Are you seriously equating observing an area using satellites with indiscriminately monitoring everyone's calls, messages, and possibly hacking their devices?

> Wouldn't the opposite be incredibly immoral? Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.

The concern is who gets to decide what is or isn't a legitimate target? Today's heroes might be tomorrow's victims. I'd rather no one have that much power over others.

I agree but there are some dodgy links that make it through and a good way to lower risk is being hesitant to click random links, or at least not being the first person to do so.

Well, MS reviewed previously, and said they've seen nothing wrong, now they are saying some employees (coincidentally, Israeli) might have not been all transparent ...

> The disclosures caused alarm among senior Microsoft executives, sparking concerns that some of its Israel-based employees may not have been fully transparent about their knowledge of how Unit 8200 used Azure when questioned as part of the review.

You think, that is plausible?

To me, Nope, it's just that, the money was too good.

Only after Guardian's report, they realized:

"Oops, we got caught, now do the damage control dance"

And here we are ...

Also, are those employees going to get fired? I doubt. But the protestor, standing up for something, did. Who is more damaging?

Oh right, the protestor, because, they ruined the big cake.

Did the unit that breach the contract lose anything? Nope, they got enough time to move their data safely, and will continue doing the same thing.

It's all evil entities feeding each other, for their own benefit.

I actually think understanding exactly how your customers do a thing is not an easy thing to be 100% sure of.

I've had sales, customer reps, even engineers and customers describe how a customer / they work ... and then I go and look and ... it's not how anyone said they work IRL.

If they act on information their employees report, they are violating their commitments.

Can anyone help clean up these sources/verify?

The first one seems to be after Microsoft's claim "and Microsoft has said it is reviewing a report in a British newspaper this month that Israel has used it to facilitate attacks on Palestinian targets".

The second one looks similar "Microsoft late last week said it was tapping a law firm to investigate allegations reported by British newspaper The Guardian".

The 3rd one seems to be a genuine example that Microsoft employees were reporting this specific contract violation concern - but I feel like there are more genuine examples I've heard of than just this one report.

The 4th one is a bit unclear, it seems to be a general complaint about the contract - not about specific violations of it.

Perhaps the more confounding question remaining is "what was so different about the report from The Guardian". It's not like these kinds of claims are new, or in small papers only, but maybe The Guardian was able to put together hard evidence from outside that allowed Microsoft to determine things without themselves going in breach of contract details?

Privacy ayatollah? Is that like an infosec shah?

Well, the average org isn't out there literally committing genocide

I've personally never seen anything requiring confidential computing in anything. Is this required in the USA? I find that hard to believe, because the technology on a cloud level is still very beta-feeling. I think that Microsoft just never looked because they did not want to know.

More likely MS was well aware of what was going on and didn't care until the Guardian forced their hand.

The reality is that no one can tell whose ass it is safe to kiss now a days, so it’s all scandal driven actions. Unless someone can create a big enough scandal, no one is going to do squat.

That’s the best part, they cannot. Well, they technically can, but the answer from the company that runs chinese azure servers is gonna be “none of your business.”

The Israel Azure region wasn't launched until 2023, and AFAIK has substantially less services available than the others. I know Google's Israel region doesn't have as many GPU options, for example.

Safer from ballistics

Why build something near or semi near conflict?

But why do you think the Netherlands govt was in anyway involved in this? I host some bsremetal in the Netherlands but I don't need to report to the government what I store..

What makes you think Netherlands government knows what data resides within its borders?

Azure’s web app for managing servers is a nightmare

Uses the same awful UI/plaform as their Xbox account settings

Microsoft always somehow succeeds in spite of the quality of everything they build.

Bullish, as in, not bearish.

I think that if Azure offers their service in Israel it has to comply with Israeli law; I don’t see why that would not govern in this case.

If Azure were providing service to the US Government then that service would be governed by US law even if the employees using the service traveled abroad; the only exception would be if service was initiated by an employee in another country under the terms for the service provider in that country, but even then likely government has contracts with the provider that would shift jurisdiction back to the US.

Look how carefully they worded that to make a carve-out for this very case: "in the country of service". As in, Gaza is now part of Israel, and according to Israeli laws, Israel is not doing any genocide on Palestinians.

Quantity doesn't correlate with accuracy. OP's point was that surely having more intelligence means you are more accurate and thus less collateral damage.

Hamas is quite open about their desire to increase civilian casualties by deliberately using civilians as human shields(which is of course a war crime). It's clearly part of their overall strategy.

The ICC did no such thing, you're probably thinking of the ICJ, which also did no such thing according to one of the judges that ruled on that decision:

“I’m glad I have a chance to address that because the court’s test for deciding whether to impose measures uses the idea of plausibility. But the test is the plausibility of the rights that are asserted by the applicant, in this case South Africa” she told the BBC show HARDtalk.

“The court decided that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide and that South Africa had the right to present that claim in the court,” Donoghue said. “It then looked at the facts as well. But it did not decide—and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media—it didn’t decide that the claim of genocide was plausible.”

“It did emphasize in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide,” she added. “But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide, isn’t what the court decided.”

Donoghue’s term on the bench expired a few days after the court delivered its initial ruling on Jan. 26.

https://www.jns.org/former-top-hague-judge-media-wrong-to-re...

>Civilians left these areas, or at least asked to leave many, many times.

Where to?

Hind Rajab ,literally a child, was brutally killed when fleeing their home, after being asked of course. The ambulance which came to rescue was blown up by the ITF. The Whole world has seen it all, ITF proudly displays it. Maybe it is time to update the Hasbara points.

>Don't forget to mention about the last time you risked your own life.

Why? ITF certainly risks many children's life, just for sport often.

A few government officials have said this. No one part of the War Cabinet has said this and it is definitely NOT the explicitly goal of the IDF.

This is entirely made up.

I would be interested to read the evidence for myself if you have sources?

Proof? Or just what is convenient for you to believe?

If anything, quite the opposite. Think about this logically - why the need for expensive surveillance if your chief goal was to annihilate a population?

It has changed quite a bit here in the US too, even among the Jewish population. Our synagogue is very divided on this, mainly between the young and the old.

Politics is weird. With the Biden administration there was lots of lip service given in opposition to the slaughter in Gaza while at the same time they were shipping unprecedented amounts of weapons to the IDF.

Now with Trump they state that they have max support for Israel while it seems like all of Europe is turning away from unconditional support for Israel and a massive change in the typical rhetoric around media in the US. That’s odd.

That is why the comment says hypothetical scenario. ;-)

Did the protestors help the media publicity?

I guess that one needs some help to transfer "swiftly" 8000 Terabytes of data. At 1 Terabit per second it would take about 18 hours.

  8000*8 Tb / 60s / 60 / 24 = .740740...
  24 h *.740 = 17.76 h

I think this has been another case of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" (Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981). Maybe rack units of disks? For very important data I would pay for the privilege of removing my disks at a very short notice.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

or it means that they met with Unit 8200 to see if there was common ground that would rationalize keeping the contract and their tech being used for a way that respected human rights, dignity, and a coherent strategy to getting to that place,

and there wasn't

Isn't media publicity the entire point of peaceful protest?

That's a funny way to say "they fired staff that vandalized company property, broke into the CEO's office, and used an internal company website to publish and promote anti-company propaganda".

That will get you fired from bussing tables or washing dishes, let alone a six-figure job at MS.

Edit: Source on the last one; the first two were widely reported on in media:

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/fired-microsoft-employee-enco...

I think how you protest matters.

I can agree with protestors, also think their choices are bad.

What concerns me is that Project Nimbus is a public project that is still actively being enabled by Google and Amazon. Secret projects are one thing, but largely meaningless, because companies, people and governments have shown they don't even care when they're in the open.

>to spy on people against whom a genocide is ongoing by their colonial occupiers

To be fair in 2021 you'd be laughed out of the room (or be in a DSA conference) if you called what was happening in Palestine a "genocide".

What other reasons are Microsoft very very bad? Genuinely curious about what your definition of "very, very bad" is and whether it aligns with mine.

I disagree that we shouldn't give them their props when companies finally give in, because most are still not doing that (see Project Nimbus). The problem here is that we don't even know they have done the bare minimum yet, since this is only one contract and to my knowledge they have several, including still actively working with the IDF.

> Yes it’s a good thing AND we don’t need to be celebrating companies when they finally do the bare minimum.

I think we should give props here. This is an important step forward. Thank you Microsoft!

I think we should protest when companies do things that are wrong and we should give them kudos when they make good moves. Carrot and stick.

I am not fans of those that say because you did wrong things in the past, I will never recognize when you change and make good moves.

I want to encourage more companies to correct their involvement in this.

October 2023

> Will Microsoft rehire the employees who were fired for protesting?

One can be correct in theory and wrong in practice at the same time.

Congrats, you're the first person I've seen to prefer the genocide of tens of thousands of innocents to being served adverts in your OS, that takes a truly special level of delusion and/or racism.

I think you're misunderstanding my question. I'm not saying "this story is bogus," but rather I'm saying that this sort of data is probably not the kind of data which is acquired through really secret means. Perhaps it was purchased from providers, or some other less-secret method.

I could write things here about those officially reported deaths (not estimates, which are much higher, but no one really knows and very likely never will), or the internal diaplacement, but since there might be at least 1 Palestinian still alive digging in the rubble somewhere, literalists like you would still feel the need to overcorrect.

I thought the defeated tone of my post made it clear that it was not meant to be taken that literally. I guess not.

If you think that figure is remotely accurate despite the fact Israel has decimated all hospitals, leveled entire areas, wiped out entire families and is starving those that are still alive to do the counting, you're being naive, and that's a generous interpretation. Once Israel finally allow the UN in, that figure is going up by a factor of at least 2 or 3. The true cost of most genocides are only counted years after it's over, when it's too late.

That's about the latest number from Gaza health ministry that stopped counting well over a year ago as Israel had destroyed all but one hospital. It doesn't even count the people left in rubble from destroying 80% of all buildings.

Their own land, of course, where they've lived for thousands of years.

Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where else?

Also for the 850K middle eastern Jews that were kicked out of their countries by arabs?

Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, here, that would have the stench of colonialism about it.

It's not their land to 'return to' - after all, people already live there and they have no moral right to displace them.

Leave the government to do its thing, and you do your charity, those are not mutually exclusive. If you are in the US ( Although I suspect Pakistan is your home country...) , FIDF is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, do a good deed and donate. Charity is a blessing (Mitzvah), spiritual elevation. I can see you are in need of one.

https://www.jfeed.com/analysis/gaza-nutella-cafe-reality