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.
Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.
United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. “I’ve had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I’ve filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times.” Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, “We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online.”
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas
Uh, why would they do this?
Probably because they were warned that Hamas or another Terrorist organization out of Gaza is planning Terror Attacks on Europe or the US
So they just cut off any Communications.
Alternatively the company is run by a bunch of racist pricks who support the genocide of Palestinians like you do
Damn, thats some google level behavior.
What the fuck, MIcrosoft.
No, it’s standard corp level behavior that’s beholden to government censorship and propaganda when it doesn’t fit the narrative. You can substitute any big tech company in the US for Google. They all do this. It’s why the government is not a fan of TikTok, they don’t have that same level of control over the flow of information.
that and it is quite literally spyware that sends all the consumer data to the CCP where they can adjust their own algorithms to show things that can sway the minds of people too young to think critically
the cpc adjusts the American version of an app operated in Singapore to propagandize Zoomers
This only happens in the minds of the paranoid. China has their own version of TikTok, Douyin, which operates under their media restrictions.
Probably the first time they have paid attention to Skype.
Friendly reminder to not use freemail accounts (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc) for anything important. It’s very hard to get any sort of support as your account is seen as low-priority. Also, always use your own domain so that it’s easy to move to a different provider in the future, without having to change your email address.
FastMail and MXRoute are good options. MXRoute has good Black Friday sales and all their plans include unlimited email address and domains (you’re just limited by total disk space).
Microsoft’s paid plan is decent too. $70/year for a personal account or $100/year for a family account (up to 6 people) and it includes the Office suite, 1TB cloud storage, and email.
Some sites and services won’t accept accounts with e-mails outside of the mainstream ones though.
Do you have an example? That’d block pretty much every business customer, including paid Google and Microsoft users (as the paid accounts use a custom domain). I’m not sure which sites and services would want to block all business users like that.
Also, FastMail is definitely mainstream. It’s pretty popular and has been around for 25 years.
Another reason to boycott Microsoft. Though I don’t expect other tech companies to be any better.
don’t ever forget that microsoft is evil
Use matrix.
Matrix originating from israel does sketch me out a bit since they are famous for spyware. Do source code reviews check out?
What else should we use?
Signal is decently rated. it is still a little more centralized than Matrix but that also makes setup easier. I’m not a cybersecurity guy though so I have no idea what’s actually good and what’s not, I just go by recommendation from people on the interwebs.
It’s fully end-to-end encrypted by default, and it also encrypts and minimizes metadata. It’s also completely free & open source, and I don’t think they have ever terminated an account for any reason other than spam. These are the things that actually matter.
REGULATE MONOPOLIES
While I agree enthusiastically, does Skype even have a dominant market position, let alone a monopoly?
I’m talking Microsoft. Having this much control over means of communication is alarming. And Microsoft continues to grow.
Hypothetically, I wonder if they can just block Microsoft accounts alltogether, denying access to (now, kind of mandatory MS account) Windows machines.
Ok, oligopoly. Happy?
So what you’re saying is, that there is now an easy way to delete your MS account?
i am sure that only affects the data YOU can ever access, but never the data already stored for later abuse ;-)
Microsoft are terrorists.
Microsoft is a private company and they can ask you to leave, no reason given, anytime.
And they have a history of over 30 years of being evil, manipulative and anticonsumer. If you base your online life on the good will of Microsoft you will be very disappointed sooner or later.
Why do people sprout this bullshit. You can’t discriminate against a protected class that includes race, gender, age, disability, national origin, religion,
What’s the funniest (and saddest) is when people who are supposedly against private discrimination repeat this when it fits them.
They aren’t. The are discriminating “for no reason at all”. Feel free to sue them. Godspeed.
They already do.
Uh so where do we go for email that’s not a private company and not something that requires tech knowledge to setup your own email server?
Meanwhile we get banned here for saying war crimes bad.
You can’t say war crimes are bad, because that helps Trump win. Trump will do more war crimes. Ergo, saying war crimes are bad means you’re in favor of war crimes.
You can’t say war crimes are bad, because that helps Trump win.
So am I supposed to root for Putin now?
You need to root for Joe Biden, because he is the only man who has ever beaten Donald Drumpf.
If you are not rooting for Joe Biden, you are anti-American.
Everything in this comment is true.
Can I root for Bernie and begrudgingly vote for Biden at least? This lesser of two old white evils shit is exhausting
Nobody is stopping you.
Here? On Lemmy? Where did you get banned for saying that?
Imaginationland.
Could it be that our ally is running an extermination campaign against a civilian population? No, that’s impossible. They all have to be terrorists, and contacting terrorists is against our terms of service.
This is what I fear the most with these platforms. They have these shitty automated moderation systems that can just decide to delete everything you have there on a whim. Already common on places like youtube and facebook, but it just keeps getting worse. Every site is pushing users into signing in with their google/microsoft/whatever accounts.
Remember the guy who lost access to his smart home when amazon banned him for no reason?
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different, but i agree with your sentiment.
if you are depending on a platform where you are the goods being sold, not the customer, you shouldn’t be surprised if you are taken of the shelf on a moment’s notice.
everyone has a choice.
I use Gmail, and am concerned about the same thing. But of the alternatives I don’t know any that have wide support for social logins, which are damn convient.
it doesn’t have to be clean cut.
i have my personal and important mails in my private mailbox, on my own domain. i use gmail as a backup and spam mail, i use it everywhere where i assume the mail can go to some spam database sooner or later.
so if i lost access to it one day, i would lose history of some confirmations from various eshops and shit like that, but nothing that would really cripple me.
i would definitely not put my family photos there and hope they stay there forever.
which are damn convient
and that’s how they get us…
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
The accusation was completely false, and even if the guy actually were a racist pos, remotely disabling devices he paid for and owns is not a good road to go on.
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
ok, that doesn’t even make sense, but it shows how wildly different and random the “reasons” can be.
i was thinking about the case where guy took a photo of some rash on his son’s penis to send it to a doctor and some automated system flagged it as child pornography.
It isn’t even on a whim. They get pressured to act on “anti semitism” and define that to mean anything that offends Zionists.
The ADL is usually responsible.
Guess that officially adds Microsoft to the BDS list? Unless it’s already on the list.
BDS?
Boycott Divest Sanction
Good luck? They effectively have a monopoly on large portions of the market.
Have to start somewhere, for example, instead of throwing a Microsoft based PC at your kids to do their school work, have them use Linux. Phase Microsoft products out of your homes/lives.
What confirmation do we have that Microsoft did not have a good reason to ban this person? There seems to be just this single report going around the net.
What confirmation do we have the person did deserve the ban? Microsoft refusing to respond does not absolve them from guilt.
Also this happened to multiple people that called their family in Gaza, it’s not one instance.
