A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.
Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.
United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. “I’ve had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I’ve filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times.” Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, “We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online.”
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas
Ah, good news in regards to gaming, esp. Steam gaming!
Steam invested quite a bit of energy into “Proton”, essentially a new kind of compatibility layer. If you remember tinkering around with wine and winetricks from years ago, that’s basically gone nowadays.
For most games, just go into the Steam settings for that game, and under “Compatibility”, check the box.
Then click download, and play. That’s it for most games 🎉
Also check out protondb.com - it’s basically a community-sourced database cataloging how well Steam games work on Linux.
Good luck on your Linux journey, and feel free to ask questions if something comes up! :)
And if you’ve been letting Steam store your save data, you should find that your save files for most games will still be available in Linux! Mileage will vary per game of course, but jumping between OSes has been pretty seamless for me!
I got a steam deck last fall and so far the only game I’ve run into that doesn’t work with my windows cloud save is Dark Souls 2