[HN Gopher] Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account witho...
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Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning,
rejects appeal
Author : bundie
Score : 150 points
Date : 2025-07-29 21:19 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.neowin.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.neowin.net)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The need for European digital sovereignty cannot be overstated.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| Watching the rollout of speech laws like the "online safety
| act" in the UK makes me rather dubious of the wisdom of that
| idea.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| And that just in the UK. For the EU's own shenanigans, we
| have persistent attempts such as these examples of fuckery:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44720103
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
|
| There have been many, many other examples over recent years.
| Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU
| regulation state in how it respects digital rights for
| individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Anyone making any claim to the superiority of the EU
| regulation state in how it respects digital rights for
| individuals is full of shit or sheerly ignorant.
|
| The EU is a huge organization and too often the right hand
| has no idea what the left hand is doing.
|
| But, the EU isn't alone in curbing digital rights for
| individuals, it's a worrying trend all over the world even
| over here in the states, with congress introducing a bill
| of our own along the same lines (Kids Online Safety Act) -
| we'll see if it goes anywhere, but the overton window is
| shifting to being in favor of regulation like this,
| unfortunately.
|
| Authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere, and rapidly.
| Mtinie wrote:
| Authoritarianism is much easier to implement in a
| pervasive surveillance environment, digital or otherwise.
| Unfortunate for all of us, even those who think they are
| immune.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The unfortunate truth is that _all_ governments suck at
| dealing with technology in a positive way. The EU has some
| wins, the US has some wins, and so on... but they all have
| significant fails too. It 's a question of which bad things
| you can live with, more than a question of who doesn't do
| bad things.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Correct I'll take the cluster F of what we have now over the
| UK style of the government watching over my shoulder as they
| force me to give up anonymity on the web for those sites that
| most require it
| Spivak wrote:
| If you live in one of the states that hasn't yet added one
| of these laws. I expect it will become a federal bill in a
| year or two so there aren't 20 variants of the same law.
|
| You can really feel the "big tent" nature of the GOP when
| these bills are being pushed despite being absolutely
| abhorrent to large swaths of Republican voters.
| frumplestlatz wrote:
| I actually can see an argument for age verification, if
| it could be truly guaranteed to apply only to porn.
|
| The constitutionality of the current laws was upheld on
| the basis of treating age verification for access to porn
| as an incidental burden, and thus warranted only
| intermediate scrutiny.
|
| My (naive?) hope is that any future mission creep will be
| rejected by the Supreme Court under strict scrutiny,
| especially as it extends into general and political
| speech.
|
| However, once you have the legal and technical frameworks
| in place, mission creep is almost inevitable, and it
| could easily take years of litigation to resolve.
|
| "Think of the children" has always been the thin end of a
| wedge used by those looking to incrementally dismantle
| inconvenient civil liberties.
|
| All that said, we're in a much better position in the US
| under the first amendment. The UK's "online safety bill"
| is already targeting a myriad of forms of political
| speech, and is just the latest example of the significant
| shift towards the curtailment of free speech across
| Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Sure would have been great if, in 2016 and 2024
| elections, the democrats had nominated someone who could
| have beat Trump. Or conversely, had not nominated the two
| people who didn't stance a chance.
|
| But yeah, keep railing against the GOP.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Looking at how they are pushing mandatory backdoors and
| surveillance it can only be worse than what we get now.
| fooker wrote:
| Like mandatory encryption backdoors and VPN criminalization?
| graemep wrote:
| its not going to happen. Quite the opposite. The EU's age
| verification app will only work on Google attested (i.e.
| controlled by American big tech) smartphones:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240
|
| The UK's Online Safety Act's main effect is to strengthen big
| tech and protect them from competition, and make self hosing
| prohibitively expensive for many.
|
| European governments will talk about digital sovereignty but
| will do nothing that involved actually spending money, or
| regulating the private sector or anything actually effective.
| bozhark wrote:
| Do the American thing: sue them
| db48x wrote:
| Seriously. Unless people sue them they'll just keep doing it.
| Sue them for the lost photos at least.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Where's the money going to come from?
| hinkley wrote:
| EFF.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Don't they have weasel words in the ToS or EULA or somewhere
| that says you accept all risk of using service and protects the
| provider of any thing to be sued over?
| ksenzee wrote:
| You'd probably find you'd "signed" a "contract" with them that
| contains a binding arbitration clause.
| roscas wrote:
| Be aware that neowin.net has facebook . com and .net scripts to
| tell them you visited the site. It is not just this site. This is
| plague and has to be stopped.
| laxd wrote:
| Just use noscript and a separate browser for malicious sites
| like fb and ig. It might seem painfull at first, but you'll
| quickly end up with with a web that is better than before.
| prmoustache wrote:
| No. Just use blabla is not enough. Sites which do that should
| be denounced.
| laxd wrote:
| Best of luck.
| squidbeak wrote:
| What's wrong with doing both?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Nothing is wrong with doing both. But when the reply to
| "this site does shady shit" is "just run this addon", it
| comes across with a subtext of "stop whining, you can
| solve it yourself". Perhaps not intentionally, but that
| is how it generally comes across.
| laxd wrote:
| It was only meant as a pragmatic here-and-now way of
| dealing with the issue, for the hn crowd. Most people are
| helpless victims.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You can sit around and wait for things to change, or you
| come up with a workaround to get done what needs to be
| done. You seem to be against workarounds instead of making
| people just sit idle doing nothing.
| graemep wrote:
| To whom should they be denounced and what effect do you
| expect it to have?
| Findecanor wrote:
| Agreed. In the meantime, I'd suggest installing Privacy Badger
| [0]. It blocks those domains for me. In return I get an angry
| popup that claims that I'm using an "ad blocker", but it can be
| clicked away. (Privacy Badger is not strictly an ad-blocker. It
| does not care what is and what is not an ad. That it blocks ads
| on this site is simply an effect of those ads being used to
| track visitors)
|
| 0. https://privacybadger.org/
| chasil wrote:
| As I hear stories of Apple, Google, and Microsoft revoking
| valuable access, I remember this article...
|
| "Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms."
|
| https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
| israrkhan wrote:
| In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain
| businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.
|
| Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and
| hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of
| ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.
| pphysch wrote:
| There was a fleeting moment where the Internet was the "Wild
| West" but we are long past that. The GP's idiom is about as
| practical as "don't be a citizen of any state".
| metalliqaz wrote:
| That is a really great analogy and it's so true.
|
| The only counter point I can think of is that you can
| always choose to build upon multiple tech platforms
| simultaneously, and depending on the technology you need,
| it might not even add all that much additional cost to do
| so.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I mean, technically you don't have to use those ecosystems
| and could roll your own stuff, including infrastructure
| instead of AWS but it's definitely going to be expensive.
|
| Which is why we need regulation for those big players
| (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're
| going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own
| market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one,
| and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own
| services.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Not so technically, your business needs customers and
| efficiencies. Big tech strategically positions themselves
| at those choke points.
|
| But realistically , if Google and Apple both for whatever
| reason banned you from all their services, idk why, then
| you would not have access to a _phone_. So then you say,
| well, it was just one person in ten million, and they
| probably did _something_ wrong-- and now you share the same
| perspective as Big Tech on this specific issue.
| graemep wrote:
| If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk
| (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge
| of the risk.
|
| I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could
| they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they
| tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?
|
| Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk
| and can avoid it.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| The key insight is that mitigating risk isn't a free
| action. No business has the bandwidth to avoid even most of
| the risks they could in principle avoid; you allocate some
| effort towards the ones that make sense to mitigate, and
| hope the others don't come to pass.
| msgodel wrote:
| There's a good reason they're called unicorns. That's not a
| strategy you should adopt for any business that's actually
| important to you.
| cm2187 wrote:
| So what happens if he uses windows 11 and its mandatory online
| account, his computer is bricked?
| RachelF wrote:
| People don't realize how fragile this makes things.
|
| Requiring an online ID to log into a local computer creates all
| sorts of vulnerabilities. When Microsoft gets hacked again, it
| can let hackers lock you out of your computer. It's basically
| ransomware-in-waiting.
| eMPee584 wrote:
| >It's basically ransomware-in-waiting. RIWAAS, nice. Classic
| ms move.
| EndsOfnversion wrote:
| Microsoft. Microsoft never changes.
| jajuuka wrote:
| I don't really see the story here. Just the LibreOffice dev got
| locked out of his account. Seems like an automated system that
| failed, which isn't exactly a revelation that false positives
| occur. Feels like this is meant to stir up OS war drama and make
| it seem like Microsoft is trying to prevent LibreOffice from
| succeeding.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You mean the part where the appeal was denied as the safety net
| of false positives? The fact that the site asks you to login to
| get support on not being able to login isn't a story? The fact
| they told him they'd help every step of the way only to ghost
| him?
|
| Are we supposed to have been beaten down to the point that none
| of this is a story? Granted, it is only one side of the story.
| We have no idea what other things this account has done.
| jibal wrote:
| I think that's the story. I think the strong implication in
| the first paragraph that it has something to do with the
| relationship between LibreOffice and Microsoft is not.
| cptaj wrote:
| Large marketplace platforms need to be regulated to have due
| process.
|
| When hundreds or thousands of companies live and die by your
| platform, you can't just close accounts arbitrarily.
|
| Either that or you get split up for monopoly. Take your pick, but
| this shit doesn't work
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 1) I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice
| dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's
| just an automated process that is misfiring.
|
| 2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted
| to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the
| slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even
| more opaque than the processes they replace.
|
| 3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is
| fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no
| choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing
| with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards
| you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without
| explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you
| can) accordingly.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice
| dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that
| it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
|
| I could agree with the beginning of that but not the
| classification of a misfire. A misfire implies a brief,
| exceptional occurrence and neither of those adjectives seem
| likely here.
|
| That's based on a few years spent in Microsoft's forever-
| shuffling admin carousel (EAC, Exch Migration, Intune, Azure
| hydra, 365/Copilot-all-the-things). Thru that, I have come to
| believe that incompetence is almost always the right answer for
| MS-generated woes.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Yeah if Microsoft is banning 1% of accounts and independently
| 0.01% have a newsworthy conspiracy angle then on average One in
| a million users would fall in this bucket. p is going to be
| near 1 without other info.
| lawlessone wrote:
| The support for issues like this from all big corps is always
| horrendous.
|
| Google is similarly notorious for brining businesses to a halt
| and only fixing the issue when it makes the news and a human at
| Google finally sees it.
| 8note wrote:
| > However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they
| have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be
| unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended
| period of time
|
| this risk goes for any 3rd party, at least the ones that follow
| sanctions compliance or suspicious activity monitoring. if your
| name shows up on a denied party list, it's illegal for anyone
| to tell you why they arent talking to you anymore.
| account-5 wrote:
| This and the many other stories like this is why none of these
| companies has any of my data.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide
| backups... Have at least one backup/copy of your own data on your
| own hardware. I have onedrive, google-drive and dropbox copied to
| my nas as well as my desktop and laptop. Other projects are in
| github or gitlab and copied on my nas.
|
| That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also
| need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so
| that I can have an extra level of safety.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Google is good in this regard as you can schedule a takeout and
| get a complete dump. Stick that on a drive that is running
| backblaze and do periodic physical backups.
| rs186 wrote:
| The moment I saw nytimes' reporting that a dad lost access to his
| Google account because of "nude" photos of his baby and couldn't
| get help, I de-Googled almost completely and am now usiny
| fastmail as my main email account. My other inboxes are only kept
| just in case someone reaches me via those old addresses.
|
| I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day
| happen to me.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| Fastmail is headquartered in Australia and Australia has
| censorship laws. Hope you're "aligned"!
| guffins wrote:
| Then you just switch to another provider. The important part
| is owning your domain name and not relying on someone else's.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Well time to move to gitlab, is anyone surprised by this. I moved
| a year ago.
| Animats wrote:
| This creates a new concern. Is it still safe to host projects
| that compete with Microsoft on Github? The answer may be no.
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