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Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians

(www.theguardian.com)
873 points helsinkiandrew | 3 comments | 25 Sep 25 15:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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politelemon ◴[25 Sep 25 16:11 UTC] No.45374648[source]▶
I am seeing several kneejerk "Microsoft bad" reactions here, which HNers don't do for many other companies. I encourage many of you to read what is written.

They listened to their internal staff and stakeholders and public pressure, and did terminated the contract instead of ignoring it or doubling down.

That is a good thing.

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nashashmi ◴[25 Sep 25 16:32 UTC] No.45374974[source]▶
The Guardian last month reported a meeting between Microsoft CEO and Unit 8200. That means this comes from high level and they did not cancel because of protestors but because of media publicity.
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1. pmontra ◴[25 Sep 25 18:06 UTC] No.45376538[source]▶
I guess that one needs some help to transfer "swiftly" 8000 Terabytes of data. At 1 Terabit per second it would take about 18 hours.

  8000*8 Tb / 60s / 60 / 24 = .740740...
  24 h *.740 = 17.76 h
But is 1 Tb/s a thing?

I think this has been another case of "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway" (Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981). Maybe rack units of disks? For very important data I would pay for the privilege of removing my disks at a very short notice.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

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2. rolph ◴[25 Sep 25 18:20 UTC] No.45376758[source]▶
that would be an interesting service contract.

the rack and infra are yours; the storage media and all contents are mine.

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3. coredog64 ◴[25 Sep 25 19:01 UTC] No.45377321[source]▶
AWS Snowball can be used to get data out of S3. They copy it onto portable devices, ship them to you, and you can copy the data off without saturating your DirectConnect bandwidth.