Microsoft and Proprietary Software
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How Authorities Erased a Historic Black Cemetery in Virginia
Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906.
“This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.”
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Half-baked thoughts on software subscriptions
Software subscriptions and online tracking are two sides of the same coin: they’re attempts to make regular income off continual effort. Depending on your perspective, they either make software and websites cheaper to use, or they come with nasty strings attached.
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Whatever Happened to Russia’s Vaunted Cyberoffensive?
On the back of an index card, they began drafting a list of the most critical government databases to preserve: a list of the country’s population; the land ownership registry; the tax system; the anti-corruption and procurement systems; and the justice, education, and health care systems. As he left the embassy that day with a list of Ukraine’s most precious digital assets in hand, a distinct thought passed through Maxwell’s mind: “Don’t mess this up.”
Over the next several months, Amazon Web Services helped Kyiv migrate over 10 petabytes, a colossal amount of crucial government data, from across almost 30 government ministries to the cloud and out of the reach of Russia’s invading forces. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, would later credit the move with helping to preserve the Ukrainian government and economy.