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”.
That's like debating the definition of homicide or rape. There is no nuance here.
People absolutely do disagree and debate what is and is not rape, though. Legal definitions exist, but have loads of subjectivity. E.g. some argue that threatening to break up with a partner over lack of sex is coercion and thus rape.
I think people don't tend to realise how authoritarian the internal structures of companies are. They're effectively miniature dictatorships. Normalising removing services because a tenant does something you personally find disagreeable is fine in the moment, but what happens when it's someone you support? Like when they removed Office365 access for a member of the EU parliament.[0] For me, this is more proof (not le…
> because a tenant does something you personally find disagreeable
You do realize that the said tenant is massacring an entire population as we speak, right? Framing that as just something that's "disagreeable" is one hell of a euphemism.
The absolute bare minimum one can do is to not actively provide the technical means to carry out this atrocity, yet you claim it's only moral to do the exact opposite. This neoliberal fantasy that it's moral and good for society to let powerful corporations do whatever it wants is an absurdity not even worth refuting. But it's downright cruel and tone-deaf when it's used to justify taking part in an officially approved genocide.
In the fist place? That was 3,000 or so years ago.
There was never a country called Israel until 1948. It was always Palestine. The idea of a nation called Israel is the invention of Zionists in the 19th and 20th century.
> There was never a country called Israel until 1948. It was always Palestine.
Palestine was never a country before 1948, immediately prior to 1948 there was a British Mandate[0] with the name Palestine, but this mandate included land that would eventually turn into countries like Jordan(which just so happens to be a country with a Palestinian majority population). After 1948 and before 1967 the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and Gaza was occupied and administered by Egypt.
The idea of a nation called Palestine is arguably a more recent invention than the nation of Israel.
> The decision has not affected Microsoft’s wider commercial relationship with the IDF, which is a longstanding client and will retain access to other services. The termination will raise questions within Israel about the policy of holding sensitive military data in a third-party cloud hosted overseas. It's worth noting that even after finding out the "most moral" army is conducting mass surveillance, they're still h…
I understand that, and I am sympathetic to those needs to some degree. They do have increased legitimate surveillance needs. But they've lost all of their good will. Partnering with them is too morally and PR-ily hazardous. I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, but I think this argument is overall kind of pointless because one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimat…
> one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland This is an interesting comparison—thank you. That said, did the Poles launch cross-border attacks on German civilians? The closest I can come up with is Bloody Sunday [1], which was an attack on ethnically German civilians, but not a cross-border incursion. (Granted, we can only observe this ex…
Israel's incursion into Gaza in October 2023 was more justifiable than Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, yes. I wasn't trying to provide a full comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel, and I prefaced the sentence appropriately. My only point is that a nation having legitimate surveillance needs to protect their soldiers' and civilians' safety isn't a reason to support their surveillance efforts by itself.
Why would being cross-border matter when the entire land was previously Palestinian land before being handed over by colonial powers and then "won" in subsequent "wars" (read: massacres) on the barely-armed villagers living there? The Viet Cong, South Africa's ANC, the Suffragettes and civil rights movements all used violence for their causes. Hamas was established in 1984, by the generation that had grown up with th…
> Hamas was established in 1984, by the generation that had grown up with the occupation in 1948 Correction, Gaza was first occupied by Israel for a few months in 1956, then occupied continuously since 1967. Regardless, by 1984, nearly half of the people in Gaza would have lived their entire lives under occupation, and the most would have lived at least half their lives under occupation.
Didn't Israel end the occupation of Gaza between 2005 and 2023? They still put up a blockade, but they didn't occupy it.
> one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland This is an interesting comparison—thank you. That said, did the Poles launch cross-border attacks on German civilians? The closest I can come up with is Bloody Sunday [1], which was an attack on ethnically German civilians, but not a cross-border incursion. (Granted, we can only observe this ex…
There was the Warsaw uprising.
All of my comments in this thread are on the anti-Israel side but this is just such a terrible comparison in so many ways. One can detest what Israel is doing without at all trying to defend Hamas's October 7th attack.
I agree that in-OS advertising for a paid product is dumb, but a) I thankfully still use Windows 10 which doesn't have those, and b) those are ultimately UX concerns, not ethical. And no, Microsoft doesn't sell your data no matter how many in tech subscribe to that conspiracy theory.
Last time I installed windows 11 in a VM I had to agree to at least 3, possibly more, un-skippable Eulas that required me to agree to share my personal information. Maybe they aren’t selling it outside of MS, but MS is such a giant company if they are using it for ads I don’t see the distinction.
The distinction is consent, and it's a pretty big one, because it's the difference between Microsoft sharing it among their services (they don't need to sell it to themselves) for the reasons outlined in the EULAs, and companies that aren't Microsoft using it for whatever reason they want. You can be assured they're following the EULAs because the consequences of not doing so would make them vulnerable to millions if not billions in fines if only one sufficiently motivated individual, like an ex-employee, leaked the evidence.
More targeted (i.e. relevant) ads are really not the evil many make them out to be. Ads in a paid product are also not quite evil, but they are incredibly idiotic and a step backwards. Either way, makes no difference to me because at this rate it seems my next OS will be a Windows-like Linux distro anyway.