1) I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even more opaque than the processes they replace.
3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you can) accordingly.
> I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
I could agree with the beginning of that but not the classification of a misfire. A misfire implies a brief, exceptional occurrence and neither of those adjectives seem likely here.
That's based on a few years spent in Microsoft's forever-shuffling admin carousel (EAC, Exch Migration, Intune, Azure hydra, 365/Copilot-all-the-things). Thru that, I have come to believe that incompetence is almost always the right answer for MS-generated woes.
> However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time
this risk goes for any 3rd party, at least the ones that follow sanctions compliance or suspicious activity monitoring. if your name shows up on a denied party list, it's illegal for anyone to tell you why they arent talking to you anymore.
Given Microsoft's previous behaviour towards competitors and open source software, it seems almost certain to me that Microsoft is doing this deliberately. They've got decades of bad faith behaviour at this point, so why give them the benefit of the doubt?
Because, this is the default operating for all big corporations at this point. Ban people based on some random automated factor. And then have no customer support channel to contact.
I just fall on general malice here too instead of specific malice.
Yeah if Microsoft is banning 1% of accounts and independently 0.01% have a newsworthy conspiracy angle then on average One in a million users would fall in this bucket. p is going to be near 1 without other info.
In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.
If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge of the risk.
I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?
Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.
There was a fleeting moment where the Internet was the "Wild West" but we are long past that. The GP's idiom is about as practical as "don't be a citizen of any state".
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not. It is only the greed for bigger profits. If a company can work with Microsoft, it can also work with LibreOffice. But LibreOffice doesn't promise them the moon, while sucking every cent out of them.
I mean, technically you don't have to use those ecosystems and could roll your own stuff, including infrastructure instead of AWS but it's definitely going to be expensive.
Which is why we need regulation for those big players (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one, and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own services.
Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups... Have at least one backup/copy of your own data on your own hardware. I have onedrive, google-drive and dropbox copied to my nas as well as my desktop and laptop. Other projects are in github or gitlab and copied on my nas.
That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so that I can have an extra level of safety.
> Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups.
Hell, even Microsoft (on the enterprise side of 365) says do not treat their services as a backup.
But we do need to get stricter about the messaging these companies are allowed to put out there regarding their services. Microsoft with one side of their mouth says 365 is definitively not a backup, and then turns around and advertises OneDrive on Windows as a backup with the "back up your folders now" notification.
To consumers that don't know any better, it's misleading and leads to a false sense of security, though I suspect "this service is not a backup and you can lose your account and all your files at anytime" doesn't sell as many subscriptions.
Google is good in this regard as you can schedule a takeout and get a complete dump. Stick that on a drive that is running backblaze and do periodic physical backups.
People don't realize how fragile this makes things.
Requiring an online ID to log into a local computer creates all sorts of vulnerabilities. When Microsoft gets hacked again, it can let hackers lock you out of your computer. It's basically ransomware-in-waiting.
The moment I saw nytimes' reporting that a dad lost access to his Google account because of "nude" photos of his baby and couldn't get help, I de-Googled almost completely and am now using fastmail as my main email account. My other inboxes are only kept just in case someone reaches me via those old addresses.
I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
I haven't been affected by any of those censorship laws and I doubt it ever will (in which case I'll just use a different provider). The biggest difference is that if something goes wrong, at least there is a real human being I can talk to at Fastmail.
Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
I had this exact same thing happen to me a while back. Luckily the account was one I had created just for this one user group who required I become part of their AD domain to access MS Teams. I tried getting back into the account and hit the same roadblock this guy did. I didn't care that much and just abandoned the account.
I figured it was something that Microsoft would soon fix, as it was such an obvious cluster; I'm surprised the issue still exists.
Some strange idea comes to my mind. I suspect that Mike Kaganski's account was marked as a Russian account. And Microsoft is cutting support to Russian accounts.
they band lawyers from Germany already... I would strictly ban them from the European market. I mean why should an us company manage office stuff in a cloud from eu people.
The time for that concern was way back when Microsoft acquired github. Instead of moving elsewhere, everyone just doubled down on making github the defacto place to host our most critical open source infrastructure.
How many times do we as a community have to get bit by Microsoft before we learn?
These platforms constantly ban people for inscrutable reasons without any recourse, except perhaps for "support by media attention". I see no reason to assume this is any different, and that the ban is unrelated to their work on LibreOffice or anything else.
GitHub (and GitHub accounts) do not seem to have this problem as near as I can tell. For better or worse, I've found that reporting spammers and bad faith actors is a largely a pointless exercise as it will all go in a black hole.
its not going to happen. Quite the opposite. The EU's age verification app will only work on Google attested (i.e. controlled by American big tech) smartphones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
The UK's Online Safety Act's main effect is to strengthen big tech and protect them from competition, and make self hosing prohibitively expensive for many.
European governments will talk about digital sovereignty but will do nothing that involved actually spending money, or regulating the private sector or anything actually effective.
There have been many, many other examples over recent years. Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
Correct I’ll take the cluster F of what we have now over the UK style of the government watching over my shoulder as they force me to give up anonymity on the web for those sites that most require it
Don't they have weasel words in the ToS or EULA or somewhere that says you accept all risk of using service and protects the provider of any thing to be sued over?
Be aware that neowin.net has facebook . com and .net scripts to tell them you visited the site.
It is not just this site. This is plague and has to be stopped.
Agreed. In the meantime, I'd suggest installing Privacy Badger [0].
It blocks those domains for me. In return I get an angry popup that claims that I'm using an "ad blocker", but it can be clicked away. (Privacy Badger is not strictly an ad-blocker. It does not care what is and what is not an ad. That it blocks ads on this site is simply an effect of those ads being used to track visitors)
Just use noscript and a separate browser for malicious sites like fb and ig. It might seem painfull at first, but you'll quickly end up with with a web that is better than before.
I don't really see the story here. Just the LibreOffice dev got locked out of his account. Seems like an automated system that failed, which isn't exactly a revelation that false positives occur. Feels like this is meant to stir up OS war drama and make it seem like Microsoft is trying to prevent LibreOffice from succeeding.
You mean the part where the appeal was denied as the safety net of false positives? The fact that the site asks you to login to get support on not being able to login isn't a story? The fact they told him they'd help every step of the way only to ghost him?
Are we supposed to have been beaten down to the point that none of this is a story? Granted, it is only one side of the story. We have no idea what other things this account has done.
Appeals are not safety nets for false positives. Making online support require a login is extremely common. However there are other methods of communication to get support. Support not calling you back is not a story. Come on now.
Having a bad support experience is not being "beaten down". Talk about hyperbolic. If this is a systemic issue, that could be a story. But why isn't my grandmother's bad experience at Costco story? My friend had to call his ISP to sort a billing mistake. Is that a story now too?
I think that's the story. I think the strong implication in the first paragraph that it has something to do with the relationship between LibreOffice and Microsoft is not.
1) I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even more opaque than the processes they replace.
3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you can) accordingly.
> I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
I could agree with the beginning of that but not the classification of a misfire. A misfire implies a brief, exceptional occurrence and neither of those adjectives seem likely here.
That's based on a few years spent in Microsoft's forever-shuffling admin carousel (EAC, Exch Migration, Intune, Azure hydra, 365/Copilot-all-the-things). Thru that, I have come to believe that incompetence is almost always the right answer for MS-generated woes.
I agree, I should have said more like "error" or "mistake" or "incompetence", rather than "misfire".
The support for issues like this from all big corps is always horrendous.
Google is similarly notorious for brining businesses to a halt and only fixing the issue when it makes the news and a human at Google finally sees it.
> However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time
this risk goes for any 3rd party, at least the ones that follow sanctions compliance or suspicious activity monitoring. if your name shows up on a denied party list, it's illegal for anyone to tell you why they arent talking to you anymore.
Given Microsoft's previous behaviour towards competitors and open source software, it seems almost certain to me that Microsoft is doing this deliberately. They've got decades of bad faith behaviour at this point, so why give them the benefit of the doubt?
Because, this is the default operating for all big corporations at this point. Ban people based on some random automated factor. And then have no customer support channel to contact.
I just fall on general malice here too instead of specific malice.
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Yeah if Microsoft is banning 1% of accounts and independently 0.01% have a newsworthy conspiracy angle then on average One in a million users would fall in this bucket. p is going to be near 1 without other info.
As I hear stories of Apple, Google, and Microsoft revoking valuable access, I remember this article...
"Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms."
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not
It is often difficult and expensive, relative to letting Facebook (or the like) do the hosting.
But VPSs are a thing, you can run almost any software on them.
Stretching the analogy: Build your castle on your own bedrock, and build "forts", or "outposts", on the enemy territory
Ignoring Facebook et. el. is stupid, but depending on them is fool hardy
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If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge of the risk.
I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?
Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.
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There was a fleeting moment where the Internet was the "Wild West" but we are long past that. The GP's idiom is about as practical as "don't be a citizen of any state".
1 reply →
> In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
No it is not. It is only the greed for bigger profits. If a company can work with Microsoft, it can also work with LibreOffice. But LibreOffice doesn't promise them the moon, while sucking every cent out of them.
I mean, technically you don't have to use those ecosystems and could roll your own stuff, including infrastructure instead of AWS but it's definitely going to be expensive.
Which is why we need regulation for those big players (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one, and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own services.
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There's a good reason they're called unicorns. That's not a strategy you should adopt for any business that's actually important to you.
If you have billions of dollars of revenue, you can make the law of tort work the way it is supposed to.
When did it happen in Apple land?
Several instances.
https://medium.com/@thedarkhacker94/apple-has-terminated-my-...
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Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups... Have at least one backup/copy of your own data on your own hardware. I have onedrive, google-drive and dropbox copied to my nas as well as my desktop and laptop. Other projects are in github or gitlab and copied on my nas.
That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so that I can have an extra level of safety.
> Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups.
Hell, even Microsoft (on the enterprise side of 365) says do not treat their services as a backup.
But we do need to get stricter about the messaging these companies are allowed to put out there regarding their services. Microsoft with one side of their mouth says 365 is definitively not a backup, and then turns around and advertises OneDrive on Windows as a backup with the "back up your folders now" notification.
To consumers that don't know any better, it's misleading and leads to a false sense of security, though I suspect "this service is not a backup and you can lose your account and all your files at anytime" doesn't sell as many subscriptions.
Google is good in this regard as you can schedule a takeout and get a complete dump. Stick that on a drive that is running backblaze and do periodic physical backups.
Absolutely! I do this yearly. It's a great way to ensure that a SNAFU somewhere doesn't nuke years of photos, email and documents.
So what happens if he uses windows 11 and its mandatory online account, his computer is bricked?
People don't realize how fragile this makes things.
Requiring an online ID to log into a local computer creates all sorts of vulnerabilities. When Microsoft gets hacked again, it can let hackers lock you out of your computer. It's basically ransomware-in-waiting.
When it first came out, I declared that Windows 11 is a hate crime. Nothing has caused me to change that an inch. It is 100% anti-consumer.
>It's basically ransomware-in-waiting. RIWAAS, nice. Classic ms move.
The moment I saw nytimes' reporting that a dad lost access to his Google account because of "nude" photos of his baby and couldn't get help, I de-Googled almost completely and am now using fastmail as my main email account. My other inboxes are only kept just in case someone reaches me via those old addresses.
I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
Fastmail is headquartered in Australia and Australia has censorship laws. Hope you're "aligned"!
Then you just switch to another provider. The important part is owning your domain name and not relying on someone else’s.
I haven't been affected by any of those censorship laws and I doubt it ever will (in which case I'll just use a different provider). The biggest difference is that if something goes wrong, at least there is a real human being I can talk to at Fastmail.
A LibreOffice dev gets locked out of his /hotmail account/ and neowin turns this into a Microsoft developer ban? Specious reporting.
Mike doesn't make this claim in the original source: https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/microsoft-anyb...
Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
This and the many other stories like this is why none of these companies has any of my data.
I had this exact same thing happen to me a while back. Luckily the account was one I had created just for this one user group who required I become part of their AD domain to access MS Teams. I tried getting back into the account and hit the same roadblock this guy did. I didn't care that much and just abandoned the account.
I figured it was something that Microsoft would soon fix, as it was such an obvious cluster; I'm surprised the issue still exists.
Microsoft. Microsoft never changes.
Some strange idea comes to my mind. I suspect that Mike Kaganski's account was marked as a Russian account. And Microsoft is cutting support to Russian accounts.
US is full of shitty corporates
Well time to move to gitlab, is anyone surprised by this. I moved a year ago.
they band lawyers from Germany already... I would strictly ban them from the European market. I mean why should an us company manage office stuff in a cloud from eu people.
This creates a new concern. Is it still safe to host projects that compete with Microsoft on Github? The answer may be no.
The time for that concern was way back when Microsoft acquired github. Instead of moving elsewhere, everyone just doubled down on making github the defacto place to host our most critical open source infrastructure.
How many times do we as a community have to get bit by Microsoft before we learn?
These platforms constantly ban people for inscrutable reasons without any recourse, except perhaps for "support by media attention". I see no reason to assume this is any different, and that the ban is unrelated to their work on LibreOffice or anything else.
GitHub (and GitHub accounts) do not seem to have this problem as near as I can tell. For better or worse, I've found that reporting spammers and bad faith actors is a largely a pointless exercise as it will all go in a black hole.
Microsoft being Microsoft.
Large marketplace platforms need to be regulated to have due process.
When hundreds or thousands of companies live and die by your platform, you can't just close accounts arbitrarily.
Either that or you get split up for monopoly. Take your pick, but this shit doesn't work
The need for European digital sovereignty cannot be overstated.
Looking at how they are pushing mandatory backdoors and surveillance it can only be worse than what we get now.
its not going to happen. Quite the opposite. The EU's age verification app will only work on Google attested (i.e. controlled by American big tech) smartphones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
The UK's Online Safety Act's main effect is to strengthen big tech and protect them from competition, and make self hosing prohibitively expensive for many.
European governments will talk about digital sovereignty but will do nothing that involved actually spending money, or regulating the private sector or anything actually effective.
Like mandatory encryption backdoors and VPN criminalization?
First we need to actually start having European OSes like SuSE being offered on shopping malls, with 100% hardware support, followed by Jolla phones.
And everything on European goverments being available as FOSS OS friendly, not Windows/macOS/iOS/Android only.
Watching the rollout of speech laws like the “online safety act” in the UK makes me rather dubious of the wisdom of that idea.
And that just in the UK. For the EU's own shenanigans, we have persistent attempts such as these examples of fuckery:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
There have been many, many other examples over recent years. Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU regulation state in how it respects digital rights for individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
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Correct I’ll take the cluster F of what we have now over the UK style of the government watching over my shoulder as they force me to give up anonymity on the web for those sites that most require it
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You’d probably find you’d “signed” a “contract” with them that contains a binding arbitration clause.
Seriously. Unless people sue them they’ll just keep doing it. Sue them for the lost photos at least.
Don't they have weasel words in the ToS or EULA or somewhere that says you accept all risk of using service and protects the provider of any thing to be sued over?
Where's the money going to come from?
EFF.
Be aware that neowin.net has facebook . com and .net scripts to tell them you visited the site. It is not just this site. This is plague and has to be stopped.
Agreed. In the meantime, I'd suggest installing Privacy Badger [0]. It blocks those domains for me. In return I get an angry popup that claims that I'm using an "ad blocker", but it can be clicked away. (Privacy Badger is not strictly an ad-blocker. It does not care what is and what is not an ad. That it blocks ads on this site is simply an effect of those ads being used to track visitors)
0. https://privacybadger.org/
Just use noscript and a separate browser for malicious sites like fb and ig. It might seem painfull at first, but you'll quickly end up with with a web that is better than before.
No. Just use blabla is not enough. Sites which do that should be denounced.
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I don't really see the story here. Just the LibreOffice dev got locked out of his account. Seems like an automated system that failed, which isn't exactly a revelation that false positives occur. Feels like this is meant to stir up OS war drama and make it seem like Microsoft is trying to prevent LibreOffice from succeeding.
You mean the part where the appeal was denied as the safety net of false positives? The fact that the site asks you to login to get support on not being able to login isn't a story? The fact they told him they'd help every step of the way only to ghost him?
Are we supposed to have been beaten down to the point that none of this is a story? Granted, it is only one side of the story. We have no idea what other things this account has done.
Appeals are not safety nets for false positives. Making online support require a login is extremely common. However there are other methods of communication to get support. Support not calling you back is not a story. Come on now.
Having a bad support experience is not being "beaten down". Talk about hyperbolic. If this is a systemic issue, that could be a story. But why isn't my grandmother's bad experience at Costco story? My friend had to call his ISP to sort a billing mistake. Is that a story now too?
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I think that's the story. I think the strong implication in the first paragraph that it has something to do with the relationship between LibreOffice and Microsoft is not.