Microsoft has fired two employees who organized an unauthorized vigil at the company’s headquarters for Palestinians killed in Gaza during Israel’s war with Hamas.
The two employees told The Associated Press they were fired by phone call late Thursday, several hours after a lunchtime event they organized at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington.
Both workers were members of a coalition of employees called “No Azure for Apartheid” that has opposed Microsoft’s sale of its cloud-computing technology to the Israeli government. But they contended that Thursday’s event was similar to other Microsoft-sanctioned employee giving campaigns for people in need.
“We have so many community members within Microsoft who have lost family, lost friends or loved ones,” said Abdo Mohamed, a researcher and data scientist. “But Microsoft really failed to have the space for us where we can come together and share our grief and honor the memories of people who can no longer speak for themselves.”
Microsoft said Friday it has “ended the employment of some individuals in accordance with internal policy” but declined to provide details.
Google earlier this year fired more than 50 workers in the aftermath of protests over technology the company is supplying the Israeli government amid the Gaza war. The firings stemmed from internal turmoil and sit-in protests at Google offices centered on “Project Nimbus,” a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021 for Google and Amazon to provide the Israeli government with cloud computing and artificial intelligence services.
We all knew that Microsoft wasn’t a good company. Let this news motivate you to switch to GNU/Linux.
just deleted windows earlier and am no longer dual booting 👐 Linux is pain but the pain is worth it
I am waiting for the gaming industry to make it worthwhile. Anti cheat is a bitch
The goalposts have moved to hopefully their final position
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99% of my games don’t work! I’m not switching!
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About half of my games don’t work, I’m not swiching!
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20% of my games don’t work but the ones that do are all perfect, I’m not switching!
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10% of my games don’t work and Valve is pushing for functioning anticheat with EasyAntiCheat and BattleEye, i’m not switching!
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You are here → 0.1% of my games don’t work because of holdout companies being assholes and going out of their way to specifically block Linux despite the massive success of the Steam Deck, I’m not switching!
At some point you have to ask yourself if it’s the companies thats holding you back or if it’s really actually you who are holding yourself back. Switching is gonna always require some kind of sacrifice or another, and currently that sacrifice has never been this minimal.
Either that, or you are just the kind of person who enjoys being a contrarian and has no interest in actually contributing anything meaningful.
For those who can’t for whatever reason, look into the LTSC version of windows at https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
Open-source Windows and Office activator featuring HWID, Ohook, KMS38, and Online KMS activation methods, along with advanced troubleshooting.
No reason to give Microsoft any money, every reason not to
This seems like it should be more of a “write-up” type of offense, rather than skipping straight to terminating employment. This is a vigil, not a protest. Microsoft: “how dare you mourn those killed by a genocidal regime.”
BTW - what is everyone’s favorite non-MS suite of office programs? I’ve been using Only Office, but curious what others think.
Unionize
As always, fuck Microsoft. Literally been saying this over 30 years already.
Don’t use windows, switch to Linux. It’s free, actually reasonably secure, actually works, won’t spy on you, won’t force shit on you just to make you pay more.
Don’t use Microsoft azure. It’s overpriced and runs in Linux anyway.
Don’t use Microsoft 365 online shit. Outlook functions horrendously bad, teams is a sad joke. I unfortunately have to deal with teams every day because government customers thought it was a good idea and EVERY call there is some shit. People can’t get in, people don’t have audio, people ALWAYS have the wrong audio device selected no matter what and need to spend the first 5 minutes to get their audio and video working. It’s shit quality compared to zoom or Google meet or open source alternatieves…
Stop giving this piece of shit your money
Hold up. Azure runs on Linux? Lol could have guessed that, but still is funny.
Azure runs on windows. Hosts run a modified version of Hyper-V.
At least, they did last I checked.
I work at a place that uses Azure to run everything (not my choice…).
Everything we have runs on Linux containers, Linux Azure functions, and a VM that runs Ubuntu.
You can run Windows on Azure but you certainly don’t have to.
You can use teams in a browser, that’s really all it is on dekstop anyway.
I wasn’t asking about a Linux client for Teams, I was asking about an open source alternative to Teams
Or a flash drive. You can just boot it from a flash drive to see if you enjoy it. Set your motherboard BIOS to boot from USB before booting from an internal drive. When the flash drive with Linux is plugged in, it’ll boot from that instead of booting Windows.
remember this when they talk about being gay friendly or anything else even remotely “woke”
