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Microsoft is reportedly banning Palestinians in the U.S. for life for calling relatives in Gaza (www.windowscentral.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

277 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.

Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.

United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. "I've had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I've filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times." Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, "We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online."

Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

When it comes to computers I'm an average nerd.

The main problems you may run into with snaps is the same problems you will run into with flatpak, appimage or docker.

This means nothing to me other than "there are some things that are more complicated with Ubuntu compared to Mint".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Snaps, flatpaks, docker etc... are small compressed applications that come with all the dependencies to run in a container. Their advantage is that they can run without installing all the extra dependencies on the host installation. They often suffer from random bugs such as permission errors. Along with many having questionable possibly malicious sources. The Ubuntu devs have went all in on them. Many people enable flatpak on mint to get some application that isn't included by the package manager. What I was trying to convey is that these differences and the arguments they enable are kinda like watching two old farts at a coffee shop arguing over whether a Ford or a Chevy truck is better. In the end snaps and flatpak have some utility but are often a sore subject for some.

What matters is if you get what you want. For instance on Ubuntu you can install steam as a snap or install the actual application. Both work fairly well. You will be able to play most games by using steam and proton or by using other helper apps to install your games. The names of these are winetricks, lutris or playonlinux. Asking which one is best will often trigger arguments similar to asking what distro is the best.

I personally slowly eliminate snaps from my Ubuntu installations by compiling the applications myself. Not everyone enjoys doing that kind of thing. No matter what you choose you can usually get it working. With Ubuntu you will have quite a bit more support in the form of posted solutions and walk throughs but distros like mint are catching up a bit.