- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.
There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.
“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.
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As should have been done already 10 years ago. When it became clear American authorities can seize any information even when stored on servers outside USA, by any American service provider.
And Obama claimed it was a “fair balance”.USA has in many ways acted almost like a totalitarian regime for decades, disregarding their own laws, international laws, and especially the laws of other countries, even allies.
This became very clear when Obama stressed that illegal surveillance/monitoring wasn’t used against American citizens.
Obviously meaning that citizens of other countries have no rights, and there are no laws preventing American intelligence in any way.As it turned out, what Obama promised wasn’t even true, and Americans stationed in for instance Iraq, were very much monitored.
With regard to information of other countries, USA has CLEARLY demonstrated, that they have no regard for decency or even laws.
This was revealed when Obama was president, and the Republicans are even worse!!
USA and EU has made an agreement on this, claimed to make it legal in EU to use American cloud services.
But as we have seen, no American administration gives a fuck about such agreements or even laws, so that agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.and Americans stationed in for instance Iraq, were very much monitored.
Um… This was never a secret. Like, at all. All the phones in the phone bank I hit up in the desert there were clearly labeled “Communications on this line can and will be monitored for operational security reasons”
Was it written on the phone of the people they called?
The claim was that with calls from foreign countries, if it was an American they spoke to, it would not be monitored.
Only foreigners were.Was it written on the phone of the people they called?
No, but if they weren’t informed, frankly, that’s on the SM for not doing so. And honestly, anyone taking a call from a deployed soldier should just understand that reality.
The claim was that with calls from foreign countries, if it was an American they spoke to, it would not be monitored. Only foreigners were.
I’m not going to speak to generalities of whose calls were monitored and shouldn’t have been. Solely the item of “Americans stationed in Iraq were monitored”, which is, frankly, obviously happening. And every SM was informed as such. And they were instructed to inform their families of that fact.
Every military spouse knew that, if they went to the pre-deployment briefings they were invited to. Every SM knew it. Every contractor knew it, and their families should have also been informed by the contractor.
Hell, even in my state, only one party legally has to know it’s being monitored and/or recorded to be legal.
Wow. This guy hates Obama lol.
Anyone who opposes mass surveillance should.
What facts did they get wrong?
No I don’t, Obama was a good president and USA was a strong ally under him.
I hate Trump.
But it’s alarming IMO that a president that we consider moderate and a friend, still think these things are OK.
And Obama was just unfortunate that it was under him that these things were revealed.You make fair points. I shouldn’t jest so carelessly. I don’t think it’s just Obama either though. Past administrations have all had hands toward what we have today.
That said; I do think you’re right really. Which also kinda makes me sad. I wish we had some real leadership, and actually hope 😅
We end up with a remixed reality of ‘King Ralph’ instead. Every day with Trump is eating away at whatever hope for some kind of check and balance to occur. It’s disheartening to feel so powerless in the face of such a FUBAR-POTUS clown show in the chainsaw wielding circus.
Anyway! Back to masking it 🎭
Past administrations have all had hands toward what we have today.
Absolutely, as I wrote Obama was just unlucky that it was under him that these things were revealed.
It’s disheartening to feel so powerless in the face of such a FUBAR-POTUS clown show in the chainsaw wielding circus.
I am really sorry for all the good Americans that have to suffer the consequences of this administration.
It will probably get worse before it gets better.
Obama taking no action to dismantle the surveillance state was my biggest problem with his administration. It was so obvious how that surveillance would be abused were it ever to get in the hands of a President with authoritarian tendencies.
And here we are.
Now they’ve fully eroded the 4th amendment and will use that knowledge to eradicate the 1st.
Yes IMO that part was very disappointing. As I used to say, Obama is an excellent president for USA, but he is still American.
Meaning there are things that we simply don’t see the same way.
But as a Dane I can’t really complain much about it. Because we were complicit, and helped USA spy against other European countries, for which I am much ashamed.
A bunch of smaller EU firms should merge and get half as tall as one of the trifecta. EU companies should get them the rest of the way up to their same size.
Nextcloud
Not really the same thing, LoadBalancer, VM, Managed service such as database, secret manager and far more are provided by the likes of Aws and GCP. Sadly the alternatives in Europe such as OVH Cloud are not really on the same level…
In Switzerland, Proton is well-known but their CEO is more than shady, and Infomaniak is a better alternative.
they offer so much, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about them before.
Most of their apps have proprietary clients though, right?And they don’t seem to offer privacy features like simplelogin for email, which was the main reason why I subscribed. and additionally, one would then have to pay separately for vpnedit: they have open source clients
Not really! You can find the source code for almost everything in their github (I say almost because I haven’t checked if everything is in there, but I know the clients are because I’ve looked them up). Besides, aside from offering extremely competitive prices, they are privacy friendly (don’t offer end-to-end, but you can read their privacy policy) and use a very ethical infraestructure. I seriously recommend you check infomaniak up; I have been using them for 2 years and couldn’t be happier.
that’s great to hear, thanks for the info. It’s strange that they don’t mention that on their websites more prominently
I really want to like Infomaniak but apparently their syncing is… Let’s say it could be better.
If you’re just looking for somewhere to host your stuff it’s good. But their “suite” with open office (or any other one, can’t remeber) still have room for improvement.
I don’t know, I have been using them for more than a year and am SUPER happy. I use their mail, their kDrive sync and calendar/tasks and have had nearly no problems. And when I have had a problem, I have gotten very fast email support, and they even pushed an update when I let them know there was a problem with the keychain acquisition on KDE. Honestly, it’s the best experience I have had ever with any cloud provider. I even have WebDAV support!
I mostly using it for basic usage, nothing advanced like hosting/website/etc.
Great to know they good for advanced activities. It gives me more reasons to stay with them and help them make the service better. :)
Maybe we go back to p2p, public key encryption and desktop apps. ipfs can store all the data in the distributed manner and gov can pay citizens for keeping data as a tax exception. But who I am to question building big corporations over and over again.
P2P has insane latency and is not applicable to most industries. It’s a decent idea for back ups though. P2P also has insane energy costs. It’s not as bad as BitCoins, but it will destroy our planet for sure.
I think that cloud costs are pretty much hidden under the corporate curtain. Things like water usage, energy usage for those 24/7 running servers, amount of servers that are running and not doing anything, finally the environmental impact around those big blocks of servers are pretty much not existent in the media.
Torrent sharing is doing fine.
Also doing same things over and over again because USA have it so Europe must have it to is not the way to go for me. I think Europe need it’s own way for technology and have all the bits to do it. I’m not saying that Europe should do the youtube in p2p manner because that’s insane but gov administration and countries beurocracy can go p2p.
P2P energy cost will be way less in my opinion. The servers don’t need to be online 24/7 if you think about it, for office workers they just need them when they are working. For people you can just request old data on demand and spin up server once per week to send bunch of encrypted emails. We’re used to that internet is instant but gov shouldn’t be instant it should be slow and stable so you don’t get punished, that’s completly oposite from what mainstream media internet is.
Cloud costs are super low. That’s why clouds are so cheap - every penny is optimised, because it eats into profits. P2P is extremely expensive and resource intensive.
Torrents are not doing fine, torrents are a really good example of huge resource waste, latency and stability issues. And, contrary to your opinion, it’s better to make YouTube P2P than gov services. Because YouTube is not sensitive to latency and doesn’t require stability or security.
Your idea that gov services should not be instant is just bonkers.
In any case, P2P is useless, insecure, slow and power hungry. And, once again, it shouldn’t be used for anything but back ups.
I think we can end discussion here because what you wrote is completly not true.
Do you even know what P2P stands for ? Do you know that you use P2P every day and all the time, for example by using HTTP2/QUIC.
You need 0 resources to run P2P network.Cloud computing costs are way higher than colocating server anywhere. Many companies are moving out from cloud after facing high costs. The only place cloud is shining is when you want to spin up many resources for a short period of time. And that is because we don’t have kind of computing power provider on the market where you could spin up many resources from many local computers.
Do you even know why cloud took of 20 years ago ? Have you been using internet 20 years ago ? Compare connection speed of local houshold from 20 years ago with speed right now. Compare mobile internet plan and think how it changed.
You have no idea what you are writing about.
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You suck brest milk for over 20 years ?
No one told the US to be careful what you wish for.
I wonder if I should sell my Microsoft stock.
Why? I highly doubt this little protest will meaningfully impact their bottom line.
That said, I always recommend diversifying. Invest in broad index funds instead of individual stocks and you’ll most likely be better off long-term.
It’s not a protest, it’s national strategy.
The appeal of someone else’s cloud for companies was that it was cheaper because of professionalization. But then enshitification hit and they got more expensive too. And the most sovereign cloud is your own.
In my immediate vicinity I can see a trend to insource critical infrastructure again. Not necessarily to their own servers but towards certified European data centers. Sometimes they manage to cut costs at the same time as the pricing structure for the big three is so in-transparent that they wasted a lot on unneeded resources.
in-transparent
As a helpful FYI the word you were looking for there was “opaque”.
“Rare”
Thus I am for forbidden to employ it merely because ‘tis of rare and precious nature? Surely thou jest!
Europe broke their own procurement laws to use Microsoft, they have so many own goals they may as well just accept their fate.
GOP: What if we used culture war as a way to shoot the economy in the balls?
Trump & Musk: Waaaaay ahead of ya!
We’re looking at scaleway. They seem pretty decent so far.
Using what OS, Microsoft Windows I assume?
Mate, Linux is so simple my 70 year old dad can use it, I’m using opensuse (German) right now, but he is on Ubuntu (British) both are solid choices that a monkey could install and use.
Out code runs on Linux containers, so no Windows needed. Personally, I use OpenSuSE, but the containers use Alpine.
That’s good. I hate this Windows monopoly that governments help propagate.
They need to look into using alternative root servers for DNS and domain registrations as well.
Multiple countries in Europe are already working overtime to rat-fuck DNS. I’d prefer if euro-leadership remained blissfully unaware of the root DNS servers.
What do u mean?
There are several governments in Europe and abroad that have ordered DNS lookups for specific domains to be blocked.
They probably mean that we can’t trust the government to keep information free and need a way to restrict governments from blocking DNS lookups.
Unfortunately, you can’t really do DNS in a decentralized manner as the concept is based on a hirarchy.
Example:
If you want to go to www.coolsite.org your computer would make the following requests:
- Hey root server, who handles requests for .org?
- Hey .org DNS server, who handles requests for .coolsite.org?
- Hey .coolsite.org DNS server, who is www.coolsite.org?
I don’t really know how to decentralize this…
Unfortunately, you can’t really do DNS in a decentralized manner as the concept is based on a hirarchy.
You very much can! As long as you understand that every . is a new level of hierarchy. And that hierarchy can be arranged, in any manner one desires. You can even have a different . as the root.
For example, you can be THE ROOT for all .stoy domains. You just have to get others to honor that, and ask you for addresses of anything in .stoy’s inventory. Of course, they can all tell you to piss off, and instead trust someone else is the true owner of .stoy.
And, honestly? Nothing at all is wrong with that!
What is wrong is right now, EVERYONE agrees that a handful of never-changing owners of .com, .org, .net domains (And other TLDs) is THE ONE TRUE ANSWER FOR US ALL. I didn’t agree to that. Did you? Do you enjoy Verisign being the one true keeper of .com?
Thank you for clarifying the issue better than I did!
We have I-Root and K-Root in Europe, these are certainly used…
All hypothetical of course. Not convinced things will go that far without some more clear indicators.
The root servers are already spread over the globe. Enough of them are operated by non US orgs too to handle things initially, I suspect that the localised anycast servers located outside the US for those USA based operators would probably go on serving.
It’d be trivial to replace them anyway, and frankly we traffic would be much lower anyway since a lot of the Internet is run by us based organisations.
For domain registration on tlds not run by the us, they should continue to operate fine.
In just see no alternative to Microsofts Office tools. I think 99% of all companies in Western world rely on Microsoft office.
There is no real alternative to Excel, that’s the killer app. Anyone arguing differently hasn’t got the corporate experience to argue.
Doesn’t even matter if an alternate is better, and none are, it’s about rock-solid compatibility and knowing your sheets and books will still work in 20-years.
MS fucks about with OS updates, but notice that they never break Excel? (or Word or PowerPoint for that matter)
Word has been broken since v.5.1a. But you’re right about Excel.
Of course there are alternatives to Excel. Anyone pretending otherwise has only worked at a few places and is generalizing with great but mistaken confidence.
But even if there weren’t, think about those companies living on the edge of one software breakdown. There’s a word for that: brittle. Meh, YOLO.
technically libreoffice exists, they really need to fix office comparability though
I’ve never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.
Those are moving goalposts. The LibreOffice devs do their best, but they’ll always be a step behind. The correct solution is to get people to move away from closed yet ever-changing standards made by monoliths who wish to retain a monopoly.
Note that I’m not saying that’s easy or even possible. Only that it’s correct.
MS Office rules the corporate world because their standards never change.
Open a document created in modern Word in Word 97. Then tell me the standards never change.
the fact that there is .xls and .xlsx, .doc, .docx … proves otherwise.
Yes they can still load and handle the old formats, but evidently the standards did change. As they are pushing for Office365 this will become an even more regular scenario as they want to force everyone to use the latest software, which then is only available in the subscription model.
…until they come up with the New Outlook which is total shit.
How documents are stored by MS Office has changed constantly over the last 40 years, as have the feature sets of the different applications, for which a new variant format if not a new format outright might be created each time. The file extension is a guide but not a complete indicator of what’s going on inside.
Microsoft have the advantage of knowing the exact structure of all the previous formats so they can auto-detect and load a document transparently without the user having any idea there might have been a difference.
Because the formats are proprietary, and follow no published standard (or not fully published), third parties like LibreOffice have to literally reverse engineer every single one of those formats and variants every time a new one pops up. It’s a game of whack-a-mole. Moving goalposts like I said.
And it’s often the case that reverse-engineering a format covers only, say, 99% of cases; those used in most of the documents that a would-be reverse engineer has seen. And then someone tries to use LibreOffice to open a document with a feature from the other 1% and it looks incompetent.
There’s also that it would be illegal to decompile a copy of MS Office to figure out exactly how it does it, so they have to work from the documents that MS Office generates and take their best guess. If Microsoft got even a whiff of the idea that someone working on LibreOffice had decompiled it, the whole project would be sued into oblivion.
No, they just need to enforce PDFs for things that leave an office so everyone else isn’t locked into loading and running a bloated mess just to view a read-only spreadsheet.
The analogue to the printed chart isn’t an XLS6 attached to e-mail. It’s a PDF.
That’s it. Done.
I’d prefer a Wiki style software that exports to PDF. Why aren’t we all using wiki’s, with build in version control and diagramming, like Confluence, Youtrack, etc…?
No, they just need to enforce PDFs for things that leave an office
Then, you’ll get people whinging that they need Adobe Acrobat Professional in order to edit the PDFs!
Something something leading a horse to water
Lol so are we in the USA
Its good to see that Americans are just following Dear Leader into the abyss.
? The point of searching for alternatives to USA Big Tech is to not follow some old man who doesn’t even understand it all. I don’t see how your comment follows.
Well, maybe you don’t understand the context of the OP, but we Europeans are leaving US tech behind due to your current president starting an unwarranted trade war with all of the US’s (former) allies.
I was praising you, or any american really, who’s sabotaging the current administration instead of just living life as usual. That’s how my comment follows.
