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.
No, because those employees didn't learn about it by snooping around in Azure data.
I am seeing several kneejerk "Microsoft bad" reactions here, which HNers don't do for many other companies. I encourage many of you to read what is written. They listened to their internal staff and stakeholders and public pressure, and did terminated the contract instead of ignoring it or doubling down. That is a good thing.
The Guardian last month reported a meeting between Microsoft CEO and Unit 8200. That means this comes from high level and they did not cancel because of protestors but because of 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
But is 1 Tb/s a thing?
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.
I feel like interrupting a CEO's speech at a big conference is pretty well understood to be a social indicator of a high level of insubordination. I suspect the protestor knew that too. The consequences were appropriate, even if I might share some of the protestor's concerns.
> insubordination Are we talking about the military or some company?
US corporate culture has a stronger sense of hierarchy than many other countries. It is an environment where one can get fired quickly and suddenly and that instills a lot of obedience and discipline (if not outright fear) in employees.
Have you not seen any news coming out of Gaza for the past two years? It's a desolate flattened lunarscape. Israel never had any intent of avoiding civilian deaths. Quite the contrary in fact and they still have their eyes on the West Bank.
> It's a desolate flattened lunarscape. Israel never had any intent of avoiding civilian deaths. So you think they managed to destroy so many buildings and only killed ~65k people (about half militants) out of 2 million by not avoiding civilian deaths? If half the buildings are destroyed, we would expect a million dead if there were no efforts to avoid civilian deaths. Do you think Israel makes no efforts to avoid ci…
They don't actively civilian deaths, they just don't particularly care about them for pragmatic reasons, because killing a million people is much less plausibly denial genocide that wouldn't fulfil the former conspiracy theory and now publicly-stated gaol of Netanyahu to subsume Gaza into the rest of former Palestine. Is that not enough evidence for you? Besides that, if you truly believe Israel's version of events that at least 30,000 of those people were "militants" (the ANC and Viet Cong were also militants and terrorists), do you really believe it's possible to get a ~50% collateral damage rate when you care about innocent civilians? Also, the 60K figure has been stuck there for a long time in an ongoing genocide and famine. Once the dust settles and Israel has let the UN in, that figure will go up by a factor of at least two or three.
Who else? The people actually holding the hostages, perhaps. Because you surely mistakenly implied here that All Gazans categorically are responsible for the hostage-taking and "deserve" to be killed as a consequence of that. Your use of language betrays your feelings. You are disgusting.
Even in nazi Germany a number of people tried to help the Jews. On Gaza: not a single that I am aware of have tried to help the hostages, not even the toddlers, despite promised financial rewards.
Why would anyone in Palestine, including Gaza, care about helping the people who have occupied them since 1948, with the help of the Brits and funding of the US?
The issue that people have with Israel's actions is the death of civilians, not the death of Hamas, the widely recognised terrorist. I believe it also to be true that the IDF do not want to kill civilians, and that their target is only Hamas. In which case, is it prudent to remove the IDF's ability to successfully target the correct people? Precise military intelligence is absolutely necessary for minimising civilian…
Do you also suggest Jewish families get back land and businesses that they lost in countries in the region in the process? Because more Jews were squeezed into Israel than Arabs who were squeezed out. These Jews also lost everything. And unlike Israeli Arabs who at least from the declaration of Israel got an invitation to stay there as citizens, this option was not offered to the Jews of surrounding nations. Furtherm…
"Squeezed"? I think you mean invited. Assuming you're not being disingenuous, which is unlikely given your other comments and clear hate for Palestinians, maybe you should look at the One Million Plan and the many similar movements by Israel to import tens of millions of Jews into the area since 1948, and the many atrocities like Deir Yassin that forced Palestinians out. Israel has been a long time in the making, since the time of the Irgun and Haganah at least, and none of the current situation is accidental.
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...
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…
I think it's the latter -- Microsoft was unable to look internally, or able to pretend they were ignorant. But the Guardian report was just too detailed to ignore.
I am seeing several kneejerk "Microsoft bad" reactions here, which HNers don't do for many other companies. I encourage many of you to read what is written. They listened to their internal staff and stakeholders and public pressure, and did terminated the contract instead of ignoring it or doubling down. That is a good thing.
> The project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and the unit’s then commander, Yossi Sariel ... In response to the investigation, Microsoft ordered an urgent external inquiry to review its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings have now led the company to cancel the unit’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI services. "Some" ... Microsoft's chief execu…
>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".