Microsoft cutting crucial link to Gaza, Palestinians say

The Digital Markets Act and/or Digital Services Act ought to have something to say about this, especially the "this secret decision is final and we refuse to say anything else" part of the story.

Regulations are why Microsoft is banning users who call Gaza.

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.

They're nothing like utilities and it makes no sense to treat them that way.

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.

Indeed. I think that if a person cannot participate in modern society without being a customer with only a few competitors to choose from, then such businesses should have a "universal service obligation" and not be allowed to refuse service without a good reason. Such a reason should be mediated by the legal system.

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.

I don't think that would help in this case: being regulated as a US public utility would still embargo Gaza and treat contact with it as radioactive.

It's worse than that - they're gradually becoming a new form of governance - and one that you can't vote out.

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.

I used to disagree with this. Recent conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine (regardless of who you side with) made me change my mind.

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.

There should be market share limits on providing identity and currency, or those should just be handled to the government (like they used to be).

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).

Especially if they don't give you access to you data (impossible in the EU thanks to the GDPR). They have to be taken to court for this.

It has R&D centers and local business centers. Skype is not in Israel and there's no reason for a VoIP solution to route through a country local facility. The "complete siege" ended ages ago. Israel provides power, food etc.

Why did you put quotes around "war"? It may be other things, but it's definitely not just a "reaction", "retaliation", or "police action"...

One of my banks uses email two factor auth- if I lost access to the email account and had no accessible backup email set I can see how being locked out of the email account would deny access to the bank account.

My grocery story requires email 2FA to log into it these days. Losing access to my email address would probably be more work than if I found myself having to move house.

well, consider the life of an immigrant ( mine ). i have bank accounts in India and the US. when i need to access my Indian accounts from the US, they provide me a 2fa code via sms and email. i don't have international roaming on my Indian SIM. Its active, but not really working in the US. losing email access means i lose access to some of my bank accounts.

There's a lot of neo-banks these days out there who have no physical offices, no phone numbers to call, nothing. If you lose access to them, you're basically going to have to pray that their support staff is willing to listen to you (assuming you can even reach them) and believe you when you tell them who you are.

Unfortunately I suspect more and more people are making accounts at banks like that and storing significant amounts of money in them.

in part yes, if you have a physical bank next to you it’s easy right? just go

but if the bank is in another country … it might be literally impossible to recover it

You can even put <hn-2024-07-11>@<some-domain.tld>.

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.

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.

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.

Where can I read more about this "catch-all" domain setup? Interested to implement this solution. Any resources you recommend?

What if your domain registrar kicks you out because you once logged in from <embargoed country>? You can't win here if corps want to hurt you.

> 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

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.

Fastmail handles this "unique email address" scenario really well, even tying into Bitwarden so you can insert a unique address into a web form with just a couple clicks, and then efficiently block/remove the email address later, as desired.

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

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.

Typical sentence of people that are guilty, just like those who pretend they should be able to hide information outside of the protective gaze of the glorious all-powerful elites who know better than thouh.

What are you trying to hide, you seditious terrorist, hmm?

You can’t be innocent or guilty if you’re never accused of anything.

Some people forget the right of free association means companies have a broad (though not universal!) right to reject someone as a customer.

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.

In court

Curious, what sort of phone do you use?

I may be completely wrong, but I think large companies are completely amoral

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.

It's interesting how no matter how much that we'd all like for technology to be this nice tidy domain of knowledge which doesn't intermingle in any messy way with philosophy or religion - where there is much less exactitude and clear boundaries - alas, this intermingling of morality comes around sooner or later.

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."

It's worth pointing out that this same lockout situation can and has happened in many more cases than listed here. It happens that the timing coincides with a specific service use, but the problem of people getting locked out of their life because Google blocked access to their account is an old one. Unfortunately, your point will be forgotten by many once this episode passes, and we'll be back to ignoring how much control has been ceded.

yes. the only alternative i know of is free software and peer-to-peer networking on a cryptographically secure basis. unfortunately there isn't currently either a viable free software political movement or a viable cypherpunk political movement, so the near future looks very dark. perhaps after a few generations of hitherto unimaginable atrocities things might start to improve, but it is now too late to prevent those atrocities

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

I get nothing positive or useful out of writing this comment but the negative potential is infinite. When the www started someone attempted to convince me that you should never interact using computers unless there is no other choice. Turns out he was right, you are not going to buy me beer, invite me, introduce me, collaborate or help me. The new contract is useless.

You get to an important issue: Type 1 vs Type 2 errors - precision vs recall. Any system is going to have errors, so what do you prioritize? The company has only limited control over this choice, as you also point out that the gov't will punish them for false negatives but not false positives. So the company prioritizes recall over precision.

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.

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.

If you're in a country sanctioned by country X, then you shouldn't use products from companies in country X. It's common sense.

unfortunately they do not

"right"

It's flagged because dang didn't unflag it, ultimately.

Which is concerning.

This.