Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

neowin.net

61–70 of 106 posts

Re: Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

#61
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

#62
post #15

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 t…

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.

Re: Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

#63
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

#65

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 (…

> 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.

Re: Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

#66
post #19
post #12

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

#67
post #58

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?

Re: Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

#69
post #49
post #38

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"!

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.

Re: Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal

#70
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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
Post reply on HN