27 ms·

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds

• zhengiszen 2y ago
  Sovereign nations... Europe is not sadly
• oldpersonintx 2y ago
  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
  • MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • unixhero 2y ago
    GDPR is a great incentive to build better products. Pre-gdpr there was a lot of sloppyness.
  • jfengel 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    EU actually built solutions that people that care about $ use like OVH and Hetzner.
    • wiether 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    There are many EU-native cloud alternatives. https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-platforms https://european-alternatives.eu/category/cloud-computing-pl... Hetzner is another big one that is for some reason not listed.
    • blagie 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE https://github.com/dream-num/univer https://github.com/dream-num/univer https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite https://github.com/firebase/firepad https://github.com/firebase/firepad https://github.com/prosemirror https://github.com/prosemirror https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc https://github.com/gobby/gobby https://github.com/gobby/gobby
        • darthwalsh 2y ago
          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 2y ago
        Proton Docs has seemed fine to me.
    • otterley 2y ago
      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.
  • ulfw 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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.
        • graemep 2y ago
          I agree that it is important to use the word fascist accurately, but it is also not not as well defined as you say. There is a reasonable case for calling China fascist. It has a cult of personality, state control of the economy, nationalism, racism, elimination of minority cultures. It is far more like Germany, Italy or Spain the in the 1930s than it is like Stalinist Russia.
  • sudosysgen 2y ago
    OVH and Hetzner are quite decent and popular. The alternative does exist and I've used it a bunch, it works.
  • codethief 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
      • codethief 2y ago
        I think this article provides a more balanced perspective: https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/september/us-cloud-act-and-gdpr-is-the-cloud-still-safe https://www.linklaters.com/insights/blogs/digilinks/2019/sep...
    • jeffrallen 2y ago
      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-trust https://www.csis.org/analysis/cloud-act-and-transatlantic-tr...
  • refulgentis 2y ago
    Uh, isnt Hetzner HNs favorite host?
  • llm_nerd 2y ago
    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.
  • jonathanstrange 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    I thought you were being serious til I read your last paragraph. Well done
  • SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    A new term seen recently: "The MAGA cloud companies": Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon.
    • scarab92 2y ago
      Except, MAGA hate all those companies. They view them as non-ideologically diverse breeding grounds for progressives.
      • michh 2y ago
        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 2y ago
          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 2y ago
• bbqfog 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        US is truly hostile tho.
        • bbqfog 2y ago
          I would argue that all aggregations of power are truly hostile, whether that's the US, the EU or Meta.
      • Loughla 2y ago
        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 2y ago
  That has been obvious since 2013 at least.
• m00dy 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • m00dy 2y ago
    I know I'll get downvoted for this, but it seems like telling the truth is now a downvote-worthy offense on Hacker News. I thought we had become more open-minded, especially with the new sheriff in town.
    • kzrdude 2y ago
      What does it mean, that "EU is nothing" without US involvement? You might want to write something more substantial if you don't want those votes.
      • m00dy 2y ago
        What technological advancements has the EU developed in the past 20 years that are widely used today?
        • megadata 2y ago
          Linux?
        • kzrdude 2y ago
          Arguably 4G networks were developed in Europe and they are widely used. It's a marathon, not a sprint. I live with a high living standard with access to good health care. Hey, I also live in a democracy, and you're right that I think we need to defend that well. Let's hope & see if we have what it takes.. And most of the world doesn't run on fancy new gizmos (that don't make money for the shareholders anyway). Europe is still rich because it produces high value items like steel from iron ore, and machines and cars from steel.
        • meekins 2y ago
          Smartphones?
        • 2y ago
• ReptileMan 2y ago
  It never was
• sergiotapia 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • megadata 2y ago
    No excrement Sherlock. When team America is suddenly team Russia, things get pretty wild. Not only for EU ...
  • JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    Problems can be solved independently and/or in parallel. I hope I made you smarter today.
  • hyperman1 2y ago
    Step 0 for keeping a secret from anyone is not asking them to store it in their house.
  • watwut 2y ago
    one of them is former ally supporting Russia and far right movements.
• questionasker10 2y ago
  [flagged]
• pclmulqdq 2y ago
  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.
  • sieabahlpark 2y ago
    [dead]
  • rcpt 2y ago
    Security isn't a "safe" vs. "not safe" bool
    • dmantis 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        Cool, encrypt everything before uploading. Keep the key client-side See, parent is right? Safe/not safe dichotomy helps nobody
        • ta988 2y ago
          I didn't know that computation on encrypted data without decryption was solved overnight.
          • erikerikson 2y ago
            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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption
• mrits 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      I don't disagree with that but don't see how it is relevant. Spying on yourself is a different issue
• milesward 2y ago
  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 €50b. The shopping list isn't all that tough. Who wants to pony up?
  • jeffrallen 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      I'd argue that there are actually no EU cloud providers. There are only EU hosting providers.
• graemep 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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_ 2y ago
          Ukraine's resources belong to Ukraine, and will return to Ukraine, as soon as Russia stops their unprovoked and unjustified assault.
• ekianjo 2y ago
  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.
• dingnuts 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • kzrdude 2y ago
    Europe has housed millions of Ukrainian refugees from the war. Here's a count of European contributions to the war. Is this embarrassing? https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/united-states-america/eu-assistance-ukraine-us-dollars_en?s=253 https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/united-states-america...
  • closewith 2y ago
    Presented without comment: https://english.nv.ua/amp/european-and-us-military-aid-in-numbers-the-economist-s-review-50491679.html https://english.nv.ua/amp/european-and-us-military-aid-in-nu...
  • watwut 2y ago
    Issue is America is actively supporting Russia while America is exaggerating own contributions.
  • jagermo 2y ago
    I mean, Europe has spent 132bn, with 115bn more allocated. Bit more than the US (114bn). https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/ https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-s...
• guywithahat 2y ago
  [flagged]
• quotemstr 2y ago
  This is rich considering the UK just a few weeks ago jawboning Apple into making user data visible to the state.
  • bbqfog 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        There are calls for terrorism and genocide coming daily from the MSM in Europe and the US.
        • Tanjreeve 2y ago
          You'd agree that there are limits to free speech then?
          • bbqfog 2y ago
            I think you may have replied to the wrong comment or this is a very drastic non sequitur.
            • Tanjreeve 2y ago
              Either one would agree that if the "MSM" were publishing bad things then there's a need to control it. At which point the question is why is a social media website different. Or you'd say that child porn and other bad things being published on websites are fine and there's no need to control things. At which point you'd be pretty wildly out of step with the majority of the population.
• ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Nobody forced you to buy an iPhone, an android alternative has always existed
    • ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
      No matter if you use iPhone or Android - in both cases a US company has full control over it.
      • nobankai 2y ago
        Define "full control" for those of us with GrapheneOS installed, pretty please.
    • graemep 2y ago
      So a different American company?
    • nobankai 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • Clubber 2y ago
        How can iPhone have a monopoly if android exists without redefining the term monopoly? Serious question.
        • matthewdgreen 2y ago
• dr_dshiv 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• amelius 2y ago
  This is going to hurt as we will all have to hand in our iPhones then.
  • davidw 2y ago
    "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 2y ago
  The only thing that changed is hearsay and inuendo which this post is based on.
• brickfaced 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • quickslowdown 2y ago
    You're still a Trump supporter? Still?!
    • brickfaced 2y ago
      Getting everything I voted for and more.
  • watwut 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • chriscjcj 2y ago
      In my younger days, I had a significant other who took advantage of my good nature, expected me to pay for everything, and was borderline abusive toward me at times. When I finally stood up to her, she told me she hated me. I believed her.
      • watwut 2y ago
        This time, America is the abuser. Not borderline abuser, but straightforwardly and clearly so. Given you think America behavior is reasonable now, I have doubts about you ever having nature you claim.
    • brickfaced 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • watwut 2y ago
        [flagged]
      • dang 2y ago
• aravindputrevu 2y ago
  People have always thoightabputitand said no to cloud. Especially those folks who are non-native tech businesses
• matt-p 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      Did you check Scaleway as well?
  • hinkley 2y ago
    OVH, who burned down a data center because it didn’t have fire suppression. Never forget.
  • maelito 2y ago
    Using Scaleway. It's great. Lots of open source stacks too.
  • preisschild 2y ago
    If you just need compute, Hetzner is pretty good too. But recently they have been having capacity problems. Most server types are sold out.
    • sam_lowry_ 2y ago
• morkalork 2y ago
  Time for Ericsson to resurrect their phone division?
• sylware 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=31
  • miki123211 2y ago
    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.
    • 2y ago
• ungreased0675 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • rcpt 2y ago
    [flagged]
• belter 2y ago
  European alternatives for digital products: https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/ EuroStack: https://euro-stack.eu/ https://euro-stack.eu/ https://www.ceps.eu/a-bold-proposal-to-build-the-eurostack-because-doing-nothing-isnt-an-option-anymore/ https://www.ceps.eu/a-bold-proposal-to-build-the-eurostack-b...
• seqizz 2y ago
  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™. Because a) the convenience, b) lack of actual competitors.
  • hedora 2y ago
    The Cloud Act means that product offering is either violating US law or snake oil.
• lynx97 2y ago
  I never was. Claiming otherwise is blatant political propaganda.
• mraniki 2y ago
  https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to
  • midasz 2y ago
    Yeah, this just seems like a great opportunity for a European startup scene. Even though plenty of bad things happened under Joe Biden - the relationship with the US was fine. Every morning you wake up to see crazy stuff Trump said and that really plants a seed.
    • braebo 2y ago
      I feel like I was unplugged. Among the most notable bad things that you witnessed the past 4 years, what in particular comes to mind when you think about it?
    • Slava_Propanei 2y ago
      [dead]
• seydor 2y ago
  The US army and NATO where the first global cloud services
• 827a 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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-mainstreaming-of-the-far-right-in-romania/ https://theloop.ecpr.eu/the-cancelled-elections-and-the-main...
    • kypro 2y ago
      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.
• kakoni 2y ago
  Ukraine moved their governmental data into AWS in the start of war [1]. [1] https://d1.awsstatic.com/institute/AWS-Institute-Accelerate-public-service-transformation-4-Security-Ukraine.pdf https://d1.awsstatic.com/institute/AWS-Institute-Accelerate-...
• bloopernova 2y ago
  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/ https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
  • k8sToGo 2y ago
    Regardless of any cloud: I hope you have a proper backup strategy
    • bloopernova 2y ago
      Multiple local copies, a cloud copy, and an archive copy on a different provider.
      • AdrianB1 2y ago
        "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" :)
      • Zenst 2y ago
        Store a local copy offsite with a friends or relative you visit regularly(encrypted). One fire and all your local copies gone otherwise.
    • k8sToGo 2y ago
      Interesting that I got down voted for this
  • jacooper 2y ago
    It's only an option, if you trust hetzner, since there no encryption whatsoever, it's just a managed nextcloud instance.
  • 2y ago
• masijo 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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.
    • rdm_blackhole 2y ago
      > 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. I guess this reality has never reached the leaders of the EU apparently. Trump was in power before and also threatened to leave NATO yet the EU countries did not prepare for this at all. They had 4 years of Biden to do so but alas they simply waited and wasted time. > 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. You find it disturbing because you are missing the forest for the trees. China is now very tightly coupled with Russia and Iran. The biggest threat to US hegemony is not Russia, not by a mile. China has the means, the power and the will to start asserting itself on the global stage. On the other hand Russia struggles to hold on to a 5th of Ukraine. Trump wants to split Russia away from China and is willing to give up on Ukraine in order to make this happen. It's that simple. Russia has huge swaths of raw minerals, fossil fuels, lumber and so on that China needs in order to expand it's economy therefore it makes complete sense to try to slide a wedge between them in order to isolate China. In this game of Geo-politics, Ukraine and the EU are just pawns that can be traded/pushed around because they have barely any weight in the global order. You can be mad about this but if you do you should be mad towards the EU leaders from the last 30 years who instead of building a robust industrial base, sent all their jobs abroad, who instead of building a army that could resist an invasion, relied on the US protection without even reaching the minimum NATO investment threshold year after year. The EU countries made their bed and now they are struggling because most of them are broke, their economies are in the gutter and are slowly crumbling. > 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. This is a weird take. On one hand Russia, is not even able to conquer the whole of Ukraine but somehow it has the capability to steamroll over all the Baltic states? So which one is it, is Russia a paper tiger or an unstoppable force? Both can't be true at the same time.
• raverbashing 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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".
    • raverbashing 2y ago
      But see, whenever the EU prescribes a specific technical solution there's endless whining about how they're "locking themselves in" even if there's a path to evolution in the regulation (see the unified charger ruling) But sure, they could have specified something to the effect of "if a browser specifies (though current technical means) that the user is DNT they should follow that" but there was lobbying from the advertisers and other parties as well
• hnclimategroup 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • sepositus 2y ago
    I had the same initial reaction. I just finished watching 60 Minutes about policing the internet in Germany and was left genuinely confused about European culture. A place where the GDPR probably has better protections for European citizens than the U.S. but where you can apparently be arrested for insulting someone online. I think it's safe to say that both continents have problems. No need to act superior.
    • microtonal 2y ago
      where you can apparently be arrested for insulting someone online. Nobody gets arrested for insulting someone online. Threatening, yes. Discriminating, maybe. Insulting, never heard of such a thing.
      • sepositus 2y ago
        Well, I summarized the other two words you used into a single one (insulting). Perhaps it's too generalized, but my point is obvious: that free speech isn't a thing over there anymore.
        • microtonal 2y ago
          What do you mean by there? I live in Europe and can say what I want, as long as I don't threaten someone, etc. You may want to check the World Press Freedom Index: https://rsf.org/en/index https://rsf.org/en/index The top-13 are only European countries. The top-18 are only European countries + Canada. The US is at position 55. Similarly, in the freedom of expression index, many European countries (including Germany, which was your example), rank higher than the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-index?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...
• niemandhier 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    OTOH most of the stuff these cloud services run won't be really missed if gone.
  • midasz 2y ago
    Change can be spurred on by law. If governments aren't allowed to use non-EU (or maybe specifically US) hosters a big enough investment could jumpstart it. I'm working for a semi-government organization who just switched over to kubernetes. That can be hosted anywhere, there's not really a moat.
• chriscjcj 2y ago
  > 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.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • peterdsharpe 2y ago
    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.
    • showdeaduser 2y ago
      Do these prediction markets pay interest? If not I'd rather not pay $0.915 for a $1.00 payout in three years.
      • peterdsharpe 2y ago
        This is a good question. It looks like Kalshi (which hosts the underlying market in question here) in fact does pay interest on both cash balances and open positions, at a reasonable market rate: 4.05%. https://kalshi.com/blog/article/interest-cash-open-positions https://kalshi.com/blog/article/interest-cash-open-positions
• Clubber 2y ago
  The cloud cometh and the cloud slowly fades away.
  • megous 2y ago
    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
    • Clubber 2y ago
      I'm sure you are aware that companies can buy more than one machine for their datacenter.
      • megous 2y ago
        Yeah, that mever came to my mind.
• ein0p 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  The US should stop subsidizing the EU. It's clear Europe has nothing to offer the US, economically or geopolitically.
  • watwut 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    Nothing to offer? Then why the tariffs?
• isaacremuant 2y ago
  And yet, the European governments (EU or not) are usually extremely happy with their own government overreach "to combat the usual demons" (drugs, terrorism, protect children, etc) and now they've added "misinformation" as a way to combat political opposition of any kind with no oversight. Living in Europe I'm more skeptical about OP who ends with 'maga/Elon musk' as if this was in any way partisan and I'm pretty sure OP would be in favour of certain tactics based on political alignment. The trump derangement syndrome is very boring this time around. It just doesn't land considering so many people "fighting fascism" were more than willing to "put people in camps" if they didn't comply with anti constitutional and tyrannical covid policies for "the greater good". It's good that people care about privacy but it's better when they're consistent and not just partisan hacks.
• cuuupid 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
  • ideashower 2y ago
    I haven't read Machiavelli, where would you recommend I begin for this in particular?
    • Pooge 2y ago
      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 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57037
      • cutemonster 2y ago
        I'd be interested if you have any recent book suggestions
        • snickerbockers 2y ago
          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.
          • cutemonster 2y ago
• crazygringo 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
        Supply lines. You offer political asylum to someone I don’t like I can shut your entire federal government down to get him.
        • crazygringo 2y ago
          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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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
  • SecretDreams 2y ago
    The only clear difference between now and even not that long ago is the fair perception that the US has flipped from (probably) "lawful neutral" to "chaotic evil". Secrets in US cloud were probably never fully safe.. but at least the US wasn't previously on a path to inflict pain on the rest of the world.
    • red-iron-pine 2y ago
      the US government was invading and bombing people for decades and the EU did nothing. "chaotic evil" my ass, the only reason they're moving now is because MAGA is threatening them directly via Greenland, or indirectly, by pulling out of NATO and backing Russia.
    • Slava_Propanei 2y ago
• Mailtemi 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  US is an unreliable partner. EU needs to work on decoupling from it ASAP in every domain.
  • Slava_Propanei 2y ago
    [dead]
• devsda 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  It is NEVER "safe to move for any government and secrets to US clouds", unless you want to be spied up on.
  • nthingtohide 2y ago
    Russia found about it the hard way when Google and Apple payment services were suspended.
    • hedora 2y ago
      In fairness, the whole international consumer banking industry cut them off. Try using your Visa card or PayPal on a Russian web site.
  • Nasrudith 2y ago
    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.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• pphysch 2y ago
  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.
  • dralley 2y ago
    Comparing digital sovereignty w/r/t critical services are hosted to "The Great Firewall" is absurd. It's not the same thing at all. China and Russia blocking YouTube is different from making sure the entire EU government and economy can't be collapsed by US turning the screws on Amazon.
    • pphysch 2y ago
      Come on. We can draw a straight line from the GFW to companies like Baidu and Alibaba. Without it, they would (initially) struggle in direct competition with endemic US products.
  • Slava_Propanei 2y ago
    [dead]
• century19 2y ago
  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.
• raptor99 2y ago
  [flagged]
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AfD_pro-Russia_movement
  • fsflover 2y ago
    It's safe to use FLOSS solutions with e2e encryption.
    • breadwinner 2y ago
      Not for long: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/microsoft-quantum-chip-encryption/ https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/microsoft-quantum...
      • hedora 2y ago
        Open source post quantum cryptography is already being used at scale.
      • fsflover 2y ago
        This is far from actual applications: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43106687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43106687
  • croes 2y ago
    Political parties in Germany don’t have the same power as the president in the US.
    • breadwinner 2y ago
      What about the Chancellor?
      • jagermo 2y ago
• waihtis 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Because the US are the bigger threat. The EU has much more leverage against the UK.
• booring 2y ago
  [flagged]
• DrNosferatu 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Curious for any specific feedback!
    • albroland 2y ago
      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-expenditures-of-nato-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/584035/defense-expenditu... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294391/nato-tank-strength-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1294391/nato-tank-streng... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293688/nato-aircraft-strength-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293688/nato-aircraft-st...
• GMoromisato 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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.
  • russellendicott 2y ago
    I just see this as an experiment to see if the system can survive without the bloat. If we need the bloat, the next person can just put it all back in. It's only 4 years.
    • acdha 2y ago
      That’s like saying your car’s airbags and turn signals are bloat because you’ve never used them. It will already take more than 4 years to repair the immediate damage by firing so many people: in addition to the lost institutional knowledge, consider how much more you have to pay them to come back after proving to be an unreliable employer. If a scientist goes to Europe, they’re not lightly moving to the United States in a couple of years. Some of the long-term consequences are permanent: everyone in Europe unambiguously knows that the post-war dynamic is gone, and if they invest in their own alternatives they won’t want to throw away that investment. As an example, allies who bought F-35s are wondering if they should’ve followed the French path now that they’re faced with the prospect of being on the other side from America. If they decide to move to European control of key infrastructure, they’re not moving back for at least a generation.
• whimsicalism 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
          maintaining martial law?
    • chasd00 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  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/2021/05/27/2237023/0/en/Press-Release-Capgemini-and-Orange-announce-plan-to-create-Bleu-a-company-to-provide-a-Cloud-de-Confiance-in-France.html https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2021/05/27/223... [2] https://www.bertelsmann.com/news-and-media/news/first-sovereign-cloud-platform-for-the-german-administration-on-the-home-straight.jsp https://www.bertelsmann.com/news-and-media/news/first-sovere...
  • based2 2y ago
    https://www.cert.ssi.gouv.fr/cti/CERTFR-2025-CTI-001/ https://www.cert.ssi.gouv.fr/cti/CERTFR-2025-CTI-001/ https://cyber.gouv.fr/decouvrir-les-solutions-qualifiees https://cyber.gouv.fr/decouvrir-les-solutions-qualifiees
  • layer8 2y ago
    > called Bleu operated by Orange and […] using Azure This is somehow funny.
    • zekrioca 2y ago
      Not sure how the person doesn’t realize the contradiction.
      • ncruces 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleu_de_France_(colour) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleu_de_France_(colour)
    • pm3003 2y ago
      The pun is intended.
      • 2y ago
• pacifika 2y ago
  What’s the alternative to ICANN?
  • lazzlazzlazz 2y ago
    ENS[1] and Box[2] come to mind. The crypto people have been contemplating this for a long time. [1]: https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [2]: https://my.box/ https://my.box/
• docmars 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    He got less than 50% of the votes
    • hedora 2y ago
      His most popular policies have about 50% support. Most poll at 2:1 or 3:1 against: https://archive.is/C08bk https://archive.is/C08bk
      • croes 2y ago
        That’s actually bad if even his most popular ones only reach 50% at max.
• jmward01 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  I wonder if growing distrust in the american cloud will benefit companies like Oxide in coming years
  • matt-p 2y ago
    Who are based where? Same fundamental problem right, you still can't get overall security (of continued supply, support and software/firmware)
    • brundolf 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
  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?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• bittermandel 2y ago
  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!
• garychalmers 2y ago
  [dead]
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      You forgot threatening to annex greenland, canada and panama, and attempting to put an end to mexican sovereignty.
    • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      > 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.
• serial_dev 2y ago
  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.
  • acdha 2y ago
    Nothing is safe in absolute terms but through Obama, European leaders could feel confident that the United States would honor its treaty obligations. The idea of an American President working in conjunction with Russia to run a shakedown on a European power wasn’t even viable in the Tom Clancy-level of cold war novel. So I’d think of it similar to how climate change has affected property risk assessment: even if your home was never absolutely safe from flooding or wildfire, your practical assessment of how much effort you should spend protecting against those risks was quite reasonably lower in the era before once in a century or once in a thousand years events became once in a decade.
• skrebbel 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Here's to hoping that decision makers will listen to him.
  • Mossy9 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Canada
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • 1over137 2y ago
      >I hope so too, but move where? On premises.
• aerhardt 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draghi_report
• 1over137 2y ago
  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.
  • sam_lowry_ 2y ago
    That's true for most EU governments as well. We lost the ability to host our own email infrastructure long before we moved to US clouds.
  • red-iron-pine 2y ago
    big tech has been pushing for cloud for a decade. same companies that also happen to have advertising and data mining as primary functions. is there any surprise they made this call?
• franczesko 2y ago
  It is also supporting companies openly admitting to run projects for the US army and Israel (project Nimbus). This alone is already enough.
• epolanski 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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 2y ago
      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
      • inetknght 2y ago
        I get what you're saying. But often it just takes a voice to speak up to fight against wrongdoing. What made it the only realistic plan?
        • Mossy9 2y ago
          Good question! I'll need to think back a few years. Based on my experience on a couple of govt organizations, the IT departments are very small, compared to the total workforce, and has to deal with decades of legacy. In this environment, any change in direction is considered (way too) carefully - a big ship turns slowly and all that. Since the team was experienced in dealing with Windows VMs, practically everything else was MS-based and MS offers lucrative bundling, Azure was thought to be the natural continuation on the infra side. One major outsourced software project nailed that trajectory, and due to the small headcount, multicloud was not desireable. And this is where I jumped in. I'd like to think I was promoting improving our on-prem capabilities until a question of "could we have a reverse proxy so we could access some internal databases from the Internet instead of relying on overnight database copies" hit a steel wall. Having heard murmurings of achieving the same via Azure APIM and ExpressRoute, I clung on, since as an architect I needed that capability for multiple projects. And after that, it was only natural to take more steps in. Slippery slide and all :p But as I mentioned, luckily all this has been so slow that reversing is not the end of the world. Unlike some of our sibling organizations who have little to no on-prem capabilities left
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  Anything that fucks Bezos and Ellison is a good thing . There’s your argument
• billy99k 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > Europe has no choice but to create its own subsidised cloud and mandate its use. Don't threaten me with a good time..
• sunnybeetroot 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  I suspect that Trump will have a very negative impact on US tech companies.
• rsync 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    This reminder would be a little more helpful if you gave some examples.
    • nhanb 2y ago
      FWIW he _is_ an example already: https://rsync.net/ https://rsync.net/
• sirjaz 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  https://justine.lol/tmp/trump.jpg https://justine.lol/tmp/trump.jpg
• pyrale 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
  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.
• pessimizer 2y ago
  On Trump's part this is probably just part of a public trade negotiation, so it's true; Europe should be hosting its own data and its own data processing. They just won't because it means a lot of short term pain for extremely dubious long term gain. The PCLOB is obviously theater that gives Europe an excuse to pretend that it has an independent data policy focused on protecting Europeans, because: 1) The US will go through European data if it wants, and happily and quietly break its own laws to do it, board or no board. 2) Europeans want even heavier surveillance of European data than the US does. 3) I'm sure Europe is happy to use the US to get around its own privacy laws. The reason Trump is breaking the board is because that will by law create a necessity for Europeans to move data out of the US, which again would be a nightmare of dubious benefit. In return for not breaking the board, Trump will ask for unrelated concessions that are a lot less expensive than that. Europe will have choices to make. Privacywise, the US will have access to European data no matter where it is stored, no matter what it needs to do to get that access. It has nothing to lose on that front, only the income (which is imagine is not huge.) But without that board, Europeans have to choose between either onshoring or leaving the data in the US even with no working deal in place (and ending the elaborate pr charade that they care about the privacy of Europeans.) That board is a gift to Europe.
• siliconc0w 2y ago
  You have as much sovereignty over a foreign-run cloud as you do over a Tesla or an Iphone. AWS or Google isn't going to give you the source to their software, and even if it did you don't have the engineering resources to review even a snapshot much less review it at the velocity it changes (and even if you wanted to try you'd need to hire the engineers away from the US tech companies).
• n0id34 2y ago
  It's like the world is slowly realising "wait, why don't we just become self-sufficient as much as we can" which is what every country should be focusing on from the get go. No brainer. You never want the power switch in someone else's hands.
  • pokstad 2y ago
    If only that same attitude would spread to consumers to fuel a new self-hosting renaissance.
• shirro 2y ago
  It is a rarity to see any organization that self hosts email or uses a domestic provider any more. It is all foreign controlled now (specifically Microsoft). It should be examined by regulators everywhere both as a monopoly and a sovereign threat. The move to US services started long before the current political situation and will still be a threat to sovereignty long after the current US exec is gone. The frustrating thing is email services like many cloud services are highly substitutable and can easily be built on open source infrastructure.
• serf 2y ago
  Let me preface this by saying : I don't really like Trump, by why are people suddenly listening to his self-ascribed titles? In 2016 he was the 'King of Debt' , a title he ascribed while talking about the debts he inherited from the previous administration, no one thought to start worrying about the start of a new monarchy then -- why now? because he's faster and looser with exec orders? hopefully everyone remembers 'king Bush Jr.' then. Personally I think it's kind of hilarious to watch; on one hand you have mega-corps moving away from places TO America so that they can facilitate E2E, while simultaneously the persona-in-charge at the moment is driving people to any of the countries that have a long history of demanding keys and throwing a fit when denied. Unless of course this article is about moving our data and software development to the Slovenia .. but it's not. I think it's great to work towards not being beholden by other countries actions, but it should've had effort towards it before a bad-actor nudged everyone awake; not during the crisis. It shouldn't have taken Trump to remind everyone that nationalization of important goods is sound strategy.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• pcj-github 2y ago
  It's not just US clouds, all USA brands are toxic now. Buy elsewhere so our economy collapses. Seriously. You're doing us a favor. We need something drastic to wake up the 77M brain-dead people here that voted for this monstrosity.
  • d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
    I'm sorry that you feel so isolated from the majority. What powerful force do you think caused over half the people you know to be so misguided?
    • midasz 2y ago
      propaganda
      • d0gsg0w00f 2y ago
        What makes you so sure that your viewpoint was not also influenced by propaganda?
    • int_19h 2y ago
      25 years ago, my country of birth voted fair and square for a man who promised to end the dark times and return them to days of glory with a strong hand. His name was Vladimir Putin. Back then, the powerful force was resentment, and honestly, they had good objective reasons to feel that way, too, given how the 90s were in Russia. It didn't make their choice any less misguided, though. 2024 in US felt familiar.
  • Slava_Propanei 2y ago
    [dead]
• Sparkyte 2y ago
  It's true that relying solely on a cloud ecosystem without continuous protections isn't safe. That's why many government agencies should consider what I classify as a co-location strategy. By implementing this approach, agencies can use private tunneling applications with encryption and APIs to securely fetch non-sensitive information. The cloud provider—such as AWS—can still be used for application hosting, but a private network should be established between the cloud environment and the co-location facility. Why is this beneficial? In a cloud environment, public ingress can be cut off instantly if needed, minimizing exposure. Applications can be designed to serve most (or all) of their data through regional gateways connected to the co-location. By placing co-location facilities close to critical data sources, latency is reduced while ensuring data remains protected and accessible within a secure network. This approach allows organizations to balance cloud scalability with enhanced security, ensuring critical data remains under strict control while applications remain flexible and resilient.
• stego-tech 2y ago
  Good to see this attitude becoming increasingly prevalent. I'm used to being a Cassandra in IT world, and while I'd have greatly preferred being wrong in my 2019 research concerns about data sovereignty, cloud-repatriation, vendor lock-in, and a shifting geopolitical landscape, welp, here we are anyway. I cut my teeth in data center operations and defense contracting, and knew immediately the real cost of public cloud would be the forfeiture of sovereignty to whichever country (and companies) controlled the major providers - surprise surprise, I was right. The solution was never to outsource core government infrastructure to a third party, but to build it in house and recruit the talent needed to keep it running, something easily done on most developed governments' budgets; by outsourcing to public cloud service providers, they traded national sovereignty for empty promises. Bookmark this comment, because my read is that in five years' time the question won't be whether or not public cloud providers can be trusted, but how to engineer infrastructure on cloud providers you cannot trust. How do you encrypt storage on a cloud platform when you can't trust the vendor's tooling to secure your keys? How do you orchestrate K8s clusters in a provider who knowingly gives a hostile foreign government access to your etcd or network layer? How do you handle data boundaries within your own org when multiple countries with competing standards demand residency of data and infrastructure? I worry it'll be the "Chinese Firewall" problem but on a global scale, as different regions carve out their own digital kingdoms and demand fealty or expulsion.
  • JFingleton 2y ago
    Perhaps Homomorphic encryption can provide part of the solution in running services on untrusted Cloud platforms? Although with Microsoft's recent breakthrough in their quantum processor, I'm not sure whether quantum will be a help or a hindrance.
• cudgy 2y ago
  Why has it taken this author so long to finally realize this? It was never “safe” to have government data managed and stored in another country. Sounds more like they just don’t like the current administration in the United States. This dislike somehow has woken them up to the reality that storing their sensitive data in another country was never a good idea.
• gogasca 2y ago
  [dead]
• templeOSdotcom 2y ago
  This sort of thing makes me groan. Oh, now it is a problem. It wasn't an issue with Obama and Biden but it suddenly is an issue that chester cheeto is running the show. It is no secret to anyone that Google, Reddit, Meta, Microsoft, Intel, Twitter and Amazon work closely with the three letter agencies in the US.
• jari_mustonen 2y ago
  This has been common sense for a long time. It's funny that people only raise this issue because of Donald Trump, whom the article refers to as "King," no less. The previous administration's green-lighting of the largest-ever industrial sabotage against Europe did not raise an eyebrow, but NBC News, a political opponent of Trump, claiming that Trump is "branding himself as a monarch" does the trick. Oh well, whatever it takes.
• JimBlackwood 2y ago
  As a DevOps’er in the EU, how would I capitalize on this? I’ve only ever done bare metal and have been lucky all of my employers hated the idea of AWS/Azure/GCP. So I feel like I’m quite well positioned to start helping companies move to bare metal alternatives. Do I start freelancing, or do I try for an AWS alternative?
• bedatadriven 2y ago
  I've been looking at this a lot, for ourselves (multitenant saas app running on gcp) and for our customers, who are starting to be curious about something between fully self-managed (too costly) and centralized/multi-tenant/american cloud. One thing that strikes me is the relationship with architecture. A monolithic, vertically scaled app can run ANYWHERE where I can rent a VM, whether in Norway with Upcloud or on a VPS in Kenya. It's only when you start stitching together managed DBs with autoscaled instance pools etc that vendor lock in begins. All of these nice toys make our service highly available. But while the overall risk is lower, it is far more correlated between customers. If our service would go down because of a political event, it would go down for all our customers at once. What about a control plane that manages a fleet of per-customer VMs across an array of cloud providers? Has anyone ever tried this?
• _blk 2y ago
  I'm not convinced that the answer is renting rackspace at the local MS datacenter.. Now please don't use that as an excuse to get on alibaba's rack.
• amai 2y ago
  People will only act on that, if Elon Musk buys Microsoft. But then it is too late.
• lazzlazzlazz 2y ago
  Europe is going down an incredibly dark path. Political censorship, encryption bans, and absurd consumer "protection" laws (e.g., like those limiting AI rollouts) mean Europeans are becoming second class globally. The irony of this post is that it is no longer safe for Europeans to rely on a European cloud.
  • amai 2y ago
    Despite these problems Europe is still the better place to live in compared to "global leaders" like USA, Russia or China. Because limiting AI rollouts is not really relevant for your quality of live, social security, health, safety, sanity etc. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index
• amai 2y ago
  See also - https://github.com/asmaier/awesome-gdpr-services https://github.com/asmaier/awesome-gdpr-services - https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://european-alternatives.eu/ - https://tycrek.github.io/degoogle/ https://tycrek.github.io/degoogle/
• casey2 2y ago
  And European countries are by and large such lumbering behemoths of tradition and regulation that by the time they build up enough will to pump the breaks on these transfers Trump will have already left office and the EU would be split up by Russia and the US. 4D chess
• busterarm 2y ago
  Schneider Electric, a French company (owners of APC), absolutely dominates the datacenter infrastructure market at somewhere over 1/3 (probably closer to 1/2) of overall TAM. EU companies many not be storing the data but they're certainly in the "making shovels" business. And that's kind of the deal. France quietly takes a huge percentage of revenue without most companies being the wiser. If EU companies start moving their infrastructure elsewhere, I'm sure that American datacenter/cloud companies will reconsider who they buy their racks, PDUs, etc, from.
• hnburnsy 2y ago
  Ironically, just saw this posted to HN... https://www.reuters.com/technology/dutch-software-firm-bird-leave-europe-due-onerous-regulations-ai-era-says-ceo-2025-02-24/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/dutch-software-firm-bird-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43169620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43169620
• tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  The article says "we can’t be bothered to get used to a different word processor" and links to LibreOffice, but in my experience, it's not about "getting used to" - it's simply that the UX of LibreOffice is absolutely atrocious. The UX is extremely overloaded with features with little organization or structure, making it hard to find the few features you actually need, and every simple thing requires 3x as many clicks as with other products. I tried making slides with LibreOffice, and even though I don't need any of the collaboration features and would prefer to work locally, I ended up deleting my entire presentation and just starting over from scratch with Google Slides, because that was easier than trying to do anything in LibreOffice.
  • consteval 2y ago
    To be completely 100% fair, all these all describe microsoft products. All of them. Overloaded with features, with no consistency, wonky behaviors, and 3x as many clicks as everything should take. The reason we look past it is, well, we're used to it. Software is 95% inertia, 5% quality.
    • tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
      I think MS Office was reasonably fine (at least the old menu based versions), and there's still a massive difference (at least 2x) between Microsoft and LibreOffice. Inertia is a big thing, but with many open source products and UX, I'd say that quality is often a similarly big if not bigger factor.
      • consteval 2y ago
        Personally I disagree. Older versions of office were better, yes, but we've been on ribbons for a while now. It's awful UX, we're all just used to Microsoft making shit software that mostly works so we look past it. This is pretty consistent across all Microsoft products. Over time they sort of deteriorate and rot. We're up to, like, a dozen different settings windows in Windows now. Half of them don't have an "apply" button. The other half don't even report when configuration fails. And, cherry on top, Microsoft has taken a "pretend it didn't happen" approach to modern error reporting. So, you don't even have a number to take to customer service. It's difficult to take Microsoft software seriously when Excel can't open two workbooks with the same name (for three decades, btw) and Windows says "oops! Windows made a fucky wucky :(" when anything bad happens. And, heaven forbid you have to configure IIS on Windows Server. Jesus Christ, I would rather blow my head off, blend the flesh chunks into a smoothie, and then drink the aforementioned smoothie by pouring it into my now exposed neck hole. But, bright side, at least NTFS is only 1000x slower than competing filesystems (ext4, btrfs, zfs). So, you can grab a cup of coffee while trying to open the logs on your failing Windows Server.
• Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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• meltyness 2y ago
  That's fine, cloud was a flawed principle to begin with.