14 ms·
Microsoft bans LibreOffice developer's account without warning, rejects appeal
- toomuchtodo 1y agoThe need for European digital sovereignty cannot be overstated.
- frumplestlatz 1y agoWatching the rollout of speech laws like the “online safety act” in the UK makes me rather dubious of the wisdom of that idea.
- southernplaces7 1y agoAnd 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=44720103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705240 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 1y ago> 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 1y agoAuthoritarianism 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoCorrect 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 1y agoIf 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 1y agoI 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 (naïve?) 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 1y agoSure 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 1y agoLooking at how they are pushing mandatory backdoors and surveillance it can only be worse than what we get now.
- fooker 1y agoLike mandatory encryption backdoors and VPN criminalization?
- graemep 1y agoits 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 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.
- pjmlp 1y agoFirst we need to actually start having European OSes like SuSE being offered on shopping malls, with 100% hardware support, followed by Jolla phones. And everything on European goverments being available as FOSS OS friendly, not Windows/macOS/iOS/Android only.
- bozhark 1y ago[flagged]
- saagarjha 1y agoWhere's the money going to come from?
- hinkley 1y agoEFF.
- db48x 1y agoSeriously. Unless people sue them they’ll just keep doing it. Sue them for the lost photos at least.
- dylan604 1y agoDon'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 1y agoYou’d probably find you’d “signed” a “contract” with them that contains a binding arbitration clause.
- roscas 1y agoBe 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 1y agoJust 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 1y agoNo. Just use blabla is not enough. Sites which do that should be denounced.
- squidbeak 1y agoWhat's wrong with doing both?
- bigstrat2003 1y agoNothing 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 1y agoIt was only meant as a pragmatic here-and-now way of dealing with the issue, for the hn crowd. Most people are helpless victims.
- laxd 1y agoBest of luck.
- dylan604 1y ago
- chasil 1y agoAs 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-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
- israrkhan 1y agoIn 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 1y agoThere 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 1y agoThat 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 1y agoI 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.
- 1y ago
- cm2187 1y agoSo what happens if he uses windows 11 and its mandatory online account, his computer is bricked?
- RachelF 1y agoPeople 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.
- EndsOfnversion 1y agoMicrosoft. Microsoft never changes.
- jajuuka 1y agoI 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 1y agoYou 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 1y agoI 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.
- jajuuka 1y agoAppeals are not safety nets for false positives. Making online support require a login is extremely common. However there are other methods of communication to get support. Support not calling you back is not a story. Come on now. Having a bad support experience is not being "beaten down". Talk about hyperbolic. If this is a systemic issue, that could be a story. But why isn't my grandmother's bad experience at Costco story? My friend had to call his ISP to sort a billing mistake. Is that a story now too?
- dylan604 1y agoDid your grandmother or friend get their issues resolved? If yes, not a story. If no, then potentially a story if they make enough noise. But sure, you go right ahead and just roll over and take shitty service and then go ahead and add a tip too while you at it. The rest of will continue to make noise and call a spade a spade. Some of us might even tell them emperor he has no clothes on
- cptaj 1y agoLarge 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 1y ago1) 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 1y ago> 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.
- rossdavidh 1y agoI agree, I should have said more like "error" or "mistake" or "incompetence", rather than "misfire".
- bravesoul2 1y agoYeah 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- account-5 1y agoThis and the many other stories like this is why none of these companies has any of my data.
- tracker1 1y agoDo 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 1y agoGoogle 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.
- davoneus 1y agoAbsolutely! I do this yearly. It's a great way to ensure that a SNAFU somewhere doesn't nuke years of photos, email and documents.
- thewebguyd 1y ago> Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups. Hell, even Microsoft (on the enterprise side of 365) says do not treat their services as a backup. But we do need to get stricter about the messaging these companies are allowed to put out there regarding their services. Microsoft with one side of their mouth says 365 is definitively not a backup, and then turns around and advertises OneDrive on Windows as a backup with the "back up your folders now" notification. To consumers that don't know any better, it's misleading and leads to a false sense of security, though I suspect "this service is not a backup and you can lose your account and all your files at anytime" doesn't sell as many subscriptions.
- rs186 1y agoThe 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 using 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 1y agoFastmail is headquartered in Australia and Australia has censorship laws. Hope you're "aligned"!
- guffins 1y agoThen you just switch to another provider. The important part is owning your domain name and not relying on someone else’s.
- rs186 1y agoI haven't been affected by any of those censorship laws and I doubt it ever will (in which case I'll just use a different provider). The biggest difference is that if something goes wrong, at least there is a real human being I can talk to at Fastmail.
- jmclnx 1y agoWell time to move to gitlab, is anyone surprised by this. I moved a year ago.
- Animats 1y agoThis creates a new concern. Is it still safe to host projects that compete with Microsoft on Github? The answer may be no.
- thewebguyd 1y agoThe time for that concern was way back when Microsoft acquired github. Instead of moving elsewhere, everyone just doubled down on making github the defacto place to host our most critical open source infrastructure. How many times do we as a community have to get bit by Microsoft before we learn?
- arp242 1y agoThese platforms constantly ban people for inscrutable reasons without any recourse, except perhaps for "support by media attention". I see no reason to assume this is any different, and that the ban is unrelated to their work on LibreOffice or anything else. GitHub (and GitHub accounts) do not seem to have this problem as near as I can tell. For better or worse, I've found that reporting spammers and bad faith actors is a largely a pointless exercise as it will all go in a black hole.
- Simulacra 1y agoMicrosoft being Microsoft.
- jackdawipper 1y agoUS is full of shitty corporates
- gnabgib 1y agoA LibreOffice dev gets locked out of his /hotmail account/ and neowin turns this into a Microsoft developer ban? Specious reporting. Mike doesn't make this claim in the original source: https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/microsoft-anybody-home/ https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/microsoft-anyb... Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
- alanhaha 1y agoSome strange idea comes to my mind. I suspect that Mike Kaganski's account was marked as a Russian account. And Microsoft is cutting support to Russian accounts.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wintermute2dot0 1y agoI had this exact same thing happen to me a while back. Luckily the account was one I had created just for this one user group who required I become part of their AD domain to access MS Teams. I tried getting back into the account and hit the same roadblock this guy did. I didn't care that much and just abandoned the account. I figured it was something that Microsoft would soon fix, as it was such an obvious cluster; I'm surprised the issue still exists.
- altogether 1y agothey band lawyers from Germany already... I would strictly ban them from the European market. I mean why should an us company manage office stuff in a cloud from eu people.