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
The problem I have is that this covers a very niche use case for me. I want it to be a tablet - lightweight etc, but not be constrained by mobile apps. I don’t want iOS’ version of lightroom, I want to have Darktable and Rawtherapee and a full fledged Visual Studio code, and well, you get the picture.
I don’t need a laptop because I also have a MacBook Pro - I went this way because Apple’s processors are too far ahead to ignore. So I can take AMD but my opinion is that intel’s offerings are just not competitive and I’m not buying any of them.
This leaves me with very few options - I’d be keen on buying an AMD-powered Ubuntu tablet but they don’t seem to exist.
And also my surface works perfectly fine, so spending a non-trivial amount of money and ewaste just to change OS seems rather silly. I’m sticking to that one for now.