This is fucking dangerous. Total watershed event.
so glad i installed mint. also user codeberg instead of gh people.
misleading title
The International Criminal Court ’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email, and his bank accounts have been frozen.
The Hague-based court’s American staffers have been told that if they travel to the U.S. they risk arrest.
Some nongovernmental organizations have stopped working with the ICC and the leaders of one won’t even reply to emails from court officials.
Those are just some of the hurdles facing court staff since U.S. President Donald Trump in February slapped sanctions on its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, according to interviews with current and former ICC officials, international lawyers and human rights advocates.
did Microsoft also freeze his bank accounts?
this is the title ☞ “President Donald Trump in February slapped sanctions on its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan”
This is a technology forum. If the article is relevant here at all, it’s because of Microsoft. A better argument could probably be made that the article shouldn’t be here.
The title is still misleading and should have been worded better. Also company complying with sanctions is not news. The only reason it’d be newsworthy is if Microsoft locked his account independently.
It is relevant because Microsoft is shutting down people their accounts for prosecuting war crimes. This should be a wakeup call for people to stop using services by the Fascist American government.
And here I am having to oversee our organisation moving to Windows 11. I would happily not do that but I cannot imagine trying to administer a network of Linux computed.
forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider
Whose CEO publicly stated that “Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses”. Oh, the irony.
Defending human rights and condemning war crimes is now punishable.
People need to stop using M$.
I totally agree, and I just switched from Windows to Linux for my desktop, but this isn’t on Microsoft - it’s sanctions on the ICC by the fascist regime running the country where they (Microsoft) are based in support of the fascist regime destroying Gaza. (I know I’m probably over simplifying it, but that’s my take on the article)
It’s still preemptive compliance by Microsoft.
Trump loves this shit because if it blows up, he can just say “I never ordered this.”
I’ve used Linux since 2005.
Since M$ started adding spyware, I have tried to avoid it as much as possible. Proton has been amazing with getting games running.
Yeah, the EU has been building out alternatives to American cloud companies like Microsoft for a while now, and it’s coming in handy for some of them. I think France in particular are working on this and launched their own alternatives to Google Docs etc.
https://www.techspot.com/news/107225-france-germany-unveil-docs-collaborative-tool-rival-us.html
Hmm we may have for a long time considered alternatives to the American cloud and tools but we still are extremely reliant on it in all administrations in France. As I recall 70% of our online government services are on American clouds. We also are almost exclusively using Microsoft windows and office for the desktop workstations.
I’m pessimistic in the sense that Europe has tried to offer an European cloud before. It was a spectacular failure that just costs us a lot of money so that businesses here could just take the money and then pretend they couldn’t make it work.
We definitely had a real shot in Europe to be sovereign. We just missed it. It’s never too late but it’s so prohibitively expensive to switch out of Microsoft ecosystem that many governments entities will rather fork out money to Microsoft.
The city of Munich’s move to open source software across thousands of workstations was by all accounts a success on a technical level, which I’m sure could be replicated by most European administrations.
The problem was, of course, political. The incoming conservative admin needed to paint the outgoing center admin as incompetent, and to do their usual corruption of course. So they jumped on a specific department’s complaint about an issue with one piece of software to cancel and roll back the entire fucking project.
A few months later, Microsoft opened up their new European headquarters in Munich. By sheer coincidence I’m sure. And in no way related to the fact that they have an incentive in the billions to keep people convinced there is no workable alternative even decades later.
I think recent events are giving a lot of motivation for these kinds of initiatives that weren’t a huge concern in the past.
There’s likely going to be a bit of a scramble as we realise we can’t rely on America and their companies anymore.
I agree. Trump just said that everyone that uses the services of American companies needs to agree with Trump or face the real risk of losing all their data.
In the face of that, even a pricier European option will look appetizing.
Sure but this looks like Microsoft complying with sanctions. I was unaware sanctions were applied to the ICC, which is complete nonsense.
I’m on the other side of the world from Microsoft HQ, and I can still hear the shouting.
Because this was basically a one way decision that will now block them from a lot of future contracts with governments, organizations and companies.
I like that the title of this post points out the least interesting part of the article, well done.
My mans was using Hotmail?
Kind of appalling that the ICC isnt using self hosted email with proper E2EE. Or is this just his private email?
If you think you can set up mail infrastructure with on premise everything that is available to your not on premise workers safer than Microsoft, you will be spending a huge amount of money to do so.
It just turns out that the US has become a rogue state that alligns with the type of war criminals and dictators that the ICC wants to prosecute. I really don’t think anyone would have predicted this 10 to 15 years ago when this mail choice was made.
Literally every university here has on prem, externally accessible email service that has basically 100% uptime and works perfectly fine with pgp and stuff.
But also Microsoft infrastructure is inherently insecure so thats a low bar to surpass.
If you think security of infrastructure has anything to do with PGP you’re misunderstanding what I mean. Self hosting mail for an organisation like the ICC would require multiple FTE’s. In the same vein that the current US administration is retaliating against them other rogue nations are constantly specifically targeting them. It’s already hard to deal with this without being specifically targeted and a couple times being targeted usually causes you to be compromised, dealing with it full time is almost impossible. Unless your team is monstrously big and securing your groupware is one of your core activities.
I’ve literally had jobs like this, and the idea that the average university that self hosts is more secure than Exchange Online is just plain wrong. I’m sure you can point to a couple of them that are safer of course, but they 'll be the exception.
If you think you can set up mail infrastructure with on premise everything that is available to your not on premise workers safer than Microsoft, you will be spending a huge amount of money to do so.
Even if they prefer not to self-host, there are plenty of providers out there that are more trustworthy than Microsoft. In fact, I would say that a medium-sized established company that derives most of its revenue from providing email and related services is likely to secure them better than an oversized tech giant that just does email on the side—they have more incentive.
I would agree that right now there are more choices. I don’t entirely agree they’re inherently safer. Nor that this choice would have been available as a choice when the original decision was made. (At a time when the US was at the very least considered to be an ally to Europe)
Yes. But nobody gets fired for hiring Microsoft. (until now, I guess? XD) It’s really as simple as that.
It can’t have worse uptime.
Hotmail was discontinued 10 to 15 years ago. They had to have got on Hotmail awhile before that.
I really don’t think anyone would have predicted this 10 to 15 years ago when this mail choice was made.
the USA has been a war criminal country for at least a century now, maybe longer
Which is why I specifically phrased the part you didn’t quote in that specific way.
