone run their own email on locally hosted domains…? Jesus fucking Christ. What are you, 14?

          Edit: lemy.lol has MX records that point to icloud.

          This toolbag indeed uses someone else’s services for their email exchange.