1) I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even more opaque than the processes they replace.
3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you can) accordingly.
> I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
I could agree with the beginning of that but not the classification of a misfire. A misfire implies a brief, exceptional occurrence and neither of those adjectives seem likely here.
That's based on a few years spent in Microsoft's forever-shuffling admin carousel (EAC, Exch Migration, Intune, Azure hydra, 365/Copilot-all-the-things). Thru that, I have come to believe that incompetence is almost always the right answer for MS-generated woes.
> However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time
this risk goes for any 3rd party, at least the ones that follow sanctions compliance or suspicious activity monitoring. if your name shows up on a denied party list, it's illegal for anyone to tell you why they arent talking to you anymore.
Yeah if Microsoft is banning 1% of accounts and independently 0.01% have a newsworthy conspiracy angle then on average One in a million users would fall in this bucket. p is going to be near 1 without other info.
Given Microsoft's previous behaviour towards competitors and open source software, it seems almost certain to me that Microsoft is doing this deliberately. They've got decades of bad faith behaviour at this point, so why give them the benefit of the doubt?
Because, this is the default operating for all big corporations at this point. Ban people based on some random automated factor. And then have no customer support channel to contact.
I just fall on general malice here too instead of specific malice.
In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.
If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge of the risk.
I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?
Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.
The key insight is that mitigating risk isn’t a free action. No business has the bandwidth to avoid even most of the risks they could in principle avoid; you allocate some effort towards the ones that make sense to mitigate, and hope the others don’t come to pass.
But relying on other people's kingdom isn't free either, that comes with a cost.
The fallacy I hear often is that because something like AWS is sooo much more expensive than co-location or VPS, that it must be easier.
Yeah, it can be... sometimes. It almost never is. You trade off the complexity for new complexity. You replace your sysadmins with Dev Ops. It's not like it just magically gets better.
It's the same way with a lot of things. A more expensive car is not necessarily better. It can be, sometimes, if you're very careful and know what you're doing. More expensive clothes aren't better either. Popularity factors into this, too. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. Plenty of really shitty things become popular.
You can absolutely build your application without relying on other companies too much. I'm not saying you need to go rogue, but you also don't need to use every single Google feature under the sun to, like, display some photos. And, if you do that, that's actually probably way worse and more expensive (effort + money) than if you didn't.
> But relying on other people's kingdom isn't free either
I know it sounds trite, but looking at what I'm responding to, it is not possible to not rely on others for anything but the most basic things where input(s), tool(s), action(s), and output(s) don't require anyone else. You need infrastructure, services, tools, materials provided by others for almost everything.
We are a highly networked species, and building a business is finding a spot in that network. You are always highly connected. Therefore I find that "kingdom" metaphor does not fit how our lives work. It's a network, not kingdoms, not even the richest country could afford to cut the connections.
Services like those from the big companies at least have the advantage that the companies cannot make them too bad, because that would backfire. Copying what most do is pretty safe compared to doing your own thing.
That's also because you want to concentrate on your core business idea. Sure, if you spend some effort doing your basic infrastructure different from others you may save a little, but overall for many companies it will be much better to copy what most others in your space do, so that you have the same basis, and not risk being different in an area that is far from your core competence.
For many areas in business you just hope for the best. You hope(d) Russia-Ukraine would not escalate, or later that it ends quickly. You hope that the latest US tariffs won't be too bad. The world is full of surprises, at least for businesses big company account access or cloud issues does not seem to be a big one, in comparison. I'm not saying this as a headline reader, but as someone dealing with a sanctioned country and other politics-related issues that have been impacting us for a while, despite doing business very far from anything critical (lifestyle consumer products).
We, for example, use one big company to host our DNS (due to history, they also used to host our emails when we began), but we have Microsoft host files (OneDrive) and Email (Office 365) for our entire business domain. I would like to not have to rely on US companies, nor more than ever (we are German), but that stuff just works. And not just as individual pieces, but also together. For example, when I open an Excel file stored in a shared OneDrive folder, and a colleague does the same, we get automatic shared editing and see each other's cursor position. Many small conveniences like that. AND, very important, emails just work - with rarely ever any issues because of rejected emails.
Whenever I see a discussion on reddit or here "why Microsoft (Office)", soooo many people only know the most superficial of arguments. They talk about "but LibreOffice", "but [insert other mail- or cloud file- service), but the apps are not even all that important. It is everything, the huge amount of infrastructure and methods they provide, automatically or manually usable, that ties everything together. The "glue" vastly outshines just Excel or just Word itself, either one of which could indeed be replaced.
When you do more than just simple email, when you have to administer a few dozen employees and their devices, you will find that the big US companies are very hard to beat.
What would be the alternative anyway? Having your own server is a nightmare in comparison! Even just making sure my emails won't be spam-rejected by at least some providers (where my customers and business partners sit) is too much. Making sure the dedicated server is always up to date with patches - that's a lot of work that I'd rather not do. In any case I still have to rely on the hosting provider, who may cut off my wonderful 100% self-owned and administered server at any time because I ended up on some anti-spam list because I did not react to some new threat that I did not even know about in time.
Overall, relying on the big mainstream providers is a prudent choice. You can't avoid trouble, and ceteris paribus choosing them IMHO makes sense.
> You can absolutely build your application without relying on other companies too much.
Obviously, since they do it! I could also bake my own bread. The point is I prefer to specialize and deal with things that don't differentiate me from others in my line of business as little as possible.
I started with computers at a time of 8 bit CPUs, when I knew every relevant memory address by heart. The many many layers these days are not something I enjoy, but I will still use the mainstream stuff nevertheless! Because I am not in the business of basic infrastructure IT and every minute I spend on it is a minute not spent where it actually matters in my business. Everybody, the few dozen employees, the partners, the customers(resellers, they all know the big companies and their products. The only thing we do ourselves is EDI messages on top - on cloud servers. But we sure don't want to come up with OneDrive and Ms Office alternatives, even if politically I'd like that.
Right, but theres levels of vendor lock in. Going up to more lock in doesn't necessarily mean an easier experience, that's what I'm trying to point out. So you have to do the risk analysis.
The fallacy I'm trying to point out is that if you outsource some functionality to locked in vendor implementation, then your life is easier. It can be, but Its often not.
I mean, technically you don't have to use those ecosystems and could roll your own stuff, including infrastructure instead of AWS but it's definitely going to be expensive.
Which is why we need regulation for those big players (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one, and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own services.
Not so technically, your business needs customers and efficiencies. Big tech strategically positions themselves at those choke points.
But realistically , if Google and Apple both for whatever reason banned you from all their services, idk why, then you would not have access to a phone. So then you say, well, it was just one person in ten million, and they probably did something wrong-- and now you share the same perspective as Big Tech on this specific issue.
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not. It is only the greed for bigger profits. If a company can work with Microsoft, it can also work with LibreOffice. But LibreOffice doesn't promise them the moon, while sucking every cent out of them.
Thats not what other people's kingdoms means. Basically all non-trivial apps are already built on VPSs. The other people's kingdoms refers to how people interact with your app. Take Zynga - they were not literally running on FB servers, I'm sure they had their own VPS, but their games just had 0 reach outside of FB. When FB decided to change things Zynga just got fucked, VPS or not.
There was a fleeting moment where the Internet was the "Wild West" but we are long past that. The GP's idiom is about as practical as "don't be a citizen of any state".
The only counter point I can think of is that you can always choose to build upon multiple tech platforms simultaneously, and depending on the technology you need, it might not even add all that much additional cost to do so.
Yeah. I would still recommend that people create separate account for dev purposes just in case. But still I have not heard of Apple locking people out like Microsoft or others do
Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups... Have at least one backup/copy of your own data on your own hardware. I have onedrive, google-drive and dropbox copied to my nas as well as my desktop and laptop. Other projects are in github or gitlab and copied on my nas.
That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so that I can have an extra level of safety.
> Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups.
Hell, even Microsoft (on the enterprise side of 365) says do not treat their services as a backup.
But we do need to get stricter about the messaging these companies are allowed to put out there regarding their services. Microsoft with one side of their mouth says 365 is definitively not a backup, and then turns around and advertises OneDrive on Windows as a backup with the "back up your folders now" notification.
To consumers that don't know any better, it's misleading and leads to a false sense of security, though I suspect "this service is not a backup and you can lose your account and all your files at anytime" doesn't sell as many subscriptions.
Google is good in this regard as you can schedule a takeout and get a complete dump. Stick that on a drive that is running backblaze and do periodic physical backups.
People don't realize how fragile this makes things.
Requiring an online ID to log into a local computer creates all sorts of vulnerabilities. When Microsoft gets hacked again, it can let hackers lock you out of your computer. It's basically ransomware-in-waiting.
The moment I saw nytimes' reporting that a dad lost access to his Google account because of "nude" photos of his baby and couldn't get help, I de-Googled almost completely and am now using fastmail as my main email account. My other inboxes are only kept just in case someone reaches me via those old addresses.
I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
I haven't been affected by any of those censorship laws and I doubt it ever will (in which case I'll just use a different provider). The biggest difference is that if something goes wrong, at least there is a real human being I can talk to at Fastmail.
Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
I had this exact same thing happen to me a while back. Luckily the account was one I had created just for this one user group who required I become part of their AD domain to access MS Teams. I tried getting back into the account and hit the same roadblock this guy did. I didn't care that much and just abandoned the account.
I figured it was something that Microsoft would soon fix, as it was such an obvious cluster; I'm surprised the issue still exists.
Don't they have weasel words in the ToS or EULA or somewhere that says you accept all risk of using service and protects the provider of any thing to be sued over?
they band lawyers from Germany already... I would strictly ban them from the European market. I mean why should an us company manage office stuff in a cloud from eu people.
Some strange idea comes to my mind. I suspect that Mike Kaganski's account was marked as a Russian account. And Microsoft is cutting support to Russian accounts.
The time for that concern was way back when Microsoft acquired github. Instead of moving elsewhere, everyone just doubled down on making github the defacto place to host our most critical open source infrastructure.
How many times do we as a community have to get bit by Microsoft before we learn?
These platforms constantly ban people for inscrutable reasons without any recourse, except perhaps for "support by media attention". I see no reason to assume this is any different, and that the ban is unrelated to their work on LibreOffice or anything else.
GitHub (and GitHub accounts) do not seem to have this problem as near as I can tell. For better or worse, I've found that reporting spammers and bad faith actors is a largely a pointless exercise as it will all go in a black hole.
its not going to happen. Quite the opposite. The EU's age verification app will only work on Google attested (i.e. controlled by American big tech) smartphones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
The UK's Online Safety Act's main effect is to strengthen big tech and protect them from competition, and make self hosing prohibitively expensive for many.
European governments will talk about digital sovereignty but will do nothing that involved actually spending money, or regulating the private sector or anything actually effective.
There have been many, many other examples over recent years. Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
> Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
The EU is a huge organization and too often the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing.
But, the EU isn't alone in curbing digital rights for individuals, it's a worrying trend all over the world even over here in the states, with congress introducing a bill of our own along the same lines (Kids Online Safety Act) - we'll see if it goes anywhere, but the overton window is shifting to being in favor of regulation like this, unfortunately.
Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, and rapidly.
Authoritarianism is much easier to implement in a pervasive surveillance environment, digital or otherwise. Unfortunate for all of us, even those who think they are immune.
The unfortunate truth is that all governments suck at dealing with technology in a positive way. The EU has some wins, the US has some wins, and so on... but they all have significant fails too. It's a question of which bad things you can live with, more than a question of who doesn't do bad things.
Correct I’ll take the cluster F of what we have now over the UK style of the government watching over my shoulder as they force me to give up anonymity on the web for those sites that most require it
If you live in one of the states that hasn't yet added
one of these laws. I expect it will become a federal bill in a year or two so there aren't 20 variants of the same law.
You can really feel the "big tent" nature of the GOP when these bills are being pushed despite being absolutely abhorrent to large swaths of Republican voters.
I voted for Trump and would make the same choice today without hesitation but agree the Republicans pushing this state by state age identification is pretty bad. State level Rs and house reps leave a bit to be desired. My vote is essentially a vote against the other party. Sometimes we have to choose between the best of two less than perfect choices. Politics is so often a deal with the devil against a worse devil
Can't really say I agree after being quite pleased with Biden's admin—would have been more than happy with the sequel. I clearly don't see the same thing you see in this guy but at least someone is happy and optimistic about it. A center left Democrat reaching across the isle so hard it pissed off her own base and with a platform of not rocking the boat sounds way better than whatever this mess is.
I hear exactly what you are saying. I voted for Biden and Clinton before. The country went insane from 2020 thru 24 and the concealing of Biden’s decline was atrocious. For me the left just went to far. I have 2 white heterosexual sons and I could not vote for a party that declared them an enemy. Everything else was downstream of that for me. Ill vote for the bad guy before I vote for that. Trump has actually surprised me, delivering on many of the issues I voted for him on. If I have to endure his grift and other flaws its a price I’ll pay. I voted against what the Dems offered.
I completely understand and empathize with why some people are upset or even dismayed at what he’s doing though; i just think it’s necessary.
I actually can see an argument for age verification, if it could be truly guaranteed to apply only to porn.
The constitutionality of the current laws was upheld on the basis of treating age verification for access to porn as an incidental burden, and thus warranted only intermediate scrutiny.
My (naïve?) hope is that any future mission creep will be rejected by the Supreme Court under strict scrutiny, especially as it extends into general and political speech.
However, once you have the legal and technical frameworks in place, mission creep is almost inevitable, and it could easily take years of litigation to resolve.
“Think of the children” has always been the thin end of a wedge used by those looking to incrementally dismantle inconvenient civil liberties.
All that said, we’re in a much better position in the US under the first amendment. The UK’s “online safety bill” is already targeting a myriad of forms of political speech, and is just the latest example of the significant shift towards the curtailment of free speech across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Sure would have been great if, in 2016 and 2024 elections, the democrats had nominated someone who could have beat Trump. Or conversely, had not nominated the two people who didn't stance a chance.
Im not sure anyone could have beaten Trump. It was his time, the prior 4 years pushed many over to his base. I voted for Clinton and Biden but there was no one that could have gotten me to vote Dem last election
I said it many times on this forum, Harris had no platform. There was nothing to vote for.
I’m just so tired of “fuck the GOP” when, as you say, it was inevitable. People love to hate a villain, I get it. “It was Hilarys turn, we will just keep marching forward” really didn’t work out. This GOP narrative is basically screaming into a mirror. Not your GOP narrative, not picking on you. Just frustrated.
I hear you. And based on how the left has reacted to his term so far, I'm not sure there is anyone currently that can prevent a Vance or Desantis presidency next time. The left is to far left, they have abandoned the center and the center has sought safety in the GOP. Not because we want to be there but because there is literally no where else for us to go. My politics have not changed, but the party I have voted for for almost 3 decades very much has.
We have left leaning main stream media organizations implying that a jeans commercial is a nazi rallying cry because it features a white woman. I just cant vote how I used to vote and look my young sons in the eye. The Dem party is gone.
Be aware that neowin.net has facebook . com and .net scripts to tell them you visited the site.
It is not just this site. This is plague and has to be stopped.
Agreed. In the meantime, I'd suggest installing Privacy Badger [0].
It blocks those domains for me. In return I get an angry popup that claims that I'm using an "ad blocker", but it can be clicked away. (Privacy Badger is not strictly an ad-blocker. It does not care what is and what is not an ad. That it blocks ads on this site is simply an effect of those ads being used to track visitors)
Just use noscript and a separate browser for malicious sites like fb and ig. It might seem painfull at first, but you'll quickly end up with with a web that is better than before.
You can sit around and wait for things to change, or you come up with a workaround to get done what needs to be done. You seem to be against workarounds instead of making people just sit idle doing nothing.
Nothing is wrong with doing both. But when the reply to "this site does shady shit" is "just run this addon", it comes across with a subtext of "stop whining, you can solve it yourself". Perhaps not intentionally, but that is how it generally comes across.
I don't really see the story here. Just the LibreOffice dev got locked out of his account. Seems like an automated system that failed, which isn't exactly a revelation that false positives occur. Feels like this is meant to stir up OS war drama and make it seem like Microsoft is trying to prevent LibreOffice from succeeding.
You mean the part where the appeal was denied as the safety net of false positives? The fact that the site asks you to login to get support on not being able to login isn't a story? The fact they told him they'd help every step of the way only to ghost him?
Are we supposed to have been beaten down to the point that none of this is a story? Granted, it is only one side of the story. We have no idea what other things this account has done.
Appeals are not safety nets for false positives. Making online support require a login is extremely common. However there are other methods of communication to get support. Support not calling you back is not a story. Come on now.
Having a bad support experience is not being "beaten down". Talk about hyperbolic. If this is a systemic issue, that could be a story. But why isn't my grandmother's bad experience at Costco story? My friend had to call his ISP to sort a billing mistake. Is that a story now too?
Did your grandmother or friend get their issues resolved? If yes, not a story. If no, then potentially a story if they make enough noise.
But sure, you go right ahead and just roll over and take shitty service and then go ahead and add a tip too while you at it. The rest of will continue to make noise and call a spade a spade. Some of us might even tell them emperor he has no clothes on
I think that's the story. I think the strong implication in the first paragraph that it has something to do with the relationship between LibreOffice and Microsoft is not.
1) I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even more opaque than the processes they replace.
3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you can) accordingly.
> I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
I could agree with the beginning of that but not the classification of a misfire. A misfire implies a brief, exceptional occurrence and neither of those adjectives seem likely here.
That's based on a few years spent in Microsoft's forever-shuffling admin carousel (EAC, Exch Migration, Intune, Azure hydra, 365/Copilot-all-the-things). Thru that, I have come to believe that incompetence is almost always the right answer for MS-generated woes.
I agree, I should have said more like "error" or "mistake" or "incompetence", rather than "misfire".
The support for issues like this from all big corps is always horrendous.
Google is similarly notorious for brining businesses to a halt and only fixing the issue when it makes the news and a human at Google finally sees it.
> However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time
this risk goes for any 3rd party, at least the ones that follow sanctions compliance or suspicious activity monitoring. if your name shows up on a denied party list, it's illegal for anyone to tell you why they arent talking to you anymore.
Yeah if Microsoft is banning 1% of accounts and independently 0.01% have a newsworthy conspiracy angle then on average One in a million users would fall in this bucket. p is going to be near 1 without other info.
Given Microsoft's previous behaviour towards competitors and open source software, it seems almost certain to me that Microsoft is doing this deliberately. They've got decades of bad faith behaviour at this point, so why give them the benefit of the doubt?
Because, this is the default operating for all big corporations at this point. Ban people based on some random automated factor. And then have no customer support channel to contact.
I just fall on general malice here too instead of specific malice.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
As I hear stories of Apple, Google, and Microsoft revoking valuable access, I remember this article...
"Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms."
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.
If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge of the risk.
I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?
Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.
The key insight is that mitigating risk isn’t a free action. No business has the bandwidth to avoid even most of the risks they could in principle avoid; you allocate some effort towards the ones that make sense to mitigate, and hope the others don’t come to pass.
But relying on other people's kingdom isn't free either, that comes with a cost.
The fallacy I hear often is that because something like AWS is sooo much more expensive than co-location or VPS, that it must be easier.
Yeah, it can be... sometimes. It almost never is. You trade off the complexity for new complexity. You replace your sysadmins with Dev Ops. It's not like it just magically gets better.
It's the same way with a lot of things. A more expensive car is not necessarily better. It can be, sometimes, if you're very careful and know what you're doing. More expensive clothes aren't better either. Popularity factors into this, too. Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. Plenty of really shitty things become popular.
You can absolutely build your application without relying on other companies too much. I'm not saying you need to go rogue, but you also don't need to use every single Google feature under the sun to, like, display some photos. And, if you do that, that's actually probably way worse and more expensive (effort + money) than if you didn't.
> But relying on other people's kingdom isn't free either
I know it sounds trite, but looking at what I'm responding to, it is not possible to not rely on others for anything but the most basic things where input(s), tool(s), action(s), and output(s) don't require anyone else. You need infrastructure, services, tools, materials provided by others for almost everything.
We are a highly networked species, and building a business is finding a spot in that network. You are always highly connected. Therefore I find that "kingdom" metaphor does not fit how our lives work. It's a network, not kingdoms, not even the richest country could afford to cut the connections.
Services like those from the big companies at least have the advantage that the companies cannot make them too bad, because that would backfire. Copying what most do is pretty safe compared to doing your own thing.
That's also because you want to concentrate on your core business idea. Sure, if you spend some effort doing your basic infrastructure different from others you may save a little, but overall for many companies it will be much better to copy what most others in your space do, so that you have the same basis, and not risk being different in an area that is far from your core competence.
For many areas in business you just hope for the best. You hope(d) Russia-Ukraine would not escalate, or later that it ends quickly. You hope that the latest US tariffs won't be too bad. The world is full of surprises, at least for businesses big company account access or cloud issues does not seem to be a big one, in comparison. I'm not saying this as a headline reader, but as someone dealing with a sanctioned country and other politics-related issues that have been impacting us for a while, despite doing business very far from anything critical (lifestyle consumer products).
We, for example, use one big company to host our DNS (due to history, they also used to host our emails when we began), but we have Microsoft host files (OneDrive) and Email (Office 365) for our entire business domain. I would like to not have to rely on US companies, nor more than ever (we are German), but that stuff just works. And not just as individual pieces, but also together. For example, when I open an Excel file stored in a shared OneDrive folder, and a colleague does the same, we get automatic shared editing and see each other's cursor position. Many small conveniences like that. AND, very important, emails just work - with rarely ever any issues because of rejected emails.
Whenever I see a discussion on reddit or here "why Microsoft (Office)", soooo many people only know the most superficial of arguments. They talk about "but LibreOffice", "but [insert other mail- or cloud file- service), but the apps are not even all that important. It is everything, the huge amount of infrastructure and methods they provide, automatically or manually usable, that ties everything together. The "glue" vastly outshines just Excel or just Word itself, either one of which could indeed be replaced.
When you do more than just simple email, when you have to administer a few dozen employees and their devices, you will find that the big US companies are very hard to beat.
What would be the alternative anyway? Having your own server is a nightmare in comparison! Even just making sure my emails won't be spam-rejected by at least some providers (where my customers and business partners sit) is too much. Making sure the dedicated server is always up to date with patches - that's a lot of work that I'd rather not do. In any case I still have to rely on the hosting provider, who may cut off my wonderful 100% self-owned and administered server at any time because I ended up on some anti-spam list because I did not react to some new threat that I did not even know about in time.
Overall, relying on the big mainstream providers is a prudent choice. You can't avoid trouble, and ceteris paribus choosing them IMHO makes sense.
> You can absolutely build your application without relying on other companies too much.
Obviously, since they do it! I could also bake my own bread. The point is I prefer to specialize and deal with things that don't differentiate me from others in my line of business as little as possible.
I started with computers at a time of 8 bit CPUs, when I knew every relevant memory address by heart. The many many layers these days are not something I enjoy, but I will still use the mainstream stuff nevertheless! Because I am not in the business of basic infrastructure IT and every minute I spend on it is a minute not spent where it actually matters in my business. Everybody, the few dozen employees, the partners, the customers(resellers, they all know the big companies and their products. The only thing we do ourselves is EDI messages on top - on cloud servers. But we sure don't want to come up with OneDrive and Ms Office alternatives, even if politically I'd like that.
Right, but theres levels of vendor lock in. Going up to more lock in doesn't necessarily mean an easier experience, that's what I'm trying to point out. So you have to do the risk analysis.
The fallacy I'm trying to point out is that if you outsource some functionality to locked in vendor implementation, then your life is easier. It can be, but Its often not.
> But relying on other people's kingdom isn't free either, that comes with a cost.
Yes, but as long as you can blame it on somebody else, it is fine. /s
I mean, technically you don't have to use those ecosystems and could roll your own stuff, including infrastructure instead of AWS but it's definitely going to be expensive.
Which is why we need regulation for those big players (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one, and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own services.
Not so technically, your business needs customers and efficiencies. Big tech strategically positions themselves at those choke points.
But realistically , if Google and Apple both for whatever reason banned you from all their services, idk why, then you would not have access to a phone. So then you say, well, it was just one person in ten million, and they probably did something wrong-- and now you share the same perspective as Big Tech on this specific issue.
If you have billions of dollars of revenue, you can make the law of tort work the way it is supposed to.
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not. It is only the greed for bigger profits. If a company can work with Microsoft, it can also work with LibreOffice. But LibreOffice doesn't promise them the moon, while sucking every cent out of them.
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not
It is often difficult and expensive, relative to letting Facebook (or the like) do the hosting.
But VPSs are a thing, you can run almost any software on them.
Stretching the analogy: Build your castle on your own bedrock, and build "forts", or "outposts", on the enemy territory
Ignoring Facebook et. el. is stupid, but depending on them is fool hardy
Thats not what other people's kingdoms means. Basically all non-trivial apps are already built on VPSs. The other people's kingdoms refers to how people interact with your app. Take Zynga - they were not literally running on FB servers, I'm sure they had their own VPS, but their games just had 0 reach outside of FB. When FB decided to change things Zynga just got fucked, VPS or not.
There was a fleeting moment where the Internet was the "Wild West" but we are long past that. The GP's idiom is about as practical as "don't be a citizen of any state".
That is a really great analogy and it's so true.
The only counter point I can think of is that you can always choose to build upon multiple tech platforms simultaneously, and depending on the technology you need, it might not even add all that much additional cost to do so.
There's a good reason they're called unicorns. That's not a strategy you should adopt for any business that's actually important to you.
When did it happen in Apple land?
Several instances.
https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/1h48tkz/app...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38394364
https://medium.com/@thedarkhacker94/apple-has-terminated-my-...
All of these are Apple just terminated developer account (and at least two of them probably don't tell the full story)
But this guy was completely blocked. It's VERY different when you lose access to everything and can't even contact support
> Microsoft has banned LibreOffice developer, Mike Kaganski, from using its services
I know that Google has done this, but I am not sure if Apple has ever gone this far.
I acknowledge that the cases are different.
Yeah. I would still recommend that people create separate account for dev purposes just in case. But still I have not heard of Apple locking people out like Microsoft or others do
Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups... Have at least one backup/copy of your own data on your own hardware. I have onedrive, google-drive and dropbox copied to my nas as well as my desktop and laptop. Other projects are in github or gitlab and copied on my nas.
That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so that I can have an extra level of safety.
> Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups.
Hell, even Microsoft (on the enterprise side of 365) says do not treat their services as a backup.
But we do need to get stricter about the messaging these companies are allowed to put out there regarding their services. Microsoft with one side of their mouth says 365 is definitively not a backup, and then turns around and advertises OneDrive on Windows as a backup with the "back up your folders now" notification.
To consumers that don't know any better, it's misleading and leads to a false sense of security, though I suspect "this service is not a backup and you can lose your account and all your files at anytime" doesn't sell as many subscriptions.
Google is good in this regard as you can schedule a takeout and get a complete dump. Stick that on a drive that is running backblaze and do periodic physical backups.
Absolutely! I do this yearly. It's a great way to ensure that a SNAFU somewhere doesn't nuke years of photos, email and documents.
So what happens if he uses windows 11 and its mandatory online account, his computer is bricked?
People don't realize how fragile this makes things.
Requiring an online ID to log into a local computer creates all sorts of vulnerabilities. When Microsoft gets hacked again, it can let hackers lock you out of your computer. It's basically ransomware-in-waiting.
>It's basically ransomware-in-waiting. RIWAAS, nice. Classic ms move.
When it first came out, I declared that Windows 11 is a hate crime. Nothing has caused me to change that an inch. It is 100% anti-consumer.
The moment I saw nytimes' reporting that a dad lost access to his Google account because of "nude" photos of his baby and couldn't get help, I de-Googled almost completely and am now using fastmail as my main email account. My other inboxes are only kept just in case someone reaches me via those old addresses.
I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
Fastmail is headquartered in Australia and Australia has censorship laws. Hope you're "aligned"!
Then you just switch to another provider. The important part is owning your domain name and not relying on someone else’s.
I haven't been affected by any of those censorship laws and I doubt it ever will (in which case I'll just use a different provider). The biggest difference is that if something goes wrong, at least there is a real human being I can talk to at Fastmail.
A LibreOffice dev gets locked out of his /hotmail account/ and neowin turns this into a Microsoft developer ban? Specious reporting.
Mike doesn't make this claim in the original source: https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/microsoft-anyb...
Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
I had this exact same thing happen to me a while back. Luckily the account was one I had created just for this one user group who required I become part of their AD domain to access MS Teams. I tried getting back into the account and hit the same roadblock this guy did. I didn't care that much and just abandoned the account.
I figured it was something that Microsoft would soon fix, as it was such an obvious cluster; I'm surprised the issue still exists.
Do the American thing: sue them
You’d probably find you’d “signed” a “contract” with them that contains a binding arbitration clause.
Seriously. Unless people sue them they’ll just keep doing it. Sue them for the lost photos at least.
Don't they have weasel words in the ToS or EULA or somewhere that says you accept all risk of using service and protects the provider of any thing to be sued over?
Where's the money going to come from?
EFF.
This and the many other stories like this is why none of these companies has any of my data.
they band lawyers from Germany already... I would strictly ban them from the European market. I mean why should an us company manage office stuff in a cloud from eu people.
Some strange idea comes to my mind. I suspect that Mike Kaganski's account was marked as a Russian account. And Microsoft is cutting support to Russian accounts.
Microsoft. Microsoft never changes.
US is full of shitty corporates
This creates a new concern. Is it still safe to host projects that compete with Microsoft on Github? The answer may be no.
The time for that concern was way back when Microsoft acquired github. Instead of moving elsewhere, everyone just doubled down on making github the defacto place to host our most critical open source infrastructure.
How many times do we as a community have to get bit by Microsoft before we learn?
These platforms constantly ban people for inscrutable reasons without any recourse, except perhaps for "support by media attention". I see no reason to assume this is any different, and that the ban is unrelated to their work on LibreOffice or anything else.
GitHub (and GitHub accounts) do not seem to have this problem as near as I can tell. For better or worse, I've found that reporting spammers and bad faith actors is a largely a pointless exercise as it will all go in a black hole.
Large marketplace platforms need to be regulated to have due process.
When hundreds or thousands of companies live and die by your platform, you can't just close accounts arbitrarily.
Either that or you get split up for monopoly. Take your pick, but this shit doesn't work
The need for European digital sovereignty cannot be overstated.
Looking at how they are pushing mandatory backdoors and surveillance it can only be worse than what we get now.
First we need to actually start having European OSes like SuSE being offered on shopping malls, with 100% hardware support, followed by Jolla phones.
And everything on European goverments being available as FOSS OS friendly, not Windows/macOS/iOS/Android only.
Like mandatory encryption backdoors and VPN criminalization?
its not going to happen. Quite the opposite. The EU's age verification app will only work on Google attested (i.e. controlled by American big tech) smartphones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
The UK's Online Safety Act's main effect is to strengthen big tech and protect them from competition, and make self hosing prohibitively expensive for many.
European governments will talk about digital sovereignty but will do nothing that involved actually spending money, or regulating the private sector or anything actually effective.
Watching the rollout of speech laws like the “online safety act” in the UK makes me rather dubious of the wisdom of that idea.
And that just in the UK. For the EU's own shenanigans, we have persistent attempts such as these examples of fuckery:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44720103
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
There have been many, many other examples over recent years. Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
> Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
The EU is a huge organization and too often the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing.
But, the EU isn't alone in curbing digital rights for individuals, it's a worrying trend all over the world even over here in the states, with congress introducing a bill of our own along the same lines (Kids Online Safety Act) - we'll see if it goes anywhere, but the overton window is shifting to being in favor of regulation like this, unfortunately.
Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, and rapidly.
Authoritarianism is much easier to implement in a pervasive surveillance environment, digital or otherwise. Unfortunate for all of us, even those who think they are immune.
The unfortunate truth is that all governments suck at dealing with technology in a positive way. The EU has some wins, the US has some wins, and so on... but they all have significant fails too. It's a question of which bad things you can live with, more than a question of who doesn't do bad things.
Correct I’ll take the cluster F of what we have now over the UK style of the government watching over my shoulder as they force me to give up anonymity on the web for those sites that most require it
If you live in one of the states that hasn't yet added one of these laws. I expect it will become a federal bill in a year or two so there aren't 20 variants of the same law.
You can really feel the "big tent" nature of the GOP when these bills are being pushed despite being absolutely abhorrent to large swaths of Republican voters.
I voted for Trump and would make the same choice today without hesitation but agree the Republicans pushing this state by state age identification is pretty bad. State level Rs and house reps leave a bit to be desired. My vote is essentially a vote against the other party. Sometimes we have to choose between the best of two less than perfect choices. Politics is so often a deal with the devil against a worse devil
Can't really say I agree after being quite pleased with Biden's admin—would have been more than happy with the sequel. I clearly don't see the same thing you see in this guy but at least someone is happy and optimistic about it. A center left Democrat reaching across the isle so hard it pissed off her own base and with a platform of not rocking the boat sounds way better than whatever this mess is.
I hear exactly what you are saying. I voted for Biden and Clinton before. The country went insane from 2020 thru 24 and the concealing of Biden’s decline was atrocious. For me the left just went to far. I have 2 white heterosexual sons and I could not vote for a party that declared them an enemy. Everything else was downstream of that for me. Ill vote for the bad guy before I vote for that. Trump has actually surprised me, delivering on many of the issues I voted for him on. If I have to endure his grift and other flaws its a price I’ll pay. I voted against what the Dems offered.
I completely understand and empathize with why some people are upset or even dismayed at what he’s doing though; i just think it’s necessary.
I actually can see an argument for age verification, if it could be truly guaranteed to apply only to porn.
The constitutionality of the current laws was upheld on the basis of treating age verification for access to porn as an incidental burden, and thus warranted only intermediate scrutiny.
My (naïve?) hope is that any future mission creep will be rejected by the Supreme Court under strict scrutiny, especially as it extends into general and political speech.
However, once you have the legal and technical frameworks in place, mission creep is almost inevitable, and it could easily take years of litigation to resolve.
“Think of the children” has always been the thin end of a wedge used by those looking to incrementally dismantle inconvenient civil liberties.
All that said, we’re in a much better position in the US under the first amendment. The UK’s “online safety bill” is already targeting a myriad of forms of political speech, and is just the latest example of the significant shift towards the curtailment of free speech across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Sure would have been great if, in 2016 and 2024 elections, the democrats had nominated someone who could have beat Trump. Or conversely, had not nominated the two people who didn't stance a chance.
But yeah, keep railing against the GOP.
Im not sure anyone could have beaten Trump. It was his time, the prior 4 years pushed many over to his base. I voted for Clinton and Biden but there was no one that could have gotten me to vote Dem last election
I said it many times on this forum, Harris had no platform. There was nothing to vote for.
I’m just so tired of “fuck the GOP” when, as you say, it was inevitable. People love to hate a villain, I get it. “It was Hilarys turn, we will just keep marching forward” really didn’t work out. This GOP narrative is basically screaming into a mirror. Not your GOP narrative, not picking on you. Just frustrated.
I hear you. And based on how the left has reacted to his term so far, I'm not sure there is anyone currently that can prevent a Vance or Desantis presidency next time. The left is to far left, they have abandoned the center and the center has sought safety in the GOP. Not because we want to be there but because there is literally no where else for us to go. My politics have not changed, but the party I have voted for for almost 3 decades very much has.
We have left leaning main stream media organizations implying that a jeans commercial is a nazi rallying cry because it features a white woman. I just cant vote how I used to vote and look my young sons in the eye. The Dem party is gone.
Microsoft being Microsoft.
Well time to move to gitlab, is anyone surprised by this. I moved a year ago.
Be aware that neowin.net has facebook . com and .net scripts to tell them you visited the site. It is not just this site. This is plague and has to be stopped.
Agreed. In the meantime, I'd suggest installing Privacy Badger [0]. It blocks those domains for me. In return I get an angry popup that claims that I'm using an "ad blocker", but it can be clicked away. (Privacy Badger is not strictly an ad-blocker. It does not care what is and what is not an ad. That it blocks ads on this site is simply an effect of those ads being used to track visitors)
0. https://privacybadger.org/
Just use noscript and a separate browser for malicious sites like fb and ig. It might seem painfull at first, but you'll quickly end up with with a web that is better than before.
No. Just use blabla is not enough. Sites which do that should be denounced.
You can sit around and wait for things to change, or you come up with a workaround to get done what needs to be done. You seem to be against workarounds instead of making people just sit idle doing nothing.
debouncing them doesn't mean you cannot come up with a workaround at the same time.
To whom should they be denounced and what effect do you expect it to have?
Best of luck.
What's wrong with doing both?
Nothing is wrong with doing both. But when the reply to "this site does shady shit" is "just run this addon", it comes across with a subtext of "stop whining, you can solve it yourself". Perhaps not intentionally, but that is how it generally comes across.
It was only meant as a pragmatic here-and-now way of dealing with the issue, for the hn crowd. Most people are helpless victims.
I don't really see the story here. Just the LibreOffice dev got locked out of his account. Seems like an automated system that failed, which isn't exactly a revelation that false positives occur. Feels like this is meant to stir up OS war drama and make it seem like Microsoft is trying to prevent LibreOffice from succeeding.
You mean the part where the appeal was denied as the safety net of false positives? The fact that the site asks you to login to get support on not being able to login isn't a story? The fact they told him they'd help every step of the way only to ghost him?
Are we supposed to have been beaten down to the point that none of this is a story? Granted, it is only one side of the story. We have no idea what other things this account has done.
Appeals are not safety nets for false positives. Making online support require a login is extremely common. However there are other methods of communication to get support. Support not calling you back is not a story. Come on now.
Having a bad support experience is not being "beaten down". Talk about hyperbolic. If this is a systemic issue, that could be a story. But why isn't my grandmother's bad experience at Costco story? My friend had to call his ISP to sort a billing mistake. Is that a story now too?
Did your grandmother or friend get their issues resolved? If yes, not a story. If no, then potentially a story if they make enough noise.
But sure, you go right ahead and just roll over and take shitty service and then go ahead and add a tip too while you at it. The rest of will continue to make noise and call a spade a spade. Some of us might even tell them emperor he has no clothes on
No one is "rolling over and taking shitty service". You're not some revolutionary for being a karen.
I think that's the story. I think the strong implication in the first paragraph that it has something to do with the relationship between LibreOffice and Microsoft is not.