Microsoft employees occupy headquarters in protest of Israel contracts / It’s the biggest escalation yet of the protests at Microsoft.
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35983430
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.
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35983430
heck yeah bring back skype
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35983430
That's one way to get fired.
*Actual headline: "Microsoft workers protesting Israel ties occupy HQ campus"
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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.
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 that stands to make big profits from collaborating with genociders, or the independent journalists calling them out for it? It's a tough one.
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35983430
they would have protested sooner, but they’d used Teams to coordinate and ran into a truckload of technical hitches.
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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 that stands to make big profits from collaborating with genociders, or the independent journalists calling them out for it? It's a tough one.
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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.
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.
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they would have protested sooner, but they’d used Teams to coordinate and ran into a truckload of technical hitches.
Sharepoint was down agan
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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.
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.
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35983430
Fuck Israel, genocidal scum!
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35983430
Good for them but... M$ has had military contracts for ages so... quit working for an evil megacorp?
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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.
Isn't the big problem that the US government does not classify the ongoing genocide and genocide?
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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.
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.
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Isn't the big problem that the US government does not classify the ongoing genocide and genocide?
Yes, and Microsoft lawyers have certainly gone over the contracts and communications to ensure that they’re always going to have plausible deniability as to what their client was doing.
The best we could hope for is some engineers to become whistleblowers and share what was said during in-person meetings, unrecorded conversations and in side channels, like Signal chats.
No Microsoft executives will ever see any legal consequences for this.
