true, but they had a local presence for reasons that benefited them; legal, operational, commercial, strategic, whatever. So I'll take it as good news.
What's going to happen the next time the government or judges called them from something? They don't respond and the judge are going to order the ISP to stop forward data from and to them, blocking them on Brazil. It's not even going to be the first time, brazillian judges have had fights with whatapp before, and for a couple of days whataap have been blocked. Whatapp move like 10% of the Brazilian economy, so it was solved quickly, Twitter is nowhere as relevant and nobody is going to care when its end blocked.
Earlier this year, Moraes ordered X to block certain accounts, as he investigates so-called "digital militias" that have been accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the government of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro.
That sounds very "on brand" for the company these days.
Should journalists start referring to the platform as "the far-right hate speech platform formerly known as Twitter"?
I never said it was a good thing. I was just commenting on the aggressive nature of Brazil LEO. Microsoft in particular bends over backwards for any gov't or LEO. I can only assume the Feds got substantial leverage over them, perhaps by manipulating the antitrust cases. Same tactics they use on the smaller guys works on the big corps too I guess. Top customer of MS legal compliance is by far the US Fed with 5000-7000 blanket surveillance of Americans presumably part of PRISM. Second highest is definitely Brazil, and they are very demanding and impatient.
Back in 2016, MS was advertising Customer Lockbox as an answer to gov't intrusion into customer privacy. It sounded perfect. Customer gets encryption keys so MS cannot comply with lawful interception requests. I think Apple does this, and it works well for them and their customers. However today I cannot tell if MS lied, dismantled this aspect of this feature, or buried it such that no one uses this ability.
While we're talking about MS playing snitch, watch out for Windows 11 and the TPM hardware requirement. Sure this might be a useful tool to fight ransomware scammers, but it definitely can also be used to fingerprint a PC and make everything potentially traceable. Look up machine identification code aka yellow dots for a nifty parallel in the printer world (pun intended).
afaik he's still barred from running for office until 2030, as a result of undermining the validity of the electoral process - the same process that once elected him btw...
He'll be 75yo in '30. Still viable as a candidate.
And, for '26, he's still the one deciding who's going to run for his party. One of the options is his wife Michelle Bolsonaro, a vulture from the same flock as her husband.
Now with Twitter out of the equation* they'll have a harder reaching their base.
EDIT: actually scrap that. It's only its offices, the service will be still available. Fuck it, now I'm sour.