[HN Gopher] It is no longer safe to move our governments and soc...
___________________________________________________________________
It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US
clouds
Author : Sami_Lehtinen
Score : 955 points
Date : 2025-02-23 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (berthub.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (berthub.eu)
| oldpersonintx wrote:
| you've had twenty years to build an EU-native alternative...what
| do you have to show us?
|
| the EU has settled for using US tech but just taxing the success
| with fines
| unixhero wrote:
| GDPR is a great incentive to build better products. Pre-gdpr
| there was a lot of sloppyness.
| jfengel wrote:
| What they have to show us is two decades of not wasting time on
| problems someone else has solved. Capitalism at its finest.
|
| Now someone has thrown a monkey wrench at the invisible hand,
| and they have to duplicate a lot of effort. They lose, we lose.
| But at least they've stopped tying their future to an
| unreliable business partner. Divorce sucks for everyone.
| morkalork wrote:
| That's basically it isn't it? Try going to any institutional
| investor asking for money to build a sovereign replacement
| for Google Docs or whatever in the last 15 years.
| nadir_ishiguro wrote:
| People have tried and you're right, there wasn't a lot of
| buy-in.
|
| It didn't help that these attempts were torpedoed
| aggressively by Microsoft, Google et al.
| senand wrote:
| That's true. They were numerous attempts to introduce a
| European alternative, which (more-or-less) failed. The US cloud
| providers are years ahead. However, the EU is suffering from
| that; the US companies pay some taxes, but far less than you
| possibly believe, and it conversely doesn't have any tax
| revenue from their own companies. Not to mention the political
| and data independence that are now more necessary than ever.
| qaq wrote:
| EU actually built solutions that people that care about $ use
| like OVH and Hetzner.
| wiether wrote:
| I have never worked with companies that chose OVH or Hetzner
| (or Scaleway or any other EU provider) for something else
| than doing things cheap.
|
| They don't care at all about the provider being a local or
| European company. They just want the cheapest option.
|
| Which usually means using the same server to host
| dev/UAT/prod, and also using the extra storage available to
| store company data unrelated to the workloads hosted on the
| server.
|
| Whereas the companies that are using big clouds are more
| focused on doing things with more care, and trying to avoid
| as much disaster as possible.
|
| But I guess having PII data exposed on the web from an
| Hetzner server is better than having everything encrypted on
| AWS...
| ranger_danger wrote:
| There are many EU-native cloud alternatives.
|
| https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl...
|
| Hetzner is another big one that is for some reason not listed.
| blagie wrote:
| Most of them are horrible.
|
| I'd love to have a good Google Docs alternative. No one has
| made one. Nextcloud is the closest we've got, and I use it
| sometimes, but it's pretty bad.
|
| It's a lot less hard to build in 2025, and hopefully, someone
| will now.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE
|
| https://github.com/dream-num/univer
|
| https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite
|
| https://github.com/firebase/firepad
|
| https://github.com/prosemirror
|
| https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online
|
| https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc
|
| https://github.com/gobby/gobby
| darthwalsh wrote:
| Can't comment on the other options, but a tool that
| requires proprietary Google Cloud Firebase is not a great
| option for ditching Google.
| soundnote wrote:
| Proton Docs has seemed fine to me.
| otterley wrote:
| Hetzner isn't really a full-service cloud provider. They
| provide machines and storage for rent. It's the first rung on
| the ladder to becoming a cloud provider, but they've got a
| long way to go.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| What is missing from here that prevents you from calling it
| full-service?
|
| https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
| otterley wrote:
| Spend some time comparing with AWS, GCP, Azure, or even
| Oracle Cloud or Alibaba Cloud, and it should be pretty
| clear.
| 42lux wrote:
| They launched S3 Storage a few weeks ago so I guess they
| are on their way.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Like, of those, which provide managed services like storage
| (blob and smb), ampq message queue, databases in a fairly
| cohesive way and easily accessible from C#?
|
| I just checked a handful but didn't see any.
| ulfw wrote:
| Wow propaganda bullshit straight on Hackernews. This what it
| has come to. After over a decade here I didn't expect to see
| the deterioration coming, but it's not surprising considering
| the state and division of your country.
| blagie wrote:
| I mean, isn't the US saying that taxing imports is an ideal
| source of revenue?
|
| But at the end of the day, there was never any real incentive
| to make an EU-native alternative. Now, there is. The US is in
| an uncertain state. Will American be great again? A fascist
| dictatorship? Argentina? Who the heck knows. Right now, we have
| a lot of speculation about what's going on and precious little
| information.
|
| Unreliable partners give a very, very strong incentive to have
| critical infrastructure local.
|
| Beyond that, what's the downside? Before, it risked triggering
| a trade war. Seems we're there already, and going local just
| gives a stronger hand.
| graemep wrote:
| The British government only fairly recently decided it needed
| to remove Chinese cameras from sensitive sites. They were
| complete happy to, for a long time, to give that power to a
| country that is an actual fascist dictatorship.
|
| Governments are too short termist to care. Its probably OK
| for the next few years so keep it cheap
|
| The danger is not just governments. Its businesses, and even
| consumer systems. If another country can brick all your
| vehicles or look through all your spy cameras or take down
| your telecoms then they have a great deal of power over you.
|
| This will only change after something happens.
| blagie wrote:
| As a point of fact, China is not, in fact, a fascist
| dictatorship. North Korea is not a fascist dictatorship
| either. Neither is or was Cuba, or medieval kingdoms with
| actual kings and warlords.
|
| Fascism is a right-wing ideology was widespread throughout
| all of Europe before WWII, and especially took hold in
| Germany, Austria, and Italy. It was at the opposite end of
| the political spectrum from e.g. Stalinist Russia.
|
| It is not a synonym for "bad government," "dictatorship,"
| "violent government," or similar.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| OVH and Hetzner are quite decent and popular. The alternative
| does exist and I've used it a bunch, it works.
| codethief wrote:
| Most companies I know (and/or have worked for) pay a lot of
| attention to where exactly their stuff is being hosted, partly
| due to GDPR. It might not be a Europe-native hoster but in most
| cases it will still be a data center in Europe (operated by
| AWS/Azure/GCP).
| senand wrote:
| Which doesn't protect these companies. The CLOUD act allows
| the US to access the data even if hosted outside of the US,
| if it's a US company - since 2018. That has been a looming
| threat ever since, but is now more perilous than ever.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| You and your colleagues probably need to learn more about the
| CLOUD Act, because it has changed the rules you thought you
| were operating under.
|
| A useful resource: https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-
| and-transatlantic-tr...
| llm_nerd wrote:
| For decades, the technology center of the universe has been
| Silicon Valley. No matter where you lived -- Canada, the UK,
| Germany, India -- if you wanted to be serious, you moved to the
| US. And if you had a company, being acquired by a Silicon
| Valley company was basically the goal. In the same way that you
| had to move to LA if you wanted to do anything serious in the
| entertainment industry.
|
| So every innovation and success ends up being sucked into the
| gravity well of Silicon Valley. Every talent ends up having to
| move to the US to be credible. Soon everything is "American".
| The great innovation center of the universe, fueled by
| foreigners and acquired foreign businesses.
|
| Will this continue? That is hugely to be seen.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Uh, isnt Hetzner HNs favorite host?
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| We're using Hetzner and BunnyCDN, never store any data on US
| servers. The decision for it is independent of the current
| political situation, mostly to avoid the US legal system as
| best as we can and to ensure GDPR-compliance.
|
| There are plenty of other alternatives, e.g. Softmaker Office
| and Papyrus are German word processor and office applications.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The EU is a pretty capitalist organization (I mean the single
| market is a big part of it). I think they have trouble
| competing with US tech companies because of our economies of
| scale, and widespread use of anti-competitive business
| practices, general inertia, and the tendency of the US to brain
| drain the rest of the world. I guess, fortunately for you guys,
| we're trying to throw away many of our advantages.
| ebiester wrote:
| There are enough tech people that are ready to brain drain
| from here right now - some well placed money would go a long
| way right now if Germany, France, the Netherlands, or another
| tech hub was ready.
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, it is call free trade. Paying to someone else. You know
| the trade deficit thing? Selling these things made it smaller.
|
| You will surprised, but American businesses benefit from
| selling their services.
| megous wrote:
| Locally (in my country) managed virtual machines, or managed
| hosting services (1990-2000s variant of "git push" (ftp) your
| PHP app somewhere and have the website running, that US
| companies re-invented as "git push" to deploy, while somehow
| managing to invert the "app" hosting vs VM cost relationship at
| the same time, making managed hosting more expensive).
|
| At work we rely on "big" clouds offered by major telecom
| companies. AWS is seen as ridiculously expensive "religious
| requirement" to gain trust, if we'd ever decide to market our
| product to US customers, but little else.
|
| Big benefit of smaller countries and local apps. We can more
| easily fit apps on one to a few computers and don't need your
| hyperscaling clouds to serve the entire world, because our
| world is 10 mil. people.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry in
| Europe. If I was in Europe, I would never use any US Tech
| products.
|
| Maybe Linux will end up making big inroads in Europe, replacing
| Windows and MicroSoft Office and Office 365 along with Google
| Docs.
| y-curious wrote:
| I thought you were being serious til I read your last
| paragraph. Well done
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| A new term seen recently: "The MAGA cloud companies":
| Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon.
| scarab92 wrote:
| Except, MAGA hate all those companies. They view them as non-
| ideologically diverse breeding grounds for progressives.
| michh wrote:
| That was true for Trump 1. This time round, things appear
| to have changed. The CEOs of these companies sitting front-
| row at the inauguration is the most visible sign of their
| newfound mutual love. MAGA have found out these companies
| will just bend to their ideological will in the interest of
| shareholder value and it shows.
| scarab92 wrote:
| Maybe in future, but for now these companies are not
| liked in MAGA-land, and simply attending the inauguration
| of a president hasn't really changed anything.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| It has demonstrated those companies willingness to
| comply. I don't agree that "it hasn't changed anything".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| It may not have changed how the rank and file see them,
| but that's not who they are currying favor with.
| atlgator wrote:
| Not just for Trump 1. It was true right up until January
| 1 of this year. Their "conversion" just started and it
| remains to be seen whether there is any depth to it or
| it's a publicity stunt to avoid Trump's ire over the next
| 4 years.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| MAGA hates basically everything modern. What matters is if
| those companies bend the knee. And in 2025 they do.
| danieldk wrote:
| Three of them (AGA) had tech bosses at prime seats at the
| inauguration. MAGA might hate them, but the Musk, Thiel,
| etc. crowd that seem to be in control of the While House
| are big tech. MAGA was only for the MAGA electorate to get
| into power. Sadly poor/angry voters will happily vote
| against their own interests if you can make them hate
| (immigrants, liberals, DEI, woke, whatever does the job).
| odiroot wrote:
| Why Apple? Oracle would probably fit better with others. Or
| even IBM.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Why Apple?
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/01/20/tim-cook-joins-
| bi...
|
| > Why not Oracle or even IBM.
|
| a) They're not as prominent as the 4 mentioned
|
| b) as an acronym, "MAGAFIO" doesn't have the same punch to
| it. It's cluttered. We get the idea that the 2nd tier tech
| oligarchs are on board anyway.
| baxtr wrote:
| I get your point. It's almost impossible at the stage we are at
| right now.
|
| But what's the alternative?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| There's not a great alternative in the next few months,
| perhaps not in the next few years, but in the longer term
| European countries should take this as a critical warning.
| Failing to cultivate a domestic software industry in 2025 is
| like failing to cultivate a domestic manufacturing industry
| in 1825.
| drysine wrote:
| Russia can do that, so can Europe.
| watwut wrote:
| The law about EU data having to be on the servers located in EU
| already exists.
| croes wrote:
| Doesn't matter thanks to the CloudAct.
| jorvi wrote:
| Yup you already can specifically sequester your data to
| Microsoft's or Amazon's EU-only servers, and even smaller
| companies like 1Password offer to store your data on
| 1password.eu instead of 1password.com.
|
| However there can be weirdness sometimes. I vaguely remember
| a case where Microsoft had to hand over EU data to a US law
| enforcement agency due to a court order, but giving that data
| would violate Irish law. I know there's a new variant of the
| EU-US Privacy Shield, but with the current US administration
| that could get ignored very easily.
|
| Which raises the question: can for example Microsoft-the-US-
| entity in de jure sense cleave off Microsoft-the-EU-entity
| whilst still maintaining de facto connection between the two?
| If not, there are definitely big opportunities abound.
| miki123211 wrote:
| That's not the way.
|
| What Microsoft might end up doing is following the China
| model, essentially giving control over their EU servers
| (probably only those in a special region) to an EU company,
| while still supplying the software and taking a (very
| large) cut of the profits.
| g8oz wrote:
| Data residency is not data sovereignty.
| anaisbetts wrote:
| I just don't know how this makes any meaningful difference
| towards the threat model of the US gov't becoming compromised
| if a US company still controls said servers and the CLOUD Act
| allows the US gov't to freely subpoena the contents of those
| servers. The companies involved will still do what the US
| says because they are forced to.
|
| Like, the conversation will go, "Get us this data"; "EU law
| says we're not allowed to"; "We don't care, do it or we shut
| you down."
| hedora wrote:
| The EU courts agree with you:
|
| https://nextcloud.com/blog/eu-court-withdraw-personal-
| data-o...
|
| Any cloud provider that operates in the US and claims to
| offer data sovereignty is lying.
| vachina wrote:
| European companies are so deeply entrenched in American
| software ecosystem I can't even. Just this past week my EU
| company deployed an agentic LLM hosted on Microsoft Azure with
| models developed by... Microsoft, on top of the existing GPT
| hosted on the same platform. They also recently moved their
| entire in-house HR platform to Oracle.
|
| It's no mistake China banned foreign companies with infinite
| money from setting up shop there. It is dangerous and expensive
| in the long run.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| But would they still if the EU used tariff like policy to
| prohibit it? "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago,
| the next best time is now." Make the law, enforce the law,
| encourage the behavior and outcomes necessary to achieve the
| success criteria.
|
| As someone with an infra background a lifetime ago, I am
| confident I could spin up Kubernetes and Deepseek R1 in OVH
| or Hetzer within a few days. The primitives exist, the EU
| simply needs to lean into cultivating and supporting them
| (orgs, platforms, etc) to push EU entities consuming these
| services away from US Tech. Perhaps the tech stack is a
| national security interest, just as a manufacturing base and
| supply chain is. Better to be prepared than to be entrenched
| in the US Tech ecosystem and then suddenly be held hostage
| for reasons.
| petercooper wrote:
| If you look at other countries/regions that impose high
| tariffs, their companies continue to buy and use American
| technologies and absorb the cost (to their local customers'
| detriment).
|
| I'd certainly enjoy the case studies of European
| enterprises jumping from full-scale Azure and AWS
| deployments to OVHcloud or Hetzner, though. That'd make for
| some interesting reading.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| But what if they outright ban it, as the US was going to
| do with TikTok (for national security reasons)? This it
| the tech services version of Nord Stream.
| VSerge wrote:
| Impossible, even in the current crazy atmosphere. An
| actual ban would mean an all-out commercial war and a
| very serious dent in globalization.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| We are rapidly approaching that point. Globalization is
| over.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5_4DvPO-7w
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/20/airbus-could-prioritise-
| non-...
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The EU's problem is that it doesn't foster company growth
| on any level and doesn't help with problems specific to the
| EU (e.g. multiple languages, differing laws, varying levels
| of unionization, and more).
|
| Blaming Trump for their own well-known problems is silly.
| They were dependent on the US before him and they will
| continue to be dependent on the US after him until they
| look in the mirror and decide to fix what is broken.
| hedora wrote:
| Tariffs don't really work for software, especially if the
| software provider holds lots of foreign government
| contracts, and you assume the foreign government and
| provider are colluding to get control over your systems.
| nprateem wrote:
| Everyone knows spinning things up is a piece of piss. It's
| the on-going maintenance and economies of scale that
| aren't. Not to mention migration, compliance, etc
| TheBlight wrote:
| The EU doesn't have a significant tech industry.
| Fraterkes wrote:
| Pythonblendervim? Ah sorry thats just the netherlands
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| That's not an "industry". "Industry" is something you can
| list on a stock exchange or lobby in a parliament.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| Oh, you mean like Spotify? Or those thousands of
| Mittelstand companies across Europe that Americans don't
| know about but are actually used in Europe?
|
| But the argument of the parent might be that a very
| active open source community based in Europe points
| towards a big potential of experienced developers working
| at their mid sized companies in the shadow of American
| big tech. Once big tech is gone...
| baq wrote:
| It doesn't have megacorps. It's full of engineers working
| for US ones.
| MortyWaves wrote:
| As a UK based engineer, I wish. I cannot for the life of
| me even get an interview, maybe first level HR interview
| for US companies. Meanwhile when applying for UK jobs, no
| problem.
|
| Don't know what it is. Am I not fake enough? Not forcing
| fake smiles and excluding obnoxious positivity
| constantly? Not ego stroking the interviewer? Am I doomed
| to, in comparison to US, poverty wages?
|
| Absolutely infuriating.
| onei wrote:
| I'm not sure if you've misunderstood, so apologies if
| this is old news. US companies may have teams of
| engineers in various other countries. But they almost
| always pay local market rate. In much the same way US
| companies will pay teams in India their local market rate
| (which is less again).
|
| My last company paid 2-2.5x a UK salary for a US
| engineer. Perhaps the ratio for a company like Meta is
| closer, but I doubt it's equal. For startups you may find
| random roles that have equal pay globally, but they're
| relatively uncommon.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| Hosting LLMs at scale without Azure/Bedrock is still a
| massive pain, and they offer EU based data sovereignty, so
| not clear what the problem is there (or are we now saying no
| doing business with US companies at all?)
| hedora wrote:
| If Microsoft is providing EU data sovereignty, then they're
| either in violation of US law (the US CLOUD Act,
| specifically) or do not have the technical capability to
| access data on those servers. (So, for instance, the
| machines could be air gapped, or they could be configured
| to never honor MS credentials, including on the software
| update path).
|
| In practice, this means no US cloud providers provide
| foreign data sovereignty (though many claim to).
| cess11 wrote:
| The CLOUD Act is incompatible with basic data protection
| rights.
|
| As long as whatever sham of a data protection agency was
| nominally functional in the US european elites could
| convince themselves that it was legal to transfer personal
| data to some US corporations, but now that agency is
| defunct.
|
| But yeah, it's a bad idea to do business with empires.
| Sooner or later they turn to bullying and extortion.
| newsclues wrote:
| Where are they going to get their power?
|
| Russian gas? Suddenly build nuclear?
| ojl wrote:
| Who are "they"? Several European countries have nuclear power
| (together with some other source as well of course) and are
| planning to build more. It will probably take a long time
| though.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Don't they still have North Sea oil?
| hedora wrote:
| They also have a strong windmill industry.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Isn't that what Russia already does?
| znpy wrote:
| > I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry
| in Europe.
|
| Unlikely.
|
| I've worked at an american cloud provider and (in another job)
| i've worked with an european cloud provider (in this context,
| when I say "worked with" I mean i was in contact with the
| people actually managing the hardware as well as the software
| that serves the "cloud").
|
| It's just a completely different mindset, and I don't see that
| changing any time soon.
|
| The main issue i see is that european cloud providers mostly
| have technically-ignorant upper management for which providing
| a cloud offering essentially boils down to "buy this software
| component from company xyz (likely an american company) and
| install this open source product abc, then slap a cloud
| marketing name and unleash the salespeople". They can't even
| contemplate the idea hiring somebody with FAANG-level skills,
| paying it FAANG-level money and let it do FAANG-level work.
| They hire a few underpaid 20-somethings and have them manage,
| at best, an OpenStack installation.
|
| I kid you not: in late 2021 i was in a meeting with (among the
| others) the head of cloud engineering of one such companies and
| asked when are they planning on offering ipv6 connectivity. The
| guy had a loud laugh and said they had no plans to even
| consider ipv6 connectivity. And that was at a company that does
| both "cloud" computing infrastructure and connectivity (!!!).
| That's the mindset.
|
| I don't see europe building a realistic alternative to american
| cloud providers, and the core issue is not technical.
| scarab92 wrote:
| They also move too slowly, so they fall further and further
| behind each year.
|
| For example, Hetzner has great potential, but they're only
| just now releasing object storage after 4 years in the cloud
| space, and they don't even have managed database yet.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| And they certainly didn't develop the software themselves
| either.
| dijit wrote:
| "4 years in the cloud space"
|
| Hetzner has existed for a _really_ long time, I 'm not even
| sure what "cloud" means in your context.
|
| Object storage and VMs is what made AWS "cloud" 15 years
| ago, so by that definition Hetzner only just became a cloud
| provider.
| scarab92 wrote:
| I mean since they started marketing themselves as a cloud
| vendor and selling cloud instances, instead of just a
| dedicated server vendor.
| dijit wrote:
| "cloud instances"; like a VPS?
| scarab92 wrote:
| Yes, they are VPSs
|
| But the more important point was that they started
| branding themselves as a cloud vendor 4 years ago, and
| investing in new offerings around that pitch, but it's
| taking them far too long to release basic parts of the
| offering, and they're falling behind.
| belter wrote:
| "AWS Services That Do Not Support IPv6" -
| https://github.com/DuckbillGroup/aws-ipv6-gaps
| thedougd wrote:
| That's two years out of date and the AWS announcements page
| is filled with IPv6 announcements.
| belter wrote:
| Lot's of No here:
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-
| ipv6-su...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| IPv6 is the new ISDN. I Still Don't Need it.
| nisa wrote:
| > The main issue i see is that european cloud providers
| mostly have technically-ignorant upper management for which
| providing a cloud offering essentially boils down to "buy
| this software component from company xyz (likely an american
| company) and install this open source product abc, then slap
| a cloud marketing name and unleash the salespeople". They
| can't even contemplate the idea hiring somebody with FAANG-
| level skills, paying it FAANG-level money and let it do
| FAANG-level work. They hire a few underpaid 20-somethings and
| have them manage, at best, an OpenStack installation.
|
| Thank you! As a german that saw how the sauce is made in
| public sector tenders it's exactly this!
|
| This is not restricted to hosting / cloud sector. It's a good
| summary for most german IT companies.
|
| Arrogance and incompetence are rampant. Programmers and their
| managers need to go en masse to have some substantial change.
|
| Everyone is so full of themselves and disconnected from
| reality it's scary.
| amelius wrote:
| Ok, that's one datapoint. Another datapoint says that Linux
| originated in Europe.
| yobbo wrote:
| These datapoints don't contradict each other.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Great, now pull up a geo-map of originated commits per
| country....
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >I don't see europe building a realistic alternative to
| american cloud providers, and the core issue is not
| technical.
|
| The brain drain ultimately takes it toll. The most capable
| people from europe ( and every where else), move to US , be
| they engineers, management, entrepreneurs etc.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > The brain drain ultimately takes it toll. The most
| capable people from europe ( and every where else), move to
| US , be they engineers, management, entrepreneurs etc.
|
| And they are going to stay there once the megalomaniac in
| chief and his South African oligarch have gone with their
| wrecking ball through the very fabric of the US society and
| economy?
| whatever1 wrote:
| Not only cloud, but the entire defense industry that was
| hibernating for the past 70 years, for you know good reasons.
|
| All of these nice F35s made in USA, will soon have no buyers
| except the USA itself.
| 42lux wrote:
| Germany pretty much only ordered the F-35 to carry US nuclear
| weapons because their current platform (Tornado) is getting
| retired. They didn't want to hand over Typhoon schematics to
| retrofit it. They pretty much only had the choice between
| F18s or F35s.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| You know, if we were really adversarial, it would be really
| really wise to reconsider allowing German planes, whether
| home built or bought from the US, "loaner" nuclear weapons
| to carry into battle.
| 42lux wrote:
| What? At least read a wiki article before commenting
| because it looks like you have no idea about the extended
| nuclear umbrella and how it works.
| nosianu wrote:
| That is _very_ optimistic.
|
| Given that for today's election here in Germany actual
| problems barely played a role. Not just that, over the last
| two decades very little was done. For example, we have
| skyrocketing rents due to a general lack of housing, which
| leads to all kinds of problems apart from affordability. For
| example worker mobility. Who dares to move to another job and
| city when it's so hard to find a flat?
|
| That's par for the course for almost all big problems.
|
| I think the probability is high that the new German
| government is going to try to sit this one out. After all,
| they survived Trump the last time, and it's only four years,
| right? Worse, they would have to do many things that will be
| very unpopular with one or the other interest group.
|
| Unless somebody puts a gun to the heads of all those in
| government they will procrastinate rather than make any big
| changes.
|
| I see little chance that they will cancel the order for US
| military hardware. They might actually buy a lot more, to
| appease Trump. After all, not getting the F-35 would have
| repercussions for the nuclear sharing agreement with the US.
| They need the F-35 to have a certified platform for nuclear
| bombs they are supposed to get from the US, stored in Germany
| for that purpose.
|
| That would mean they would need a European approach to
| nuclear weapon sharing and weapons. The German government
| regularly has trouble even just to work together with only
| France, due to wildly different philosophies and interests.
|
| Europe is far too divided, and the German government sees its
| role in doing as little as possible when it comes to radical
| change.
|
| I think part of it is that the leadership of all our big
| parties mostly consists of politicians whose whole life is
| just that. They don't have anything else. Even if they get a
| job at a company it's for their political connections. They
| won't risk this, and they barely have any strong opinions!
| They look at polls and change what they stand for accordingly
| and easily. I'm not saying this to sound mean, I think that
| this is a mostly accurate description.
|
| Opposing the US would take spine! It's a lot of trouble and
| uncertainty. They will try to avoid that if at all possible.
|
| ----------
|
| By the way, it's not just F-35. Germany also ordered the
| Israeli-American Arrow 3 long-range missile defense system,
| sixty CH-47 Chinook, and 380 other contracts worth 23 billion
| just from the "Sondervermogen" (special fund) of 100 billion.
| Surely that will just become more, given that Germany
| continues to need to purchase things like Patriot missiles.
|
| The strategy was - to the chagrin of the French if I
| understood the news articles written at the time right - to
| rather buy something proven and quickly available from the
| Americans rather than start a lengthy inter-European
| development process.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The F-35 is an extremely compelling and competitive product,
| with some unique forward-looking capabilities that are
| difficult to replicate. It was also built for export, both
| technically and politically, so many of the foreign buyers
| are more invested in it than they may otherwise be.
|
| It is this generation's F-16, many thousands will be built
| and sold.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Not if the US becomes more and more adversarial, especially
| if they jeopardize NATO. The current administration already
| acts almost like an enemy of Europe, it's quite baffling.
| Politicians have to justify military expenses to the
| voters.
| secondcoming wrote:
| But will the US renege on the supply of spare parts?
|
| Will it tear up existing deals and say 'accept the new
| terms or your planes won't fly'?
| whatever1 wrote:
| Not sure how valuable is the hand that Trump has.
|
| Why today would one spend $100M on 1 equipment unit when
| you can pump instead $100M and get 10M unstoppable
| drones?
| throwup238 wrote:
| $100M/10M drones = $10 per drone.
|
| What drones are you going to get for $10 each (now or in
| the future)? How are they "unstoppable"? How are you
| going to deploy millions of $10 drones on the battlefield
| without tons of $100M platforms that can survive AA
| defenses long enough to get to the engagement? How much
| range do you think _$10 of batteries_ even gets you?
| whatever1 wrote:
| I can today assemble a drone from parts from Alipay and
| program the firmware in an esp32 for ~ 20$. I am not
| kidding, Google it.
|
| That is without me manufacturing any of the components.
| If one had a nation state backing I am confident it can
| be done for a fraction of it.
|
| They are unstoppable because if you have a tank and there
| is a swarm of 500 of them what do you aim? One of them
| will find the opening to drop the grenade on your tanks
| weak spot. These are all single use kamikaze drones.
|
| Same for battery range. Europe is preparing for a
| defensive war on their land. Even 10 miles of ranges
| should suffice. You can always deploy them from a
| mothership.
| throwup238 wrote:
| You're massively underestimating what it takes to get
| from an esp32 hobbyist drone to a weaponized drone with
| 10 mile range and an actual explosive payload capable of
| taking out armor (in any number). Or the sensor package
| it would take to make them useful against personnel. Let
| alone deploying ten million of them in a real war.
|
| And you're entirely ignoring the very real problem of the
| mothership which _has to survive_ to get within ten miles
| of the battlefield, unless you're planning on releasing
| them from box trucks which means their range will either
| be useless or they'll get taken out by bigger, more
| expensive loitering drones the second they're spotted.
| War is antagonistic co-evolution in its purest form,
| these naive solutions dont last very long which is why
| our weapons cost so much (for everyone, not just the
| west).
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Many of the physical parts are manufactured in Europe
| under license. I've never heard of this as a major
| concern.
|
| The main point of conflict is that the US holds the
| source code for the advanced software systems very
| closely, no partner country has access. A lot of the
| differentiated and exotic capabilities of the F-35 that
| make it attractive to other countries are in the
| software, everyone recognizes this. There are many
| algorithms and techniques that rely on classified
| computer science to deliver qualitative advantages. Even
| if other countries could replicate the hardware, without
| replicating the software anything they built would be a
| pale shadow of the F-35 in terms of capability, which
| makes alternative hardware much less compelling.
|
| The US knows all the leverage is in the software, so that
| is the part they strictly control. It is yet another case
| of the software eating the world, military systems
| edition.
| Epa095 wrote:
| I wonder how hard it would be to reverse engineer it, if
| it really came to that.
| Lennie wrote:
| Might be a good idea to spend a couple of million by
| setting up a small office of 10 people to work on it in
| the coming years.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The US has a bunch of (classified) tech to make reverse
| engineering unusually difficult. It is also several
| million lines of complex code. Different countries have
| different builds of the software, with some features
| missing, degraded, or disabled. There are also regular
| capability upgrades with new software versions; the
| production versions of some software features are roadmap
| items still under development.
|
| I suspect that by the time anyone was able to
| successfully reverse engineer it, it would be semi-
| obsolete, which limits the value in doing so. Playing
| catch-up requires taking a lot of aggressive R&D risks
| that European governments have traditionally been very
| uncomfortable with or which take far too long to execute.
| secondcoming wrote:
| That's interesting. I'd have assume the secret sauces
| were in the radar and targeting systems.
|
| Maybe the source code also contains a secret kill switch?
| I'd definitely put one in if I was selling fighter planes
| to 3rd parties. Alliances can switch overnight, as we're
| seeing right now.
|
| IIRC the French refused to give the UK the means to
| disable Argentina's Exocets during the Falklands War.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| They would lose access to lots of tech for example top
| radar tech which is designed (and I think built) in
| Europe as well as lithography machines. We'll sell the
| latter to China instead of the US if they try to play
| those games.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| My country bought the F-35 for the sole purpose of being a
| deterrent to a future Russian invasion. Now that the US and
| Russia are allies, how can we trust that those planes will
| receive spare parts and other support during a conflict?
|
| I think European alternatives for F35 are obviously needed.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| So we're about to _finally_ get the year of Linux on the
| desktop?
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Almost every EU company I worked with, migrated from Windows
| to Ubuntu at some point.
| century19 wrote:
| I've worked with many and it was always Windows, with some
| use of MacBooks in recent years. Never once seen Linux
| desktops.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| It's been one year away for 30 years!
| DaSHacka wrote:
| More like "Year of the EU computing independence" this time,
| totally for real guys!
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Linux will gain traction as soon as people have difficultly
| figuring out how to open a terminal window - by design. The
| main problem with linux, or specifically linux distros, is that
| they are designed and maintained by people who like using
| linux, which eternally damns it to ~5% market penetration.
| petercooper wrote:
| The EU hasn't even got a home-built social network with
| significant market reach, let alone the wherewithal to pull off
| ditching Microsoft and Google. It'd be nice to see that change,
| but there's surely some sort of blocker after 25 years of the
| Web being a mainstream technology.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| There is an active effort currently to have the EU contribute
| towards funding https://freeourfeeds.com/ (to enable a
| distributed, global AT Proto network). Does the EU need the
| network to be home grown or have the valuation matter? I
| argue no, it is a utility, not a business to be captured and
| squeezed by investors or other potential controlling
| interests.
|
| (as of this comment, Bluesky has ~32M users and counting)
| bloomingkales wrote:
| They can fork phpbb. You didn't really think these social
| networks are anything more than that?
|
| We just need to see if phpbb can scale to a billion, and if
| not, why not.
| petercooper wrote:
| Well, I'm all for the return of the classic forum
| experience!
|
| The UK's largest "social" sites are pretty much forums
| (e.g. Mumsnet, The Student Room, DigitalSpy,
| MoneySavingExpert) and while they're good for their
| respective topics, they don't cover the
| Reddit/Facebook/Instagram use cases (they could be arguably
| considered on a par with individual sub-reddits).
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _Well, I 'm all for the return of the classic forum
| experience!_
|
| If you make each individual bulletin board receive
| broadcasts from a central server, then you get the
| network effects of Facebook and Reddit. Individual boards
| can just sub to the central server keeping them connected
| to the hivemind or not. Your community can remain
| isolated or throttled (only 30% of global updates get
| through). We do this manually here, where not all global
| posts get through (you'd be hard pressed to push a Reddit
| post to the top here). It's the simplest way to federate
| using existing technology.
|
| This model is already at play. X, Bluesky, Reddit, Truth
| Social, and Rumble are basically heavily funded private
| message boards with a large mindshare subscriber base.
|
| Taking our message boards back is proving to be
| difficult, especially because trying to move the userbase
| off of it is the same as trying to move people off drugs.
| KajMagnus wrote:
| > If you make each individual bulletin board receive
| broadcasts from a central server
|
| Your're doing this with phpBB? Doesn't happen to be open-
| source somewhere?
|
| Would be interesting to have a look, I think I a bit like
| this opt-in partial federation / hivemind. Would be even
| more interesting if it was possible to sync comments
| between such forums.
|
| **
|
| Developing forum software myself, Talkyard. Based in
| Europe (Sweden).
|
| Started thinking even more about using some European
| cloud, as an option. There's a Swedish hosting provider
| that looks interesting (I think)
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _sync comments_
|
| I guess you could do syncing kind of like how CCing email
| is done. CC my home server and global server. This gives
| you agency to remain _detached_ from the hivemind, and
| vice versa. This is not some idea out of left field, it
| 's roughly my workflow between Reddit or HN or other
| sites. I manually do the filtering in my mind when I move
| through different channels.
|
| Phpbb is open source, but I mostly brought it up to show
| that Facebook is just that, and nothing more. Forking
| Reddit will also give you a Facebook clone (and a Reddit
| clone).
| Lennie wrote:
| https://matrix.org/ is partly funded by French government.
| darkwater wrote:
| > We just need to see if phpbb can scale to a billion
|
| No need for that, we are just half a billion in Europe.
| danieldk wrote:
| The used to exist (e.g. Hyves, StudiVZ), but they are
| murdered by FAANG. However, there are still locally
| successful companies that could expand to the rest of Europe
| if US companies were dropped. E.g. just speaking of The
| Netherlands, Bol.com is much more popular than Amazon,
| Marktplaats is more popular than eBay (which is pretty much
| non-existent here) and owned by a Nordic company, etc., iDEAL
| is much more popular for payments than PayPal, Stripe, etc.
| (and works far better). Such companies can fill the void.
|
| Microsoft will be tough to replace. There are good
| alternatives, but retraining personnel, etc. will take years.
| Google, I am not sure. Their cloud services are replaceable.
| Search may be tougher, but the quality of Google Search has
| become so bad that it's often easier to ask an LLM.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Tuenti?
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Tuenti was huge in Spain.
| mettamage wrote:
| Is Marktplaats not bought out by eBay?
|
| See also: https://mergr.com/transaction/ebay-acquires-
| marktplaats-bv
| danieldk wrote:
| eBay sold Marktplaats in 2015:
| https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marktplaats.nl
| Lennie wrote:
| Takeaway (thuisbezorgd) and Zalando are some pretty large
| players in the EU markets. Spotify of course.
| fsflover wrote:
| PeerTube is made in France, Mastodon AFAIK in Germany.
| Reventlov wrote:
| And that's why we need to stop being dependent on the US:
| everything in there is described in terms of << market share
| >>, and not in terms of usefulness, ethics, or independence.
| ozim wrote:
| With social networks or any EU startup problem is you have to
| deal with different languages right at the start.
|
| Being US startup with English only you have access to 300m
| people right away.
|
| There were country specific social networks but then all cool
| kids were on FB so everyone moved there.
|
| The same with LinkedIn, our country specific business social
| network closed down finally last year. First 3-5 years it was
| growing then everyone moved to LinkedIn so that network was
| ghost town for 15 years someone kept it alive just in case
| but seems like they stopped wasting money.
| c-fe wrote:
| I think the language problem will become less of a problem
| in the future due to (1) more (young) people living in
| citys and (2) all young people in cities speaking english.
| At least compared to previous generations imo. This could
| be my subjective view based on luxembourg, netherlands, and
| visiting other european cities.
| ozim wrote:
| Don't overestimate "young people speaking english"
| especially with current demography you still need to tap
| ones that are excluded from English as there will be much
| more of those.
|
| I do see opportunities with LLMs as making all kind of
| platforms language agnostic - you should be able to write
| your own language and read your own language even if
| other person is from different country using different
| language.
| Lennie wrote:
| Network effect is also hugely important.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Maybe so called social network is not something to reproduce.
| Who cares who runs them if they deteriorate sociality,
| generate addictive consumption of things detrimental to
| mental health and favor extremists point of view?
| hedora wrote:
| Mastodon is German:
|
| https://joinmastodon.org/about
|
| (So is SAP, for that matter.)
| pton_xd wrote:
| > I guess "Make America Great" may spawn a big Cloud Industry
| in Europe.
|
| Have you tried using OVH? It's... not ready for prime time.
| Don't get me wrong, I love it for cheap EU servers, but man is
| it a pain in the ass to deal with.
| dmix wrote:
| Europe is already pretty experienced in increasing their costs
| of doing business to avoid any sort of risk already so I'm sure
| they'll figure something out.
| cgcrob wrote:
| I think the impact is going to be far greater than that.
|
| I have seen, at least here in the UK, some people speaking
| about moving entirely back to hardware that is controlled by
| the organisation. The case is there on a cost basis already but
| people are reluctant to admit this. If another magical
| guarantee expires such as a security one, then the reason can
| be shifted to that and the cost justification is collateral.
|
| Getting out of PaaS systems is going to be horrible and
| expensive though. We never should have gone further than IaaS.
|
| I suspect the idea of the cloud as it stands today may die
| fairly quickly.
| huang_chung wrote:
| Fortunately EU would never make a rash decision of a political
| nature, like switch an entire government to Linux only to
| switch back to Microsoft a few years later.
| paganel wrote:
| Maybe of the "liberal" Europeans techies are commenting on this
| American website and complaining about how bad America is,
| apparently with no self-awareness and how European governments
| and not only should boycott American stuff. The same goes for
| commenting the same thing on American website Reddit.
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| Europe has done this before. Airbus did not exist but now it is
| the best aircraft maker since Boeing decided to retire all
| their senior engineers in favor of quick profits. Europe
| created Airbus, they can do the same with a new Cloud provider.
| layer8 wrote:
| This presumes that today's Europe is comparable to the one
| ca. 60 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_
| Airbus#1970%E2%80...
|
| (I'm not disputing the chances, just the logic of the analogy
| with Airbus.)
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Don't forget Boeing moved their headquarters and leadership
| to DC. Making the widgets is just the inconvenient part
| management doesn't really care about/need to be involved
| with, the focus worthy part of their business is government
| extraction in Boeing corporate's minds. Our corporate class
| is such short sigted trash.
| kichimi wrote:
| They can do even better. I don't know how much I can say but
| there is an EU funded alternative in the works.
| odiroot wrote:
| On the other hand, many of us in Europe still have the memories
| (or our parents tales) of our governments spying on everything
| we say and do. With all the chilling consequences.
|
| Half a century of communist rule showed us not to trust our
| governments.
|
| Every now and then, the Brussels bureaucrats show us how much
| do they value our privacy and electronic safety.
| hedora wrote:
| The US govt would never do that.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > If I was in Europe, I would never use any US Tech products.
|
| Could you possibly name any specific riscs?
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Trump.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Not just Trump but any potential future administration.
| We're no longer reliable partners who can keep continuity
| of our bureaucracy and foreign policy going for longer than
| four years without a geopolitical seizure.
| PessimalDecimal wrote:
| Some specific RISCs: RISC-V, MIPS, ARM, POWER, PowerPC.
| Lennie wrote:
| Some others: SPARC and SuperH.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| Not just cloud but military and many other things.
|
| I think MAGA is good for Europe, there's a big incentive to
| remove any kind of US dependency.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| That's the problem with adversarial competition instead of
| collaboration. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you
| think the other entity is a shark, then your going to start
| acting like a shark too in order to protect yourself.
| tensor wrote:
| There is already a decent cloud industry in Europe. OVH has
| been around for decades, and many companies in North America
| even use them because they are often a bit cheaper. But you
| also have newer players like Scaleway and CDNs like Bunney.net
| that are growing fast.
|
| I think the harder services to replace are things like Github
| and O365/Google Workplace.
| matt-p wrote:
| Are OVH decent? I'm not entirely sure that they're even
| passable and what other options would you have in Europe?
| everfrustrated wrote:
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/10/ovh/
| aerhardt wrote:
| "Cloud" is not boxes like OVH and Hetzner sell. Cloud is a
| gigantic software layer offering all kinds of features and
| abstractions.
|
| I think it'd be faster and cheaper to replicate GitHub or
| even Office, which are complex but fairly feature-stable,
| than to offer a real cloud competitor with a fraction of the
| services that Amazon, Microsoft or Google offer in their
| cloud portfolios.
|
| I heard an interesting thought on the Lex Friedman podcast
| though. If software engineering really becomes cheaper and
| more readily available thanks to AI, maybe more companies
| will start building more of their own services. Then, maybe
| then, will the European enterprise be able to wean itself off
| from the big cloud vendors.
| rahkiin wrote:
| How does Scaleway measure up these days?
|
| Are there good resources for comparing clouds with
| sovereignty in mind?
| docmars wrote:
| As intended. European independence and sovereignty would be a
| great outcome from all this.
| bittermandel wrote:
| Definitely is, it triggered us at Molnett, Clever Cloud,
| Safespring and others to start believing in competing with the
| hyperscalers!
| bbqfog wrote:
| Every government and big company spies on you. If you don't host
| your own hardware, you should expect that. If you do host your
| own hardware, you're still vulnerable to things like Mossad
| spyware. None of this is new, and Europe is as guilty if not
| _more_ guilty than anyone at this state of affairs.
| Loughla wrote:
| I think the difference is that you would rather take your
| chances that your own system gets compromised by Mossad, which
| you can't really do anything about, than willingly hand over
| your information to a country that is increasingly hostile?
| bbqfog wrote:
| Like you said, the truly hostile entities will gain access
| anyway. The people breaking into the systems to gain access
| are the ones you really need to be worried about. I'm pretty
| sure the US government has that capability if it wants it
| (not that I endorse it, I don't).
| watwut wrote:
| US is truly hostile tho.
| bbqfog wrote:
| I would argue that all aggregations of power are truly
| hostile, whether that's the US, the EU or Meta.
| Loughla wrote:
| Yes. I agree. But the difference is making them be an
| adversary, which can be dealt with, versus handing it them
| willingly. There is a difference there.
| this_user wrote:
| That has been obvious since 2013 at least.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| It never was
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It was never safe for any government to move any secrets to any
| cloud. The fact that the US government is okay with doing this
| with its own secrets surprises me to this day. You have no
| secrets from the person who owns your hardware.
| rcpt wrote:
| Security isn't a "safe" vs. "not safe" bool
| dmantis wrote:
| The world literally has hard proofs of mass espionage by the
| NSA and CIA after Snowden and Wikileaks Vault 7. Moving your
| government secrets to the US cloud has been madness for at
| least 12 years.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Cool, encrypt everything before uploading. Keep the key
| client-side
|
| See, parent is right? Safe/not safe dichotomy helps nobody
| ta988 wrote:
| I didn't know that computation on encrypted data without
| decryption was solved overnight.
| erikerikson wrote:
| It seems like you might be aware of limitations but for
| those who aren't aware of the technique:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
| rcpt wrote:
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
|
| Alright so get a magical amulet.
| dijit wrote:
| Correct, it's more like a bitmask.
|
| Except if any of the bits are flipped you're f-d; especially
| so if your adversary is a nation.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I guess so, but based on current events, it doesn't seem like
| the US Govt. has any secrets that it places any value on.
| Between a bunch of glorified interns being given access to
| anything & everything and a bunch of known compromised
| department heads being appointed... it doesn't strike me that
| the US Govt. takes its national security very seriously at all.
|
| The US Govt. seems empirically much more vested in what goes on
| in public restrooms than it does in what goes on in global
| affairs and military conflicts.
| danaris wrote:
| [flagged]
| watwut wrote:
| I see Americans defending Trumps and Musk. Or acting as if
| everyone just overreacted. So I would say, quite a lot of
| Americans are either fine with this or actively want it.
| moshun wrote:
| There are 300M people here and Trump won by ~200K. You
| can safely say that some are fine with this
| administrations behavior, but many are not and starting
| to actively protest and resist. Both are true
| simultaneously.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| He still got almost 48% of the overall vote, however.
|
| He may not have won the popular vote by much, but he
| certainly has a dedicated base of staunch supporters.
|
| By their unceasing jeering, bright hats, and constant
| online presence I'd be surprised if there's anyone hasn't
| noticed them by this point.
|
| Somehow it's worse than in 2016
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| The masses are asses.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| The very fact that it's even possible to have this kind of
| thing happening unfettered, unconstrained, and
| unaccountable is evidence in and of itself that the US
| Govt. doesn't take its national security & secrets
| seriously though, isn't it?
| epistasis wrote:
| In what sense?
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| In that taking those things seriously would have
| included:
|
| * More creative threat-modeling.
|
| * More effective prevention measures.
|
| * More vigorous mitigation & stonewalling attempts.
|
| * More rapid remediation & rejection of the intrusion.
|
| Especially for a threat vector that was telegraphed so
| openly so far in advance. The circumstances might be
| unprecedented, but they're not at all surprising.
| epistasis wrote:
| What sort of threat modeling would have prevented this?
|
| There are plenty of mitigation and stonewalling going on,
| but mostly through the courts.
|
| Executives must have some power, or else the process
| itself becomes the executive and there's no ability to
| respond to anything.
|
| If there's anybody to blame, we must place the blame on
| the executive wielding the power, and those who have
| enabled this to happen by putting that particular
| executive in power by subverting the traditional vetting
| process. If a political party no longer performs basic
| vetting of that level then the entire party should
| probably be eliminated.
| epistasis wrote:
| It was well known that this was exactly what Musk would do,
| by anyone paying the slightest shred of attention to what
| was going on.
|
| He said it was what he was going to do, he was up on the
| stage, I heard many many people salivating for DOGE cuts
| like this before the election, and even today.
| oooyay wrote:
| > It was well known that this was exactly what Musk would
| do, by anyone paying the slightest shred of attention to
| what was going on.
|
| I agree, and frankly anyone feeling "surprised" right now
| probably still thinks strongly worded emails and letters
| are enough to solve the problems they're _just now_
| seeing. Those things rely on a stable democracy where
| constituents and what happens to them matter at all.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Musk buying Twitter and then spending millions to buy votes
| in PA weeks before the election seemed pretty obvious.
|
| People like him don't spend without an expectation of
| something in return.
|
| The more surprising thing is the amount of people who think
| successful capitalist = successful political leader, when
| the incentives and constituencies are drastically
| different.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| On the contrary this is exactly what they said they'd do if
| elected. This is exactly what was voted for. Don't pretend
| like Americans didn't have agency in the destruction of
| their own country.
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is a good point. Aside from the objectively
| unavoidable and nigh-uncountable deluge of articles, opeds,
| social media posts, video news segments and direct
| statements from the candidate and his representatives
| describing exactly what they intended to do and a 927 page
| document detailing the plan that was released two and a
| half years before the election, what warning did anybody
| have?
| hedora wrote:
| The polls are starting to agree with you. Trump's actions
| are extremely unpopular, and support from his base is
| eroding:
|
| > In the CNN poll, Musk having a prominent role in the
| administration is viewed as a "bad thing" (54-28) by a
| nearly 2-to-1 ratio. The Post-Ipsos poll showed Americans
| disapprove by a similarly wide margin (52-26) of Musk
| "shutting down federal government programs that he decides
| are unnecessary."
|
| > And Americans said 63 to 34 that they are concerned about
| Musk's team getting access to their data, which is the
| subject of high-profile legal fights.
|
| > Even 37 percent of Republican-leaning voters said they
| are at least "somewhat" concerned about Musk getting their
| data.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/20/trump-
| pol...
| DaSHacka wrote:
| The sheer number of flagged replies to this comment is
| telling.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Some political views are now prohibited on HN, it would
| appear.
|
| EDIT: Case in point.
| closeparen wrote:
| The US government's secrets are routinely held and processed by
| contractors. The prototypical government secret is something
| like the plans of an airplane designed and manufactured by
| Lockheed Martin.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Elon Musk will have access to all data.
|
| That should scare everyone given his propaganda machinery
| aimed at elections he does or doesn't like
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| It isn't uniform by any means but the US runs on a physically
| independent cloud, often in their own facilities, designed by
| the big cloud companies. When using the public cloud for
| unclassified work (e.g. working with outside vendors), the data
| is only allowed to reside in specific data centers that have
| been vetted by the government, not all US regions have the same
| authorization. For example, government data in an S3 bucket in
| the public cloud may only be accessed and processed within the
| same region, which can be annoying if your infrastructure is
| elsewhere.
|
| The US is far ahead of most countries when it comes to
| government use of the cloud. Other developed countries often
| learn how to do it from the US but are less comfortable with
| the technical requirements, which slows down adoption.
| dataflow wrote:
| Physical isolation is kind of irrelevant for the concerns
| being voiced here no? It's not like Europe's main worry is
| random people walking in and yanking hard disks out of
| servers in datacenters.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Other developed countries are less comfortable because all
| the major cloud providers are US-owned companies and the NSA
| has a very, very long history of using US companies as
| information security weapons.
|
| Not that they're the only ones. Israel has been busy stuffing
| investment cash into the pockets of Unit 8200 members so they
| can found security software and service startups
| _coughSnykcough_
| vimbtw wrote:
| This is a great point. For example, near where I live there's
| a massive Google cloud warehouse out in the middle of a field
| next to the highway. Inside of that warehouse there's a
| separate section for servers belonging to the US government
| that can benefit from all the electricity contracts Google
| has negotiated, the physical security and fences that Google
| has set up, and the fiber optic cables they've laid.
|
| It's the best of both worlds, they get the decades of
| research Google has put into systems engineering and fault
| tolerance while retaining the security of having their own
| servers.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| It's not the technology, it's the US Cloud Act which has
| slowed a lot of it down.
|
| Very few actually qualified and capable techies here trust
| any of the US-based cloud providers.
| dangus wrote:
| Isn't this just kind of willfully ignorant to the way the
| government cloud works?
|
| GovCloud claims that it's used to "manage sensitive data and
| controlled unclassified information (CUI)."
|
| I don't think the US government is dumping classified info onto
| corporate cloud environments judging by this description from
| GovCloud. But there's plenty of info that's sensitive but
| unclassified and the government does need to function in a lot
| of ways that doesn't involve state secrets.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ for more of a description
| of what GovCloud actually is.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> I don't think the US government is dumping classified info
| onto corporate cloud environments judging by this description
| from GovCloud.
|
| There are cloud environments specifically for classified
| info:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/federal/secret-cloud/
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/coreinfrastructurea.
| ..
| dgacmu wrote:
| and google also, including top secret:
| https://www.nextgov.com/acquisition/2024/04/google-now-
| autho...
| dcrazy wrote:
| "Secrets" is a broad term that covers everything from payroll
| information to the history of CIA clandestine operations. Only
| some kinds of these are stored in the cloud.
| rapatel0 wrote:
| The US Gov't has their own GOV Cloud Datacenter Regions. It's
| run by azure and AWS but there are restrictions on who is
| allowed to use it. It's not really public
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/?whats-new.sort-by=item.a...
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-government/doc...
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The point is Amazon and Microsoft surely have vested
| interests in government data they are not supposed to be
| privy to.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| And the government has lots of leverage it can use against
| Amazon and MS if they use it in a way the government
| doesn't want. EU govts don't have that
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| US Government leverage: $200,000 fine, appealable.
| tyre wrote:
| US Government leverage: FISA secret court, prison time
| overstay8930 wrote:
| touch the right HSM in one of these facilities and you
| get to know what it's like to disappear
| userbinator wrote:
| Not with this current government.
| losradio wrote:
| I am sure both companies have NDAs and contractual
| agreements in place that can be enforced and monitored.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| It's not just the corporations as a whole that are an
| issue. It increases the insider risk footprint of that data
| to include your cloud provider's employees as well as your
| own. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google almost certainly employ
| agents of your adversaries (including US agents working
| without their knowledge) who have weird attack vectors and
| now have to be part of your threat model.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| you can obviously have secrets from someone who holds your ssd,
| that is the whole point of encryption.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Thats not fool proof what so ever.
| sidibe wrote:
| It's as fool proof as you can get though.
|
| If your data is well encrypted they practically don't have
| any access to any of the information except how much of it
| there is
| ncallaway wrote:
| I feel like you've narrowed the original statement ("You have
| no secrets from the person who owns your hardware") when you
| scope it to just data storage at rest. I take hardware to
| mean significantly more than just at rest data storage in the
| context that it was used.
|
| If your unencrypted data flows through any AWS memory or
| compute, _or_ if your encryption key flows through any AWS
| memory or compute, then AWS *can* access that data.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > It was never safe for any government to move any secrets
| to any cloud.
|
| does this not refer to moving data?
| ncallaway wrote:
| I don't think it refers solely to data at rest, no.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| There are secrets and then there are secrets.
|
| For the former, confidential compute is far enough along that
| this data can in fact be secret from the hardware owner. This
| is vital even for on-prem hardware -- IT folks and techs with
| physical access shouldn't have access simply due to proximity.
|
| For the latter, sure, but this is very expensive. It goes well
| beyond owning the hardware.
| breadwinner wrote:
| > _You have no secrets from the person who owns your hardware._
|
| What if the hardware is physically located in your own country,
| and employees of cloud vendor are virtually "accompanied", and
| watched, any time they login to the hardware? That's called
| sovereign cloud and all cloud vendors have it.
| tpm wrote:
| But the long hand of US law reaches even there if it is owned
| by an US company.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| Yes, I agree.
|
| I make the parallel with "gold." Whoever has your gold, got you
| by the hanging spheres.
|
| Given the importance of data today, I am baffled common
| citizens are not familiar with the "Data at rest" principle.
| zhengiszen wrote:
| Nice comparison
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| So the US is within its rights to ban TikTok?
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| No, that's overreaching.
|
| If a country's citizens want to give away their data, it's
| well within their right to do so. At most, the U.S.
| Government should educate about it, much like tobacco
| dangers.
|
| Having that said, U.S. citizens with clearance and/or
| government employees should be subject to data loss
| prevention measures, like they already do[0].
|
| I'd be forward for a ban if it was an issue of public
| mental health, but the U.S. Government cannot take that
| angle because they'd have to kill Meta Platforms as well.
| They know they can't, Meta lobbyists will _not_ allow that.
|
| But restricting TikTok based on data control and free
| speech liberties, that's overreaching. I've already seen
| TikTok videos of people saying they'd stamp their U.S.
| passport on the forehead and give it to Chinese ByteDance
| rather than use Instagram. It is well within their rights
| to do so if they so desire.
|
| --
|
| [0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-tiktok-is-
| being-ba...
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| Quick note I wanted to add: My take on this matter comes
| from a "regardless of what you do, the why is more
| important than the what."
|
| Ban TikTok? Do whatever, I don't use my account. I
| deleted the app long ago.
|
| Why do you do it? Fight that tooth and nail. Do it for
| the right reason and be consistent.
| jviotti wrote:
| I think this is the key. It is cheaper and more convenient than
| ever to deploy and manage data critical services yourself, in a
| self hosted manner that is protected by whatever jurisdiction
| you are in. What matters is not who builds it, but who has
| access to the data, and ideally, that's only you!
| cogman10 wrote:
| This does raise a valid question of what secrets can or should
| the government have.
|
| I think it's obvious that some secrets should be kept. It makes
| little sense to expose our nuclear secrets, counter espionage,
| or ongoing investigation efforts. But how far does or should
| that extend? Should everything the NSA/CIA/FBI/IRS does be
| secret? Should they stay secret for years or decades or
| forever?
|
| IMO, the US goes too far in it's secrets. Stuff gets classified
| that just makes the government look bad and that's dangerous.
|
| And that's where I'm somewhat less concerned about putting US
| secrets into the cloud. Sure there's highly sensitive stuff
| that shouldn't go there, but there's also a lot of stuff that
| shouldn't have been a secret in the first place.
| Andrex wrote:
| FOIA makes the US gov't one of the more transparent
| democracies, as a counterpoint. So much so it started getting
| copied by them.
|
| https://reason.com/2024/12/26/foia-for-all/
| Nullabillity wrote:
| According to _the very link you posted_ , the US was two
| whole centuries late to the party. Better late than never
| of course, but the spin of trying to then frame it as an
| American Victory(tm) is pretty ridiculous.
| thelamest wrote:
| "Transparency" as leaks from abuse is very, very different
| from transparency as a policy of easy access - and neither
| makes you necessarily better informed. In short, a biased
| selection of information can leave you worse off than having
| no information.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| pretty sure my remote encrypted backups[1] can keep a secret or
| two from the cloud storage provider
|
| [1]https://rclone.org/crypt/
| riffic wrote:
| That's not necessarily true if you use the appropriate tools
| and controls to safeguard data. Further, "any cloud" is a
| sweeping generalization and not all clouds are created equal.
| You raise valid concerns about trusting third-party hardware
| BUT.. come on, ease up on the alarmism.
|
| To elaborate: robust encryption, dedicated hardware security
| modules (HSMs), and sophisticated key management safeguards
| data even if it resides on someone elses hardware.
|
| If you design your system properly, even if the cloud provider
| manages the underlying hardware, your secrets remain secure
| because the keys and sensitive data are protected in a
| controlled, isolated environment.
| aiono wrote:
| The US government is okay basically because people who own
| cloud platforms are part of the government.
| rsync wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Why would encrypted data, which the provider holds no keys to,
| be a dangerous way For a government to hold a secret?
| milesward wrote:
| I'd guess a reasonable start at delivering near-equivalent
| capabilities, capacity, and reliability from a standing start
| today, in just Europe, to be about EUR50b. The shopping list
| isn't all that tough. Who wants to pony up?
| jeffrallen wrote:
| European cloud providers already exist, and companies from
| industries and countries where data protection is regulated are
| already happy clients (see Swiss FINMA, and German governments
| required by law to carefully respect GDPR).
|
| Maybe an influx of business will make us grow the European
| clouds, but that's ok, we're up to it.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| I'd argue that there are actually no EU cloud providers.
| There are only EU hosting providers.
| graemep wrote:
| Its never been a good idea. I do not think non-EU European
| countries can rely on EU cloud, not can EU countries can
| necessarily rely on each other.
|
| The only effect the distrust of the current US government will
| have is a few articles. It expensive and difficult for this to be
| sufficient incentive to change anything.
|
| We should probably grateful they have not put it all on Chinese
| clouds.
| watwut wrote:
| America is literally allying itself with Russia, trying to turn
| Ukraine into basically colony (by demanding their resources
| forever), threatening annexation of Canada (repeatedly). Oh,
| and in the process of starting a trade war.
|
| Non-EU can trust EU waaay more then anyone except Russia can
| trust to America. American leadership made it clear that norms,
| laws or morality are only for suckers.
|
| The levels of behaviors between the sides here are not
| symmetrical
| whimsicalism wrote:
| EU also demands resources in exchange for military support
| such as the French+UK-led intervention into Libya. Saying US
| is an ally of Russia is a pretty big stretch, meanwhile the
| EU has members that are actually allied with Russia and lots
| of large Russia-aligned multinationals like Gunvor
| serial_dev wrote:
| I don't get why you are downvoted.
|
| Every war that the NATO countries somehow miraculously got
| involved in is an economic war for natural resources and
| control, and the big EU countries always take their share
| of the pie.
|
| Ukraine's resources, one way or another, will be split up
| between Russia, EU, and the US (or more precisely it will
| end up in the hands of the oligarchs and "black rocks" of
| these countries).
| msm_ wrote:
| Ukraine's resources belong to Ukraine, and will return to
| Ukraine, as soon as Russia stops their unprovoked and
| unjustified assault.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I most certainly did not say who Ukraine's resources
| belong to, I'm saying that I predict that no matter how
| and when the war ends, I'm afraid the country's resources
| will be split up between the superpowers. It's not what I
| want, not what I advocate for, it's just what I foresee
| happening.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Shouldn't America's resources (money, military support,
| Starlink, etc.) then belong to America?
| epistasis wrote:
| Of course? How is that even in question. The US promised
| protection to Ukraine for giving up its nuclear weapons,
| then freely gave much aid as it was in its mown interests
| to do so.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| What natural resources or economic values was the Kosovo
| war in 1999 about?
|
| What other incentives than control, resources or
| economics do wars in general have? Why do you hold the
| countries you mentioned to higher standards?
| rmu09 wrote:
| Like in serbia with operation "Allied Force"? You can
| question the official story, but that was not for control
| over natural resources.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| You mean the EU's war in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan
| which resulted in EU companies such as Exxon Mobile
| getting even richer off of the oil contracts?
|
| Sorry I mean American's wars, not the EU's wars. The EU
| hasn't really done resource wars since the colonial
| times.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| righhht https://wikileaks.org/clinton-
| emails/emailid/12900
|
| france is involved in resource conflicts all over
| subsaharan africa bffr
| rdtsc wrote:
| > America is literally allying itself with Russia, trying to
| turn Ukraine into basically colony (by demanding their
| resources forever)
|
| It was Ukraine/Zelensky who suggested that first not Trump.
| It was back in November. But we tend to forget such things
| for some reason...
|
| From https://www.ft.com/content/623c197f-6952-4229-bfbc-0a96e
| 43d6...
|
| > Two of the ideas were laid out in Volodymyr Zelensky's
| "victory plan" with Trump specifically in mind, said people
| involved in drawing it up. The proposals were later presented
| to Trump when Ukraine's president met him in New York in
| September.
|
| So Trump agreed eventually and then Zelensky started a media
| storm about how Trump wants take their natural resources and
| turn them into a colony. And everyone somehow immediately
| forgot that the proposal originated with Ukranian government.
|
| > The levels of behaviors between the sides here are not
| symmetrical
|
| It comes from a fundamentally different perceptions of
| reality and politics. There is idea that things have to be
| just and fair. And when they are not we like to say "it's not
| fair" and someone comes and fixes it. I am afraid it just
| doesn't work like that past the childhood age.
|
| > American leadership made it clear that norms, laws or
| morality are only for suckers.
|
| When weren't they? You're thinking maybe everyone just
| finally woke up? Morality and laws do not apply in practice
| on the international arena. It would be nice if they did, I
| agree, but they don't currently.
|
| EU should have always had it's own strong army, it should
| have never trusted the US and not relied on them for
| protection. But they also shouldn't have been buying energy
| from Putin and funding his operation for years.
| def_true_false wrote:
| The real problem with the resources deal was the lack of
| security guarantees.
| rdtsc wrote:
| That was the security guarantee: having the presence of
| US mining companies there. Honestly, I don't really think
| US really needs Ukraine's mineral resources. US has
| plenty of its own to extract. But it was a pretext to
| invest and increase US presence there.
|
| At some point Ukraine will run out of men. As much as I
| want to, I don't see US troops deployed to Ukraine, maybe
| EU can send its troops? Biden said as much at the start
| of the war, too, and it's still true.
|
| At this point I don't see a Ukrainian victory over Russia
| and going back to 1992 borders. They will have to give a
| lot of things up and the longer it waits, the worse its
| negotiate position will be.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| OK. But Ukraine choses to keep figting. Let them decide
| their fate.
|
| At the start of the war EVERYONE said Russia would take
| Ukraine in days, and asked Zelenskyy when he wanted to
| evacuate. Not sure why anything they said back then is
| worth while to base opinions on today.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > Not sure why anything they said back then is worth
| while to base opinions on today.
|
| There is still a lot of that hope but it's also a
| different time. The bravery of of Ukrainians in the
| initial wave and the counter-offensive as unmatched. The
| West helped but it didn't help enough. It was always
| piece-mailing military equipment. With a lot of wait
| times and a lot of hand wringing. We gave them tanks, but
| no F16s at the time. We could given them AA weapons
| earlier and more of it. They also made mistakes, there is
| a decent amount of corruption, and fumbled on recruiting
| after those who wanted to fight joined they started
| sending vans with military dressed people to effectively
| kidnap men off the streets or their places of employment.
| That looks bad and make their own people fearful of the
| military and those men won't be fighting the same way as
| those who sign up voluntarily.
|
| > OK. But Ukraine choses to keep figting. Let them decide
| their fate
|
| Their fate was never really just their own after the
| initial resistance. Without the Western help they
| couldn't have lasted this long. The West both helped a
| lot, and not enough at the same time. It's like a friend
| needing life saving surgery and it costs $10k. We send
| him $8k. He should be very grateful for such a generous
| gift, but everyone knows that also won't be enough and he
| will likely die.
| altacc wrote:
| I work at an large Europe based multi-national and hosting has
| always been a concern due to the big differences in data
| protection and privacy rules. We never use a service not hosted
| in the EEA.
|
| The current threats that the US is making to Europe about it's
| data protection, privacy, consumer protection, etc... laws is
| very much of concern and is already beginning to be a factor in
| our ongoing RFPs and procurement process. We're not just
| following the law, we also don't trust some companies with our
| reputation.
| ekianjo wrote:
| It was never safe in the first place and only a fool could be
| convinced of that. Keep your data locally as much as you can.
| mrits wrote:
| It's interesting to me that the reaction of Europe is to start
| taking their security more seriously. While I'm never sure the
| though process of a certain individual I do know this was the
| point of the conservative party in the US
| nobankai wrote:
| > I do know this was the point of the conservative party in the
| US
|
| No incumbent president, democrat or republican, has ever
| meaningfully restricted America's digital surveillance
| capabilities. Backdooring domestic hardware for the sake of
| "national security" is a bipartisan effort in America.
| znpy wrote:
| Seconding this, iirc at the time when Edward Snowden started
| leaking documents Barack Obama was president and I don't
| remember any effort from him to restrict USA's surveillance
| capabilities.
| mrits wrote:
| I don't disagree with that but don't see how it is relevant.
| Spying on yourself is a different issue
| quotemstr wrote:
| This is rich considering the UK just a few weeks ago jawboning
| Apple into making user data visible to the state.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Indeed. GDPR, cookie laws, draconian anti-free speech content
| policies. I'm not a fan _at all_ of the US government but
| Europe has proven to be the last place on earth you want to
| host something.
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| If your "tech innovation" isn't capable of restricting child
| pornography and calls for terrorism and genocide maybe it's
| not 100% a loss for everyone else?
| bbqfog wrote:
| There are calls for terrorism and genocide coming daily
| from the MSM in Europe and the US.
| Tanjreeve wrote:
| You'd agree that there are limits to free speech then?
| bbqfog wrote:
| I think you may have replied to the wrong comment or this
| is a very drastic non sequitur.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| So tear down the bulletin boards. No not the electronic
| ones, the wooden ones.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| one of these things is not like the others
| everfrustrated wrote:
| The US has DCMA and strong free speech protections.
|
| There is no free speech protection in any EU country.
|
| DCMA is overlooked but it's hugely beneficial for US
| companies and means they're not liable for what their users
| publish/write on their site. In Europe you have to staff
| moderation teams to remove defamatory content etc or become
| liable to be sued yourself.
| watwut wrote:
| I don't find USA to have meaningful speech protection.
| Retaliatory lawsuits are frequent and the process itself is
| and the process itself is the punishment.
|
| Plus, current goverment don't care about laws and people on
| top of it have history of retaliating against speech.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| It is still a lot better than the _nothing_ that exists
| in EU as free speech. Also the current government does
| not care about laws and the previous did not want free
| speech, but in the end there is plenty of it.
| aranelsurion wrote:
| Yet almost all US companies where users can publish stuff
| operate in EU just as well. Seems like the upside of the
| market size outweights the downside of risks.
| ako wrote:
| There is free speech in Europe, just not free lies. I think
| it's a good thing if voter manipulation through Russian lies
| is addressed, this is just a piece of online warfare from
| Russia.
| bbqfog wrote:
| This is the kind of thing you don't have to contend with if
| you host outside of Europe. I don't care about your beef
| with Russia, I do care about free speech though.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| It's indeed easy not to care about "our beef with Russia"
| when you're far away from them. The feeling is quite
| different when you live next to them, and know that your
| home might get bombed one day because of Putin's
| geopolitical fantasies you have absolutely no control
| over.
|
| I like free speech, but I would rather not die because an
| army of Russian trolls managed to replace Western
| democratic governments with Russian puppets.
| bbqfog wrote:
| Just food for thought... I have a hard time viewing the
| people who want to restrict speech as my ally. Quite the
| opposite. I'll take so-called (likely fictional) "trolls"
| over restrictions of speech any day of the week.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| I don't see why anybody would doubt the existence of
| those trolls. It's quite obvious that social media can be
| cheap and efficient tool for spreading propaganda, and
| information warfare / spreading propaganda among your
| enemies is nothing new. It's done by many nation states
| and other actors, Russia is just among the most
| successful.
|
| Anyway, I tend to agree that "too much" freedom of speech
| is not the real issue here. Across Western world,
| neoliberal economic policy has failed to bring prosperity
| among large segments of population. Politicians have also
| ignored very real issues, such as failed humanitarian
| migration policies, DEI-policies which discriminate
| against particular "privileged" groups and so on. Trolls
| would have much lower success rate, and far right parties
| would be much smaller if these concerns had been taken
| seriously before by mainstream parties. People who are
| happy and optimistic about their lives and future rarely
| become extremists.
| bbqfog wrote:
| I find it ironic since your complaint about DEI almost
| certainly comes from the dreaded trolls you're
| referencing. I don't actually need a "troll" to tell me I
| don't want to spend billions of my tax dollars defending
| Europe when everywhere you look in the US things are
| falling apart. That's not Russia, it's just reality.
| ako wrote:
| Online warfare is warfare, and russias lies can
| destabilize working democracies. We all know the stories
| of the horrors of the 2nd world war, and never again also
| means fighting online warfare. Freedom is more important
| than freedom of lies. I'm sure that if you ask people who
| experienced the 2nd world war to choose between freedom
| and freedom of lies, they'd choose freedom.
|
| Also, a vote for the right is a vote to increase the gap
| between the poor and the wealthy, things will only get
| worse.
| bbqfog wrote:
| My own country lies to me far more than Russia could ever
| even dream it. The president of the US went on live tv
| and said he saw non-existent "beheaded babies" just to
| service Israel. Russia isn't even a blip of a problem for
| US citizens. In fact, a lot of people that want to take
| away our freedoms seem to be anti-Russia, so at worst
| they're the enemy of our enemy.
| scambier wrote:
| Is the UK still considered "European"?
| com wrote:
| Only geographically. For many other attributes, accelerating
| away at speed.
| nadir_ishiguro wrote:
| By the rest of Europe? Kinda.
|
| They always seem to have imagined themselves to sit halfway
| across the Atlantic instead of a few miles off the French
| coast.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| Ok.
|
| And how about making every citizen constantly carry an always-on
| device from the USA full of sensors and permanent internet
| access?
|
| And how about basing all infrastructure on these devices, so that
| nothing works without them?
|
| And how about not letting a software ecosystem flurish, so that
| when robots (cars, humanoid robots, weapons ...) take over, all
| of them will be controlled by US software?
| darkest_ruby wrote:
| Nobody forced you to buy an iPhone, an android alternative has
| always existed
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| No matter if you use iPhone or Android - in both cases a US
| company has full control over it.
| graemep wrote:
| So a different American company?
| nobankai wrote:
| [flagged]
| Clubber wrote:
| How can iPhone have a monopoly if android exists without
| redefining the term monopoly? Serious question.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I think it would be very reasonable to redefine the term
| monopoly (or "anti-competitiveness") so that it
| encompasses the closed technical platforms that dominate
| the 21st century.
| fsflover wrote:
| It's called duopoly, and it's not much different.
| dang wrote:
| Can you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we
| don't have to keep banning you?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| nobankai wrote:
| Can you help me understand how I've broken the site
| guidelines? Both my comment and the parent's are good
| faith discussions cut along the same rhetoric this site
| has tolerated for years. None of the responses are even
| taking this into flamewar territory, it's a black-and-
| white pastiche of security versus obscurity.
|
| > so we don't have to keep banning you
|
| My account has five karma, Dan. One downside of
| uncommunicated permanent bans is that it precludes the
| leverage you ordinarily use to encourage reform.
| dang wrote:
| Your GP comment broke at least these:
|
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| " _Please don 't sneer, including at the rest of the
| community._"
|
| " _When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead
| of calling names._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > _One downside of uncommunicated permanent bans is that
| it precludes the leverage you ordinarily use to encourage
| reform_
|
| I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying here. It
| seems simple to me though: if you'd stop breaking the
| site guidelines so repeatedly and badly then we'd be
| happy not to ban you again, and if you won't stop doing
| that, we have little choice.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| Unless you're using Graphene or similar, you're still plugged
| into a US corporation when using Android.
| bigfudge wrote:
| This is such a bad argument, because for a functional modern
| smartphone (for non nerds) you need to get into bed with
| either Apple or Google.
|
| The way out of this is not expecting consumers to install
| fdroid. It's putting in place proper regulations to preserve
| privacy and security for EI societies.
| nobankai wrote:
| > It's putting in place proper regulations to preserve
| privacy and security
|
| That ship sailed _so_ long ago. Not only because national
| security demanded warrantless backdoors, but because our
| companies now control regulation. If Tim Cook or Elon Musk
| take issue with some pesky demands for open architecture or
| security audits, they complain to Trump and resolve it via
| EO. Any protest is already quashed. Phone owners who don 't
| actively resist hold no leverage against their OEM.
|
| Stuff like F-Droid and PostmarketOS _is_ the solution to
| this particular problem - people just don 't want to admit
| it. It's easier to give up essential liberty, purchase
| temporary safety, and demand that you deserve security
| along with it too. Too few people realize that personal
| freedom is a necessary precondition to personal safety.
| everdrive wrote:
| Android devices run a Google OS and report data to Google.
| Apple's privacy claims are not actually impressive when
| inspected, however Android is far, far worse when it comes to
| privacy violations. It doesn't really matter than the phone
| itself might be manufactured by a 3rd party. In fact, it
| could be worse; your data could be excessively leaked to both
| Samsung and Google, rather than merely Google.
| jksflkjl3jk3 wrote:
| At least with Pixel you can install GrapheneOS.
| fsflover wrote:
| After giving your money directly to Google.
| croes wrote:
| That comes on top
| beng-nl wrote:
| You're not wrong, but your point doesn't diminish the point of
| the post.
|
| Maybe we should discuss one topic at a time so we can make
| progress somewhere without the implication that progress that
| isn't everywhere is progress nowhere?
| piskov wrote:
| All this doesn't mean your back-end should be based on
| something like Microsoft Windows Server with MS Sql Server. Or
| modern equivalent of serverless Windows Azure.
|
| Russians (and everyone closely watching) started that
| transition almost painlessly in 2014.
|
| Have your own search engine. Have your own payment system. Base
| your infrastructure on open-source.
|
| You know, be sovereign, not dependent.
|
| The users switching from iOS to Android is just the last mile.
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| That would require banning US services. As the European
| industry (held down by bureaucracy) does not stand a chance
| to build solutions that can compete.
|
| It seems like this is not on the horizon yet. And in the
| times of AI, it would probably result in a huge productivity
| hit.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > All this doesn't mean your back-end should be based on
| something like Microsoft Windows Server with MS Sql Server.
|
| Why the hell not?
|
| From a _technology_ perspective (i.e., data /information
| theory/performance/what HN _should_ be about), MSSQL is
| really, really hard to beat in a big enterprise ecosystem.
| This isn 't because of decades of prerequisite evil dealings
| that make it a morally incompatible offering, but because
| it's been so thoroughly exposed to every possible use case
| that yours would certainly flow nicely.
|
| I've been watching a lot of otherwise really compelling ideas
| and high energy teams get turned into complete shit due to
| these ideologies. I can understand a EU tech startup being
| hesitant toward US-based technology, but in 99% of the cases
| I hear about, it's a purely American tech company with _zero_
| international presence that is making a bunch of noise about
| how much they hate whatever domestic /paid/"closed"
| offerings.
| fsflover wrote:
| > The users switching from iOS to Android
|
| Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices
| than Apple from iOS (therecord.media)
|
| 816 points by gormandizer on March 30, 2021 | 445 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Android does not mean Google services are involved... (I
| know it does for most, but not for all =)
| fsflover wrote:
| Only if you're able to reinstall the OS, and only if you
| gave your money directly to Google (to buy a Pixel).
| loglog wrote:
| This is factually wrong. All Chinese manufacturers sell
| Android phones without Google services.
| fsflover wrote:
| And without tracking?
| mmaunder wrote:
| And then fund a lot of talking instead of a lot of doing.
| fsflover wrote:
| > making every citizen constantly carry an always-on device
| from the USA full of sensors and permanent internet access
|
| I hope it gives at least some boost to GNU/Linux phones. Librem
| 5 is my daily driver, and it feels amazing despite its
| drawbacks.
|
| Related:
|
| 'The tyranny of apps': those without smartphones are unfairly
| penalised (theguardian.com)
|
| 676 points by zeristor 1 day ago | 784 comments
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137488
| anonymousiam wrote:
| If you believe that the USA has the only government that wants
| to surveil its citizens, then you should open your eyes. The US
| possibly has more restrictions on directly surveilling its own
| citizens (within the US) than any other country.
|
| That pesky Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights keeps getting
| in their way, so they've created ways around it, such as
| allowing allied nations to do the surveillance for them.
|
| Every government in the world has mandates that require a
| surveillance capability. This has been the reason that
| satellite constellations cannot route traffic directly from
| user-to-user, but instead must route through "hubs", at a cost
| of doubling the required, but precious bandwidth.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > And how about making every citizen constantly carry an
| always-on device from the USA
|
| Screw that, every EU politician have an iPhone or Android
| phone, loaded with apps from Meta, X, Tiktok and what have you.
| Step one should be for our politicians to put some sort of
| emphasis on their own privacy in relationship to the US, Russia
| and China.
| amelius wrote:
| This is going to hurt as we will all have to hand in our iPhones
| then.
| davidw wrote:
| "Free trade is good, actually" where different places can focus
| on doing what they do best and trade for other goods and
| services.
|
| But you have to have reasonably sane trading partners for that
| to work and that has gone out the window.
|
| And yeah, it's going to hurt a lot of people.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| The only thing that changed is hearsay and inuendo which this
| post is based on.
| aravindputrevu wrote:
| People have always thoightabputitand said no to cloud. Especially
| those folks who are non-native tech businesses
| matt-p wrote:
| The main problem to my mind is that we have none. OVH are perhaps
| the only semi serious option and that's super depressing.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| As someone who been using US clouds for over 10 years now, I
| was looking in the state of EU clouds recently.
|
| It's like going back in time 15 years.
|
| OVH co-mingling postgres customers on the same underlying
| server with no noisy-neighbour protections! AWS RDS is obsolete
| tech these days and they can't even match that!
| matt-p wrote:
| Yes, I know. I wouldn't really want to use OVH for anything
| besides bare metal, same for hetzner (even then, they're not
| great at it).
|
| The only good providers I'd use again are London based.
| nicce wrote:
| Did you check Scaleway as well?
| hinkley wrote:
| OVH, who burned down a data center because it didn't have fire
| suppression. Never forget.
| maelito wrote:
| Using Scaleway. It's great. Lots of open source stacks too.
| morkalork wrote:
| Time for Ericsson to resurrect their phone division?
| sylware wrote:
| How to say this... it was not in the first place. And it is not
| specific to the US, it is the external cloud operator which is
| the issue.
|
| It is a very complex matter. Roughly speaking, if you rely a lot
| on information systems, in the end you are own by the real
| operators of those information systems.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I think "international cyber-relations" is something that's more
| generally coming into mainstream attention [0], whereas it's
| always been a bit muted and behind the scenes because people
| never questioned where the Internet _is_. Another factor moving
| attention back to geography is energy. We started caring about
| what "the cloud" costs the planet. The magic of "The
| Cloud/Internet" was to make location disappear. Now, _who_ has
| your data is an issue again. Clearly the Danes are not on BFF
| terms with US at the moment. Here in the UK our problem is GCHQ
| using a lot of AWS. I 've no doubt current US politics will lead
| to big changes in how computing and storage is structured. Maybe
| we'll get some good new protocols and practices (I'm thinking of
| real massively distributed systems) out of this which make things
| more resilient and less parochial for everyone.
|
| [0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=31
| miki123211 wrote:
| And this will be felt on both sides of the pond.
|
| Unlike most other developed countries, the US has no real site
| blocking, mostly because it doesn't need it. They have enough
| control over the financial system and enough friends in foreign
| governments that they can essentially nuke websites that don't
| follow American law off the face of the earth, or at least
| force them not to serve American users of their own "free
| will". See e.g. crypto exchanges that don't follow KYC/AML,
| crypto-native prediction markets that nevertheless require a
| VPN for Americans to access, despite not even interacting with
| the non-crypto financial system, piracy sites which are often
| shut down at the behest of the US government, foreign banks
| that ask you whether you're a US citizen etc.
|
| Once the answer to "we are the SEC, you can't let Americans
| visit your site or we'll get you extradited" changes from
| "yessir" to "fuck off, we're Europeans who have never stepped
| foot in the US, American law doesn't apply to us, and our
| government is gonna back us up on that", things will get really
| interesting.
|
| As a European who is very much against EU tech regulations and
| the EU way of doing tech generally, this is definitely one
| change I'll welcome with open arms.
|
| As an aside, I'm surprised "freely offering drugs / pirated
| content / havala-style unregulated P2P crypto exchanges to
| Americans on the open internet" isn't a model that a US-
| unfriendly nation has tried so far.
| belter wrote:
| European alternatives for digital products: https://european-
| alternatives.eu/
|
| https://www.scaleway.com/en/
|
| EuroStack: https://euro-stack.eu/
|
| https://www.ceps.eu/a-bold-proposal-to-build-the-eurostack-b...
| seqizz wrote:
| I recently got a message on LinkedIn from an AWS headhunter for:
| "Position for European Sovereign Cloud".
|
| So I assume most of the mentioned issues will be irrelevant
| soon(tm). Because a) the convenience, b) lack of actual
| competitors.
| hedora wrote:
| The Cloud Act means that product offering is either violating
| US law or snake oil.
| lynx97 wrote:
| I never was. Claiming otherwise is blatant political propaganda.
| mraniki wrote:
| https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to
| seydor wrote:
| The US army and NATO where the first global cloud services
| 827a wrote:
| The UK government just demanded Apple to disable Advanced Data
| Protection, globally, in order to backdoor the iPhone; and Apple
| has at least compiled with it for UK users; but no, for sure, its
| the US Clouds that are unsafe, not because of specific laws or
| executive orders, but just... vibes. "The vibes are off, we're
| done" get real.
|
| Romania just annulled a democratic election because of supposed
| interference from Russia. _Some_ would say that by doing so
| Russia won anyway, but democracy doesn 't seem to be a priority
| for some European countries. But, sure: Its the United States
| that presents the greatest danger.
| com wrote:
| Only one half of your comment is true.
|
| Election interference does occur, and to protect democracy,
| courts must act where there is clear evidence.
|
| Or are you referring to Hungary in your second paragraph?
| 827a wrote:
| No; Romania [1]. But yes, Hungary also has its own set of
| problems; Europe has always been allergic to democracy, and
| its no surprise that allergy would keep rearing its head in
| the 21st century.
|
| [1] https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-cancelled-elections-and-the-
| main...
| kypro wrote:
| I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with this reasoning, if
| it wasn't for the fact they only get involved when it's
| Russia trying to push the election in a certain direction.
|
| There's countless examples of countries trying to influence
| the elections of others. I'm from the UK and a notable
| example that comes up here was when the US president
| threatened Brits that the UK would be put on the bottom of
| the list of trade talks if they voted Brexit.
|
| And just recently nearly 100 staff from the UK government
| were supporting Harris in the US presidential election.
|
| I'd also argue that propagating this idea that people are too
| stupid to see through the lies and interference in an
| election undermines the point of democracy. If we cannot
| trust people to make sound democratic decisions, then why do
| we even support democracy as a political system? In a
| democracy sometimes people will be misled. You need to trust
| that people will ultimately make the right decisions.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| People discussing ideas freely on social media isn't
| "election interference".
| hedora wrote:
| It actually is in this case, unless you're using
| doublespeak.
| 827a wrote:
| One thing is for sure: Annulling the results of an
| election is _definitely_ election interference, unless
| _you 're_ using doublespeak.
| kakoni wrote:
| Ukraine moved their governmental data into AWS in the start of
| war [1].
|
| [1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/institute/AWS-Institute-
| Accelerate-...
| bloopernova wrote:
| I'm in the process of moving my various google data onto Hetzner
| storage share[1]. It's a Nextcloud instance with 5TB of storage
| for $16/month. My wife and I each have a normal user, we can
| share stuff just as well as before, and we can install things
| like a simple Kanban app, sync to our Android phones, etc etc.
|
| So far it's been great, I highly recommend it.
|
| [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
| k8sToGo wrote:
| Regardless of any cloud:
|
| I hope you have a proper backup strategy
| bloopernova wrote:
| Multiple local copies, a cloud copy, and an archive copy on a
| different provider.
| Zenst wrote:
| Store a local copy offsite with a friends or relative you
| visit regularly(encrypted). One fire and all your local
| copies gone otherwise.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| "Now that we know how you did it, we will raid you and get
| it. And we will use the $5 wrench to get the passwords from
| you" :)
| masijo wrote:
| As a third worlder, this is hilarious. I'm sorry but I can't help
| but laugh at the panic some people are manifesting over the US no
| longer being the world police and involving itself militarily in
| another continent.
|
| I don't like Trump, I really don't, but I hope he continues with
| this. Sadly he probably won't do the same with Israel though.
| watwut wrote:
| US is involving itself. They arw actively supporting Russia and
| actively threatening Canada.
|
| USA is not stepping back, they are acting like an aggressor
| both against Ukraine and Canada. And against EU those somewhat
| less so.
| throwaway_12321 wrote:
| EU people calling US unreliable now? For the last 50 years EU
| has been doing to Israel what US is doing to EU... Sadly for
| you, the West will figure itself out.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| The US no longer playing world police isn't what's disturbing,
| it's understandable that they want EU to take care of its
| defense. The disturbing thing is how the current administration
| blamed Ukraine for the war, sees Putin's Russia as an ally, and
| actively wants to destabilize EU by supporting pro-Russian
| forces inside it.
|
| All this is not so hilarious for me, living next to Russia and
| wondering if they will invade us within next 5-10 years, and
| whether we will receive any help from abroad when Europe seems
| to become increasingly pro-Russian. What is happening now is
| potentially a matter of life and death to us.
| hedora wrote:
| So, you're hoping for more US backed genocide and ethnic
| cleansing campaigns, and less defending third parties when
| dictators decide to invade them?
|
| How do you envision this playing out in your corner of the
| third world?
| raverbashing wrote:
| I think the biggest impediment here is binary thinking, which
| permeates a lot of this dialog
|
| Sure, I agree with the article. Sure, the EU is way behind here
| in implementation, and the privacy stuff takes (IMHO) a bit of an
| absolutist position. But then we ask ourselves, how many people
| do actually turn down cookie banners (well I do, but still)
|
| As a start, not even the US gov trusts their vendors, that's why
| there's FedRamp and such. It's a detailed procedural and deep
| certification.
|
| Is it safe to have your stuff in a US cloud vendor? Well, which
| stuff? Is it safe to have it in a server under your desk?
| Probably less safe in the end
|
| Which countries have actual specialists in securing data? (hey
| didn't the USDS just get shut down?) Which countries actually
| implement those security guidelines? (Or just general best
| practices?)
|
| tl;dr: SNAFU
| aranelsurion wrote:
| > how many people do actually turn down cookie banners (well I
| do, but still)
|
| does anyone know why EU hasn't regulated (read: forced) use of
| DNT headers or a similar mechanism instead of non-standard
| cookie banners that are obviously being abused in a malicious
| compliance way?
|
| Seems to me it could've been just "If I send you `DNT: 1`, that
| means refuse all non-functional cookies".
| niemandhier wrote:
| European cloud providers can only exist in niches at the moment:
| - cheap but unreliable -> hetzner - integrated into the DFN ->
| gwdg - and so on
|
| The market is captured by us companies. I doubt that this will
| change.
|
| The reason is simply that the the number of clients that care for
| the problems described is small compared to the total market. If
| you run a company that caters to these clients, you will cater to
| a small market with special requirements.
|
| Companies like that tend to be pricy and hence won't take market
| share from Americans.
| rmu09 wrote:
| OTOH most of the stuff these cloud services run won't be really
| missed if gone.
| chriscjcj wrote:
| > Not only is it a terrible idea given the kind of things > the
| "King of America" keeps saying,
|
| When attempting to formulate a persuasive argument, this isn't a
| great place to start in my opinion. It's perfectly acceptable to
| dislike Trump and his policies. If you do, then go ahead and
| state your reasons. He was elected by the people of his country
| and he'll be done in four years' time. That's not how kings
| generally function. Perhaps I'm throwing the baby out with the
| bathwater, but I don't find myself too interested in reading the
| article after the inflammatory introductory TLDR.
| peterdsharpe wrote:
| You imply that the title "King of America" is pejorative, but
| did he or did he not refer to himself as a king? As far as I
| can tell, he endorsed this title.
|
| To add on this, prediction markets currently put Trump Sr. as
| 8.5% likely to win the 2028 GOP nomination
| (electionbettingodds.com). So, I wouldn't take your "he'll be
| done in four years" as certainty. The market thinks things are
| far more precarious than you do.
| Clubber wrote:
| The cloud cometh and the cloud slowly fades away.
| megous wrote:
| It would be funny if I survived my web dev career without ever
| having to touch AWS and friends, just because CPU core count,
| memory bandwidth, etc. scaling got to a point a single machine
| could handle total population of my country. :D
| ein0p wrote:
| It never was safe in the first place. Storing sensitive data in a
| locale under the jurisdiction where it can be freely accessed
| without your knowledge has always been idiotic. That's why all
| proper, sovereign countries demand that their data, and that of
| their citizens, is stored in datacenters within their national
| borders.
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| The US should stop subsidizing the EU. It's clear Europe has
| nothing to offer the US, economically or geopolitically.
| watwut wrote:
| You are aware that US business selling stuff to Europe is what
| makes trade deficit smaller? It is not a subsidy for a business
| to sell and get money.
| croes wrote:
| Nothing to offer?
|
| Then why the tariffs?
| cuuupid wrote:
| One oft forgotten thing is that the US government clouds rated
| for IL5/6 are secluded on SIPRnet and JWICS. These are totally
| separate networks with CDS's being the only way to go from one
| net to the other.
|
| In practice this means the US Government remains in control of
| the network backing their cloud. ITAR regulations make it
| treasonous to have foreign eyes on these clouds. Foreign
| governments are not afforded any of those protections when
| sitting on US clouds.
|
| Even among FVEY, there are designations for data relative to
| member states and information is not as free flowing on JWICS as
| one might assume. It is more like a controlled stream than a
| raging river
| snickerbockers wrote:
| Did none of these people read Machiavelli? Relying too much on
| foreign governments, especially "friendly" imperialists is never
| safe because it gives them a degree of control over you. That's a
| problem no matter who is in charge. If you slept through the
| PRISM scandal and are only regretting your failure to take action
| because you don't like the guy who just won an election, then
| you're beyond salvation.
|
| At the very minimum you should be encrypting all data before you
| transmit it to machines you don't physically control, but even
| that's not necessarily good enough because it still gives them
| the ability to withhold that data from you. And that's to speak
| nothing of some hypothetical future technology that may be able
| to defeat your encryption entirely.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| The world would be better off if people, like yourself (no
| offense) would read Machiavelli as a satire.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| Well at the very least you need to take the stuff about power
| dynamics to heart, because that's the part that's most
| relevant and the part that modern Europeans have the worst
| understanding of.
|
| I find Europeans to be particularly annoying because they've
| willingly turned themselves into de-facto vassal-states
| without even realizing it, and despite constantly panicking
| over the outcomes of internal American politics they never
| learn their lesson or take any real steps to become less
| dependent on the United States.
|
| I'm pretty sure I remember the exact same conversations about
| whether it's safe to host data in America eight years ago,
| because they haven't changed at all. I happen to think
| they're over-reacting and that Trump isn't going to do
| anything with their precious data, but they're well within
| their rights to have negative opinions about internal
| american politics. However it's also incumbent upon them to
| understand that they have no standing in who the American
| people elect, and that if they don't feel safe not being
| America's #1 priority they need to become more self-reliant.
| Europe is not the center of the world to us, they're just
| another one of the six continents that aren't North America.
| ideashower wrote:
| I haven't read Machiavelli, where would you recommend I begin
| for this in particular?
| Pooge wrote:
| The Prince[1]. Although I think it's not very "readable" for
| today's standards. I've had a much easier time reading
| political science books that were written more recently.
|
| [1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57037
| cutemonster wrote:
| I'd be interested if you have any recent book suggestions
| snickerbockers wrote:
| yeah, uh, well he's been on a bit of a sabbatical for the
| last five centuries so there aren't any recent ones. Not
| sure when he's planning to come out of retirement.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| check this "Machiavelli for kids".. seems gone as of now, so
| in archive.org:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160304023516/https://www.claud.
| ..
| snickerbockers wrote:
| "The Prince" is the important one, IIRC he wrote some plays
| and such too but Prince is where his name got associated with
| cutthroat politics. It's a pretty boring read but it's not
| difficult to understand, I read it when I was 14 and I didn't
| have any significant difficulties even though I lacked
| context in contemporary Italian politics. Even though I was
| bored out of my mind (i did not read this book by choice) its
| been a major influence on my life because it explains all the
| different ways your choices can have surprising results in
| the long run if they're planned well by you (or your
| adversary).
|
| It's a book he wrote about how to maintain power in a feudal
| society, with references to many historical events to back up
| his arguments. Usually it comes down to being wary of
| accepting help from somebody else unless you understand their
| motivations, what they stand to gain, and what you stand to
| lose in the long run. It's sort of like "Art of War" in that
| it's written for a specific time and place but the principles
| behind it are so universal they can be applied to many
| different situations, even business management and
| interpersonal relationships.
|
| So anyways, my point in the OP above was that this is the
| sort of situation that he wrote extensively about; obviously
| there weren't any computers or cloud storage in 15th-century
| Italy, but he definitely makes several points on the dangers
| of relying too heavily on third parties for resources,
| because it gives them leverage with which to manipulate them.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That ship has sailed with technology in general.
|
| Sure, it isn't safe for EU governments to store data on US
| clouds.
|
| It also isn't safe for US governments to rely on chips made in
| Taiwan that China could invade. Or for TikTok to be a primary
| media source in the US.
|
| The fact is, we're an economically interconnected world at this
| point, in terms of software, in terms of hardware, and in terms
| of hardware supply chains.
|
| And it's hard to see it going backwards. Economic efficiency is a
| powerful force. It often seems like the solution has to be to try
| to implement as many safeguards as possible, rather than cut off
| sources of technology. But I don't know... it's an incredibly
| difficult question.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's an old civics aphorism: if goods don't cross borders,
| then armies will.
|
| Giving all your data to foreign states though may be a bridge
| too far. That's not the same as buying cars or Swedish Fish.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Giving all your data to foreign states though may be a
| bridge too far._
|
| Does it really matter?
|
| If large Western countries want to spy on each other, there
| are _so many_ ways via so many devices.
|
| That's why I'm talking about safeguards -- why not just focus
| on ensuring everything is encrypted in rest and in transit,
| so you can use anybody's cloud anywhere?
| hinkley wrote:
| Supply lines. You offer political asylum to someone I don't
| like I can shut your entire federal government down to get
| him.
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's an act of war.
|
| Fortunately, going multi-cloud is a thing. Storing data
| with multiple providers in multiple countries. Lots of
| companies which specialize in multi-cloud solutions.
|
| Again, like I said -- safeguards.
| gmuslera wrote:
| Since now? It was safe before, as in what is happening now was
| totally impossible before, and somewhat it happens anyway? Do
| they started to care about making backups after they lost data?
|
| Risk is not about "something happened, so it may happen again",
| but if something bad can happen, if it is possible, and maybe
| weight it as probable or not. Black swans exists, and if you bet
| everything on that they not, you may lose everything.
|
| And the process of moving government and societies to some
| controlled by a foreign power cloud takes time to get in, and to
| get out. And you can't tell that something bad was being done
| while showing a smiling face.
|
| It is not something coming out of the blue. There was strong
| signals of intervention back to the start of internet, and a more
| or less official confirmation of what was happening in the shadow
| with Snowden's revelations. But somewhat is now when that is
| perceived as a risk.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It has always been unsafe, it is very questionable under the
| GDPR (though governments are obviously excluded from the GDPR
| itself), and lots of governments and companies have been using
| or working on alternatives. But the temptation of of US clouds
| has been strong, and now is a good time to remember everyone
| who previously thought the benefits outweighed the risks
| Mailtemi wrote:
| In addition to Cloud, there is one more thing: Mobile. Banks.
| Parking lots. Shops. Europe should invest in a Linux phone OS
| with NFC and unified push notifications.
| hedora wrote:
| Yeah. Progressive web apps are a great way to hedge bets on
| this. They also bypass App Store censorship, binary tampering,
| etc.
|
| Maybe someone will revive firefox os or build a better
| successor to it.
|
| Ideally, there'd be a law saying that any government service
| (direct, or contracted out, so including infrastructure like
| parking and EV charging) must be offered via a PWA that works
| in EurOS, iOS and Android.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| US is an unreliable partner. EU needs to work on decoupling from
| it ASAP in every domain.
| devsda wrote:
| Hopefully, this push will stop the trend of calling countries
| trying to legislate data residency and privacy laws to keep their
| citizens data out of foreign prying eyes as authoritarian and
| painting them as threats balkanizing the free internet.
|
| Wishful thinking? may be, because the world isn't and doesn't
| have to be fair.
| raincom wrote:
| It is NEVER "safe to move for any government and secrets to US
| clouds", unless you want to be spied up on.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| Russia found about it the hard way when Google and Apple
| payment services were suspended.
| hedora wrote:
| In fairness, the whole international consumer banking
| industry cut them off. Try using your Visa card or PayPal on
| a Russian web site.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I don't think it is safe to move to anybody's cloud if you are
| concerned about spying. We have seen far too many invocations
| of the magical words "national security" and "think of the
| children" universally.
| pphysch wrote:
| The PRC essentially pioneered the concept of digital sovereignty
| with the "Great Firewall" approach in the late 90s. It was
| famously ridiculed by Bill Clinton as a hopeless endeavour.
|
| In the wake of 2014 and souring relations with the West, Russia
| also started looking more seriously at digital sovereignty. This
| was castigated as "isolationism" and an attack on the "open
| Internet".
|
| Now it's nearing a household term among EU tech groups. Because
| this was never about democratic ideals, it is about power and
| control, especially in a volatile multipolar world.
| century19 wrote:
| I have interviewed Turkish people that did not have Cloud
| experience as their large companies (e.g. banks) were not allowed
| to use US cloud services. Seems like that was wise now.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| EU should build their own cloud services. I mean it's not rocket
| science, but I don't know anything in EU that can compete with
| the big three.
| fransje26 wrote:
| You don't need to compete with the big three if they are part
| of a world order crumbling in front of your eyes.
|
| You need to build services that allow you to continue to
| function as democracies and that ensure you can tackle the
| challenges ahead.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Is it safe to store data in Germany, given the strong showing of
| AfD in the election? They are now in second place, and who knows
| what will happen in the next 5 years!
|
| AfD is pro-Russia and pro-Trump:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AfD_pro-Russia_movement
| fsflover wrote:
| It's safe to use FLOSS solutions with e2e encryption.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Not for long: https://www.infosecurity-
| magazine.com/news/microsoft-quantum...
| hedora wrote:
| Open source post quantum cryptography is already being used
| at scale.
| fsflover wrote:
| This is far from actual applications:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43106687
| croes wrote:
| Political parties in Germany don't have the same power as the
| president in the US.
| breadwinner wrote:
| What about the Chancellor?
| jagermo wrote:
| Not nearly as in the US, plus our version of the supreme
| court is not beholden to political parties
| breadwinner wrote:
| So in other words, storing data in Germany does not solve
| the problem, it is just better than the US. The US
| currently has a wannabe monarch, but that's just for the
| next 4 years... we hope.
| croes wrote:
| The GOP is now full of those wannabe monarchs otherwise
| they would stop him but they just want to succeed him and
| use what he and Musk start to implement.
| fransje26 wrote:
| Isn't the yellow monarch already talking about running
| for a third term? (Dementia and legality concerns not
| considered)
| timewizard wrote:
| No governments are trust worthy.
|
| When did Hacker News start believing they are?
|
| Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >When did Hacker News start believing they are?
|
| I think the 'majority' were always like that, though I think
| in the recent years the proportions became higher.
| waihtis wrote:
| Meanwhile author makes zero comment on UK encryption nonsense, or
| the mad EU drive towards absolute information control.
|
| Its just another case of rocket + orange man bad
| croes wrote:
| Because the US are the bigger threat.
|
| The EU has much more leverage against the UK.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| European Democracies should start a, new, NATO-like military
| Alliance on their own, but without Trump's America.
|
| (and without the notorious US-made military equipment kill-
| switches)
|
| And while we're at it, this time will be different: Instead of
| the membership criteria being anti-communism, it should be
| effective Liberal Democracy and Freedom from Exceptionalist
| Exemptions, namely from the International Rule of Law. So, to be
| part,
|
| 1. Compulsory ICC membership - hence no exceptionalistic US, and
| no exceptionalistic Israel.
|
| 2. No "Illiberal Democracies": say, for example, composite of a
| minimum 0.67 score on the WJP Rule of Law Index and others:
| therefore no Orbanic Hungary, and no illiberal others like it.
| Poland, Slovakia, Italy: you better watch your ways if you want
| in.
|
| 3. Democratic backsliding removes you rights in the Alliance,
| and, can proportionally lead to outright expulsion.
|
| Not one more new military equipment purchase from the US, (and
| dispreference for other non-qualifying nations procurement).
| Member nations should use their - substantial - industrial
| capacity to equip themselves with indigenous military materiel.
|
| Hey, it would be actually great for their economy!
|
| Initially European scope, but bridges to a broader global scope
| (or even a secondary sister-Alliance) with open-ended
| partnerships with Canada, Australia, New Zeland, Japan, South
| Korea, and yes: Taiwan.
|
| US and/or Israel want to join, if a more Democratic future
| selves? Simple: fully join the ICC, and meet the Alliance's full
| criteria as every other member.
|
| Same applies for prospective new members.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Curious for any specific feedback!
| albroland wrote:
| 1. How do you intend to pay for it? 2. How do you intend to
| enforce it? 3. How do you intend to defend it?
|
| How many tanks can you deploy? IFVs? Artillery? How much
| ammunition can you supply? How many fighters are in service
| and mission ready? Bombers? Tanker aircraft? Transport?
| Helicopters? How many battalions (of any type) can be
| formed/deployed?
|
| Repeat the same exercise in the context of a navy.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/584035/defense-
| expenditu...
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294391/nato-tank-
| streng... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293688/nato-
| aircraft-st...
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| 1. Funding and Industrial Coordination:
|
| We would use something similar to the EU's Recovery and
| Resilience Facility (RRF) to fund this initiative - like a
| EU Marshall Plan, and, cooperate across partners' ample
| industrial capacity:
|
| If we can make cars, airliners and cruise ships, we can
| make military equipment.
|
| Swedish gear is actually a good template: license
| manufacturing of what's needed criss-crossing the Alliance,
| and joint develop new generation equipment and technologies
| as necessary.
|
| After all, it's being done since Concorde and goes on today
| - we just need to increase the scale.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| 2. Enforcement follows naturally from the funding
| mechanism:
|
| Access to joint funding, industrial cooperation, and
| defense capabilities is tied directly to maintaining
| democratic standards. Very simple - fail the democratic
| checks (Rule of Law index, ICC membership, etc.), and your
| access to the system's resources and voting rights gets
| restricted - like originally mentioned.
|
| Continue backsliding on democracy? The restrictions
| escalate proportionally. This creates both carrots (access
| to shared capabilities) and sticks (potential exclusion)
| that make democratic standards self-enforcing through
| practical incentives rather than just moral arguments.
|
| The Orban playbook stops working when undermining
| democratic institutions has immediate defense and
| industrial consequences. It's a more robust enforcement
| mechanism than the EU's current Article 7 process.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| 3. Defense strategy shifts from NATO's "US-centric" model
| to a distributed European capability matrix:
|
| Start with French and U.K. nuclear deterrence as
| foundation. Layer in proven European systems (Rafale,
| Gripen, Leopard) while rapidly developing next-gen
| capabilities through joint programs. Think European DARPA
| meets industrial policy.
|
| Key force multipliers: integrated air defense spanning the
| continent, standardized logistics, shared intelligence
| platforms, and fully interoperable command systems. Defense
| partnerships with Canada/Australia/New Zeland/Japan/South
| Korea/Taiwan provide complementary capabilities and
| strategic depth.
|
| No US kill-switches means full sovereign control of
| systems. Distributed manufacturing ensures supply
| resilience. Distributed architecture rather than
| centralized hub-and-spoke.
|
| This model isn't about matching US or legacy NATO
| capabilities 1:1, but creating a robust, autonomous system
| that potential adversaries can't easily disrupt or defeat.
| European industrial and technological capacity makes this
| feasible - we just need the political will to execute.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Bonus: Times have indeed changed - Trumpist chaos (came
| back to bite us and) is upon us. It is high time our
| security Alliance evolves from anti-communism to effective
| upholding of Democracy.
|
| An overwhelming majority of democratic countries in the
| world recognize the ICC. Why accept exceptionalist members
| any longer?
|
| In short,
|
| - NATO: Accept compromised / exceptionalist members for
| strategic advantage.
|
| - This proposed new Alliance: Democratic standards ARE the
| strategic advantage.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Will the members truly be willing to goto war (even nuclear
| war) to enforce the agreement? Unless the entire planet
| believes that whole heartedly the pact is meaningless.
|
| I have my doubts, without the US NATO is largely toothless
| IMO.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| The credibility question cuts both ways - a Trump-
| compromised NATO isn't more reliable than a European
| alliance with clear democratic commitments and mutual
| interests.
|
| France and the UK already maintain a credible nuclear
| deterrent. European industrial capacity dwarfs Russia's.
| The EU's combined GDP exceeds China's. Scale isn't our
| problem - political will is.
|
| Sweden indeed shows how principled positions can be
| maintained while building serious defense capabilities. Now
| multiply that model by Europe's combined industrial and
| technological base.
|
| The ICC point is crucial - when most nations accept
| international law, continuing to accommodate
| "exceptionalism" becomes a weakness, not a strength. An
| alliance of genuine democracies, bound by shared values and
| mutual accountability, may prove more reliable than one
| held together by mere convenience.
|
| Rather than asking if Europe can afford to build this
| capability, perhaps we should ask if we can afford not to.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Genuinely confused:
|
| Why the downvotes?
|
| In 2025, Trump dumped Ukraine, sided with Putin and made a
| number of bully threats (including invasion) to its formal
| National Security partners. Security which - at least still
| today - is bound by literal treaty.
|
| Should Europe just roll over and wag its tail?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| What kind of partnership is this that one side wants to boss
| around its only-good-if-wimp partner?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Illiberal democracies start with suppression and control of
| speech. Which is core to the EU regime currently.
|
| > without the notorious US-made military equipment kill-
| switches
|
| Evidence?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| It's a secondary point, but sure,
|
| It's a widely common practice:
|
| France had kill switches in its export Exocet missiles - why
| wouldn't the US have also kill switches in its export
| equipment?
|
| It would actually be strange if they were absent.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ui54r7/france_urged.
| ..
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| > Illiberal democracies start with suppression and control of
| speech. Which is core to the EU regime currently.
|
| Really?
|
| The EU limits explicit calls to violence, genocide denial,
| and coordinated disinformation campaigns.
|
| Meanwhile, Russia imprisons people for holding blank signs,
| China censors Winnie the Pooh, and Hungary closed its last
| independent radio station.
|
| Don't you think your standards for what free speech is could
| be slightly different, depending to whom they apply?
| GMoromisato wrote:
| The world has changed, but the EU acts like the solutions that
| used to work will continue to work in the future. Neither
| regulating limits to AI nor waiting for Trump's term to end will
| solve the underlying problem.
|
| First, Trump's rise in the US is not an isolated phenomenon.
| Almost every country in Europe has its own right-wing, anti-
| globalization, pro-nativist parties, and in almost all countries
| their power has grown. Globalization decreased economic friction,
| but not evenly--there were winners and losers. The winners were
| the professional class who could sell their services to a global
| market. The losers were the labor class who saw their jobs
| outsourced and who had to pay more to the professionals they
| needed (doctors, teachers, etc.). The result was Trump.
|
| US policies will moderate as Trump's failures pile up, but we're
| never going back to the globalist, "citizens of the world"
| consensus of the 2000s.
|
| Second, (and ironically), globalization has given leverage to
| high-agency individuals to amass more power than previously
| possible. Billionaires are exerting influence (Musk, obviously,
| but also Gates, Bezos, Marc Benioff, Bloomberg, Koch brothers,
| etc.) not just because they have money, but because money can
| influence more people through globalized businesses. Social media
| is the obvious vector, but even a business like Starbucks has
| influence by how they set labor trends.
|
| Moreover, authoritarians like Putin are only constrained by hard
| power, not by international institutions. And ironically, the
| whole point of international institutions is to decrease
| investment in hard power! The result is that people like Putin
| can do whatever they want.
|
| It is obvious that globalization, as currently structured, has
| failed. But no one (to my mind) has yet proposed a better model.
| The left wants to keep globalization and tinker around the edges;
| the right wants to tear it all down and retreat to autarchy.
|
| Eventually, the world will enter a more stable equilibrium.
| Whoever can see that new equilibrium can prepare for it or even
| influence how it comes about. Anyone got any ideas?
| arunabha wrote:
| There are obviously _strong_ emotions on both sides regarding the
| actions of the first few weeks of the Trump administration.
| Whether you believe the goals are worthy or not, one must
| acknowledge that the manner in which all of this is being done is
| deeply disturbing.
|
| Trump will be gone in a few years, one way or the other. However,
| the foundations that are being poured for legitimizing a
| strongman, authoritarian role for the executive and almost
| eliminating the role of the other two branches is deeply
| dangerous.
|
| If you believe the goals are worthy enough that the ends justify
| the means, think of the worst president ever(in your opinion) and
| consider whether you'd want _them_ to have the same power?
| Because politicians never let power go willingly. They will
| certainly point to Trump 's precedent as a means of legitimizing
| their actions.
|
| My fervent hope is that our institutions are strong enough to
| weather this assault and that enough people make it clear to the
| administration that there are lines they are not willing to
| cross. Whether that happens remains to be seen.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I worry about the rising tides of nationalism/anti-globalism both
| in the US and in Europe. I view things like this as accelerating
| the trend, not 'resist'ing it.
| hedora wrote:
| War is already here and expanding. The US will probably switch
| sides and align with Russia.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if NATO is replaced with something that
| excludes the US and includes Ukraine, Greenland, Canada and
| Mexico.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If 'US switch sides' means US giving military or financial
| support to Russia in the war, I strongly doubt it. If it
| means Trump giving rhetorical support to Russia, sure.
|
| I'm willing to bet against both the military support for
| Russia & the NATO dissolution at 4:1 odds before end of this
| year and 2:1 before end of next year.
|
| I don't think anyone serious actually thinks either of those
| things are going to happen so I doubt anyone would take me up
| on that offer.
| hedora wrote:
| I think the US will pull out of Ukraine and then focus on
| maintaining martial law and territorial expansion.
|
| If you think I'm making the latter part up, look at the
| budget package the senate voted for yesterday.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| maintaining martial law?
| chasd00 wrote:
| The US will get closer to Russia in order to pull Putin away
| from China. Isolating China is a higher priority than saving
| Ukraine.
| pedropaulovc wrote:
| This is nothing new, Microsoft signed an agreement with the
| French government to build a sovereign cloud called Bleu [1]
| operated by Orange and Capgemini using Azure and Microsoft 365
| technology. The German government did something similar and
| launched Delos Cloud, operated by SAP and Arvato Systems.
|
| [1] https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-
| release/2021/05/27/223...
|
| [2] https://www.bertelsmann.com/news-and-media/news/first-
| sovere...
| based2 wrote:
| https://www.cert.ssi.gouv.fr/cti/CERTFR-2025-CTI-001/
|
| https://cyber.gouv.fr/decouvrir-les-solutions-qualifiees
| layer8 wrote:
| > called Bleu operated by Orange and [...] using Azure
|
| This is somehow funny.
| zekrioca wrote:
| Not sure how the person doesn't realize the contradiction.
| pm3003 wrote:
| The pun is intended.
| darkwater wrote:
| They should have used "violette" then (azure + orange)
| maelito wrote:
| Aweful strategists did that, if they weren't simply corrupted.
| pm3003 wrote:
| The reasoning is that, with sufficient security, on premise
| (more or less) cloud technology is not much different in
| terms of sovereinty from sourcing your hardware from China.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| That was such a low blow, given we have stellar companies like
| OVH that have demonstrated their skills and willingness to
| bring great hosting, and are fully local.
| pacifika wrote:
| What's the alternative to ICANN?
| docmars wrote:
| I see what this guy is saying, but one important thing this
| article misses entirely is: Trump was elected with overwhelming
| support, and is carrying out the will of the people. I think
| people should stop pretending that his decisions weren't
| commissioned, and deluding themselves into believing that he's
| acting on his sole authority somehow.
| croes wrote:
| He got less than 50% of the votes
| hedora wrote:
| His most popular policies have about 50% support. Most poll
| at 2:1 or 3:1 against:
|
| https://archive.is/C08bk
| croes wrote:
| That's actually bad if even his most popular ones only
| reach 50% at max.
| jmward01 wrote:
| There are two questions here: Should gov/company/actual human use
| x, y or z from the US and HOW can they avoid it? I personally
| don't see a lot of strong answers to the 'how' question right
| now. At a basic level I think this is because we don't have a
| clear, coherent 'cloud OS' that makes it easy to build
| alternative offerings.
|
| I run proxmox and try to host some things locally but the server
| offerings aren't quite there yet. What would be amazing would be
| for me to be able to truly host my own cloud so that I could
| share a doc with someone and the editor was hosted by my servers
| and safely sandboxed. It would be extraordinary if I could get my
| phone to offload storage to my personal cloud in place of iCloud
| and this was as easy as pointing to my personal cloud instead if
| being, at best, still a patchwork.
|
| Things like portainer, podman, proxmox, etc are putting different
| pieces together but they are missing the crucial ingredients of
| exposing themselves to the internet safely and easily and being
| the foundation that my personal OS can actually easily run on.
| This split between device OS and cloud OS is something that
| hasn't yet really happened and it is holding us back from
| creating a viable alternative ecosystem to commercial offerings.
| I think the things missing from current offerings like proxmox
| are:
|
| 1) The cloud OS of the future needs to expose VPNs and control
| domains as first class citizens so that my devices can join it
| securely and natively. These resources are the hard-drives and
| network cards of a cloud OS but they are treated like apps in
| current offerings. 2) It needs to integrate with auth in ways
| that allow me to 'share' a doc from my personal cloud just as
| easily as google does and allow others to connect in secure,
| controlled ways. There isn't a point to opening up to the
| internet if you can't allow others to connect safely. 3) It needs
| to integrate with other clouds and provide native ways to migrate
| data and services between your personal cloud and other clouds.
| 4) It needs to seamlessly expand from user level cloud to
| enterprise and beyond. This is the 'Developers developers
| developers' moment. If I can develop in my local cloud things
| that I can deploy to a real enterprise could then I will build a
| lot of things even if they don't go to the enterprise.
|
| I think building the route to 'how' is the important question
| here. You can't just legislate 'use the alternative' if the
| alternative doesn't exist. So what is the route here? How do we
| get to a point where it is actually possible to choose a
| different cloud? I think there are a couple ways here but a core
| component is likely a split in linux to start a cloud native
| install path. Basically, when you install on a machine it always
| installs as a container running on a hypervisor/cloud OS so the
| machine joins/starts a cloud OS install first and then the user
| OS installs are virtualized on top from the start. Basically,
| bare-metal should belong exclusively to the cloud OS. I think
| this likely would create the initial split needed to focus
| efforts on developing the cloud OS separate from the user OS and
| possibly start us down a path where the ecosystem exists to
| enable people to hop off of US cloud providers. As a side benefit
| though it would make migrating to new hardware way easier since I
| could likely just migrate my virtualized environment after
| joining it to the cloud OS the old machine is hosted on.
| brundolf wrote:
| I wonder if growing distrust in the american cloud will benefit
| companies like Oxide in coming years
| matt-p wrote:
| Who are based where? Same fundamental problem right, you still
| can't get overall security (of continued supply, support and
| software/firmware)
| brundolf wrote:
| Their software stack is open-source, and their machines don't
| have any telemetry or external dependencies. They're designed
| to be air-gap-able, while still giving you a cloud-like
| experience
| matt-p wrote:
| That's a great start but it doesn't actually solve much.
|
| It's a closed system so I can only buy hardware through
| them, what if at some later date the US demand hardware
| backdoors, what if due to tariff (or other drama) we can no
| longer buy them? How do we get spares?, what do we do if a
| server breaks?, what if they go out of business? What if we
| need some other kind of servers or offering they can't
| provide?
| deadbabe wrote:
| With the backlash European companies are making toward US tech,
| can US companies now rip up their GDPR policies in return and
| stop with these cookie banners everywhere?
| bittermandel wrote:
| There's quite a lot going on over the last year or two to
| actually build a real cloud in Europe, which is basically nott
| just dedis/VMs like on Hetzner or OVH. Take a look at Clever
| Cloud or Molnett!
| zhengiszen wrote:
| Sovereign nations... Europe is not sadly
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| This article is not a reasonable take on the situation. It is
| saying America isn't a "reliable partner". What does that mean?
| Demanding that NATO countries pay their fair share instead of
| free loading, is now not being a reliable partner? If anything
| it's the other way around, considering the US has funded Europe's
| defense. America is still the best partner for Europe and it
| makes more sense for the two to rely on each other than to waste
| resources while China - an actual dangerous dictatorship -
| continues to rise.
|
| It's also odd to paint Trump as "dictatorial" given that European
| leaders constantly look for ways to control or punish free
| speech, or for ways to suppress election results they don't like.
| Look at the coup in Ukraine in 2014, the actions taken after it,
| or the proposal to ban AfD in Germany, or the effort to reverse
| the Romanian election. It's EU leadership that has become
| authoritarian.
| croes wrote:
| Negotiate with russia about Ukraine without Ukraine.
|
| Calling a elected president of country a dictator and spread
| false claims of 4% approval.
|
| Bringing in a UN resolution that lacks the part where Russia is
| the aggressor in the war with Russia.
|
| Blackmailing a country that fights for survival to get rare
| earths.
|
| And for free speech, the US don't have free speech. People are
| silenced by fear by ,,free-speech" abolitionists so they don't
| dare to speak freely in fear of repressive measures.
|
| That's law of the jungle not free speech.
|
| And the AfD is full of enemies of the constitution and that's
| illegal as a party in Germany.
|
| Nobody prohibits to be such an enemy of the state but you can't
| expect to get paid by germany tax payers for trying to destroy
| that state. That his neither authoritarian nor anti-free-
| speech.
| hedora wrote:
| You forgot threatening to annex greenland, canada and panama,
| and attempting to put an end to mexican sovereignty.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > And for free speech, the US don't have free speech. People
| are silenced by fear by ,,free-speech" abolitionists so they
| don't dare to speak freely in fear of repressive measures.
|
| The US is basically the only country with good free speech
| laws. I am not saying they're perfect, but I'm not sure what
| your argument on that point is. Can you share something more
| specific and explain how it invalidates the American
| constitutional protections on free speech?
|
| > And the AfD is full of enemies of the constitution and
| that's illegal as a party in Germany.
|
| You either have a democracy where people can choose their
| leaders or you don't. It appears Germany doesn't. Preventing
| a party that is popular, from existing or participating in
| elections, is literally authoritarian and anti free speech by
| definition.
|
| > Bringing in a UN resolution that lacks the part where
| Russia is the aggressor in the war with Russia.
|
| What do you call the illegal coup in 2014? It removed the
| representation of everyone in Crimea and Donbas right? What
| about NATO expansionism? The aggressor isn't very clear. I
| would argue that the 2014 coup and efforts to suppress
| Russian ethnic people in Ukraine was an act of aggression
| that eventually led to this conflict.
|
| > Blackmailing a country that fights for survival to get rare
| earths.
|
| This framing just shows how thankless it can be for America
| to help Europe. Asking for something fair in return for
| hundreds of billions in defense and security funding (not
| just in this conflict but for a much longer time), especially
| since it helps remove China's rare earth control, is
| reasonable. It's not blackmail to propose a fair deal.
| Ukraine and Europe are also certainly free to refuse the deal
| and not expect American taxpayers (whose pocket this comes
| out of) to help them further, considering they've already
| done so much.
| croes wrote:
| > The US is basically the only country with good free
| speech laws.
|
| You know how online comments can be used to silence people?
| Imagine we had a heated argument and I end with ,,I know
| where you live" Depending on the circumstances at some
| people at that point feel threatened and stop using their
| free speech.
|
| Or think about the people who get fired for online
| comments.
|
| You could say, free speech doesn't mean free if
| consequences but that means it's not free speech, but
| without consequences you could threat other people and stop
| their freedom of speech. Every freedom stops where the
| freedom of others begin, that's why no freedom can be
| unlimited.
|
| > You either have a democracy where people can choose their
| leaders or you don't.
|
| Sorry that's BS. Every democracy has rules for those who
| want to vote and want to get voted. Something like
| stripping convicted of their voting rights forever is
| impossible in Germany. You can even vote in prison. And
| given that taxpayers pay for the parties expenses and that
| they get free airtime in TV for their ads the are certain
| rules you have to comply to be a allowed party. So comply
| with the constitution is one main point.
|
| >It's not blackmail to propose a fair deal.
|
| Pay or we cut of your military's communications via
| StarLink is not a proposal of a fair deal. Without
| communication people will die. Pay or die is definitely
| blackmail.
|
| > What do you call the illegal coup in 2014? It removed the
| representation of everyone in Crimea and Donbas right? What
| about NATO expansionism?
|
| Because former soviet states joined NATO russia had to
| attack and kill Ukrainian civilians? Really?
|
| And don't forget that people in Donbass voted for
| Zelenskyy.
|
| By that livic Russia could attack the US and shouldn't be
| labeled the aggressor. I doubt that Trump would do that but
| maybe he would offer some US states to make a deal to get
| peace.
| serial_dev wrote:
| It is _no longer_ safe? Like it was safe a month ago? It was safe
| with Biden, Obama or Bush as presidents?
|
| It baffles me how people look at other administrations through
| rose colored glasses and pretend that the problem started since
| Trump took over and Musk is working on this DOGE stunt. The swamp
| has always been there.
|
| It _was never_ safe, and _never will be_ , no matter who is the
| president and how outrageous some of their actions are.
|
| This article didn't need the picture of "Trump is signing
| things". This article cannot be taken seriously because of that,
| and it's so frustrating because otherwise it made good points.
| skrebbel wrote:
| To all the people saying that this is nothing new: to me the key
| point here is that the author of this article, Bert Hubert, isn't
| your average activist / purist linux hacker. He's at least
| _somewhat_ influential in government circles, in that he has held
| various government IT consulting positions and is listened to by
| lots of government IT workers. He 's one of the few people I know
| of who deeply understands how tech works, and also deeply
| understands how government works (at least the Dutch government).
| He's also a frequent guest in radio and TV shows and the likes.
|
| I'm hoping that this article acts as a catalyst for the Dutch
| government, and other EU governments, to move everything away
| from American clouds.
| tempodox wrote:
| Here's to hoping that decision makers will listen to him.
| Mossy9 wrote:
| I hope so too, but move where? Does Scaleway or UpCloud or any
| other EU cloud provider have comparable offerings? Sure, if
| everything you have is running on containers or VMs, the stuff
| is easy to port to Hetzner et al., but what to do with the
| cloud specific apps (Azure functions etc.)? Rebuilding those
| for other platforms is probably a no-go unless the Union pours
| billions into supporting this.
|
| Though I've cursed it for years, I'm increasingly glad our
| org's cloud migration has been so slow that we've only now
| rolled out the first apps. Pretty much everything we've build
| can be run anywhere we want, so if it's time to drop the ball
| and go back to onprem, we've not wasted anything but time on
| setting up the base
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Canada
| 1over137 wrote:
| >I hope so too, but move where?
|
| On premises.
| buildfocus wrote:
| Scaleway at least is genuinely not a bad alternative for this
| kind of thing already today - they do have plenty of managed
| services like serverless functions, object storage, queues,
| etc, in addition to the simple VMs and container hosting.
| neoromantique wrote:
| Scaleway (and I say this with very deep sadness) is pretty
| bad in terms of reliability right now, there are at least a
| couple big outages every year over the course of last few
| years that I've been using them.
|
| Admittedly they have a new CTO who according to our support
| agent is very focused on improving that, so here's hoping,
| because otherwise their tech offering is very convenient.
| portaouflop wrote:
| OVH? Hertzner?
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Lidl?
|
| :/
| kefirlife wrote:
| OpenFaaS is one option for your functions. Knative is pretty
| good as well for the bulk of your applications without
| exposing developers to kubernetes directly. Between that and
| Crossplane I think you have all the pieces needed to move
| away to a self hosted solution where you are managing either
| metal or VMs through a hosting provider.
|
| I'm not sure what this looks like outside of the US, but
| colocation providers offer racks of machines, or to host your
| machines, while providing access to cheap bandwidth and
| peering capabilities. It's absolutely possible to move away
| from the major cloud providers. However, it will require a
| degree of investment within your organization to support
| these deployments no matter which you choose, which could be
| a new investment compared to using AWS, GCP or Azure.
| matt-p wrote:
| You need teams of people, the good news is that they're
| available here. It's not hard as such just requires time
| and money (quite a lot).
|
| It's not just kubernetes and openFaaS, what about that
| thing that's a virtual appliance and requires a VM, now you
| need KVM. Network and firewalls? Storage as in fully
| replicated cannot ever lose a byte or have it unavailable
| storage? Object as well as block. Databases, point in time
| restores/backups/automated maintenance for postgres and
| then you've probably got a mssql server for that one app,
| and mysql for that other app.
|
| It becomes just a fairly massive task back in the real
| world.
| sekh60 wrote:
| OpenStack out of the box does KVM, network, firewalls,
| NVFs, orchestration (via native heat or terraform), and
| with the Magnum component can launch k8s, Mesos, or Swarm
| largely automagically. Storage is typically via ceph
| (which does block, object [supports Swift/S3 protocols]
| and filesystem) and supports snapshots and is fully
| replicated. Sadly the managed database service didn't
| make it far, but with Heat or Terraform it's pretty easy
| to spin up a VM holding your DBs. The native FaaS
| service, Qinling got deprecated a while back. Secrets
| management via the barbican component. Web interface via
| the horizon component.
|
| I'm not too familiar with the whole range of AWS
| offerings, but I really think aside for DBaaS and FaaS
| OpenStack can cover pretty much everything someone would
| need, especially combined with Ceph for storage.
|
| All opensource.
| matt-p wrote:
| Yes, I'm aware. It doesn't reduce or negate the need for
| a team responsible for running storage and understanding
| how it works, then a team owning databases (probably with
| some development resources too) and so on.
|
| It actually takes work to setup and run we are not just
| installing some packages and then pretending you can
| scrap aws.
| champtar wrote:
| AWS EBS volumes (except io2) have an annual failure rate
| of 0.2%, so if you have 1000 running statistically you
| will loose 2. For io2 it's 0.001%, but still not 0.
| matt-p wrote:
| io2 high durability is 1 in 100,000 per year.
|
| S3 has 99.999999999% durability as standard.
|
| I see your point that it's not technically 100% but, as
| close as can be reasonably achieved.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Isn't Google doing some thing where they give the software
| stack to a local operating partner?
|
| I guess you can say the code is still backdoored / untestable
| but it seems that could be audited.
| decimalenough wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > _People also fool themselves that special keys and
| "servers in the EU" will get you "a safe space" within the
| American cloud. It won't._
|
| The problem isn't sneaky backdoors, the problem is that the
| King of America can order Google to shut that thing down
| and Google will have no choice but to comply.
| jankeymeulen wrote:
| Not really, the whole point of this type of cloud
| offering is that it doesn't phone home to Google / the
| US. Sure, it will be left to the partner to support all
| of it, but it can't be shut down from one day to the
| other.
|
| (Googler, opinion my own)
| pyrale wrote:
| The issue with that is that Google can be required to
| backdoor it, and the partner can't realistically vet
| updates to a reasonable level.
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| > but what to do with the cloud specific apps (Azure
| functions etc.)?
|
| Don't build them. Vendor lock-in is a real problem: even if
| there are no political issues, it's a business risk because
| they can charge you whatever they want.
|
| Also, the cost of migrating off these things is usually
| overestimated. It's an HTTP request, for crying out loud.
| Mossy9 wrote:
| Fully agree with you there - building cloud-only stuff has
| always seemed foolish to me. Even Azure Functions can be
| done as e.g. simple C# programs which would be trivial-ish
| to port ovee to VMs.
|
| But my concern is for those that have built something as
| Azure/AWS only, who are now stuck with the bed they've
| made. Sure, there are lessons to be learned here, but if
| the volume of these is too high, then there will be
| pushback on any meaningful change since it will be too
| expensive
| 6510 wrote:
| If it costs billions then that is what it costs.
| Mossy9 wrote:
| If that's the price tag, then I fear that "let it slide"
| will win the vote when governments decide what to do. Put
| another way, if the effort of making a change could be
| lowered, it's more likely that a change will be attempted
| matt-p wrote:
| The upside of having a "aws" level competitor that pays
| taxes in Europe, could be worth billions or more.
| preisschild wrote:
| https://european-alternatives.eu/
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| I've been interviewing candidates using questions targeted at
| getting them to talk about experience instead of skill. Like
| asking about their involvement during production incidents,
| then drill down to see if there's anything interesting to focus
| on. Can probably also be gamed by AI but people are usually
| surprised about my approach and they often provide good
| feedback after the call, even if I have to decline their
| application so I guess it works somewhat well for both since it
| doesn't force anyone to just recite the same phrases.
| NomDePlum wrote:
| The concern isn't new. I've been involved in several UK
| government projects that considered moving to AWS.
|
| Each time the discussion on moving to a US based provider was a
| big consideration, particularly the use of managed services
| that involve data was a hot topic. Part of the risk assessment
| was considering what the consequences might be if the US
| government became a bad actor. It was seen as high impact but
| extremely low probability. Starting to look like we got that
| part of the assessment wrong.
|
| I think it will take time for the impetus to move to US clouds
| providers to slow and reverse but I'm not sure I'd be surprised
| if it does happen now.
| grandempire wrote:
| By that do you mean influential with the Obama/biden
| administration?
| skrebbel wrote:
| I said the word "Dutch" multiple times. The article itself
| says it a million times. So, no, not the "Obama/biden
| administration".
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| heh.
|
| by the course of looking for programming job, i have scanned
| hundreds of job-ads, incl. governmental. _everybody-and-his-
| dog_ requires AWS /Azure/GCP knowledge as if it matters thaaaat
| much. These cloud-y things have become a mandatory buzzword,
| and i am not talking about sysadmin/devops.
|
| In my last gig the system was kept cloud-agnostic, so moving
| between providers or on-prem be possible at any time. And i as
| CTO kept that good thing, although had to resist some pushes.
| But seems such cases are few - most places now dream of hyper
| mega-giga-scale and Lambdas and Big-queries.. while doodling
| few thousands of requests.
|
| Lets see if there's any wind change.. vendor-lock is a real
| thing, with much deeper (architectural or life-cycle)
| consequences than usually perceived.
| cavisne wrote:
| The thing that gets me is the disingenuous parallel
| construction. Just say the truth.
|
| Europe wants to improve its economy by growing their consumer
| tech industry. Some of these products like Google Analytics
| (the example he is upset about) are really hard to replicate
| (writing to a database on every visit to your website is an
| expensive thing to do, significantly more expensive than
| hosting the website!). So they've been slowly increasing the
| tariffs (disguised as privacy regulations) on US tech firms.
| It's gone poorly, even EU governments (let alone EU businesses)
| still use products like Google Analytics, and US tech firms
| have been able to engineer their way around the regulations,
| again doing a better job than EU governments who have been
| busted countless times for breaking GDPR with their own
| systems.
|
| No one cares about any "data sharing agreement" or a "Privacy
| and Civil Liberties Oversight Board" no one has ever heard of
| that has never done anything. Its a tariff with various ways to
| pick winners and losers.
|
| The only thing thats changed is there is a higher chance these
| privacy regulations will be recognized as tariffs by the US.
| pm3003 wrote:
| What you describe is true, and it can also be
| counterproductive vecause to be competitive you need the best
| and cheapest services, and raising the prices doesn't often
| result in a healthier tech ecosystem. Typical Eurocrat
| thinking.
|
| But EU citizens genuinely care about privacy, in part because
| of decades of totalitarian and near-totalitarian regimes.
|
| There is another risk underpinning this, I'm not familiar
| with this so it's mostly hearsay on my part, but foreign
| firms in the US routinely get completely screwed in US
| courts, and fear the seizing of their data in discovery
| processes or other ways. The data sharing agreement was made
| to provide some degree of clarity or assurances in this
| regard.
|
| I've met managers who are convinced that if they're not
| careful, their IP and business data will get stolen by their
| US competitors through various legal or less-legal means. EU
| executives have been detained for days at the border on
| suspicions of terrorism to coerce them into selling US
| assets. I can't judge if this is paranoia, and maybe those
| companies could make use of better protection against Chinese
| hackers but there's certainly some truth to that.
| aerhardt wrote:
| Cloud will continue to evolve massively with AI, as vendors offer
| more specialized infra and software abstractions, but the salient
| point is that in Europe we haven't even been able to build the
| first 10% of what providers like Amazon, Microsoft or Google
| offer. Hetzner was only "considering" a managed Postgres
| offering, last time I checked, ffs...
|
| My take is that capital in Europe is (a) way too risk-averse and
| (b) fragmented across many European countries... As much as I've
| always sympathized with the EU, "Europe" as a single entity is a
| fucking lie, an illusion in our collective minds.
|
| Try building a business in Spain, and then expanding to France.
| Yes, you have free movement of capital and labor to help you -
| which is a massive foundation - but after that all you'll find is
| red tape and difficulties emanating from the differences in
| culture and language.
|
| Similarly, it seems impossible to privately amass the amount of
| capital needed for an investment such as what is needed to "make
| the first 10% of what AWS offers".
|
| The only alternative is through continent-wide industrial policy,
| Draghi style[1]. More power to the bureaucrats in Brussels, and
| more taxes than we're already paying - and we're fucking
| suffocating already down here. No thanks!
|
| This is why the future looks dire. My only hope is that maybe
| with AI software development becomes cheaper and we can all build
| more services in-house. But please someone give us at least the
| first 10-20% most useful cloud abstractions. I wouldn't want to
| waste even the compute-time of my AI engineers in building a
| resilient managed Postgres.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draghi_report
| 1over137 wrote:
| Canadian government IT is mostly all Microsoft. The government
| can't even send themselves email without it going through
| Microsoft, a company based in a country (USA) that wants to take
| over Canada. Insanity.
| franczesko wrote:
| It is also supporting companies openly admitting to run projects
| for the US army and Israel (project Nimbus). This alone is
| already enough.
| epolanski wrote:
| Few of my clients have been very nervous about this, and I know
| we're trying to ditch several US offerings with alternatives.
|
| Microsoft is one of the hardest to get rid off, as it traverse
| the business from teams to SharePoint to azure dev ops and
| GitHub.
|
| But when it comes to running systems themselves, there's valid
| European alternatives.
| Mossy9 wrote:
| As someone who has (reluctantly) been advocating and pushing our
| org to move stuff over to Azure, this is going to get interesting
| as tomorrow I'll start pushing the cart to the other direction. I
| never wanted to go to the cloud a a goal itself, but wished for a
| more modern infra to improve processes and security, which we
| surely now can achieve onprem as well.
|
| Luckily there's always been scepticism and challenges with
| tightening data security regulations, so maybe people will mostly
| be relieved if we need to turn around on this.
|
| Anyway, it will surely be an interesting discussion on Monday...
| inetknght wrote:
| > _As someone who has (reluctantly) been advocating and pushing
| our org to move stuff over to Azure_
|
| I get moving off of AWS and GCP. But to Azure? That move
| doesn't make sense to me at any time that Azure has been a
| thing. Why have you ever wanted to move things _to_ Azure?
| Mossy9 wrote:
| Since practically every government in Europe is a Microsoft
| "shop", Azure is the first stop when The Cloud is concerned.
| Unofortunately, often the last one too... Wheels were already
| moving, I helped rhem gain traction.
|
| So yeah, not my favorite of the whole "not my favorite" cloud
| migration plan, but the only realistic path forward at the
| time
| deadbabe wrote:
| Come to Cloudflare.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Anything that fucks Bezos and Ellison is a good thing . There's
| your argument
| billy99k wrote:
| It wasn't safe when rogue engineers at Amazon colluded with the
| US government to take down Parler simply because they didn't like
| the politics they supported.
|
| It wasn't safe when the US government worked with Twitter and
| Facebook to silence the opposing view points about Covid Vaccine
| injuries and lied to us constantly about the effectiveness.
|
| There are children to this day that can't get heart transplants
| in the US because they don't have the Covid vaccine, which only
| 2% of American children have taken.
|
| I know lots of people that took the J&J vaccine and it's been
| taken off the market due to deadly blood clots. Doctors
| mentioning this at the time were silenced and many lost their
| jobs.
|
| When I see more people in the tech community talking about the
| authoritarian left that nearly destroyed our freedoms over the
| last 4 years, I might start listening to you about your concerns
| about our current state of politics.
| rexpop wrote:
| AWS suspended Parler over violent content, not because of
| political views, and not in collusion with the state.
|
| The J&J vaccine was not "taken off the market." It was
| temporarily paused to investigate rare blood clot cases. Out of
| 8.7 million doses administered, 28 cases of blood clots were
| identified, with three reported deaths. COVID-19 killed a
| million Americans, and would have killed more without the J&J
| vaccine which probably prevented 5.7 million infections and--
| with an R0 somewhere between 1.4 and 3.28--many millions more.
| This information was not suppressed, it's public knowledge
| discussed openly in scientific and medical communities.
|
| There is an undeniable authoritarian element to the US federal
| government, but when has the US ever backed a "leftist" coup in
| a foreign country? There's no coherent "left" movement in the
| US. No socialist party.
|
| Really, your victim mentality--fed by baseless conspiracy
| theories--is absurd, and your promotion of this harmful
| rhetoric endangers innocent lives. The US is a a police state,
| but not a meaningfully "left" one. It's a republican oligarchy.
| nprateem wrote:
| Lots of people seem to think this is only about data. The real
| risk is if trump says "ok, switch off the clouds for Europe"
|
| Europe has no choice but to create its own subsidised cloud and
| mandate its use.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > Europe has no choice but to create its own subsidised cloud
| and mandate its use.
|
| Don't threaten me with a good time..
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| On the topic of this, what is the best platform similar to
| Digital Ocean App Platform that isn't run by a US company?
| submeta wrote:
| Trump is just openly saying what the previous governments have
| covertly been doing: Spying on their allies and enemies alike.
| Since the Snowden revelations we know that the US is spying on
| everyone. Not just citizens, but governments, allied politicians,
| just everyone. After the revelations there was a moment of shock
| in Europe. But eventually newspapers and magazines wrote less and
| less about it. The reality is: There's five eyes and Israel, and
| then there's the rest of the world. And the world should start
| distancing itself from these malicious actors.
| buyucu wrote:
| I suspect that Trump will have a very negative impact on US tech
| companies.
| rsync wrote:
| Just a reminder...
|
| There _are_ cloud infras ("clouds") that are wholly independent
| of the large, entrenched, politically connected providers like
| Amazon and Microsoft.
|
| We think of this as a monoculture wherein every single thing is
| somehow built on top of AWS. That's not true.
| noman-land wrote:
| This reminder would be a little more helpful if you gave some
| examples.
| sirjaz wrote:
| All government systems should be on-prem, and secured by proper
| personnel. None of the data should be in a cloud providers hands,
| even by their own country's providers. There needs to be a
| separation between business and government infrastructure.
| jart wrote:
| https://justine.lol/tmp/trump.jpg
| pyrale wrote:
| > the legal basis for sharing personal data with American
| companies is dead since Donald Trump has neutered the special
| court that would make such transfers legal.
|
| It was always dead, or rather, it's in a shrodinger's state where
| the EU comission puts bullshit in a box, and companies pretend
| it's fine until the CJEU opens the box and acknowledge that it
| is, in fact, bullshit. It's happened multiple times already.
|
| Aside from that small quip, the article is, obviously, right. Any
| sane European would count their fingers after a handshake with
| this administration. Expecting this particular agreement to hold
| is madness.
| openplatypus wrote:
| We are ready. Whole built infrastructure on EU or European
| (Swiss) cloud. And I mean all. Server, customer data, but also
| support infra, email, documents, etc.
|
| We build Wide Angle Analytics ground up outside of US systems.
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