Now they’re going on a slippery slope. Just what EU needed to convince them entirely.
Does anybody read the articles anymore or just post titles?
The EU pushed for Microsoft to lock the account because they were dealing with Russian oil. It was a Ukrain war sanction
Or at least that’s what the article said.
In this instance, the cutoff was sought by the European Union (EU), in an attempt to pressure Russia to back off its assaults on Ukraine.
Really burying the lead there. They were shut off due to government sanctions, not arbitrarily by Microsoft.
Really, really dishonest to demonize Microsoft who are in the middle of this. And I say that as someone who hates Microsoft and most of what they do! But this was intentionally painful sanctions decided on by the governments of 27 member countries. 🤷♂️ Don’t sell to Russia…
*burying the lede (it’s a term from old press printing)
It’s burying the lead. As in, you put metal in the ground.
Most style guides and standards accept either spelling, especially when writing for general audiences.
For strict, formal writing, “lede” is still preferred.
https://getproofed.com.au/writing-tips/idiom-tips-bury-the-lede-or-bury-the-lead/
Most style guides and standards accept either spelling, especially when writing for general audiences.
Not everywhere is America.
I agree with your statement and simultaneously find it hilarious thrt it is in response to a comment with an Australian link.
49% owned by Rosneft while another 49% are owned by “UCP” (Russia’s United Capital partners). Basically a 100% russian refinery in India…
I think the main thing to focus on is govs should realize they need to ditch Windows, cause what’s stopping dumbass America (Tr*mp) from filling a sanction against a country he doesn’t like that week?
Your framing is inconsistent with the information provided in the story. Actually, I think your version is more deceptive than the original, although both could be made more transparent, too.
Enforcing sanctions is not Microsoft’s purview though. Unless their TOS specifically cover rthis scenario, which I doubt.
The article implies Microsoft is prepared to admit breach of contract terms, rather than risk EU distrust (or further distrust, after the Khan/ICC debacle).
“Sorry government, I can’t enforce your sanctions, my ToS don’t allow me”
Do you really think this works?
It’s the way it should work. A private company can only be compelled to enforce a government demand under due process of the applicable jurisdiction. Ensures trust through transparency.
If both US and EU foreign policy can dictate who suddenly gets cut off from Microsoft services, trust in those services will erode.
After denying Outlook access to Khan due to (non-judicial) US sanctions against the ICC, multiple European public and private orgs are implementing exit strategies from Microsoft and all providers with a US presence.
The reason leveraging Microsoft as a foreign policy weapon works is because they dominate the market, and Eorope have grown complacent since end of WW2. All thta seems to now be changing.
It’s the way it should work. A private company can only be compelled to enforce a government demand under due process of the applicable jurisdiction. Ensures trust through transparency.
They are compelled to enforce a government demand under due process of the applicable jurisdiction. For a multinational corporation, the applicable jurisdiction are all the jurisdictions they operate in. Since multinational corporations exist to funnel profits into their host country, that country has the ability to compel them under due process in other countries.
You might argue that it’s not good for companies to be this large, and I’d agree. You might also argue that specific sanctions aren’t good, and I’d agree. But the idea that a companies ToS should supercede jurisdictions and that they shouldn’t be curtailed by the governments under which they operate is fundamentally corrosive to the concept of statehood.
Sanctions exist to restrict trade with other countries. This can’t work if companies can just ignore sanctions, and I don’t want e.g. european companies to ignore sanctions against Russia.
There’s nothing to indicate that Microsoft was legally obligated to suspend their service in this case, is my point.
They’re not legally obligated to deny their services to customers who have legal disputes totally unrelated to their contract with Microsoft.
It’s like getting the power company to cut your electricity because you have unpaid parking tickets - It’s probabkly a great way to get parking offenders to pay what they owe, but it undermines trust in general, yes?
Of course there is an indication that Microsoft was legally obligated to suspend their service in this case:
In this instance, the cutoff was sought by the European Union (EU), in an attempt to pressure Russia to back off its assaults on Ukraine.
If they wish to operate in the EU, they have to follow some of the EU’s demands.
It’s like getting the power company to cut your electricity because you have unpaid parking tickets - It’s probabkly a great way to get parking offenders to pay what they owe, but it undermines trust in general, yes?
It’s more like “getting your accounts frozen because you operate in a country that has sanctions against it”. Which is a totally normal thing to do. Companies cutting off other companies that operate in countries which attack other countries doesn’t undermine my trust - companies continuing to operate in such countries undermines it.
Enforcing sanctions is not Microsoft’s purview though.
that should be true, but for some reason, these companies are hiding their glee behind governments as they go above and beyond what the sanctions require.
It is if they want to operate in the country imposing the sanctions.
Which hits them harder it’s always just about the money. They won’t stop supporting genocide in other countries so fuck the capitalist pigs.
Control is never just outsourced; it’s also abdicated through that outsourcing.
If software is a service, then service can be denied at any time. Host your own infrastructure, and reclaim digital ownership.
That goes for large businesses and individuals.
My company spent last decade automating moving entire organizations and all their software to the cloud. This decade weve been automating moving entire organizations off the cloud. Sometimes to private clouds but most of the time to on prem hardware just like the old n times.
So many were sold a magical fairytale of huge cost savings and reliability but were greated with an entirely different reality.
I will never understand why businesses want to let someone else control their infrastructure. Putting your money-maker in someone else’s hands is just telling them that it’s OK to give you the squeeze later.
Someone else controls your infra no matter what. Say you’ve got a data center, you run all your applications on site. Great, until your ISP or electrical or DNS provider or registrar fuck you.
In many cases, I’d say it’s because they aren’t IT or IT Security focused businesses. A pizza shop, clothing retailer, or whatnot, needs IT stuff to function, but that’s not the focus of their business. Hiring an IT team at IT worker rates is expensive, especially as a support/tertiary role for your business.
We moved out entire stack to the cloud, knowing full well we’re gonna bring it back in the future. We hosted our apps on traditional servers and server maintenance was a nightmare, we didn’t have the capacity and our application uptime is critical to our operations, so we strategically moved everything to the cloud so we can not worry about the maintenance for a bit while we took the time to rebuild our infrastructure properly with load balancing and high availability, and refactored our applications, we’re now slowly moving things back.
Because managers really like giving contracts to those giving a presentation in an exotic resort and have a great service agreement so all blame for mishaps can be shifted away from their career.
Also, at least in here, lease costs (like all as-a-service things) are considered to be flexible while own hardware and specially workforce are static costs. And no one wants to increase static costs, even if it’s clear as daylight that flexible cost only flexes upward over time unless the company suddenly shrinks by quite a lot.
Whoever decides to trust Microsoft will always get burned. Amazon and Google not much better.
This case is the result of government sanctions, not Microsoft arbitrarily doing shit.
You mean besides abandoning whole fields of research and selling out to the government routinely?
I’m down to criticize Microsoft on things they actually deserve to be criticized on. This scenario isn’t one of those, though.
So if I paid a lawyer to hold certain documents for me, but the lawyer was afraid the EU would somehow hurt their profits, and then the lawyer said, you can’t have your documents, with no judicial review, no hold ordered, no orders, you think that’s ok?
Companies operating in certain jurisdictions are subject to various forms of export control and other types of compliance policies when dealing with foreign entities. I’m sure this Russian company was aware of that when choosing Microsoft as their cloud provider. They probably should have chose a Russian cloud provider instead, though that might have exposed them to more of Putin’s corruption while protecting them from anti-Putin sanctions. Kind of a lose-lose either way for them I guess.
Yep, i’ve seen this exact pattern at three diffrent companies - the cloud repatriation movement is gaining serious momentum as CFOs finally see the true long-term costs versus the initial promises.
The cloud is often more expensive though.
in house IT got fucking lazy or not funded properly likely both
Yeah, it is very important to consider how dependant you are on third parties. At the very least the more dependence the more power they have over you. But also how screwed you are if they just go under.
- If you use SaaS they can interrupt your use at any time and you can only react (for example demanding a reversal or lawsuits).
- If you host closed source software they can’t interrupt service on an existing contract but can legally require you to stop using it if they don’t renew the contract. (And if the company goes under you can likely get away with using the software as long as it doesn’t need code fixes.)
- If the software is open source you can continue using the software indefinitely including making code fixes. (Maintenance may be expensive as it is now your problem but that can be costed and an exit plan made if required.)
The new model is SAAH (Software As A Hostage). You would think that overpaid CTOs and CEOS would be able to anticipate something as obvious as this. “The Cloud” just means “someone else’s server”.
That cloud marketing was great at give idiots false sense of ownership
You’d think russian assets would work harder not to be dependent on US clouds.
deleted by creator
One extreme defensive move for an enterprise would be to implement full redundancy for anything not hosted on-premises. Redundancy for data protection is relatively straightforward, but having multiple email, supply chain, or e-commerce services is very expensive and disruptive. What are the odds that it would even be needed? Whatever those odds were, they just became much higher.
This is simply dumb. The odds are greater than zero. you must have a disaster plan. It sucks that MS did this but I don’t have much sympathy for anyone that decided to save money by ignoring DR.
Especially a utility of all things.
Critical Dependency As A Service
For when you need to outsource the potential crippling of your business to potentially hostile third parties.
I swear to god I keep wondering when people are going to wake up to the fact that Cloud is such a fucking rip off on every level.
