We really need some consumer protections around emails.
Imagine if your landlord could just intercept your mail on the same way.
It's part of our identities.
We're living in the Wild-West of the internet
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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While I agree with your point, this is more like signing a rental agreement allowing your landlord to enter your apartment unannounced and without you being present, and then crying about it when they do exactly that. I wouldn't use hotmail as a throwaway account, let alone to develop the main Foss competitor of office.
Well now i know Linux is ready to switch over to.
Thanks Microsoft!
why are people that are building FOSS software not using FOSS software to build it? Gitlab? Forgejo?
People are complicated and FOSS isn't as simple as all or nothing.
Sometimes people have things setup before they discovered FOSS - it's hard for me to give up my gmail account from age 14, even though I run my own domain now.
Sometimes FOSS gets captured - Microsoft owns githib now, which makes tough decisions for all the projects hosted there.
I'm on the outside so forgive me if this is a dumb question, didn't Linus Torvalds create GitHub?
git is a very complex undo/redo tool designed to simultaneously track the changes made to multiple documents by multiple users while being efficient with managing disk space and other resources. (It also has other clever tricks it can do). It was created by Linus Torvalds, current development is led by Junio Hamano.
Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon made GitHub.com, which was eventually sold to Microsoft. GitHub does two things well: -You can easily clone any project hosted with them to your own git repository using the command 'git clone https://github.com/[Username]/[ProjectName]' -The rest of the public website is basically a looking glass for everything git does under the hood natively (but with a nice webUI instead of a cold command prompt).
Personally I lost faith in GitHub when it started offering Copilot assistant. We're only a two heartbeats away from Microsoft saying that using Copilot for any of your projects code constitutes Microsoft contributed to that project as a precursor to Microsoft saying it basically 'owns' all this open-source stuff. Embrace, extend, extinguish (I recommend everyone run docker and GitTea to create a personal clone store (give your favorite projects insurance) and that all developers move away from GitHub)
Thanks for the reply, cheers.
Eat shit, microsoft
EU should really create rule to use only EU FOSS tech for goverment services. For all member states.
This tells me LibreOffice has become a threat to Microsoft, and I'm here for it.
If anyone else is curious what it's like, LibreOffice's site is here. Highly recommend.
using Microsoft Word for too long makes me break out in Tourette's
Writer is so much more understandable
Word is proof that there is no God and that we're all alone in the cold vacuum of space. Word is every traffic light being red. Word is getting an itchy arsehole because you couldn't quite wipe yourself properly.
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It tells me microsoft is petty
Large corporations have zero empathy for competition.
What will their quarterly report say? Think of the stockholders. (/s)
If large corporations have zero empathy for their competition, why do they have such an easy time coordinating raising grocery prices well above the free market optimum?
Large corporations are owned by capital holders. Often it's the same set of capital holders owning different corporations because they've diversified their assets. It is not in the interest of their owners to have a free market race to the bottom.
So they make deals. And when socialists force the government to forbid those deals, they find Schelling points where they can make deals without making deals. It's not collusion; it's covid supply issues; ask anyone. And with neoliberal/neocon dismantling of regulatory agencies they can just do it.
So they have empathy for other large corporations. But it goes further than that. At least for now, capital assets are still managed by people. Those people are flesh and blood. They eat, they socialize, they make friends, and they care about their friends and acquaintances. And this caring is embedded into the choices that they make at work, where they compete against their friends and acquaintances.
So large corporations have empathy not just for other corporations, but also for rich people in general. Golden parachutes, nepotist appointments, favors, massively overpaid C-suite execs and expensive consultancy jobs from each other's hobby projects.
Corporations bleed trillions of dollars for the sake of empathy with their competitors and with private individuals, they just won't accept a competitor to bourgeoisie hegemony.
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Probably has something to do with more and more things like this happening:
https://cybernews.com/news/france-lyon-microsoft-office-tech-adoption/
Anyone who has projects on Github they care about, you might wanna move it to self-hosting or another git host while you still can, because once MS gets tired of killing e-mails, Github repos are probably going to start getting sniped next.
Even if you stay on GitHub, definitely mirror to another host. Git is designed to be distributed, why not make use of that capability!
This isn't a conspiracy...
It's the reality of using Hotmail as a business account in 2025.
Which is frankly nuts.
But the author even says the same thing happened to them before too
Using Hotmail for anything was already a bad idea, using it for an open-source dev account is worse. I don't understand why they haven't switched to something else 20 years ago.
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No real reason to be using a hotmail account in this day and age, even less so if you're a developer of a direct competitor for Microsoft.
Eh, that's the problem with email - it's much harder to change and migrate, because you can't guarantee others will use your new email, much less find out who somehow still has the old email to send messages to and expects a reply from.
This is an argument for having your own domain for emails. There is an annual cost but at least your address isn't locked to a specific provider sokcd you can change some DNS settings to point at a different mail server.
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What isn't made clear is if this had anything to do with him being a LibreOffice developer. Or just the usual Kafkaesque bullshit that happens when someone's account gets flagged for "suspicious activity" or whatever and they cannot get a real human being to help or reverse the problem.
Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail's account recovery process.)
Doesn't he live in Moscow? So it might just be due to the sanctions.
Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)
That could be it. What is certain is that these big corps really don't want to pay human beings to sort out issues so if you get caught in the middle of some BS you may have no recourse out of it.
Relying on American companies is a liability in of itself.
While there is corruption everywhere and on a standardized basis, there are of course countries with higher levels of corruption, the US is the #1 source of corruption and criminality in the world. Additionally it's the ideological centre for global oligarch/criminal gangs.
Microsoft's monopoly in Windows and Office alone results in extraction of hundreds of billions of dollars from companies and individuals all around the world.
Why do I feel like any customer support has been replaced by ai and it has led to this show of shit?
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By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.
Whenever I see a story of "some guy who relies on working loses access to it and suddenly can't do anything anymore" I think "this can never happen to me". Which means there's a whole category of problems you're suddenly never going to see. It also means you're less naive. So just don't vendor-lock yourself in. Don't put a log-in for an account which you don't control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.
On top of that, you'll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I'm just saying, if you don't even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you'll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.
I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it's probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn't vendor-lock yourself in.
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