Comment by politelemon
1 month ago
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.
Did the protestors help the media publicity?
I really wonder if a company like microsoft has any real concern over people tweeting negative things about it. It seems like companies are finally realizing a lot of it can just be ignored, but with microsoft specifically, what’s the risk? Who in a position to deny ms enough money that they’d care or even notice is going to decide to do it based on people protesting?
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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.
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.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
that would be an interesting service contract.
the rack and infra are yours; the storage media and all contents are mine.
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or it means that they met with Unit 8200 to see if there was common ground that would rationalize keeping the contract and their tech being used for a way that respected human rights, dignity, and a coherent strategy to getting to that place,
and there wasn't
I want to believe this is true, but it would only be true if they cancel all the contracts they have with Israel that enable the genocide, rather than just the ones that have made the most noise. Otherwise it's just PR, not ethics. In other words, a lot is resting on the "some" in that quote.
Isn't media publicity the entire point of peaceful protest?
They fired staff who protested against the firm’s ties to the IDF.
That's a funny way to say "they fired staff that vandalized company property, broke into the CEO's office, and used an internal company website to publish and promote anti-company propaganda".
That will get you fired from bussing tables or washing dishes, let alone a six-figure job at MS.
Edit: Source on the last one; the first two were widely reported on in media:
https://lunduke.substack.com/p/fired-microsoft-employee-enco...
One protestor was fired after interrupting a CEO's speech.
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Some people seem to think rioting and vandalism are acceptable behaviors.
It's important that people engaging in such activity are dealt with swiftly and justly. Such behavior further encourages violence and destruction as acceptable behaviors in society, which they are not.
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Every protest we praise in history broke the law at some point.
“Promote company-hating propaganda” is an interesting way to describe what happened.
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Source?
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They've been raising the alarm for months. If this extreme action is what it took Microsoft to look into genocide and then terminate the contract, it was absolutely the right call
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I think how you protest matters.
I can agree with protestors, also think their choices are bad.
I am deeply opposed to the Israeli military, and sympathetic to the cause of the employees, but as the other poster pointed out, they were legitimately fired.
Moreover, their actions didn't improve anything and only serve as further fodder for painting their side here as radical.
> 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 executive was involved in cementing a collaboration for a secret military / intelligence project with an AI component, to spy on people against whom a genocide is ongoing by their colonial occupiers. This only "ended" when the public became aware of it, for political and (possibly) legal reasons, clearly indicating that they would have continued with "business as usual" if the public hadn't become aware of it. What other Israeli projects are Microsoft hiding and supporting, that possibly aids Israel's genocide, is what concerns me ...
What concerns me is that Project Nimbus is a public project that is still actively being enabled by Google and Amazon. Secret projects are one thing, but largely meaningless, because companies, people and governments have shown they don't even care when they're in the open.
>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".
True, the correct term back then would've been apartheid.
> 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".
you have a very narrow historical lens if you think a DSA conference in 2021 is the only place that has treated allegations of genocide seriously.
I'd recommend reading through [0] which has a very nice chronological timeline.
for example, way back in 1982 the UN General Assembly voted to declare the Sabra and Shatila massacre [1] an act of genocide. it was carried out against a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, by a militia allied with the Israeli military, and during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon:
> In February 1983, an independent commission chaired by Irish diplomat Seán MacBride, assistant to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, concluded that the IDF, as the then occupying power over Sabra and Shatila, bore responsibility for the militia's massacre. The commission also stated that the massacre was a form of genocide.
there's also a long history of "well...it's not genocide, because genocide only comes from the Geno region of Nazi Germany, everything else is sparkling ethnic cleansing" type of rhetoric:
> At the UN-backed 2001 Durban Conference Against Racism, the majority of delegates approved a declaration that accused Israel of being a "racist apartheid state" guilty of "war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing". Reed Brody, the then-executive director of Human Rights Watch, criticised the declaration, arguing that "Israel has committed serious crimes against Palestinian people but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide", while Claudio Cordone, a spokesman for Amnesty International, stated that "we are not ready to make the assertion that Israel is engaged in genocide"
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_genocide_accusatio...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre
Will Microsoft rehire the employees who were fired for protesting?
No? Hmm, then you should not let Microsoft whitewash its record by taking credit for the very cause those workers were punished for defending
> Will Microsoft rehire the employees who were fired for protesting?
One can be correct in theory and wrong in practice at the same time.
Yes, Microsoft was right in theory for firing the protestors, but wrong in practice because Microsoft should have listened to their employees before it got to the point they felt they had to mount a protest to get executives' attentions.
> did terminated the contract instead of ignoring it or doubling down
This was after they ignored it and doubled down for almost 3 years*. What was the total gain in profits and how many Palestinians died during that time? You’re going to ignore the full cost because they did the least they could do almost 3 years later?
* if the starting line is set to October 2022 attacks, if not how long were they making money off this contract?
October 2023
The problem is that if you're very very bad, you can do a good thing and still be very bad.
What other reasons are Microsoft very very bad? Genuinely curious about what your definition of "very, very bad" is and whether it aligns with mine.
In other comments replying to another user you dismissed "criticisms from the 90s", but I think that's not entirely justified. If the bad things they did in the 90s are still having bad effects today, and they built their success on those bad things, then it's not really enough just to stop doing them; they would need to actively try to right those past wrongs.
However, even in the present, the increasing intrusiveness of their update schemes, forcing people to have a Microsoft account even to install Windows, shoving AI into people's faces at every opportunity, etc., would all count as reasons I think they are bad. Also I tend to think in general that simply existing as a giant corporation with large market share is bad.
To be clear, I also think that Apple, Google, Amazon, etc., are also very very bad. I think I'd agree that these days Microsoft is on the lower end of badness among these megacorps. However, that's partly just because it's become somewhat weaker than it was at the height of its badness. You could argue that this isn't "badness" but something like "ability to implement badness" but I see those as pretty closely tied. Basically the bigger a corporation becomes, the harder it has to work to avoid being bad.
> What other reasons are Microsoft very very bad
Their laziness, greed and business acumen have left us in the position that the world's dominant personal OS is insecure, unreliable and running a protection racket with virus detection (and virus writers)
This is an ongoing rolling clusterfuck, and is entirely due to MS
Search for "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
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That's a very dishonest framing. The article contains some not particularly subtle relativizations in various places, e.g., “ability to use SOME of its technology,” which make it clear that Microsoft is not reacting decisively here in any way, but is trying to muddle through somehow and make a few publicly visible concessions.
Furthermore, why do you think the reactions are knee-jerk? That implies a rather biased attitude on your part.
It has come a tad too late to be called a good thing.
Yes it’s a good thing AND we don’t need to be celebrating companies when they finally do the bare minimum.
Nobody with any semblance of ethical, just or just plain being a basic good corporate citizen would say.. oh yeah mass surveillance of the comms of a whole population for money is in any way acceptable or ok. This shouldn’t be a tech side note this should be a total meltdown front page scandal. What a disgusting abuse of power by all involved.
> Yes it’s a good thing AND we don’t need to be celebrating companies when they finally do the bare minimum.
I think we should give props here. This is an important step forward. Thank you Microsoft!
I think we should protest when companies do things that are wrong and we should give them kudos when they make good moves. Carrot and stick.
I am not fans of those that say because you did wrong things in the past, I will never recognize when you change and make good moves.
I want to encourage more companies to correct their involvement in this.
I agree. If we want our pressure campaigns to be successful, we need to reward companies that respond to them.
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I disagree that we shouldn't give them their props when companies finally give in, because most are still not doing that (see Project Nimbus). The problem here is that we don't even know they have done the bare minimum yet, since this is only one contract and to my knowledge they have several, including still actively working with the IDF.
M$ is bad, just not cause of this
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I mean, they have thoroughly soiled their reputation with the US tech workforce by being the most egregious abusers of the H1B program.
If we tally up all the good things Microsoft did and weighed them to some of the bad things, it'd be like weighing a few grains of sand versus Mount Olympus.