4 ms·

As an European: cloud is someone else computer, sovereign computing means users own their iron, sw and data, as government, so a sovereign computing means a Sta

by kkfx 2y ago

As an European: cloud is someone else computer, sovereign computing means users own their iron, sw and data, as government, so a sovereign computing means a State own hw, sw and data belonging to it. That's ALMOST the case for most EU states so far, but less and less the case, and more and more with private partnership engendering public IT, which is public information, nervous system, witch is the OPPOSITE of sovereign computing and Gaia-X (a failed project anyway) it's the apex of such disgraced model. Oh BTW to be sovereign ALSO DESKTOP must be FLOSS, witch is almost not the case in any public administration. The hw since it's full of fw to the point of being de facto connected black box, network hw included, mush be open or state-made. Witch is not the case in the 99.9% periodic of the cases.

jeffrallen 2y ago
As a fellow European, I'm perfectly content to use someone else's computer, as long as they have a legal responsibility to respect my privacy, i.e. not submitting to the USA Cloud Act.
- WA 2y ago
  Speaking of: Is there an EU alternative to Netlify where I can basically upload/host a small static website for free, including custom domains and free SSL?
  - mvanbaak 2y ago
    While 'for free' is something we all want (who wants to spend their money right) it is not a sustainable business case. And with prices of it/server/hosting in the EU being a lot higher then in other parts of the world, what you want is not going to be easy to find.
    - kkfx 2y ago
      it's cloying how people (individuals and SMEs) forget that in the present time in vast part of the world we have FTTH with enough bandwidth and low enough ping that's MUCH better than a cheap VPS or someone else server. The only needed thing is a fixed IP, witch is pretty available anyway. A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much powerful and much more flexible than living on someone else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need, it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn mainframe.
      - mvanbaak 2y ago
        Yes, self/home hosting is an option for some. but maintaining a server is not as easy as you make it sound. Power, cooling, noise, spare hardware, network etc are all factors that are taken care of by a provider, that are not easy to replicate. And even if you can self-host, fighting against (D)DOS attacks is not something I have seen done at any consumer ISP.
        kkfx 2y ago
        At a personal|SME level? Who might want do DDOS John Smith or Pop's store? How much iron you need for such usage? That's without counting the various "datacenters horror stories" about how badly many providers are really without appearing. My homeserver is a simple NixOS, so I have to maintain just a config, easy to replicate anytime without manual setups or complex orchestration, it's a small celeron machine with 32Gb ram and two sata classic disks + 2 nvme on a PCIe adapter card, total cost around 300€ few years ago, cooling is juts the home cooling, power it's free on sunny days (domestic p.v.) and otherwise it's still cheaper than the cheapest VPS, plus it can do much more. It's run my HA, Asterisk (for having some VoIP numbers on my deskphone and diverting call to my mobile when I'm not at home, nothing more), a small video-surveillance setup, fetchmail+maildrop+notmuch to serve mails via muchsync, etc etc etc a minimal equivalent VPS setup would costing me around 100+€/month, performing much less. If my server die I have a spare motherboard+cpu a little bit outdated but powerful enough drives are both mirrors from different brands, I have some cold spare anyway shared if needed with my main desktop etc in case of a complete crash I have my config, few kb of text, and I can replicate it anywhere. For personal usage is MUCH more than any classic hosted setup. The only real issues is for most: - knowing the software stack they need, witch is rare, because yes maintain a classic Arch or FreeBSD server it's much less comfy than NixOS/Guix System especially if you never heard of them but heard a gazillion of recommendations to use k*s or docker, proxmox and co AT HOME some even trying on raspi sbc... - some minor legal and hw things, depending on your home and how much the temp mount in summer inside. Essentially for most it's just about knowing the sw stack witch is a big issue since no university seems to be interesting in really teaching FLOSS nowadays and most professors themselves have very little practical knowledge.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Not for free, but for negligible cost.
- kkfx 2y ago
  Like Schrems sentences you can't get that from USA companies, legally, but you can't get technically for ANY third party, because you are not on their servers, and no one else is there to control them. How can you verify what any company state in a GDPR nightmare letter response? I've sent one time ago where a bank asking me to drop an RSA physical OTP for an Android app, that alone violate PSD2 (since the app it's not only a soft-token but also allow to operate on the same device, the reason why banking piracy was a thing again and more then ever), they respond accordingly to the law, but I can only choose to trust or not their response, I can't prove anything and I have nothing tangible to push some public inquiry on them. Oh, you might feel protected if you upload ONLY encrypted contents, at least feel protected for an unknown amount of time, potentially very long but potentially not enough long. So no, you can choose to trust someone else, but it's a choice that demand trust, you can't verify, so it's a vulnerability.

by kkfx 2y ago

jeffrallen 2y ago

As a fellow European, I'm perfectly content to use someone else's computer, as long as they have a legal responsibility to respect my privacy, i.e. not submitting to the USA Cloud Act.

WA 2y ago
Speaking of: Is there an EU alternative to Netlify where I can basically upload/host a small static website for free, including custom domains and free SSL?
- mvanbaak 2y ago
  While 'for free' is something we all want (who wants to spend their money right) it is not a sustainable business case. And with prices of it/server/hosting in the EU being a lot higher then in other parts of the world, what you want is not going to be easy to find.
  - kkfx 2y ago
    it's cloying how people (individuals and SMEs) forget that in the present time in vast part of the world we have FTTH with enough bandwidth and low enough ping that's MUCH better than a cheap VPS or someone else server. The only needed thing is a fixed IP, witch is pretty available anyway. A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much powerful and much more flexible than living on someone else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need, it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn mainframe.
    - mvanbaak 2y ago
      Yes, self/home hosting is an option for some. but maintaining a server is not as easy as you make it sound. Power, cooling, noise, spare hardware, network etc are all factors that are taken care of by a provider, that are not easy to replicate. And even if you can self-host, fighting against (D)DOS attacks is not something I have seen done at any consumer ISP.
      - kkfx 2y ago
        At a personal|SME level? Who might want do DDOS John Smith or Pop's store? How much iron you need for such usage? That's without counting the various "datacenters horror stories" about how badly many providers are really without appearing. My homeserver is a simple NixOS, so I have to maintain just a config, easy to replicate anytime without manual setups or complex orchestration, it's a small celeron machine with 32Gb ram and two sata classic disks + 2 nvme on a PCIe adapter card, total cost around 300€ few years ago, cooling is juts the home cooling, power it's free on sunny days (domestic p.v.) and otherwise it's still cheaper than the cheapest VPS, plus it can do much more. It's run my HA, Asterisk (for having some VoIP numbers on my deskphone and diverting call to my mobile when I'm not at home, nothing more), a small video-surveillance setup, fetchmail+maildrop+notmuch to serve mails via muchsync, etc etc etc a minimal equivalent VPS setup would costing me around 100+€/month, performing much less. If my server die I have a spare motherboard+cpu a little bit outdated but powerful enough drives are both mirrors from different brands, I have some cold spare anyway shared if needed with my main desktop etc in case of a complete crash I have my config, few kb of text, and I can replicate it anywhere. For personal usage is MUCH more than any classic hosted setup. The only real issues is for most: - knowing the software stack they need, witch is rare, because yes maintain a classic Arch or FreeBSD server it's much less comfy than NixOS/Guix System especially if you never heard of them but heard a gazillion of recommendations to use k*s or docker, proxmox and co AT HOME some even trying on raspi sbc... - some minor legal and hw things, depending on your home and how much the temp mount in summer inside. Essentially for most it's just about knowing the sw stack witch is a big issue since no university seems to be interesting in really teaching FLOSS nowadays and most professors themselves have very little practical knowledge.
- layer8 2y ago
  Not for free, but for negligible cost.
kkfx 2y ago
Like Schrems sentences you can't get that from USA companies, legally, but you can't get technically for ANY third party, because you are not on their servers, and no one else is there to control them. How can you verify what any company state in a GDPR nightmare letter response? I've sent one time ago where a bank asking me to drop an RSA physical OTP for an Android app, that alone violate PSD2 (since the app it's not only a soft-token but also allow to operate on the same device, the reason why banking piracy was a thing again and more then ever), they respond accordingly to the law, but I can only choose to trust or not their response, I can't prove anything and I have nothing tangible to push some public inquiry on them. Oh, you might feel protected if you upload ONLY encrypted contents, at least feel protected for an unknown amount of time, potentially very long but potentially not enough long. So no, you can choose to trust someone else, but it's a choice that demand trust, you can't verify, so it's a vulnerability.