If anybody within Microsoft is able to do something, please contact me -- jason at zx2c4 dot com.
It should be illegal for these companies, just like utilities, to deny service to anyone or any entity in good standing for dues.
There is little hope for getting this through in the US where most politicians of any stripe hate the public, and the ones that don't have hardly any power. But it might be possible to do this in the EU.
Then, we non-EU folks need to apply for Estonian e-residency [1] which may get us EU regulatory coverage.
More regulation won't help here, because the regulation-maker is itself the hostile party.
What would help is full control over the supply chain. Hardware that you own, free and open-source operating systems where no single person is the bottleneck to distribution, and free software that again has no single person who is a failure point and no way to control its distribution.
Also “there is no appeal possible” should be plain illegal.
"In addition to the information referred to in paragraph 1, the controller shall, at the time when personal data are obtained, provide the data subject with the following further information necessary to ensure fair and transparent processing: the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, referred to in Article 22(1) and (4) and, at least in those cases, meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing for the data subject."
EDPB Guidelines on automated decision making: https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/article29/items/612053 especially page 25 is relevant
C‑634/21 is also somewhat relevant to understand how courts have applied ADM in general context of credit reporting https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... though it didn't specify what information actually needs to provided for 13(2)(f).
I don’t know the number. But personally I think using the services and ‘simply’ only use them if the disappearance isn’t catastrophic and have the price be low or free while it works isn’t too bad a trade-off.
Admittedly that’s a big ‘if.’
If this requirement was in place they would be a bit more careful about terminating accounts because the cost equation would incentivize it. Maybe they would be more careful in their automation or require more than one level of human review before cutting off access.
These companies are gatekeepers for their platform. It isn’t crazy to require them to act more responsibly.
Start worrying about the erosion of your rights as a consumer.
The contrasting approach, where one designs a platform that remains secure even if the owner is allowed to run whatever software they like, may be more complex but is overall much better. There aren’t many personal-use systems like this, but systems like AWS take this approach and generally do quite well with it.
"Financially, it was a year of record performance. Revenue was $281.7 billion, up 15 percent. Operating income grew 17 percent to $128.5 billion." https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html
So don't be so naive to tell us that 1-2 additional people to handle the appeal process is anything but rounding error in their balance sheet.
It wouldn't. For example, before Gmail, email was often free or nearly free (bundled with your internet service), but in most cases, you could talk to a human if you had issues with the service.
What we couldn't do is turn these business models into planetary-scale behemoths that rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. In essence, you couldn't have Google or Facebook with good customer support. I'm not here to argue that Google or Facebook are a net negative, but the trade-offs here are different from what you describe.
Do not discount complete, total, utter, profound fucking incompetence as the driving reason behind this.
Getting the business verification was an astounding shitshow. With a registered C corp and everything, massively unclear instructions, UI nestled in a partner site with tons of dead ends. And then even after all the docs, it took another week because -- in an action that nobody could possibly have ever foreseen -- we had two different microsoft accounts due to a cofounder buying ONE LICENSE of O365 for excel and doing domain verification because it suggested it.
<Tin foil hat on> Microsoft doesn't want to allow software that would allow the user to shield themselves, either by totally encrypting a drive, or by encrypting their network traffic! </Tin foil hat on>
I don't think Microsoft cares (about anything besides making mo' money), but there are plenty of (state) actors that can influence the decision-making at Microsoft when it comes to these issues.
No tinfoil needed.
That's what Big Tinfoil wants you to believe!
https://www.tiktok.com/@etong_winter_palikir/video/739554877...
Microsoft the corporation may only care about making money, but a lot of very high ranking folks within MS Security aren't just friendly to intelligence agencies, they take genuine pride in helping intelligence agencies. They're the kinds of people who saw nothing wrong or objectionable with PRISM whatsoever, they were just mad they got caught, and that the end user (who they believe had no right to even know about it) found out anyway. The kind of people who openly defend the legitimacy of the FISA court.
This aren't baseless accusations, this comes from first-hand experience interacting with and talking to several of them. Charlie Bell literally kept a CIA mug on a shelf behind him, prominently visible during Teams calls, as if to brag.
Remember - Microsoft was the very first company on the NSA's own internal slide deck depicting a timeline of PRISM collection capabilities by platform, started all the way back in 2007. All companies on that slide may have been compelled to assist with national security letters. Some were just more eager than others to betray the privacy and trust of their own customers and end-users.
I was always convinced that Skype was bought by microsoft so CIA/US intelligence agencies to have listening capabilities.
The first thing Microsoft did after the Skype purchase was making it easier to tap into the calls by removing p2p calling and routing calls using centralized servers.
If Microsoft amounts to a sentient entity (i.e. is able to care about things), we have a bigger problem.
If we put the wall of metaphor between us and that interpretation, it still remains likely that "users shielding themselves" is of primary concern to Microsoft's bottom line.
At least it reached its goal if it entertained you
It also reminds me of the case of the entire family who lost all of their payment-linked individual accounts including business data and an academic dissertation because the son allegedly behaved inappropriately with a bot. Collective punishment on top of technofeudal instant banishment.
Microsoft even supports Wireguard in Azure Kubernetes Service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
?
They've since moved on to the SSS strategy: Ship, Slip, Slop.
Who cares if it's OSI-approved or not, a line saying "M$, Google, and the like need written permission for every use case" would help to make those leeches honest. Just learn from the JSLint example.
plus n-word dot com hosts information about the plus n-word license which purports:
- The software will not be used or hosted by western corporations that promote censorship
- The software will not be used or hosted by compromised individuals that promote censorship
- Users of the software will be immune to attacks that would result in censorship of others
That would be both hilarious and horrifying if the only thing stopping the corporate dystopia is that Microsoft doesn't want to say the N word.
Valkey is better because all of the new development work happens on Valkey, not because of the license. If the actual developer changed the license, that would be a different situation.
In digital services there's no such thing. There's only a damned corporation employing idiots who don't care about community.
But yes, there's a lot of critical single maintainer projects.
It's outrageous. MS is simply enforcing some Government crackdown on encryption software that would interfere with backdoors.
This is the same thing that's happened every time I've tried to have a Microsoft account. I don't think Microsoft wants to have customers who aren't rich.
Nothing in the Apple site or phone stuff would even clue the user in to what was happening, much less how to resolve it.
This is stupid. If Microsoft wants people to stop writing kernel drivers, that's potentially doable (we just need sufficient user mode driver equivalents...) but not doing that and also shortening the list of who can sign kernel drivers down to some elite group of grandfathered companies and individuals is the worst possible outcome.
But at this point I almost wish they didn't fix it, just to drive home the point harder to users how little they really own their computer and OS anymore.
Windows users are in a tough spot, but with the dawn of Copilot, nobody should be surprised. Frankly, those who remain with Windows after this latest betrayal have chosen their fate.
Ah. So almost every single business in the world… suckers?
because most managers I know in my professional life go with the vendor that buys them dinner or slips them tickets for box seats.
No one is calling an executive meeting to discuss banning an OSS dev’s account.
I wouldn’t be surprised if NSA already had a list of these applications and the strategies on how to cripple them or worse, compromise them.
"Currently undergoing some sort of 60 days appeals process, but who knows."
.. and the op said:
"I have tried to contact Microsoft through various channels but I have only received automated replies and bots. I was unable to reach a human."
... which is a roundabout way of saying you did not spend lawyer hours and you did not contact them through channels that they cannot ignore: registered, physical mail, from a lawyer.
I'm sorry for these difficulties, truly, but don't tell me you can't reach a human when you most definitely can reach a human. From my own experience with an organization at least as calloused and indifferent as MS[1], as soon as I sent a real, legal communication I had real live humans lining up to talk to me.
[1] Pacific Gas and Electric
Sometimes, it's both incompetence AND malice.
Honestly, anyone still using Windows probably deserves it.
If it weren't for the current administration, I'd say it's time for regulatory action.
The FTC wasn't doing their job between 1980-2020 because of their ridiculous standard of, "if it doesn't raise consumer prices, it must be allowed." This lead to massive consolidation in many industries which of course ended up raising prices and hurting consumers anyway.
Recently they've had some wins but overall they're still failing to do their job.
Because the Democrats were better at keeping them on a leash? No. Clinton was in charge 30 years ago and blew it.
> The Department of Justice, now under Bush administration attorney general John Ashcroft, announced on September 6, 2001, that it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...
The old model where the user decides which software or apps to run on their machine, is basically already replaced by a whitelist system that is managed by companies who have no interest or obligation to approve developers. Factors like ”being an individual”, an open source developer or god forbid reside outside the USA, you rely on a combination of L1 support doom loops, unjustifiable high recurring prices, kafkaesque and changing requirements, internal inconsistencies. Windows is the worst, but all platforms (except Linux) suffer from this and you can and will get hurt, delayed, and gaslit. If you haven’t, it’s just a matter of time.
I have been blocked for 6 months now with Digicert code cert renewal, for my app Payload, which will never get any media attention. The app doesn’t matter though, the approval process is per-entity (usually, a company). The point is that nobody gives a shit, because they have a monopoly/cartel and they start the validation process after they take your money.
If you are not an app publisher, the best way I can describe it is the ”pre-let’s encrypt” era of SSL certs, but more expensive, strict and ambiguous. In fact, I’ve never gone through any worse approval process in my life, and that includes applying for residency in two countries, business licenses, manual tax filings etc.
You can/should write your congressman (or whatever they are called in your country) and get better laws in place.
More specifically, it used to be feasible to distribute software between me (the developer) and my customers (the users) without a mandatory gate keeper that looks at me and decides whether I’m worthy, am from the right country, have good intentions etc. This is currently necessary on all desktop and mobile platforms except Linux. There is exactly 1 gatekeeper per platform (the platform owner who controls your device), except windows, which effectively have like 3-4 CAs that’s shrinking every year due to mergers and private equity ownership.
Software curation and reputation systems can be good, either with whitelists (say steam) or blacklists (say antivirus). I can see some use cases for it, but they should be within user control. What we have now is worse than a fearmongering Stallman rant. It’s incredibly bad, both pragmatically and philosophically.
2) they got 120,000 views, 400 retweets, and 1.7k likes in ~12 hours. that is a good amount of awareness. certainly more than i would get from a tweet. certainly more help than whatever you are doing here.
ah, well thank god you came in here and set them straight.
i am sure the veracrypt maintainer is appreciative of your service.
They won't let you secure your drive the way you want. They won't let you secure your network the way you want (per the top-level comment about Wireguard). In so doing they are demonstrating not just that they can stop you from running these particular programs but that they are very likely going to exert this control on the entire product category going forward, and I see little reason to believe they will stop there. These are not minor issues; these are fundamental to the safety, security, and functionality of your machine. This indicates that Microsoft will continue to compromise the safety, security, and functionality of your machine going forward to their benefit as they see fit. This is intolerable for many, many use cases.
I think it is becoming clear that Microsoft no longer considers Windows users to be their customers any more. Despite the fact that people do in fact pay for Windows, Microsoft has shifted from largely supporting their customers to out-and-out exploiting their customers. (Granted a certain amount of exploitation has been around for a long time, but things like the best backwards compatibility in the industry showed their support, as well.)
I suspect this is the result of a lot of internal changes (not one big one) but I also see no particular reason at the moment to expect this to change. To my eyes both the first and second derivative is heading in the direction of more exploitation. More treating users like a cattle field and less like customers. When new features or work is being proposed at Microsoft, it is clear that it is being analyzed entirely in terms of how it can benefit Microsoft and users are not at the table.
No amount of wishing this wasn't so is going to change anything. No amount of complaining about how hard it is to get off of Windows is going to change anything; indeed at this point you're just signalling to Microsoft that they are correct and they can treat you this way and there's nothing you will do about it for a long time.
Open source developers are doing Microsoft a big favor when they support Windows and publish Windows builds and installers. It's a substantial effort, and apparently that effort isn't appreciated.
If all open source software dropped support for Windows, it wouldn't really affect the open source community that much. It would definitely cause headaches for Microsoft however.
I agree that supporting Windows helps its ecosystem.
But also open source software on Windows is an important gateway to the free world. When you are already used to Firefox, LibreOffice and VLC, you might as well switch to Linux painlessly, but if those didn't run on Windows, switching to Linux would require relearning everything.
I've been thinking, and said before, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows users as a captive audience they can exploit for whatever the corporate executives fancy at the moment. It seems more like a gradual transition.
In any case, it seems to be getting more clear that Linux is destined to be the best OS for power-users.
Their first big win was when they banned the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court from accessing any of the court's documents, then deleted all of those documents. Now they're going after slightly less important enemies of the state. That bar will continue to drop as long as it's allowed to. And let's not kid ourselves: if you develop or use encryption software that Mossad can't break, you are an enemy of the state.
My advice is don't use a MS account if you can, at least not for anything critical. You don't need it for development, you can use 3rd party CAs for signatures.
Even if one doesn't want to maintain that project for purely private reasons, recommending Bitlocker as the drop-in-replacement always made it smell fishy to me.
More importantly, if development seized with no public comment, that would be one thing and may strengthen the "he got arrested" theory. However, there was some final communication, specific recommendations to rely on Bitlocker of all things, a new version of Truecrypt was released solely for decrypting existing disks and then the web page was removed, including a flag set on robots.txt to ensure it wouldn't appear on archive.org. All this concurrent to a crowd funded source code audit that, in the end, did not find any server issues or backdoors (I recall some speculation back in the day, that either known code quality issues or an intentional backdoor could have caused the exodus).
That all makes it hard to link this to an arrest of the main developer, though I dislike speculation without any hard evidence and if there is no new information, I'll keep this filed under "there is no answer".
I think he was trying to scream “Run!” without actually screaming “run”.
Yikes
https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://www.true...
> The contempt of court was caused by Levison providing the keys printed in a tiny (4 point) font, which was deemed "largely illegible" by an FBI motion, which went on to complain that "To make use of these keys, the FBI would have to manually input all 2560 characters, and one incorrect keystroke in this laborious process would render the FBI collection system incapable of collecting decrypted data."
(And to be clear, that's all they ever saw of said keys)
>When my oldest son [Linus Torvalds] was asked the same question: "Has he been approached by the NSA about backdoors?" he said "No", but at the same time he nodded. Then he was sort of in the legal free. He had given the right answer, [but] everybody understood that the NSA had approached him.
so the assumption here is that TC were also asked to accept "contributions" from bioluminescent individuals, and chose not to. "just use Bitlocker" was a deafeningly loud dogwhistle, don't you think?
Windows and macOS are just too risky to do any business with. Waste of all resources.
Everything else about complying with the wacko age verification law is up to distro builders.
Please correct me if I am wrong, this is what I read here.
Sure, if you're all in on MS365 (like all schools here in the Netherlands), Windows may be somewhat more handy with its native apps and all your stuff there with a single log-in.
For the vast majority of people MS365 is a requirement, but really the issue is that even minor fixes require the command line on Linux and that makes it unusable.
No it isn't actually, not for the majority, my wife (former Sales Person and Manager) uses Google office tools and used LibreOffice Write and Calc for years successfully.
I myself am quite different. I have thoroughly had it with my current iPhone and am eyeballing /e/OS, before that I really started to find Android boring, before that Windows mobile (the nice one with the cards). I switch Gnome, KDE, some other DE (now getting ready to try Niri) every year or 2. I don't get the struggle, for me a new env is like a present (even though I normally hate presents). So much niceness to explore, so much to optimize. I love it. But I'm also one of those guys that reads the oven manual and tries all functions in week 1.
I'm not weird, all you people are weird.
You can install Fedora Linux, Linux Mint or Manjaro, and it's more user friendly than Windows 11 and macOS.
Look at popular unix based OS's - Android, MacOS, iOS..
Whats the first thing they do? Take the command line out back and shoot it. Whereas for linux users, their is this l33t h4cker festishization of only using a keyboard to do everything. All these distros have an extremely robust CLI under the hood, and an afterthought quasi GUI on the surface. Just good enough for grandma to check her email and watch youtube.
Also I hate linux repos with a passion, because they are optimized for CLI usuage, and (like the whole OS) the GUI parts are a total unoptimized afterthought. Never mind that they are a dumping ground for whatever code anyone shits out, with virtually zero management or curation. With a CLI you don't see this, with a GUI it's a total mess.
I'm fine with app stores, but they need to be actively managed and curated. If not, I far far prefer just downloading .exe's from the source.
Which is 90% of the use of a computer. And Steam is taking care of the other 10%.
My wife has used Linux for many years successfully and has never used the CLI once.
Linux is the most obvious, but there are numerous flavors of BSD as well.
> and yet... still unusable by the mass majority of people.
That info is 20+ years out of date. Distros like Suse and Ubuntu made Linux "click, click, click, it's installed" more than two decades ago. i've watched complete non-techies switch to Mint Linux long-term, the only intervention from me (their resident techie) being showing them how to boot up the USB stick installer.
Any OS that requires even once going to the command line is unusable for 99% of the population (and for me I just shouldn't ever have to).
If there isn't enough outcry they will go forward and disable more signing keys related to things like torrent clients, VPN software, eject UBO from the edge store etc etc.
Atleast now I'm a bit more certain that VC is indeed safe.
And now they're locking down Window OS, hard. Expect github and vscode to follow.
Are there some ways to combat such decisions legally?
I recently de-listed my app in the store and closed my Microsoft developer account. I was wrong for having bothered with it; just a waste of my time for no benefit. Stick to your own deployment.
Anyway, even if you could get your own cert it would be same thing: MS could revoke or blacklist your indicate cert (though usually the grounds for doing so are much less shaky than your account being suspended for vague “tos violations”)
The Microsoft Store account was painful to set up, I'll note. My developer account had also been cancelled by Microsoft for unknown reasons, and I ultimately had to set up a brand new one. New email, new name. My new account has my middle initial because I couldn't clash with the existing, closed account. My first and last name alone are banished forever from the store.
The "same thing", as you concede, isn't the same thing. Quantity has a quality of its own: one happens all the time and we're reading an article about it happening right now. In the comments there's another prominent maintainer who it happened to, and it happened to me personally! That's three right here! The other happens so infrequently that people in this same HN thread are complaining that it isn't happening enough. Can you find an example that's like Veracrypt and WireGuard? In practice, it seems they rarely do this, even when they should. You can actually view the list under "Manage computer certificates" > "Untrusted Certificates." On my computer the entire list is 20 certificates.
I'm standing by my suggestion, 100%. These aren't equivalent risks at all.
I just migrated to MS artifact signing and, thank the lord, had an actually easier time getting verified than I did with the Sectigo and Comodo in the past. I’m sure I’m not representative of anyone else’s experience but having already had a developer account (with a different email and without an Azure account!) that I had already been using for the Microsoft Store might have helped, as well as the fact that I had a well-established business history (I’ve heard businesses younger than 3 years can’t get verified??), but reading all the comments here makes me very uneasy about the future.
It’s good to know the HSM route isn’t a complete non-starter. The main reason I panned it is that when I started looking into this I found that a number of companies that had previously offered the HSM route had done a bait and switch and were now keeping custody unless you were big enterprise (meaning willing to put up with 10k/yr fees). I did find a few that would allow OSS devs to sign their work, but read horror stories on Reddit and elsewhere about their freezing the account and issuing no refunds if you ask them to issue the cert in the name of your LLC or corporation instead of with your personal name (which I expressly did not want). Also, they actually were more expensive than Azure artifact signing even after the HSM cost was taken out.
I have stay far away from that process for a long time. Apple MacOS seems like the worst in that department IMHO.
I grew up being able to download software and install it, and actually prefer that model (relying on reputational trust of the party publishing it, my own verification from other signals researched, or sandboxing techniques where appropriate).
Most users may not be aware, but a rare gem of a version of Windows that refreshingly doesn't even come with the store (or a bunch of the other unwanted bloat) is IoT Enterprise LTSC.
As a lifelong Windows user, the premise of Microsoft controlling what goes on my PC is revolting. I'm buying a tool from them, not a set of handcuffs. If it was some non-profit, open-source group running the store I might be more inclined to trust it. But ultimately the only gatekeeper on a product I own should be me. Otherwise I don't really own it, which leads to problems like this one.
And of course, it doesn't affect their earnings and there are no consequence, or significant, so they won't care and won't respond or tell what went wrong.
Can one move legally? Sure. But then it effectively is a combo of who blinks first and who can hold their breath longer.
If you publish to any closed platform including ios, mac, win, android, this is the risk you run and a condition of operating you will need to accept.
Veracrypt has kernel drivers. Microsoft's ability to control what you can sign is specific to kernel drivers, and Microsoft's trigger finger around bans exists in the world where bad drivers BSOD machines.
In general this isn't your problem.
It could have grown into a massive, self-service testing playground where any developer could submit their product and put it through an arsenal of basic, automated evaluations (e. does uninstall leave tidbits behind?), with paid upgrades to more tailored services. They could even publish scores to help consumers coarsely compare workmanship across different vendors, and encourage an emphasis on quality across the whole ecosystem.
Instead they decided to just become overpaid bouncers who take your money, check your ID, and don't even bother about what you bring through the door.
> ...it seems like they instituted an identity verification policy, didn't notify me about it, and then I guess they suspended accounts who didn't do the verification.
So, make sure you verify your account? Check spam folder regularly? Log in via web interface at least once a year?
What ? On my computer ? Microsoft really has some nerves. My Microsoft account is scheduled for deletion.
https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/f8eac...
You can also roll you own encryption if you are not stupid and naive. Probably a question of self-reflection.
The newest frontier AI models can easily find 0-days in all major software stacks, while the two biggest open source security tools on Windows can’t even ship patches.
But aside from one or two experimental attempts, also presented at BlackHat https://web.archive.org/web/20250914062843/https://portswigg...
- the consumer has nearly lost access to high end plausible deniability