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.
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.
You have to trust someone with these communications, there is no free communication beyond face to face
Matrix (federated) or Briar (multi-modal P2P) are both good options for getting rid of dependency on central organizations.
Still need an ISP. ISPs are pretty centralized and monolithic for lots of people.
I’ll just build my own cell tower and become my own ISP, checkmate
It won’t be too useful unless you peer with the others.
That sounds just meshtastic.
You’re assuming that people in Gaza have consistent access to the internet. The beauty of Skype is that you can call a landline through it.
Unless you build your own, you have to trust your ISP to move packets, but you don’t have to rely on any third party services or give them your personal info to use social media.
Fully decentralized, open-source, and encrypted social networks exist. The only servers needed are your computer and the computers of the friends you communicate with. (See: Retroshare )
They’re just never going to get big because small, personal friend-to-friend networks can’t compete with the network effects of centralized media and a never-ending torrent of dopamine on tap.
dead link?
Whoops, somehow managed to typo it. Fixed now.
From my comment above:
You’re assuming that people in Gaza have consistent access to the internet. The beauty of Skype is that you can call a landline through it.
trust yourself by hosting a matrix server
How do you call a landline number in a war zone through a matrix server?
I was simply responding to the comment:
You have to trust someone with these communications, there is no free communication beyond face to face
the oh-so-clever smart alecks saying “whaddabout ISPs???” forgot about 2-way radio and meshnets
Signal is right there.
Signal is centrally hosted thus it’s proverbial rug can be pulled.
Wait until you find out about internet service providers
You can have more than one dumb pipe to push bits through, but if the ISP can read your network traffic then you have bigger problems than a single-point-of-failure.
Do you have more than one ISP?
I’m very lucky in that regard. Not only do we have a local ISP and mobile service from a national carrier, but the electric co-op that provides our power just ran 2.5Gb/s fiber through the neighborhood and lets members use 200Mb/s on it for free.
Who doesn’t?
For the most part the ISP doesn’t have a way to know you are using VoIP to contact people in a particular country (unless you are using a VoIP service owned by the ISP of course).
True. Yet another linchpin.
Edit: spelling.
and Threema
Threema is what signal should have been.
But I ain’t got in me to start forcing people again lol
Signal it is until it is proven untrustworthy
Yeah, they’re both good (still).
features Threema Signal price $5 / 5€ Free account creation phone number optional phone number required
They fucked up so badly, Elon Musk was right for once.
They didn’t fuck up, they made a design choice about the scope of the app. Are they also fucking up by not blurring the messages on screen? After all someone could be looking over your shoulder without you realizing it. Maybe Signal should ship with spyglasses.
You’re absolutely right and it’s insane I keep coming across these wild takes from people that clearly don’t understand technology
I’m not sure why you think anyone would want a messenger that touts itself for its encryption to not encrypt things.
It does encrpyt messages: In transit, exactly as advertised. Holy fuck.
Then it’s weird they are fixing it now. Why aren’t they insisting this doesn’t need to be dealt with because it was a feature, not a bug?
Wasn’t Elon Musk trying to push Telegram?
That wouldn’t shock me, but he was right that Signal was not addressing a known vulnerability. In fact, denying that it even was a vulnerability.
For what it’s worth, I trust Telegram even less than Signal. And at least Signal seems to be finally doing something about the problem.
This is what net neutrality and anti-trust laws are for.
deleted by creator
This is exactly what they want you to believe.
Your average person doesn’t know of any communication method other than mega corps.
Yor right I will just use my billions of dollars to build a global internet infrastructure and make my posts on my own phone using the os I just built in my spare time for fun its not about trust its about necessity
That’s what you get
You’re right, they deserve this. You asshole.
We had an issue a couple days ago where we couldn’t move a VIP to a new phone because the vendor wanted us to perform multi-factor auth via a device from two years ago. We had to roll back the service. Our entire lives are built atop fragile digital infrastructure with broken and poorly thought-out policies.
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.
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
Fucking disgusting
Reeks of governmental intervention
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.
It’s not misleading. It’s reporting on the BBC article as it was originally published.
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.
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.
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.
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
Well, fuck Microsoft now more so.
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.
Ban me too while you’re at it, so I never have to use your shitty software ever again
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.
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.
The digital genocide of Palestinians hath commenced.
“Killed my online life”
How dramatic. Get another account.
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.
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.
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.
Definitely not accessible for everyone, but I don’t think they’re insinuating that everyone needs to host their own server.
My brother has the one with the apple bundle that was super easy to set up bc it’s Apple, but he can still move the domain if needed.
I’m not reading that
Believe me, nobody thought you would.
Teenagers hate reading.
Edit: lemy.lol has MX records that point to icloud.
This toolbag indeed uses someone else’s services for their email exchange. Tight.
I’m probably older than you.
🙄
Sorry, but you are aware there’s a TON of commercial services, starting from $1/month (or even less), that allow you to bring your own domain and host email, right?
Hell even my boomer interior designer mom was able to figure out how to buy a domain and set up email hosting on it, so it’s not like this is some hyper-technical complicated thing that nobody could possibly figure out, because it’s just tooo haaaard.
You don’t actually NEED to run your own server for email to own your own domain, so your fit over script kiddies and billions of IPs or whatever is kinda uh, not how any of this needs to work for normal people.
You are referring to leasing a domain, not owning one.
This person is adamant about ownership.
What you are referring to is borrowing others services, which is what they are explicitly detesting as foolish.
It’s pure naivete. Mom’s basement shit.
