A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.
Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.
United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. “I’ve had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I’ve filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times.” Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, “We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online.”
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas
Matrix originating from israel does sketch me out a bit since they are famous for spyware. Do source code reviews check out?
What else should we use?
Signal is decently rated. it is still a little more centralized than Matrix but that also makes setup easier. I’m not a cybersecurity guy though so I have no idea what’s actually good and what’s not, I just go by recommendation from people on the interwebs.
It’s fully end-to-end encrypted by default, and it also encrypts and minimizes metadata. It’s also completely free & open source, and I don’t think they have ever terminated an account for any reason other than spam. These are the things that actually matter.
If there was malware in Matrix I’m sure the many people who have looked at the code would have found it by now and we’d hear all about it. It’s also worth noting that most Matrix servers you can choose are not in Israel.
And Signal is not a good alternative, as just like Microsoft here, they can ban you if they don’t like where you’re sending messages. Not that they will, but they have that power.
Free/open source software is an international development effort. Whether some developers are Israeli is irrelevant because the code is public and has developers worldwide.
And they are famous for spyware, yes, but that’s from specific state-sanctioned companies. Like NSO group.