[TheOtherHobbes]

MS are notorious for blacklisting IP ranges from providers like Linode, which makes it impossible for a small biz to run its own commercial system.

I'm not surprised they also keyword block, because Outlook flags Microsoft's own marketing messages as spam.

There really needs to be some kind of global Digital Bill of Rights which provides legal recourse from these giant sclerotic algo-run oligopolies.

MS, Meta, Amazon, YouTube and Apple all have policies that can nuke SMEs on a whim without consequences, often without even noticing, after their algorithms make a wrong decision about imaginary "abuse".

[ghusto]

> There really needs to be some kind of global Digital Bill of Rights which provides legal recourse from these giant sclerotic algo-run oligopolies

Agreed. I think the problem is mainly that communicating what is wrong in a way that politicians can understand is difficult, and the people who governments hire to make them understand, are not incentivised to do so here (they're typically corporate types, good at ticking boxes, not so good at technology).

Making the EU understand issues such as why Apple's monopoly is a bad thing is easy in comparison, because everybody has a phone and everybody understands "shops". Even so, I'm impressed that went the way it did. I don't have much hope for politicians understanding what MS et al. are doing to mail though.

[nonrandomstring]

This is about Microsoft, a corporation so giant and unaccountable that it's able to hide behind complexity. The OP's email issues may even be a non-malicious expression of that complexity. Nonetheless, the result is opaque power, from which European tech must rapidly divest dependency.

But there is a larger pattern to acknowledge here. It's about unaccountable digital privilege and the ability to wield technology for capricious harm.

This week I've been interviewing US government tech workers about the misuse of the SSA "master death file". If you're in this file you're digitally "deleted from society", after which all credit cards are automatically cancelled, bank accounts frozen, so one cannot get paid, see a doctor, travel or function in US society. DOGE are actively working to consolidate and centralising systems to make it "easier" to nudge undesirables to "self-deport".

In order to do this, huge amounts of illegal activity are already afoot, but most people, including judges, are not technically able to comprehend what is being done or what technofascism looks like.

If we want a "Bill of Bytes", it is going to need some very wise and far sighted thinkers who understand the nature of digital harms, and it will need to apply as much to governments and individuals as to private enterprise.

Existing "cyberlaw", including things like "computer misuse" are looking decidedly stone-age in the face of 21st century "layer-8/9" threats.

[TheNewsIsHere]

> …”the SSA "master death file". If you're in this file you're digitally "deleted from society", after which all credit cards are automatically cancelled, bank accounts frozen, so one cannot get paid, see a doctor, travel or function in US society.”

That is the general idea and working theory, but in practice experience has taught me that the MDF doesn’t actually reliably perform this function. As always, it comes down to implementation.

I’ve handled the estates of multiple deceased members of my family, and in that capacity I have witnessed that the result of your death being reported to SSA varies wildly even across businesses in the same industry.

My favorite is ISPs. At least two of the major national ones don’t actually seem to close accounts upon death, even if notified, with no services active and the account settled to $0.

I still receive bills even after notifying the sender of the account holder’s death. There are still financial services accounts with no activity that seem never to close.

I assume that many businesses are just using open accounts they know belong to dead people in order to artificially inflate their customer counts.

The federal government and its agencies very quickly update their databases with additions to the death file, and that seems to stick. Private sector is a crap shoot.

[nonrandomstring]

Praise inefficiency! It actually seems a really useful garbage collection mechanism. And such a lame tool to abuse, if indeed the points made about "weaponising" it are accurate. I'll post link to the episode here when it's out.

[nonrandomstring]

As promised, here's an interview with Alt US Digital Service (AKA "We The Builders") with some eye opening talk about misuse of digital systems to harry and bully US citizens into "self-deportation".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43903037

[joaopbnogueira]

Yeah, this is kind of the point. I'm not sure there's even a legal process for this as this is entirely under MS (opaque) internal control and we're not even based on the US.

[walth]

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

We had the same thing happen with any email with 2f<domain> anywhere in the message body on Google workspace

The "2F" URL decodes to slash / and a third party registered our 2f<company>.com (probably for nefarious purposes)

That kicked on the automatic filtering on messages that had URL encoded links and started blocking them.

Eventually, we had to register 2fgoogle.com ourselves to escalate the issue.

[joaopbnogueira]

Ok, that was smart. I bet it was fixed quickly.

[BOOSTERHIDROGEN]

Which cloud server providers are safe from sporadic Microsoft IP blacklisting?