Be aware that neowin.net has facebook . com and .net scripts to tell them you visited the site.
It is not just this site. This is plague and has to be stopped.
I don't really see the story here. Just the LibreOffice dev got locked out of his account. Seems like an automated system that failed, which isn't exactly a revelation that false positives occur. Feels like this is meant to stir up OS war drama and make it seem like Microsoft is trying to prevent LibreOffice from succeeding.
1) I doubt this is Microsoft conspiring against a LibreOffice dev. It's not impossible, but it seems way more likely that it's just an automated process that is misfiring.
2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even more opaque than the processes they replace.
3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you can) accordingly.
Given Microsoft's previous behaviour towards competitors and open source software, it seems almost certain to me that Microsoft is doing this deliberately. They've got decades of bad faith behaviour at this point, so why give them the benefit of the doubt?
Do not trust Microsoft, Google or any other company to provide backups... Have at least one backup/copy of your own data on your own hardware. I have onedrive, google-drive and dropbox copied to my nas as well as my desktop and laptop. Other projects are in github or gitlab and copied on my nas.
That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so that I can have an extra level of safety.
The moment I saw nytimes' reporting that a dad lost access to his Google account because of "nude" photos of his baby and couldn't get help, I de-Googled almost completely and am now using fastmail as my main email account. My other inboxes are only kept just in case someone reaches me via those old addresses.
I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
Some strange idea comes to my mind. I suspect that Mike Kaganski's account was marked as a Russian account. And Microsoft is cutting support to Russian accounts.
I had this exact same thing happen to me a while back. Luckily the account was one I had created just for this one user group who required I become part of their AD domain to access MS Teams. I tried getting back into the account and hit the same roadblock this guy did. I didn't care that much and just abandoned the account.
I figured it was something that Microsoft would soon fix, as it was such an obvious cluster; I'm surprised the issue still exists.
they band lawyers from Germany already... I would strictly ban them from the European market. I mean why should an us company manage office stuff in a cloud from eu people.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 60.2 ms ] threadAnd everything on European goverments being available as FOSS OS friendly, not Windows/macOS/iOS/Android only.
"Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms."
https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
When hundreds or thousands of companies live and die by your platform, you can't just close accounts arbitrarily.
Either that or you get split up for monopoly. Take your pick, but this shit doesn't work
2) I cannot prove that this (opaque) process has been retrofitted to use LLM's in its decision making, but I would not be the slightest bit surprised. Neural networks are, intrinsically, even more opaque than the processes they replace.
3) Using Big Tech as a place to backup your work/files/etc. is fine, as long as you have a local copy, and sometimes you have no choice but to deal with them. However, any time you're dealing with Big Tech, even if they have no particular animus towards you, they may suddenly be unavailable (to you) without explanation, for an extended period of time. Plan (as best you can) accordingly.
That said, I should better automate my project backups... I also need to get my backup (redundant) NAS at a friends house (vpn) so that I can have an extra level of safety.
I knew that if I didn't do that, the same thing would some day happen to me.
Mike doesn't make this claim in the original source: https://mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2025/07/25/microsoft-anyb...
Hotmail/outlook support isn't great (I've had a similar challenge but it was eventually resolved), google support is worse (a similar challenge, eventually denied).
I figured it was something that Microsoft would soon fix, as it was such an obvious cluster; I'm surprised the issue still exists.