Microsoft employees occupy headquarters in protest of Israel contractsIt’s the biggest escalation yet of the protests at Microsoft.

Comments

• Mrkawfee@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I wish them the best of luck. Microsoft has blood on its hands.

  source
• CriticalMiss@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Very brave. Tech industry is a very tightly knit circle. If they’re known around as employees who put morals above profits they’ll find themselves not welcomed in many companies. Sad reality.

  source

  • uhdeuidheuidhed@thelemmy.club ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s fine.

    It means their expertise can only benefit companies that value morals.

    source
• ohwhatfollyisman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  they would have protested sooner, but they’d used Teams to coordinate and ran into a truckload of technical hitches.

  source

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Sharepoint was down agan

    source

    • WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      There was an “upgrade”.

      source
• doingthestuff@lemy.lol ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  So you’re saying they’re hiring?

  source
• yesman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.

  -Microsoft, in May Dear Microsoft, If you looked for evidence, that is going to imply that your software could totally be used to harm people, it just isn’t in this case. As far as you know.

  source

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    In a blog post published in May, the company said it had “found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”

    But Microsoft said this month that it had enlisted the law firm Covington & Burling to conduct a further review after a report that Israel’s military surveillance agency intercepted millions of mobile phone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and stored them on Azure servers. That trove helped inform the selection of bombing targets in Gaza, according to reporting by the Guardian newspaper, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and Local Call, a Hebrew-language news site.

    Who are you going to believe? The company profiting from collaborating with genocides, or the independent journalists calling them out for it? It’s a tough one.

    source

    • fluxion@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’m not sure how you’d even know that was the case.

      However, now they know. So time to cancel those contracts, or…?

      source
  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s one of those things that is literally true but misleading.

    They store, for example, all of the calls (content and metadata) that is captured from Gaza(which is all of it, since they control the cellular network). This use of Azure doesn’t target or harm people, it just stores a tremendous amount of data.

    The unsaid part is that this storage capability is later used by other data mining tools which analyze mass amounts of data in order to classify people as “Hamas” or “not-Hamas”.

    It is THAT tool that was/is used to make targeting decisions.

    So Azure wasn’t used to target people. It only provided the storage, which enabled the use of mass collection and data mining tools which was used to target people.

    Just like how IBM didn’t run concentration camps, they just provided the punch card system that allowed the processing of census data. The processed data which was later used to round up people for the camps.

    Microsoft is exactly that culpable for this genocide. They didn’t do anything illegal. However, in my opinion they are morally implicated in this. No matter how they want to try to distance themselves in press releases they are still, to this very hour, providing this capability.

    Because it’s a lot of money and it isn’t their children.

    source

    • Saleh@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Helping a genocide is very much illegal. If you sell precursor chemicals for poison gas to a death camp operator, you are also complicit.

      After Oct. 7 the usage by the IDF exploded. In early 2024 reports about the AI tools used to justify slaughtering Civilians en masse came out, employees have been raising alarms through the “proper” channels and then went to public protest as Microsoft ignored them and cracked down on any mention of it in Forums, Town Halls and the like.

      They absolutely know that they are complicit and would rot in prison the rest of their lifes if this goes to court properly.

      source

      • -> View More Comments
    • MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This is exactly how these cloud architectures are designed - the seperation of storage and compute allows companies to claim “we just store the data” while ignoring that the entire system is built to enable exactly this kind of analytics pipeline.

      source
• MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Fuck Israel, genocidal scum!

  source
• someguy3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  That’s one way to get fired.

  source
• 0x0@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Good for them but… M$ has had military contracts for ages so… quit working for an evil megacorp?

  source

  • vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Military contracts and genocide are two different things.

    Like sure military contracting causes a net harm to society but we can’t fault people for drawing a line somewhere.

    source

    • 0x0@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The line gets really blurry if the contract is with a company from the most belligerent country on earth… sorry but unless you’re a greybeard I cannot really sympathetize if you work for GAFAM (or whatever the acronym is now).

      source
• pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  hexk yeah bring back skype

  source