Google deleted a guys entire account for having pictures of his own son in the pool. Google also deleted a colleague’s master thesis because he allegedly had a pirated book in his Google Drive - he owned the book, we have local stores that sell .epubs.
Now Microsoft deleted a LibreOffice’s developer account.
Do you know what all of these examples have in common? Appealing doesn’t work, “your” files were never yours if you give up control to a corporation, US big tech can’t be trusted.
You don’t have to go fully libre software (though maybe you should!) but at the very least use software that isn’t taking your content hostage: have local copies, only accept local copies that are automated and using open formats.
Do you have a source for these two? I’m not saying you’re wrong - I would like to share the stories! I agree that US big tech companies cannot be trusted.
I know that saying this here is preaching to the choir, but don’t use Microsoft or Google products. None of them. They can and will take things from you. They cannot be trusted.
On the 17th of last month, Reddit user u/deus03690 shared how Microsoft locked their account, which, among other things, contained 30 years of “irreplaceable photos and work” on OneDrive.
Who the Fuck is so stupid to store important information online without an offline backup?
If you’re not a computer nerd, it’s common to think Microsoft has a bunch of backups and that’s the whole point of the cloud. He’s not particularly stupid, he just got scammed like thousands of others.
In a just world, he’d successfully sue MS for damages.
Lemmy tends to forget that we’re almost exclusively computer nerds. I’ve been the voice to my family and friends (hopefully not to a religious point lol) about these such issues, and they’re generally pretty receptive. But they aren’t going to go out of their way to learn what I have, nor should they. I am merely my network’s trusted IT pro, be it game servers for friends or most recently Immich for extended family.
If claiming our digital rights is framed as a free for all, we will never secure any protection before it’s too engrained to object. Together, hell look at Lemmy itself, we can not only educate people on these issues, but be the IT role that actually knows how to run whatever service in a secure and truly private manner.
PS I have to give Immich some love here, no matter how many stories like OP’s you show to someone, they aren’t going to settle for less. And now that Immich is an option for my network, its features make it barely a question for those moving off of google. Another TB of storage? That will be 40$ one time. No nags, no bullshit. And the context search is freaking amazing, without ever having to train some corps model off of (more) of your images.
It is not about whether a cloud provider has the necessary failure prevention techniques. This is about sovereignity over your own data.
If you store your data in a cloud, and it is not your cloud, then the owner of that cloud can cut off your access to this data at any time. With the usual contracts, your means to counter such moves are moot at best.
Having important data in your own hands is vital. I do not put data on the net that i cannot afford to lose - either, I don’t care (e.g. like the contents of this post, if it gets deleted, I’m not hurt), or I do have the data here, in my own home, on my own servers, on my own backups.
You’re right of course, but look at this like someone who’s not a nerd. You don’t have to maintain your own car. You don’t have to cook your own meals. You don’t have to fix your own plumbing or electricity. If you get sold a lemon, or were fed spoiled food, or your apartment is unlivable, then it’s not really your fault and you often have legal recourse.
But you do have to learn a lot about the computer, and if you do it wrong everybody just calls you stupid. I’m lucky it’s not like that for dancing.
This guy is a LibreOffice developer. He should be smarter than the average Internet Idiot. By far. By all means, he should know not to trust Microsoft.
And comparing this to maintaing a car or house is comparing apples and oranges. In those cases, I have rather clear legal means to get my rights. Online, not so much. And even worse for those living outside the US.
Fair, I was referring more to u/deus03690.
I’d even call him/her an idiot. Assuming the “30 years of irreplacable data” means that he/she is around on the internet for at least half the time, even this person should have learned from many cases like this that online only storage is not viable, especially for important data.
Its still stupid to trust anyone with your only copy of your important data, who can just disable your account in an instance without thinking twice about it.
Millions of people sadly
I don’t use onedirve or google drive. The cloud is wack.
Local SyncThing folder sharing ftw
As much as I’d love hating on Microsoft, I think this gross incompetence & shitty bureaucracy over malice from Microsoft. Kaginski was locked out of his account & Microsoft made it annoyingly difficult to recover. This is something I have also faced using Microsoft’s enterprise products, something we pay a lot of money for.
The bane of my existence is visiting Microsoft community posts, where “MVPs” advertise their years of experience before suggesting the most banal advice ever.
DISM and SFC fixes everything, right? Right.
Don’t forget to install the latest drivers!
I know what would help. Do you mind sending the details to me again although they’re already in your original post?
On sending the information:
Microsoft bot: this issue has been marked as closed due to inactivity
What about a link to another post that isn’t related at all that shows the same pattern of us recommending DSIM and not being able to read?
I’m am too far removed from windows to understand what this comment means 😅
It’s “defrag your hard drive” in a new hat and even less useful
I mean, I’ve had some luck professionally with strange intermittent issues being resolved simply by running those commands. For intermittent issues once I get stumped I’ll run the sfc/dism commands while scanning the event viewer for any other leads and about half the time I’ll leave the user with a “okay monitor and let us know if the issue returns” and sometimes that’s enough to get rid of the issue
True, but the fact that sfc gets thrown out as a fix to everything under the sun makes it look like your OS is a self corrupting piece of shit.
Which i know, accurate, but you shouldn’t advertise
SFC is the system file checker, used to check a Windows OS install’s files for any corruption and to replace them with legit working files. DISM (if I remember right) is a tool for turning a Windows install into install media, and has some similar features for ensuring the installed OS has no corrupted file issues.
So pretty much the option to “Verify Integrity of Game Files” for Steam Games, but for the OS. And also by Microsoft, so of questionable usefulness/functionality.
I spent almost 5 years in the trenches of tech support in a Windows environment. I still used those commands as a hail mary when I didn’t have any other ideas and needed some extra time to research. I think I’ve only seen it actually help three times.
Loosely speaking…
SFC ≈
# pacman --database --checkDISM ≈
# pacstrap ...
Oh, MS gave them a seal of approval and blessings to go get cred with the hacker anti establishment crowd?
How generous of them!
Is this is the same Microsoft that wants EU to give github developers a lot of money to fund open source projects?
“Please Fund projects done by others, loved by all, which we can come and embrace, extend & extinguish… pretty please!”
…and train our AI 👹
This is the only reason, and convenient low level access to scrape for vulnerabilities (which they can use, not fix).
“AI” is taking your job but please fix this output first!
The user said Microsoft reached out 10 days later, asking them to fill out a recovery form and promising to help them “every step of the way,” but they haven’t heard from the company since.
More like nevery step of the way, am I right?
Fuck Microsoft
Use !codeberg@programming.dev instead!
Happy to see there is a good GitHub alternative
I didn’t realize Codeberg offered email services. When did that start?
I mean that Developers in general should move away from Microsoft services such as GitHub.
Developers on GitHub take notice. You damn well know Micro$oft will screw you in the end. They’ll slip a legalese phrase into a revised ToS and suddenly they’ll own your project or stop you from accessing it.
the wildest part of this is that the libreoffice dev still uses hotmail
like honestly, microsoft doing him a solid by getting him off it
Could be worse. Could have been an aol address.
Back around the turn of the millennium (to make me sound aged and wise) I did AOL tech support. I ran into so many people that used AOL email as a storage medium. I received death threats from a guy that lost his doctor thesis work because he was storing it in chunks attached to AOL emails to himself. That isn’t even close to the dumbest thing I encountered in that ring of hell.
My mom’s primary e-mail account is AOL, which she actually pays for.
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