Microsoft cutting crucial link to Gaza, Palestinians say

For one, you are right, and two, they are actively incentivized to be immoral. Doing something in a moral way is to take something extra into account - morality. Taking into account, as an action, costs extra resources, which translates to money or risk, but then, risk also translates into money. So, what we end up with is that being moral is being handicapped. Money can be made by avoiding it.

The situation is especially worse when the other participants, the competitors, are also not moral. They can simply out-price a moral participants - people are less likely to buy the thing for its ethical "real price", if they can get a similar one for much cheaper. This can clearly be seen even in markets where being moral is a bonus, like, I'd say, how the current market is. "Morally superior" is a product differentiator, with labels like "bio", "organic", "fair", "ethical", "free from", "vegan" - even the ol' PU leather being rebranded as "vegan leather". So even in a context like this, non-morally-superior products sell way more than moral ones. So the incentives for companies are not really there, not just from an operational, but from a market standpoint as well.

>that is is an emergent property.

I agree, and I think it's part of the general human experience, especially with taking responsibility for anything that has impact. Attention and possibility of action is limited, so even if the perfectly moral course of action would be known, it might not be possible to enact it. And then, the arguments are endless as to what's moral and what not, and what part of that should people be engaged in. This is all too much to handle for an individual, so, even if morality is desired, sub-optimal decisions will be made on a daily, as part of life. Which is, in many ways, no different to when a company makes them - with respect to the size and impact though, of course.

Morality/ethics/religion/philosophy can't help but come to bear on any and all technology, once it becomes widespread, systemic and seemingly "too big to fail."

Let’s note however that even "owning a domain" is an illusion of control, as IANA is ultimately a retainer of uncle Sam. I don’t know if there is any functional distributed alternative that promote more autonomy to end users that can works out of the box (or even just a few basic install steps away) in most digital terminal out there.

Pro tip on this, use gibberish if you want a true canary. I know it's tempting to use microsoft@ or ms@ or msft@ etc, but companies are getting smarter about selling emails and filter those out.

You don't need your own domain for that. Gmail (and probably the other big ones) support it as well, just add a plus sign and whatever after your username: username+microsoft@gmail.com will end up in the inbox of username@gmail.com.

This is true when services support sign-up with a password and you are an advanced user. I'm not sure that this is easy for many vulnerable people that need this. The advice you may need to add is that you should use these unique email addresses to create burner accounts on login providers (Microsoft accounts, Google accounts, etc.) because that's how you have to access some services.

But you also imply that the gov't should punish BOTH types of errors, but I'm not sure that's fair. By extension it implies that the company should have a perfect system, with no errors of either type. That's not realistic, and a company should be punished for meeting an impossible goal.

Better is for the government to just be explicit about it: we're requiring companies to employ broad sanctions, and even if some innocents get swept up, we think it's worth it to stop the bad guys. Or the verse, if that's the gov't decision.

however, historically speaking, regimes of oppression have often been dismayingly stable, long outliving the states that establish them—consider that the traditional liberties eliminated by julius caesar in 049 bce, diocletian in the late third century, and constantine in the early fourth century were not regained until the late medieval or even modern era (the final end of the roman empire in 01453, the end of serfdom in the 13th through 19th centuries, the confederation of eight cantons in about 01315, the re-establishment of a senate in the us in 01789, the french revolution in 01799, etc.)

federated systems like mastodon (or email) are a step in the right direction, but we need a decentralized system, without single points of failure, rather than just a federated one

Which is concerning.

Two Iranian co-workers have gone through some Kafkaesque bullshit with Github blocking them, even though both are living in Europe for more than a decade they got flagged and had their accounts suspended, taking months to re-activate them.

For example a major chain convenience store with few similar competitors could ban someone for shoplifting, but someone innocent caught by this should be able to sue and win if the store cannot convince a court that such an event actually occurred. A mom-and-pop store wouldn't be within scope of this.

And the same for online businesses.

Instead the u.s. needs laws that protect user digital rights, and all companies should have to adhere to those laws, not just big ones.

Similarly, big vertically integrated computing platforms should be broken up (in-house applications should have exactly the same access to APIs documentation, support, etc, as third party ones).

The real solution here is to use Signal (or something like it).

And I don't mean to criticize Microsoft or regulations. Microsoft is faced with an impossible task here, I assume they're doing the best they can.

How is it that some rich Californian CEO with their own bias and agenda can decide to shut off service to entire groups of people in an active war zone? These decisions could cost people their lives! That's insane.

The term "Facebook Jail" might be coined jokingly (and the consequences of being there are pretty trivial) but the mere existence of the term is a tacit acceptance of the idea of judicial oversight by a private corporation.

Yes, you can choose not to engage with meta or its products, or (less easily) Microsoft or Google - but we're close to the point where refusing to use the products of (and thus be defacto-governed by) one of the tech giants will have implications beyond self-imposed inconvenience.

Already you'll be excluded from a significant proportion of social plans if you don't have either WhatsApp or Messenger.

What are you trying to hide, you seditious terrorist, hmm?

Some people forget that when they signed up to a service, they granted the service provider the right to decide when to cease providing the service, at the service provider's discretion.

Unfortunately I suspect more and more people are making accounts at banks like that and storing significant amounts of money in them.

but if the bank is in another country … it might be literally impossible to recover it