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
Do you know what also keeps people away from Linux? Being told that Linux Mint is a good distro for beginners, and then going to the Linux Mint website and finding that there are three different flavors, Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE, and not knowing what any of that means because you’re a beginner. Beginners don’t benefit from incomplete information that requires prior knowledge, and every time I see “use Linux Mint” without any clarification on Desktop Environments, I see a jerk who doesn’t know what “beginner” means.
As someone who did exactly this, the differences are spelled out pretty clearly for “Linux beginners”. System reqs and included features all there to read…
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I remember when I was first learning linux, I found this super evangelistic website explaining how totally easy it is to use linux nowadays (this was about 15 years ago, so that was a fucking lie).
They gave some basic task as the first example of something you might need to do, and they said, no shit, “It’s easy! Just open up the terminal and type…” and I closed the website.
Not because I couldn’t do that instruction, I was working in IT and I already maintained multiple linux servers, but because of how utterly unhinged that instruction was. I didn’t know if their information would be useful, but I did know that I couldn’t trust their judgement anymore. You cannot tell people an OS is “easy” and “for everyone” then transition straight into “open up the terminal” in the same goddamn breath. They didn’t even explain how to open up the terminal, because of course it’s different everywhere and they wanted universal instructions.
I really, really want to make linux work for me. I have four linux machines in my home, although three of them are raspberry pis, and i have tried it in laptops and on my main machine many times over the years, always finding it more trouble than it’s worth. But I have never seen any indication that the community has ever moved on from, “It’s easy! Just open up the terminal…”
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
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