Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas.
The two employees told The Associated Press they were fired by phone call late Thursday, several hours after a lunchtime event they organized at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington.
Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology to the Israeli government. But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns for people in need.
“We have so many community members within Microsoft who have lost family, lost friends or loved ones,” said Abdo Mohamed, a researcher and data scientist. “But Microsoft really failed to have the space for us where we can come together and share our grief and honor the memories of people who can no longer speak for themselves.”
Microsoft said Friday it has “ended the employment of some individuals in accordance with internal policy” but declined to provide details.
Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
As always, fuck Microsoft. Literally been saying this over 30 years already.
Don’t use windows, switch to Linux. It’s free, actually reasonably secure, actually works, won’t spy on you, won’t force shit on you just to make you pay more.
Don’t use Microsoft azure. It’s overpriced and runs in Linux anyway.
Don’t use Microsoft 365 online shit. Outlook functions horrendously bad, teams is a sad joke. I unfortunately have to deal with teams every day because government customers thought it was a good idea and EVERY call there is some shit. People can’t get in, people don’t have audio, people ALWAYS have the wrong audio device selected no matter what and need to spend the first 5 minutes to get their audio and video working. It’s shit quality compared to zoom or Google meet or open source alternatieves…
Stop giving this piece of shit your money
Are there some open source Teams alternatives you’d recommend?
Mattermost
Thanks, I’ll check that out!
You can use teams in a browser, that’s really all it is on dekstop anyway.
I wasn’t asking about a Linux client for Teams, I was asking about an open source alternative to Teams
Oh OK lol
Hold up. Azure runs on Linux? Lol could have guessed that, but still is funny.
Azure runs on windows. Hosts run a modified version of Hyper-V.
At least, they did last I checked.
I work at a place that uses Azure to run everything (not my choice…).
Everything we have runs on Linux containers, Linux Azure functions, and a VM that runs Ubuntu.
You can run Windows on Azure but you certainly don’t have to.
We have a similar mix, though I was referring to the underlying virtualisation providing their cloud hosting.
I need a practice laptop to learn Linux with…
Or a flash drive. You can just boot it from a flash drive to see if you enjoy it. Set your motherboard BIOS to boot from USB before booting from an internal drive. When the flash drive with Linux is plugged in, it’ll boot from that instead of booting Windows.
Oh nice. See, this is the kind of stuff I’ll have to look up lol
Yeah, booting from USB is something you see a lot in the data security and/or privacy-oriented circles. Because many USB boot drives are designed to be volatile, meaning nothing about the OS is actually stored on the drive. So you can nuke the whole OS just by unplugging the drive.
Basically every (smart) drug dealer who orders their supplies on Tor uses a USB drive OS, so if the cops ever bust down their door they can just yank the USB and destroy all evidence of their online orders.
But it can also be useful for test-driving a particular repo. If you ever manage to fuck things up royally, you’re just one reboot away from a fresh start.