It bothers me more that it was held in the Netherlands than that it was held on Azure servers. It’s a fucking disgrace to any government to be facilitating anything like this, and the Netherlands seems extra complicit.
What makes you think Netherlands government knows what data resides within its borders?
I don’t necessarily expect them to know what resides within their borders, I merely expect them to act against atrocities. It is no accident that all this data was located in the Netherlands.
> 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data – equivalent to approximately 200m hours of audio – was held in Microsoft’s Azure servers in the Netherlands
I wonder why IDC choose the Netherlands location. Microsoft has one Azure region in Israel itself: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/reliability/regions-...
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.
“I want to note our appreciation for the reporting of the Guardian,” [Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith] wrote, noting that it had brought to light “information we could not access in light of our customer privacy commitments”. He added: “Our review is ongoing.” Its interesting that they seem to be saying they dont know the full details of how their customers are using Azure, due to privacy commitments…
JIDF and Unit 8200 have infiltrated a lot of US tech companies.
This is a very significant issue for American tech companies, they either need to restore the trust of global customers, or they will lose it completely.
The word genocide has a legal definition, it’s not up for discussion or debate. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide according to genocide scholars.
Legal definitions are often up for discussion and debate. That’s a large part of what lawyers do, in fact.
Anyway I have no comment on the specific claim being made here, I just really dislike it when discussion is stifled by saying “I’m right and no one can ever disagree”.
“I want to note our appreciation for the reporting of the Guardian,” [Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith] wrote, noting that it had brought to light “information we could not access in light of our customer privacy commitments”. He added: “Our review is ongoing.” Its interesting that they seem to be saying they dont know the full details of how their customers are using Azure, due to privacy commitments…
The whole point of confidential computing is that the cloud provider can't access your data and can't tell what you're doing with it. This is a must have requirement in many government contracts and other highly legislated fields.
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.
“I want to note our appreciation for the reporting of the Guardian,” [Microsoft’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith] wrote, noting that it had brought to light “information we could not access in light of our customer privacy commitments”. He added: “Our review is ongoing.” Its interesting that they seem to be saying they dont know the full details of how their customers are using Azure, due to privacy commitments…
Weird, pretty sure employees brought this to their attention a few times already… https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-azure-gaza-palestine-is... https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-azure-gaza-israel-prote... https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-build-israel-gaza-prote... https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-protest-employees-fired...
If they act on information their employees report, they are violating their commitments.
A little humility would be in order here. "I am not aware of this" is quite different than "there is no evidence whatsoever." The latter comment implies you are aware of the reporting and issues and have carefully weighed them. This is something that has been discussed in major Israeli media publications.
> A little humility would be in order here. You couldn't know (but you could have guessed) this but as an Israeli I'm well aware what appeared in major Israeli media publications and this didn't.