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Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

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Re: Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

#141

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

shrubble wrote: post #72
noworriesnate wrote: post #5

TIL that Microsoft is the least Israel-friendly of the big three clouds: > Among the cloud giants, Microsoft is considered the most vulnerable to anti-Israel protests and allegations of the use made by the Ministry of Defense on Azure, its cloud platforms, since it is the only company among the three major cloud companies that has not signed a special agreement with the Israeli government and the Ministry of Defense.…

I’m kind of confused, in that Israel is not that big in terms of population, about 10 million people; how much data and cloud do they need? The state of Pennsylvania is 13 million; would MSFT losing PA do them serious financial damage?

Israel is essentially fighting wars on multiple fronts at all times. Since they are so small and vulnerable, they have to lean more on intelligence. As a result they have the most advanced intelligence apparatus in the world, far beyond US intelligence for example. Part of their intelligence strategy, clearly, is advanced use of technology & data collection/mining/analytics. So they're gonna end up with a lot of data.

Re: Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

#142

Post by frumplestlatz »

array_key_first wrote: post #92
krembo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The UN, like most western organizations, is biased in favor of Israel. Meaning, this reporting is what favorable coverage looks like. You should read unfavorable coverage, it's much much worse. It took the UN a long time to acknowledge Israel even did anything wrong.

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

#144

Post by kikoreis »

bhouston wrote: post #95
shevy-java wrote: post #66

> In September 2025, Microsoft decided to unilaterally terminate the usage agreement with IDF intelligence Unit 8200 after an article published in the UK newspaper "The Guardian," which claimed that the unit was collecting information about Palestinians for the purpose of fighting terrorism Ok but ... isn't Microsoft forced, by law, to cooperate with the US government and US military? So why is that then not an ethic…

> isn't Microsoft forced, by law, to cooperate with the US government and US military? Microsoft and other cloud companies are not forced to do anything the US government or US military tells them to do. You are just making this up.

Actually there is a long and storied history of mechanisms created to compel American companies to comply with requests for digital intervention. A good starting point is the concept of the NSL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

Relevant acts include https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priv... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act and the more recent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Re: Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

#145

Post by SilverElfin »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #85
bhouston wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TIL that Microsoft is the least Israel-friendly of the big three clouds This is a good thing. American companies should not be allowing their tech to be used to in the gross ongoing human rights violations in Israel/Gaza/West Bank. Google and Amazon knew their tech could be used for human rights abuses in Israel (their lawyers warned them so) but ignored that in favour of $$$ per the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deepli…

Thanks for the link, I didn't realize the EFF spent their money on such things. I honestly thought they focused on free speech/privacy/open source. I'm not trying to argue pro Israel or what not, I just wish they'd focus on their core mission.

Yep. These nonprofits have a tendency of being abused for the personal causes of their staff. Clearly this isn’t part of their mission unless you go through some mental gymnastics.

Re: Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

#147

Post by array_key_first »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #142
array_key_first wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN, like most western organizations, is biased in favor of Israel. Meaning, this reporting is what favorable coverage looks like. You should read unfavorable coverage, it's much much worse. It took the UN a long time to acknowledge Israel even did anything wrong.

[flagged]

The UN is a political tool absolutely - and it's one that's biased in favor of Israel.

Look, you have to understand that you and I are looking at this from a western lense. The west is EXTREMELY pro-israel. So your Overton window isnt just shifted a little buddy. It's fucking whiplashed alllllll the way to one side. So yes, from your perspective or mine the UN might appear as not pro Israel.

But um, they are, and quite a bit too. Again, if you want to see actual real anti-israel reporting, read stuff from Iran. You will surely notice it sounds very, very different from how the UN portrays Israel.

Re: Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

#148

Post by Hikikomori »

tptacek wrote: post #61
_alternator_ wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no genocide expert, but it does seem like legal scholars who _are_ genocide experts agree that the facts here seem to clearly meet the bar. The people who you credit with "hav[ing] the better side of the legal argument" do not seem, from my vantage, to be arguing in good faith. They are trying to bog us down in semantics when a truly horrifying crime is happening, and saying that we can't call a horse a horse is…

Really the only thing that moved me to comment here, besides message board vulnerability amplified by waiting for a Rust compile run to finish, was the implication upthread that mass displacement of populations was genocidal. The rest of it I don't think there's enough daylight between us to debate usefully.

Pretty disingenuous to pretend that's the only thing that was listed.

Re: Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

#149

Post by anon84873628 »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #85
bhouston wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TIL that Microsoft is the least Israel-friendly of the big three clouds This is a good thing. American companies should not be allowing their tech to be used to in the gross ongoing human rights violations in Israel/Gaza/West Bank. Google and Amazon knew their tech could be used for human rights abuses in Israel (their lawyers warned them so) but ignored that in favour of $$$ per the EFF: https://www.eff.org/deepli…

Thanks for the link, I didn't realize the EFF spent their money on such things. I honestly thought they focused on free speech/privacy/open source. I'm not trying to argue pro Israel or what not, I just wish they'd focus on their core mission.

Well, reporting the largest abuses of non-free software companies could be seen as a corollary to that.

Re: Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy

#150

Post by [deleted] »

_alternator_ wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly people involved in the Israeli government that have expressed genocidal intent. The problem is that you can say that about basically every state in the world. It can't be the case that the moment a state commits an ethnically-targeted war crime it is per se committing genocide because you can find someone in the majority, the opposition, or the administrative state that has embraced genocidal logi…

I'm no genocide expert, but it does seem like legal scholars who _are_ genocide experts agree that the facts here seem to clearly meet the bar. The people who you credit with "hav[ing] the better side of the legal argument" do not seem, from my vantage, to be arguing in good faith. They are trying to bog us down in semantics when a truly horrifying crime is happening, and saying that we can't call a horse a horse is…

[deleted]
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