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

  • @drcobaltjedi
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    1 month ago

    I’m also going to recommend Linux Mint, its a really friendly beginner distro. I’ll presonally recommend you do Linux Mint Debian instead of normal linux mint since regular linux mint is Ubuntu based and really loves snaps.

    The default user env is cinnimon which is going to look a lot like Windows 10 making the transition easier. If you want to install steam its literally a command line away from installing and then its ready to go. That and Steam personally pushing for Linux as a viable gaming platform there are a lot more games now that work out of the box now on steam.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 month ago

      Mint doesn’t use snaps at all by default. It has a regular .deb repository supplemented by Flatpaks.

      • @drcobaltjedi
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        11 month ago

        Really? I swore I’ve been told that the regular mint uses snaps since ubuntu loves them. I haven’t used mint since snaps were a thing eitherway.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 month ago

      I’m saving this to note down that the flavor I’m most likely to want is “Cinnamon”. I didn’t really understand the rest, but thank you!

      • @drcobaltjedi
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        21 month ago

        Would you like an eli5 for some stuff you’ll see in the linux community/forums/etc?

        I’d personally be happy to give you a quick rundown of some stuff.